THE CODEX

The Codex is a collection of essays written by Scott Alexander that discuss how good reasoning
works, how to learn from the institution of science, and different ways society has been and
could be designed. It also contains several short interludes containing fictional tales and real-life
stories. The essays contained have been widely read within the rationality and effective altruism
communities, and have a strong bias towards actually reading the scientific papers being
discussed, analyzing the arguments closely, and taking the conclusions seriously.

https://www.lesswrong.com/codex

(Compiled by Jason Dsouza)


Table of Contents
Table of Contents 2
Argument and Analysis 17
Eight Short Studies On Excuses 17
The Clumsy Game-Player 17
The Lazy Student 18
The Grieving Student 19
The Sports Fan 20
The Murderous Husband 20
The Bellicose Dictator 21
The Peyote-Popping Native 23
The Well-Disguised Atheist 24
Conclusion 25
Schelling fences on slippery slopes 25
Abandoning the Power of Choice 26
The Legend of Murder-Gandhi 26
Slippery Hyperbolic Discounting 28
Coalitions of Resistance 29
Summary 30
Intellectual Hipsters and Meta-Contrarianism 30
Pretending To Be Wise 32
Meta-Contrarians Are Intellectual Hipsters 33
Footnotes 35
Cardiologists and Chinese Robbers 36
I. 36
II. 38
All Debates Are Bravery Debates 41
I. 41
II. 42
 III. 43
IV. 44
The Virtue of Silence 46
Proving Too Much 49
Beware Isolated Demands For Rigor 51
I. 51
II. 53
III. 54
IV. 56
V. 57
Categorization and Concepts 59
Diseased thinking: dissolving questions about disease 59
What is Disease? 61
Hidden Inferences From Disease Concept 62
Sympathy or Condemnation? 63
The Ethics of Treating Marginal Conditions 65
Summary 67
The Categories Were Made For Man, Not Man For The Categories 67
I. 68
II. 71
III. 73
IV. 77
V. 81
VI. 83
The noncentral fallacy - the worst argument in the world? 85
Footnotes 89
Ethnic Tension And Meaningless Arguments 91
I. 91
II. 92
 III. 94
IV. 95
V. 97
VI. 101
VII. 103
VIII. 106
IX. 108
Probability and Predictions 110
The Pyramid And The Garden 110
I. 110
II. 111
III. 115
On Overconfidence 116
I. 117
II. 121
III. 125
If It’s Worth Doing, It’s Worth Doing With Made-Up Statistics 127
Techniques for probability estimates 132
Prepare for Revelation 132
Bet on it 133
Convert to a Frequency 133
Find a Reference Class 134
Make Multiple Statements 135
Imagine Hypothetical Evidence 136
Confidence levels inside and outside an argument 137
Is That Really True? 138
Spotted in the Wild 138
Footnotes 141
Studies and Statistics 142
Beware The Man Of One Study 142
II. 145
III. 148
IV. 150
Debunked And Well-Refuted 150
I. 151
II. 152
III. 153
IV. 155
V. 157
Noisy Poll Results And Reptilian Muslim Climatologists from Mars 157
Beware of Phantom Lizardmen 157
Poll Answers As Attire 158
Never Attribute To Stupidity What Can Be Adequately Explained By Malice 159
Two Dark Side Statistics Papers 161
I. 162
II. 165
The Control Group Is Out Of Control 168
I. 168
II. 170
III. 171
IV. 174
V. 177
VI. 179
The Cowpox of Doubt 183
How Common Are Science Failures? 187
Learning To Love Scientific Consensus 192
I. 192
II. 196
 III. 203
Research and Reviews 207
Marijuana: Much More Than You Wanted To Know 207
I. Would Relaxation Of Penalties On Marijuana Increase Marijuana Use? 208
II. Is Marijuana Bad For You? 213
III. What Are The Costs Of The Drug War? 216
IV. An Irresponsible Utilitarian Analysis 218
Wheat: Much More Than You Wanted To Know 222
Some People Without Celiac Disease Are Sensitive To Gluten – Mostly true but of
limited significance 224
Wheat Increases Intestinal Permeability Causing A Leaky Gut – Probably true, of
uncertain significance 226
Digestion Of Wheat Produces Opiates, Which Get You Addicted To Wheat –
Probably false, but just true enough to be weird 227
Wheat Something Something Something Autism And Schizophrenia – Definitely
weird 229
Wheat Has Been Genetically Modified Recently In Ways That Make It Much Worse
For You – Probably true, especially if genetically modified means “not genetically
modified” and “recently” means “nine thousand years ago” 231
The Lectins In Wheat Interfere With Leptin Receptors, Making People Leptin
Resistant And Therefore Obese – Currently at “mere assertion” level until I hear some
evidence 232
Wheat Is Actually Super Good For You And You Should Have It All The Time –
Probably more evidence than the other claims on this list 233
Final Thoughts 236
SSRIs: Much More Than You Wanted To Know 238
1. Antidepressants were oversold and painted as having more biochemical backing
than was really justified – Totally true 239
2. Modern SSRI antidepressants are no better than older tricyclic and MAOI
antidepressants, but are prescribed much more because of said overselling – First part
true, second part less so 240
3. There is large publication bias in the antidepressant literature – True, but not as
important as some people think 241
 4. The effect size of antidepressants is clinically insignificant – Depends what you
mean by “clinically insignificant” 242
5. The effect of antidepressants only becomes significant in the most severe
depression – Everything about this statement is terrible and everyone involved should
feel bad 245
6. The beneficial effects of antidepressants are only noticed by doctors, not the
patients themselves – Partly true but okay 249
7. The apparent benefits of antidepressant over placebo may be an “active
placebo” effect rather than a drug effect – Unlikely 250
8. Antidepressants have much worse side effects than you were led to believe –
Depends how bad you were led to believe the side effects were 251
9. Therefore, we should give up on medication and use psychotherapy instead –
Makes sense right up until you run placebo-controlled trials of psychotherapy 256
10. Further complications 257
Conclusion 260
Alcoholics Anonymous: Much More Than You Wanted To Know 261
I. 263
III. 266
IV. 269
V. 270
VI. 274
VII. 277
Prescriptions, Paradoxes, and Perversities 278
I. 278
II. 280
III. 282
IV. 283
V. 285
VI. 287
VII. 289
Footnotes 289
Guns And States 290
 I. 290
II. 293
III. 297
IV. 302
V. 305
Teachers: Much More Than You Wanted To Know 306
I. 306
II. 308
III. 312
IV. 316
V. 319
VI. 322
Antidepressant Pharmacogenomics: Much More Than You Wanted To Know 323
I. 323
II. 325
III. 327
IV. 328
V. 330
VI. 331
VII. 337
VIII. 338
Hypotheses and Hunches 340
The Atomic Bomb Considered As Hungarian High School Science Fair Project 340
I. 340
II. 341
III. 344
IV. 347
V. 350
It’s Bayes All The Way Up 352
 II. 359
III. 362
Why Are Transgender People Immune To Optical Illusions? 364
I. 364
II. 365
III. 367
IV. 370
The Case Of The Suffocating Woman 372
I. 372
II. 373
III. 376
IV. 379
Politics and Pragmatics 380
I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup 381
I. 381
II. 383
III. 385
IV. 388
V. 390
VI. 392
VII. 395
VIII. 397
IX. 399
X. 401
XI. 403
Book Review: Albion’s Seed 405
I. 405
A: The Puritans 406
B: The Cavaliers 410
 C: The Quakers 414
D: The Borderers 419
III. 425
Albion’s Seed, Genotyped 432
Society Is Fixed, Biology Is Mutable 435
A Philosopher Walks Into A Coffee Shop 437
The Witching Hour 442
Economics and Efficiency 447
Against Tulip Subsidies 447
I. 447
II. 449
III. 451
IV. 452
Considerations On Cost Disease 453
I. 454
II. 465
III. 466
IV. 471
V. 477
VI. 479
Highlights From The Comments On Cost Disease 480
The Price Of Glee In China 501
I. 501
II. 505
Things Probably Matter 508
How The West Was Won 513
I. 513
II. 517
III. 520
 IV. 523
The Lizard People Of Alpha Draconis 1 Decided To Build An Ansible 527
I. 527
II. 528
III. 530
A Modern Myth 532
1. Eris 532
2. Ares 533
3. Apollo 537
4. Aphrodite 539
5. Hermes 543
6. Pandora 548
7. Athena 553
8. Prometheus 556
9. Everybody 567
10. Zeus 575
Epilogue: Trump 579
Futurism and Forecasting 581
Superintelligence FAQ 581
1: What is superintelligence? 581
1.1: Sounds a lot like science fiction. Do people think about this in the real world?
581
2: AIs aren’t as smart as rats, let alone humans. Isn’t it sort of early to be worrying
about this kind of thing? 582
2.1: What do you mean by “fast takeoff”? 583
2.1.1: Why might we expect a moderate takeoff? 584
2.1.2: Why might we expect a fast takeoff? 585
2.1.2.1: Is this just following an exponential trend line off a cliff? 587
2.2: Why does takeoff speed matter? 588
3: Why might a fast takeoff be dangerous? 588
 3.1: Human civilization as a whole is dangerous to lions. But a single human placed
amid a pack of lions with no raw materials for building technology is going to get ripped
to shreds. So although thousands of superintelligences, given a long time and a lot of
opportunity to build things, might be able to dominate humans – what harm could a
single superintelligence do? 589
3.1.1: What do you mean by superintelligences manipulating humans socially?589
3.1.2: What do you mean by superintelligences manipulating humans
technologically? 590
3.2: Couldn’t sufficiently paranoid researchers avoid giving superintelligences even
this much power? 591
4: Even if hostile superintelligences are dangerous, why would we expect a
superintelligence to ever be hostile? 592
4.1: But superintelligences are very smart. Aren’t they smart enough not to make
silly mistakes in comprehension? 593
5: Aren’t there some pretty easy ways to eliminate these potential problems?594
5.1: Once we notice that the superintelligence working on calculating digits of pi is
starting to try to take over the world, can’t we turn it off, reprogram it, or otherwise
correct its mistake? 595
5.2. Can we test a weak or human-level AI to make sure that it’s not going to do
things like this after it achieves superintelligence? 595
5.3. Can we specify a code of rules that the AI has to follow? 597
5.4. Can we tell an AI just to figure out what we want, then do that? 598
5.5. Can we just tell an AI to do what we want right now, based on the desires of
our non-surgically altered brains? 599
5.6. What would an actually good solution to the control problem look like? 600
6: If superintelligence is a real risk, what do we do about it? 601
AI Researchers On AI Risk 603
Should AI Be Open? 617
I. 617
II. 618
III. 620
IV. 623
V. 624
VI. 627
 SSC Journal Club: AI Timelines 628
I. 628
II. 629
III. 630
IV. 632
V. 634
Where The Falling Einstein Meets The Rising Mouse 635
Theory 1: Mutational Load 638
Theory 2: Purpose-Built Hardware 639
Theory 3: Widely Varying Sub-Abilities 641
Theory 1.1: Humans Are Light-Years Beyond Every Other Animal, So Even A Tiny
Range Of Human Variation Is Relatively Large 641
Don’t Fear The Filter 644
The Great Filter is not garden-variety x-risk 645
The Great Filter is not Unfriendly AI 646
The Great Filter is not transcendence 646
The Great Filter is not alien exterminators 647
Book Review: Age of Em 649
I. 649
II. 650
III. 655
IV. 661
V. 667
VI. 670
Ascended Economy? 671
I. 671
II. 674
III. 676
IV. 678
G.K. Chesterton On AI Risk 678
 The Demiurge’s Older Brother 684
2,302,554,979 BC - Galactic Core 684
2114 AD - A wild and heavily forested Pacific Northwest dotted with small towns688
Community and Cooperation 690
In Favor of Niceness, Community, and Civilization 690
I. 690
II. 692
III. 693
IV. 698
V. 700
VI. 703
VII. 705
VIII. 707
Guided By The Beauty Of Our Weapons 708
I. 709
II. 711
III. 717
IV. 719
V. 722
The Ideology Is Not The Movement 724
I. 724
II. 726
III. 729
IV. 732
V. 742
Archipelago and Atomic Communitarianism 743
I. 743
II. 745
III. 748
 IV. 751
V. 754
Meditations On Moloch 760
I. 760
II. 771
III. 775
IV. 782
V. 793
VI. 796
VII. 801
VIII. 802
Five Planets In Search Of A Sci-Fi Story 804
Gamma Andromeda 804
Zyzzx Prime 805
K’th’ranga V 806
Chan X-3 807
New Capricorn 807
It Was You Who Made My Blue Eyes Blue 808
Day Zero 808
Day One 811
Day Two 815
Day Three 820
Day Four 822
Day Five 824
Parables and Prayers 827
Burdens 827
The Parable Of The Talents 831
I. 831
II. 835
 III. 836
IV. 840
V. 842
VI. 845
VII. 846
Nobody Is Perfect, Everything Is Commensurable 847
I. 847
II. 851
III. 855
Answer to Job 856
Universal Love, Said The Cactus Person 860
The Goddess of Everything Else 869
Argument and Analysis

Eight Short Studies On Excuses

The Clumsy Game-Player

You and a partner are playing an Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma. Both of you
have publicly pre-committed to the tit-for-tat strategy. By iteration 5, you're
going happily along, raking up the bonuses of cooperation, when your partner
unexpectedly presses the "defect" button.

"Uh, sorry," says your partner. "My finger slipped."

"I still have to punish you just in case," you say. "I'm going to defect next turn,
and we'll see how you like it."

"Well," said your partner, "knowing that, I guess I'll defect next turn too, and
we'll both lose out. But hey, it was just a slipped finger. By not trusting me,
you're costing us both the benefits of one turn of cooperation."

"True", you respond "but if I don't do it, you'll feel free to defect whenever you
feel like it, using the 'finger slipped' excuse."

"How about this?" proposes your partner. "I promise to take extra care that
my finger won't slip again. You promise that if my finger does slip again, you
will punish me terribly, defecting for a bunch of turns. That way, we trust each
other again, and we can still get the benefits of cooperation next turn."
You don't believe that your partner's finger really slipped, not for an instant.
But the plan still seems like a good one. You accept the deal, and you continue
cooperating until the experimenter ends the game.

After the game, you wonder what went wrong, and whether you could have
played better. You decide that there was no better way to deal with your
partner's "finger-slip" - after all, the plan you enacted gave you maximum
possible utility under the circumstances. But you wish that you'd pre-
committed, at the beginning, to saying "and I will punish finger slips equally
to deliberate defections, so make sure you're careful."

The Lazy Student

You are a perfectly utilitarian school teacher, who attaches exactly the same
weight to others' welfare as to your own. You have to have the reports of all
fifty students in your class ready by the time midterm grades go out on
January 1st. You don't want to have to work during Christmas vacation, so you
set a deadline that all reports must be in by December 15th or you won't grade
them and the students will fail the class. Oh, and your class is Economics 101,
and as part of a class project all your students have to behave as selfish utility-
maximizing agents for the year.

It costs your students 0 utility to turn in the report on time, but they gain +1
utility by turning it in late (they enjoy procrastinating). It costs you 0 utility to
grade a report turned in before December 15th, but -30 utility to grade one
after December 15th. And students get 0 utility from having their reports
graded on time, but get -100 utility from having a report marked incomplete
and failing the class.

If you say "There's no penalty for turning in your report after deadline," then
the students will procrastinate and turn in their reports late, for a total of +50
utility (1 per student times fifty students). You will have to grade all fifty
reports during Christmas break, for a total of - 1500 utility (-30 per report
times fifty reports). Total utility is -1450.
So instead you say "If you don't turn in your report on time, I won't grade it."
All students calculate the cost of being late, which is +1 utility from
procrastinating and -100 from failing the class, and turn in their reports on
time. You get all reports graded before Christmas, no students fail the class,
and total utility loss is zero. Yay!

Or else - one student comes to you the day after deadline and says "Sorry, I
was really tired yesterday, so I really didn't want to come all the way here to
hand in my report. I expect you'll grade my report anyway, because I know you
to be a perfect utilitarian, and you'd rather take the -30 utility hit to yourself
than take the -100 utility hit to me."

You respond "Sorry, but if I let you get away with this, all the other students
will turn in their reports late in the summer." She says "Tell you what - our
school has procedures for changing a student's previously given grade. If I ever
do this again, or if I ever tell anyone else about this, you can change my grade
to a fail. Now you know that passing me this one time won't affect anything in
the future. It certainly can't affect the past. So you have no reason not to do it."
You believe her when she says she'll never tell, but you say "You made this
argument because you believed me to be the sort of person who would accept
it. In order to prevent other people from making the same argument, I have to
be the sort of person who wouldn't accept it. To that end, I'm going to not
accept your argument."

The Grieving Student

A second student comes to you and says "Sorry I didn't turn in my report
yesterday. My mother died the other day, and I wanted to go to her funeral."

You say "Like all economics professors, I have no soul, and so am unable to
sympathize with your loss. Unless you can make an argument that would
apply to all rational actors in my position, I can't grant you an extension."

She says "If you did grant this extension, it wouldn't encourage other students
to turn in their reports late. The other students would just say 'She got an
extension because her mother died'. They know they won't get extensions
unless they kill their own mothers, and even economics students aren't that
evil. Further, if you don't grant the extension, it won't help you get more
reports in on time. Any student would rather attend her mother's funeral than
pass a course, so you won't be successfully motivating anyone else to turn in
their reports early."

You think for a while, decide she's right, and grant her an extension on her
report.

The Sports Fan

A third student comes to you and says "Sorry I didn't turn in my report
yesterday. The Bears' big game was on, and as I've told you before, I'm a huge
Bears fan. But don't worry! It's very rare that there's a game on this important,
and not many students here are sports fans anyway. You'll probably never see
a student with this exact excuse again. So in a way, it's not that different from
the student here just before me, the one whose mother died."

You respond "It may be true that very few people will be able to say both that
they're huge Bears fans, and that there's a big Bears game on the day before
the report comes due. But by accepting your excuse, I establish a precedent of
accepting excuses that are approximately this good. And there are many other
excuses approximately as good as yours. Maybe someone's a big soap opera
fan, and the season finale is on the night before the deadline. Maybe someone
loves rock music, and there's a big rock concert on. Maybe someone's brother
is in town that week. Practically anyone can come up with an excuse as good as
yours, so if I accept your late report, I have to accept everyone's.

"The student who was here before you, that's different. We, as a society,
already have an ordering in which a family member's funeral is one of the
most important things around. By accepting her excuse, I'm establishing a
precedent of accepting any excuse approximately that good, but almost no one
will ever have an excuse that good. Maybe a few people who are really sick,
someone struggling with a divorce or a breakup, that kind of thing. Not the
hordes of people who will be coming to me if I give you your exemption."

The Murderous Husband

You are the husband of a wonderful and beautiful lady whom you love very
much - and whom you just found in bed with another man. In a rage, you take
your hardcover copy of Introduction To Game Theory and knock him over the
head with it, killing him instantly (it's a pretty big book).

At the murder trial, you plead to the judge to let you go free. "Society needs to
lock up murderers, as a general rule. After all, they are dangerous people who
cannot be allowed to walk free. However, I only killed that man because he
was having an affair with my wife. In my place, anyone would have done the
same. So the crime has no bearing on how likely I am to murder someone else.
I'm not a risk to anyone who isn't having an affair with my wife, and after this
incident I plan to divorce and live the rest of my days a bachelor. Therefore,
you have no need to deter me from future murders, and can safely let me go
free."

The judge responds: "You make a convincing argument, and I believe that you
will never kill anyone else in the future. However, other people will one day be
in the position you were in, where they walk in on their wives having an affair.
Society needs to have a credible pre-commitment to punishing them if they
succumb to their rage, in order to deter them from murder."

"No," you say, "I understand your reasoning, but it won't work. If you've never
walked in on your wife having an affair, you can't possibly understand the
rage. No matter how bad the deterrent was, you'd still kill the guy."

"Hm," says the judge. "I'm afraid I just can't believe anyone could ever be
quite that irrational. But I see where you're coming from. I'll give you a lighter
sentence."

The Bellicose Dictator

You are the dictator of East Examplestan, a banana republic subsisting off its
main import, high quality hypothetical scenarios. You've always had it in for
your ancestral enemy, West Examplestan, but the UN has made it clear that
any country in your region that aggressively invades a neighbor will be
severely punished with sanctions and possible enforced "regime change." So
you decide to leave the West alone for the time being.

One day, a few West Examplestanis unintentionally wander over your

unmarked border while prospecting for new scenario mines. You immediately
declare it a "hostile incursion" by "West Examplestani spies", declare war, and
take the Western capital in a sneak attack.

The next day, Ban Ki-moon is on the phone, and he sounds angry. "I thought
we at the UN had made it perfectly clear that countries can't just invade each
other anymore!"

"But didn't you read our propaganda mouthpi...ahem, official newspaper? We

didn't just invade. We were responding to Western aggression!"

"Balderdash!" says the Secretary-General. "Those were a couple of lost

prospectors, and you know it!"

"Well," you say. "Let's consider your options. The UN needs to make a credible
pre-commitment to punish aggressive countries, or everyone will invade their
weaker neighbors. And you've got to follow through on your threats, or else
the pre-commitment won't be credible anymore. But you don't actually like
following through on your threats. Invading rogue states will kill a lot of
people on both sides and be politically unpopular, and sanctions will hurt your
economy and lead to heart-rending images of children starving. What you'd
really like to do is let us off, but in a way that doesn't make other countries
think they'll get off too.

"Luckily, we can make a credible story that we were following international

law. Sure, it may have been stupid of us to mistake a few prospectors for an
invasion, but there's no international law against being stupid. If you dismiss
us as simply misled, you don't have to go through the trouble of punishing us,
and other countries won't think they can get away with anything.

"Nor do you need to live in fear of us doing something like this again. We've
already demonstrated that we won't go to war without a casus belli. If other
countries can refrain from giving us one, they have nothing to fear."

Ban Ki-moon doesn't believe your story, but the countries that would bear the
economic brunt of the sanctions and regime change decide they believe it just
enough to stay uninvolved.
The Peyote-Popping Native

You are the governor of a state with a large Native American population. You
have banned all mind-altering drugs, with the honorable exceptions of alcohol,
tobacco, caffeine, and several others, because you are a red-blooded American
who believes that they would drive teenagers to commit crimes.

A representative of the state Native population comes to you and says: "Our
people have used peyote religiously for hundreds of years. During this time,
we haven't become addicted or committed any crimes. Please grant us a
religious exemption under the First Amendment to continue practicing our
ancient rituals." You agree.

A leader of your state's atheist community breaks into your office via the
ventilation systems (because seriously, how else is an atheist leader going to
get access to a state governor?) and says: "As an atheist, I am offended that
you grant exemptions to your anti-peyote law for religious reasons, but not
for, say, recreational reasons. This is unfair discrimination in favor of religion.
The same is true of laws that say Sikhs can wear turbans in school to show
support for God, but my son can't wear a baseball cap in school to show
support for the Yankees. Or laws that say Muslims can get time off state jobs
to pray five times a day, but I can't get time off my state job for a cigarette
break. Or laws that say state functions will include special kosher meals for
Jews, but not special pasta meals for people who really like pasta."

You respond "Although my policies may seem to be saying religion is more

important than other potential reasons for breaking a rule, one can make a
non-religious case justifying them. One important feature of major world
religions is that their rituals have been fixed for hundreds of years. Allowing
people to break laws for religious reasons makes religious people very happy,
but does not weaken the laws. After all, we all know the few areas in which the
laws of the major US religions as they are currently practiced conflict with
secular law, and none of them are big deals. So the general principle 'I will
allow people to break laws if it is necessary to established and well-known
religious rituals" is relatively low-risk and makes people happy without
threatening the concept of law in general. But the general principle 'I will
allow people to break laws for recreational reasons' is very high risk, because
it's sufficient justification for almost anyone breaking any law."
"I would love to be able to serve everyone the exact meal they most wanted at
state dinners. But if I took your request for pasta because you liked pasta, I
would have to follow the general principle of giving everyone the meal they
most like, which would be prohibitively expensive. By giving Jews kosher
meals, I can satisfy a certain particularly strong preference without being
forced to satisfy anyone else's."

The Well-Disguised Atheist

The next day, the atheist leader comes in again. This time, he is wearing a false
mustache and sombrero. "I represent the Church of Driving 50 In A 30 Mile
Per Hour Zone," he says. "For our members, going at least twenty miles per
hour over the speed limit is considered a sacrament. Please grant us a religious
exemption to traffic laws."

You decide to play along. "How long has your religion existed, and how many
people do you have?" you ask.

"Not very long, and not very many people," he responds.

"I see," you say. "In that case, you're a cult, and not a religion at all. Sorry, we
don't deal with cults."

"What, exactly, is the difference between a cult and a religion?"

"The difference is that cults have been formed recently enough, and are small
enough, that we are suspicious of them existing for the purpose of taking
advantage of the special place we give religion. Granting an exemption for
your cult would challenge the credibility of our pre-commitment to punish
people who break the law, because it would mean anyone who wants to break
a law could just found a cult dedicated to it."

"How can my cult become a real religion that deserves legal benefits?"

"You'd have to become old enough and respectable enough that it becomes
implausible that it was created for the purpose of taking advantage of the law."

"That sounds like a lot of work."

"Alternatively, you could try writing awful science fiction novels and hiring a
ton of lawyers. I hear that also works these days."

Conclusion

In all these stories, the first party wants to credibly pre-commit to a rule, but
also has incentives to forgive other people's deviations from the rule. The
second party breaks the rules, but comes up with an excuse for why its
infraction should be forgiven.

The first party's response is based not only on whether the person's excuse is
believable, not even on whether the person's excuse is morally valid, but on
whether the excuse can be accepted without straining the credibility of their
previous pre-commitment.

The general principle is that by accepting an excuse, a rule-maker is also

committing themselves to accepting all equally good excuses in the future.
There are some exceptions - accepting an excuse in private but making sure no
one else ever knows, accepting an excuse once with the express condition that
you will never accept any other excuses - but to some degree these are devil's
bargains, as anyone who can predict you will do this can take advantage of
you.

These stories give an idea of excuses different from the one our society likes to
think it uses, namely that it accepts only excuses that are true and that reflect
well upon the character of the person giving the excuse. I'm not saying that the
common idea of excuses doesn't have value - but I think the game theory view
also has some truth to it. I also think the game theoretic view can be useful in
cases where the common view fails. It can inform cases in law, international
diplomacy, and politics where a tool somewhat stronger than the easily-
muddled common view is helpful.

Schelling fences on slippery slopes

Slippery slopes are themselves a slippery concept. Imagine trying to explain
them to an alien:
"Well, we right-thinking people are quite sure that the Holocaust happened, so
banning Holocaust denial would shut up some crackpots and improve the
discourse. But it's one step on the road to things like banning unpopular
political positions or religions, and we right-thinking people oppose that, so
we won't ban Holocaust denial."

And the alien might well respond: "But you could just ban Holocaust denial,
but not ban unpopular political positions or religions. Then you right-thinking
people get the thing you want, but not the thing you don't want."

This post is about some of the replies you might give the alien.

Abandoning the Power of Choice

This is the boring one without any philosophical insight that gets mentioned
only for completeness' sake. In this reply, giving up a certain point risks losing
the ability to decide whether or not to give up other points.

For example, if people gave up the right to privacy and allowed the
government to monitor all phone calls, online communications, and public
places, then if someone launched a military coup, it would be very difficult to
resist them because there would be no way to secretly organize a rebellion.
This is also brought up in arguments about gun control a lot.

I'm not sure this is properly thought of as a slippery slope argument at all. It
seems to be a more straightforward "Don't give up useful tools for fighting
tyranny" argument.

The Legend of Murder-Gandhi

Previously on Less Wrong's The Adventures of Murder-Gandhi: Gandhi is

offered a pill that will turn him into an unstoppable murderer. He refuses to
take it, because in his current incarnation as a pacifist, he doesn't want others
to die, and he knows that would be a consequence of taking the pill. Even if we
offered him $1 million to take the pill, his abhorrence of violence would lead
him to refuse.

But suppose we offered Gandhi $1 million to take a different pill: one which
would decrease his reluctance to murder by 1%. This sounds like a pretty good
deal. Even a person with 1% less reluctance to murder than Gandhi is still
pretty pacifist and not likely to go killing anybody. And he could donate the
money to his favorite charity and perhaps save some lives. Gandhi accepts the
offer.

Now we iterate the process: every time Gandhi takes the 1%-more-likely-to-
murder-pill, we offer him another $1 million to take the same pill again.

Maybe original Gandhi, upon sober contemplation, would decide to accept $5

million to become 5% less reluctant to murder. Maybe 95% of his original
pacifism is the only level at which he can be absolutely sure that he will still
pursue his pacifist ideals.

Unfortunately, original Gandhi isn't the one making the choice of whether or
not to take the 6th pill. 95%-Gandhi is. And 95% Gandhi doesn't care quite as
much about pacifism as original Gandhi did. He still doesn't want to become a
murderer, but it wouldn't be a disaster if he were just 90% as reluctant as
original Gandhi, that stuck-up goody-goody.

What if there were a general principle that each Gandhi was comfortable with
Gandhis 5% more murderous than himself, but no more? Original Gandhi
would start taking the pills, hoping to get down to 95%, but 95%-Gandhi
would start taking five more, hoping to get down to 90%, and so on until he's
rampaging through the streets of Delhi, killing everything in sight.

Now we're tempted to say Gandhi shouldn't even take the first pill. But this
also seems odd. Are we really saying Gandhi shouldn't take what's basically a
free million dollars to turn himself into 99%-Gandhi, who might well be nearly
indistinguishable in his actions from the original?

Maybe Gandhi's best option is to "fence off" an area of the slippery slope by
establishing a Schelling point - an arbitrary point that takes on special value as
a dividing line. If he can hold himself to the precommitment, he can maximize
his winnings. For example, original Gandhi could swear a mighty oath to take
only five pills - or if he didn't trust even his own legendary virtue, he could give
all his most valuable possessions to a friend and tell the friend to destroy them
if he took more than five pills. This would commit his future self to stick to the
95% boundary (even though that future self is itching to try to the same
precommitment strategy to stick to its own 90% boundary).

Real slippery slopes will resemble this example if, each time we change the
rules, we also end up changing our opinion about how the rules should be
changed. For example, I think the Catholic Church may be working off a
theory of "If we give up this traditional practice, people will lose respect for
tradition and want to give up even more traditional practices, and so on."

Slippery Hyperbolic Discounting

One evening, I start playing Sid Meier's Civilization (IV, if you're wondering -
V is terrible). I have work tomorrow, so I want to stop and go to sleep by
midnight.

At midnight, I consider my alternatives. For the moment, I feel an urge to keep

playing Civilization. But I know I'll be miserable tomorrow if I haven't gotten
enough sleep. Being a hyperbolic discounter, I value the next ten minutes a lot,
but after that the curve becomes pretty flat and maybe I don't value 12:20
much more than I value the next morning at work. Ten minutes' sleep here or
there doesn't make any difference. So I say: "I will play Civilization for ten
minutes - 'just one more turn' - and then I will go to bed."

Time passes. It is now 12:10. Still being a hyperbolic discounter, I value the
next ten minutes a lot, and subsequent times much less. And so I say: I will
play until 12:20, ten minutes sleep here or there not making much difference,
and then sleep.

And so on until my empire bestrides the globe and the rising sun peeps
through my windows.

This is pretty much the same process described above with Murder-Gandhi
except that here the role of the value-changing pill is played by time and my
own tendency to discount hyperbolically.

The solution is the same. If I consider the problem early in the evening, I can
precommit to midnight as a nice round number that makes a good Schelling
point. Then, when deciding whether or not to play after midnight, I can treat
my decision not as "Midnight or 12:10" - because 12:10 will always win that
particular race - but as "Midnight or abandoning the only credible Schelling
point and probably playing all night", which will be sufficient to scare me into
turning off the computer.

(if I consider the problem at 12:01, I may be able to precommit to 12:10 if I am

especially good at precommitments, but it's not a very natural Schelling point
and it might be easier to say something like "as soon as I finish this turn" or
"as soon as I discover this technology").

Coalitions of Resistance

Suppose you are a Zoroastrian, along with 1% of the population. In fact, along
with Zoroastrianism your country has fifty other small religions, each with 1%
of the population. 49% of your countrymen are atheist, and hate religion with
a passion.

You hear that the government is considering banning the Taoists, who
comprise 1% of the population. You've never liked the Taoists, vile doubters of
the light of Ahura Mazda that they are, so you go along with this. When you
hear the government wants to ban the Sikhs and Jains, you take the same tack.

But now you are in the unfortunate situation described by Martin Niemoller:

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out, because I was
not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out,
because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out, because I was not
a Jew.
Then they came for me, but we had already abandoned the only
defensible Schelling point

With the banned Taoists, Sikhs, and Jains no longer invested in the outcome,
the 49% atheist population has enough clout to ban Zoroastrianism and
anyone else they want to ban. The better strategy would have been to have all
fifty-one small religions form a coalition to defend one another's right to exist.
In this toy model, they could have done so in an ecumenial congress, or some
other literal strategy meeting.

But in the real world, there aren't fifty-one well-delineated religions. There are
billions of people, each with their own set of opinions to defend. It would be
impractical for everyone to physically coordinate, so they have to rely on
Schelling points.

In the original example with the alien, I cheated by using the phrase "right-
thinking people". In reality, figuring out who qualifies to join the Right-
Thinking People Club is half the battle, and everyone's likely to have a
different opinion on it. So far, the practical solution to the coordination
problem, the "only defensible Schelling point", has been to just have everyone
agree to defend everyone else without worrying whether they're right-thinking
or not, and this is easier than trying to coordinate room for exceptions like
Holocaust deniers. Give up on the Holocaust deniers, and no one else can be
sure what other Schelling point you've committed to, if any...

...unless they can. In parts of Europe, they've banned Holocaust denial for
years and everyone's been totally okay with it. There are also a host of other
well-respected exceptions to free speech, like shouting "fire" in a crowded
theater. Presumably, these exemptions are protected by tradition, so that they
have become new Schelling points there, or are else so obvious that everyone
except Holocaust deniers is willing to allow a special Holocaust denial
exception without worrying it will impact their own case.

Summary

Slippery slopes legitimately exist wherever a policy not only affects the world
directly, but affects people's willingness or ability to oppose future policies.
Slippery slopes can sometimes be avoided by establishing a "Schelling fence" -
a Schelling point that the various interest groups involved - or yourself across
different values and times - make a credible precommitment to defend.

Intellectual Hipsters and Meta-Contrarianism

Science has inexplicably failed to come up with a precise definition of

"hipster", but from my limited understanding a hipster is a person who
deliberately uses unpopular, obsolete, or obscure styles and preferences in an
attempt to be "cooler" than the mainstream. But why would being deliberately
uncool be cooler than being cool?

As previously discussed, in certain situations refusing to signal can be a sign of

high status. Thorstein Veblen invented the term "conspicuous consumption"
to refer to the showy spending habits of the nouveau riche, who unlike the
established money of his day took great pains to signal their wealth by buying
fast cars, expensive clothes, and shiny jewelry. Why was such flashiness
common among new money but not old? Because the old money was so secure
in their position that it never even occurred to them that they might be
confused with poor people, whereas new money, with their lack of aristocratic
breeding, worried they might be mistaken for poor people if they didn't make
it blatantly obvious that they had expensive things.

The old money might have started off not buying flashy things for pragmatic
reasons - they didn't need to, so why waste the money? But if F. Scott
Fitzgerald is to be believed, the old money actively cultivated an air of
superiority to the nouveau riche and their conspicuous consumption; not
buying flashy objects becomes a matter of principle. This makes sense: the
nouveau riche need to differentiate themselves from the poor, but the old
money need to differentiate themselves from the nouveau riche.

This process is called countersignaling, and one can find its telltale patterns in
many walks of life. Those who study human romantic attraction warn men not
to "come on too strong", and this has similarities to the nouveau riche
example. A total loser might come up to a woman without a hint of romance,
promise her nothing, and demand sex. A more sophisticated man might buy
roses for a woman, write her love poetry, hover on her every wish, et cetera;
this signifies that he is not a total loser. But the most desirable men may
deliberately avoid doing nice things for women in an attempt to signal they are
so high status that they don't need to. The average man tries to differentiate
himself from the total loser by being nice; the extremely attractive man tries to
differentiate himself from the average man by not being especially nice.
In all three examples, people at the top of the pyramid end up displaying
characteristics similar to those at the bottom. Hipsters deliberately wear the
same clothes uncool people wear. Families with old money don't wear much
more jewelry than the middle class. And very attractive men approach women
with the same lack of subtlety a total loser would use.1

If politics, philosophy, and religion are really about signaling, we should

expect to find countersignaling there as well.

Pretending To Be Wise

Let's go back to Less Wrong's long-running discussion on death. Ask any five
year old child, and ey can tell you that death is bad. Death is bad because it
kills you. There is nothing subtle about it, and there does not need to be. Death
universally seems bad to pretty much everyone on first analysis, and what it
seems, it is.

But as has been pointed out, along with the gigantic cost, death does have a
few small benefits. It lowers overpopulation, it allows the new generation to
develop free from interference by their elders, it provides motivation to get
things done quickly. Precisely because these benefits are so much smaller than
the cost, they are hard to notice. It takes a particularly subtle and clever mind
to think them up. Any idiot can tell you why death is bad, but it takes a very
particular sort of idiot to believe that death might be good.

So pointing out this contrarian position, that death has some benefits, is
potentially a signal of high intelligence. It is not a very reliable signal, because
once the first person brings it up everyone can just copy it, but it is a cheap
signal. And to the sort of person who might not be clever enough to come up
with the benefits of death themselves, and only notices that wise people seem
to mention death can have benefits, it might seem super extra wise to say
death has lots and lots of great benefits, and is really quite a good thing, and if
other people should protest that death is bad, well, that's an opinion a five
year old child could come up with, and so clearly that person is no smarter
than a five year old child. Thus Eliezer's title for this mentality, "Pretending To
Be Wise".
If dwelling on the benefits of a great evil is not your thing, you can also
pretend to be wise by dwelling on the costs of a great good. All things
considered, modern industrial civilization - with its advanced technology, its
high standard of living, and its lack of typhoid fever - is pretty neat. But
modern industrial civilization also has many costs: alienation from nature,
strains on the traditional family, the anonymity of big city life, pollution and
overcrowding. These are real costs, and they are certainly worth taking
seriously; nevertheless, the crowds of emigrants trying to get from the Third
World to the First, and the lack of any crowd in the opposite direction, suggest
the benefits outweigh the costs. But in my estimation - and speak up if you
disagree - people spend a lot more time dwelling on the negatives than on the
positives, and most people I meet coming back from a Third World country
have to talk about how much more authentic their way of life is and how much
we could learn from them. This sort of talk sounds Wise, whereas talk about
how nice it is to have buses that don't break down every half mile sounds
trivial and selfish..

So my hypothesis is that if a certain side of an issue has very obvious points in

support of it, and the other side of an issue relies on much more subtle points
that the average person might not be expected to grasp, then adopting the
second side of the issue will become a signal for intelligence, even if that side
of the argument is wrong.

This only works in issues which are so muddled to begin with that there is no
fact of the matter, or where the fact of the matter is difficult to tease out: so no
one tries to signal intelligence by saying that 1+1 equals 3 (although it would
not surprise me to find a philosopher who says truth is relative and this
equation is a legitimate form of discourse).

Meta-Contrarians Are Intellectual Hipsters

A person who is somewhat upper-class will conspicuously signal eir wealth by

buying difficult-to-obtain goods. A person who is very upper-class will
conspicuously signal that ey feels no need to conspicuously signal eir wealth,
by deliberately not buying difficult-to-obtain goods.

A person who is somewhat intelligent will conspicuously signal eir intelligence

by holding difficult-to-understand opinions. A person who is very intelligent
will conspicuously signal that ey feels no need to conspicuously signal eir
intelligence, by deliberately not holding difficult-to-understand opinions.

According to the survey, the average IQ on this site is around 1452. People on
this site differ from the mainstream in that they are more willing to say death
is bad, more willing to say that science, capitalism, and the like are good, and
less willing to say that there's some deep philosophical sense in which 1+1 = 3.
That suggests people around that level of intelligence have reached the point
where they no longer feel it necessary to differentiate themselves from the sort
of people who aren't smart enough to understand that there might be side
benefits to death. Instead, they are at the level where they want to differentiate
themselves from the somewhat smarter people who think the side benefits to
death are great. They are, basically, meta-contrarians, who counter-signal by
holding opinions contrary to those of the contrarians' signals. And in the case
of death, this cannot but be a good thing.

But just as contrarians risk becoming too contrary, moving from "actually,
death has a few side benefits" to "DEATH IS GREAT!", meta-contrarians are
at risk of becoming too meta-contrary.

All the possible examples here are controversial, so I will just take the least
controversial one I can think of and beg forgiveness. A naive person might
think that industrial production is an absolute good thing. Someone smarter
than that naive person might realize that global warming is a strong negative
to industrial production and desperately needs to be stopped. Someone even
smarter than that, to differentiate emself from the second person, might
decide global warming wasn't such a big deal after all, or doesn't exist, or isn't
man-made.

In this case, the contrarian position happened to be right (well, maybe), and
the third person's meta-contrariness took em further from the truth. I do feel
like there are more global warming skeptics among what Eliezer called "the
atheist/libertarian/technophile/sf-fan/early-adopter/programmer empirical
cluster in personspace" than among, say, college professors.

In fact, very often, the uneducated position of the five year old child may be
deeply flawed and the contrarian position a necessary correction to those
flaws. This makes meta-contrarianism a very dangerous business.
Remember, most everyone hates hipsters.

Without meaning to imply anything about whether or not any of these

positions are correct or not3, the following triads come to mind as connected
to an uneducated/contrarian/meta-contrarian divide:

● KKK-style racist / politically correct liberal / "but there are scientifically

proven genetic differences"
● misogyny / women's rights movement / men's rights movement
● conservative / liberal / libertarian4
● herbal-spiritual-alternative medicine / conventional medicine / Robin
Hanson
● don't care about Africa / give aid to Africa / don't give aid to Africa
● Obama is Muslim / Obama is obviously not Muslim, you idiot / Patri
Friedman5

What is interesting about these triads is not that people hold the positions
(which could be expected by chance) but that people get deep personal
satisfaction from arguing the positions even when their arguments are
unlikely to change policy6 - and that people identify with these positions to the
point where arguments about them can become personal.

If meta-contrarianism is a real tendency in over-intelligent people, it doesn't

mean they should immediately abandon their beliefs; that would just be meta-
meta-contrarianism. It means that they need to recognize the meta-contrarian
tendency within themselves and so be extra suspicious and careful about a
desire to believe something contrary to the prevailing contrarian wisdom,
especially if they really enjoy doing so.

Footnotes

1. But what's really interesting here is that people at each level of the
pyramid don't just follow the customs of their level. They enjoy
following the customs, it makes them feel good to talk about how they
follow the customs, and they devote quite a bit of energy to insulting the
people on the other levels. For example, old money call the nouveau
riche "crass", and men who don't need to pursue women call those who
do "chumps". Whenever holding a position makes you feel superior and
 is fun to talk about, that's a good sign that the position is not just
practical, but signaling related.
2. There is no need to point out just how unlikely it is that such a number
is correct, nor how unscientific the survey was.
3. One more time: the fact that those beliefs are in an order does not mean
some of them are good and others are bad. For example, "5 year old
child / pro-death / transhumanist" is a triad, and "warming denier /
warming believer / warming skeptic" is a triad, but I personally support
1+3 in the first triad and 2 in the second. You can't evaluate the truth of
a statement by its position in a signaling game; otherwise you could use
human psychology to figure out if global warming is real!
4. This is my solution to the eternal question of why libertarians are always
more hostile toward liberals, even though they have just about as many
points of real disagreement with the conservatives.
5. To be fair to Patri, he admitted that those two posts were "trolling", but I
think the fact that he derived so much enjoyment from trolling in that
particular way is significant.
6. Worth a footnote: I think in a lot of issues, the original uneducated
position has disappeared, or been relegated to a few rednecks in some
remote corner of the world, and so meta-contrarians simply look like
contrarians. I think it's important to keep the terminology, because most
contrarians retain a psychology of feeling like they are being contrarian,
even after they are the new norm. But my only evidence for this is
introspection, so it might be false.

Cardiologists and Chinese Robbers

I.

It takes a special sort of person to be a cardiologist. This is not always a good

thing.

You may have read about one or another of the “cardiologist caught falsifying
test results and performing dangerous unnecessary surgeries to make more
money” stories, but you might not have realized just how common it really is.
Maryland cardiologist performs over 500 dangerous unnecessary surgeries to
make money. Unrelated Maryland cardiologist performs another 25 in a
separate incident. California cardiologist does “several hundred” dangerous
unnecessary surgeries and gets raided by the FBI. Philadelphia cardiologist,
same. North Carolina cardiologist, same. 11 Kentucky cardiologists, same.
Actually just a couple of miles from my own hospital, a Michigan cardiologist
was found to have done $4 million worth of the same. Etc, etc, etc.

My point is not just about the number of cardiologists who perform dangerous
unnecessary surgeries for a quick buck. It’s not even just about the cardiology
insurance fraud, cardiology kickback schemes, or cardiology research data
falsification conspiracies. That could all just be attributed to some distorted
incentives in cardiology as a field. My point is that it takes a special sort of
person to be a cardiologist.

Consider the sexual harassment. Head of Yale cardiology department fired for
sexual harassment with “rampant bullying”. Stanford cardiologist charged
with sexually harassing students. Baltimore cardiologist found guilty of sexual
harassment. LA cardiologist fined $200,000 for groping med tech. Three
different Pennsylvania cardiologists sexually harassing the same woman.
Arizona cardiologist suspended on 19 (!) different counts of sexual abuse. One
of the “world’s leading cardiologists” fired for sending pictures of his genitals
to a female friend. New York cardiologist in trouble for refusing to pay his
$135,000 bill at a strip club. Manhattan cardiologist taking naked pictures of
patients, then using them to sexually abuse employees. New York cardiologist
secretly installs spycam in office bathroom. Just to shake things up, a Florida
cardiologist was falsely accused of sexual harassment as part of feud with
another cardiologist.

And yeah, you can argue that if you put high-status men in an office with a lot
of subordinates, sexual harassment will be depressingly common just as a
result of the environment. But there’s also the Texas cardiologist who pled
guilty to child molestation. The California cardiologist who killed a two-year-
old kid. The author of one of the world’s top cardiology textbooks arrested on
charges Wikipedia describes only as “related to child pornography and
cocaine”.

Then it gets weird. Did you about the Australian cardiologist who is fighting
against extradition to Uganda, where he is accused of “terrorism, aggravated
robbery and murdering seven people”? What about the Long Island
cardiologist who hired a hitman to kill a rival cardiologist, and who was also
for some reason looking for “enough explosives to blow up a building”?

Like I said, it takes a special sort of person.

II.

Given the recent discussion of media bias here, I wanted to bring up Alyssa
Vance’s “Chinese robber fallacy”, which she describes as:

..where you use a generic problem to attack a specific person or group, even
though other groups have the problem just as much (or even more so).

For example, if you don’t like Chinese people, you can find some story of a
Chinese person robbing someone, and claim that means there’s a big social
problem with Chinese people being robbers.

I originally didn’t find this too interesting. It sounds like the same idea as
plain old stereotyping, something we think about often and are carefully
warned to avoid.

But after re-reading the post, I think the argument is more complex. There are
over a billion Chinese people. If even one in a thousand is a robber, you can
provide one million examples of Chinese robbers to appease the doubters.
Most people think of stereotyping as “Here’s one example I heard of where the
out-group does something bad,” and then you correct it with “But we can’t
generalize about an entire group just from one example!” It’s less obvious that
you may be able to provide literally one million examples of your false
stereotype and still have it be a false stereotype. If you spend twelve hours a
day on the task and can describe one crime every ten seconds, you can spend
four months doing nothing but providing examples of burglarous Chinese –
and still have absolutely no point.

If we’re really concerned about media bias, we need to think about Chinese
Robber Fallacy as one of the media’s strongest weapons. There are lots of
people – 300 million in America alone. No matter what point the media wants
to make, there will be hundreds of salient examples. No matter how low-
probability their outcome of interest is, they will never have to stop covering it
if they don’t want to.
This has briefly gotten some coverage in the form of “the war on police”. As
per AEI:

Is there a “war on police” in America today? Most Americans think so,

and that’s understandable given all of the media coverage of that topic.
A Google news search finds 32,000 results for the phrase “war on cops”
and another 12,100 results for “war on police,” with sensational
headlines like “America’s War on Cops Intensifies” and “Bratton Warns
of Tough Times Ahead Due to ‘War on Cops’.” A recent Rasmussen poll
found that 58% of likely US voters answered “Yes” to the question “Is
there a war on police in America today?” and only 27% disagreed. But
data on police shootings in America that were reported last week by The
Guardian tell a much different story of increasing police safety.

According to data available from the “Officer Down Memorial Page” on

the annual number of non-accidental, firearm-related police fatalities,
2015 is on track to be the safest year for law enforcement in the US since
1887 (except for a slightly safer year in 2013), more than 125 years ago.
And adjusted for the country’s growing population, the years 2013 and
2015 will be the two safest years for police in US history, measured by
the annual number of firearm-related police fatalities per 1 million
people.

When politically convenient, it is easy to make Americans believe in a war on

police simply by better coverage of existing murders of police officers. Given
that America is a big country with very many police, even a low base rate will
provide many lurid police-officer-murder stories – by my calculation, two
murders a week even if officers are killed only at the same rate as everyone
else. While covering these is a legitimate decision, it can be deceptive unless
it’s framed in terms of things like whether the rate has gone up or down,
whether the rate is higher or lower for the group involved than the base rate in
the population, and it still seems scary when you explicitly calculate the rate.

But a Chomskian analysis would ask whether the talk of a “war on cops” is
really a uniquely bad example of journalistic malpractice, or whether it is bog-
standard journalistic malpractice which is unique only in being called out this
time instead of allowed to pass.
Let’s stick with coverage of police for consistency’s sake. I’ve made a very
similar argument before regarding claims of racist police shootings (see Part D
here), but let’s avoid that particular rabbit hole and consider a broader and
more unsettling point. We all hear anecdotes about terrible police brutality.
Suppose, in fact, that we’ve heard exactly X stories. Given that there are about
100,000 police officers in the US, is X consistent with the problem being
systemic and dire, or with the problem being relatively limited?

I mean, it’s hard to say. Quick Fermi calculation: if I can think of about one
horrible story of police brutality a week, and assume there are fifty that aren’t
covered for every one that is, then per year that makes…

But wait – what if I told you that number was a lie, and there were actually
500,000 police officers in the US? Suddenly the rate of police brutality has
decreased five times from what it was a second ago. If you previously believed
that there were 100,000 police officers, and that the police brutality rate was
shameful but that decreasing the rate to only one-fifth its previous level would
count as a victory, well, now you can declare victory.

What if I told you the 500,000 number is also a lie, and it’s actually way more
cops than that? Do you have any idea at all how many police there are?
Shouldn’t you at least have an order-of-magnitude estimate of what the police
brutality rate is before deciding if it’s too high or not? What if I told you the
real number was a million cops? Five million cops? Ten million? That’s a
hundred times the original estimate of 100,000 – shouldn’t learning that the
police brutality rate is only 1% of what you originally estimated (or, going the
other direction, 10,000% of that) change your opinion in some way?

(No, I won’t tell you how many cops there actually are. Look it up.)

I feel this way about a lot of things. The media is always giving us stories of
how tech nerds are sexist in some way or another. But we may suspect they
want to push that line regardless of whether it’s true. How many tech nerds
are there? A million? Ten million? How many lurid stories about harassment
in Silicon Valley have you heard? Do we know if this is higher or lower than
the base rate for similar industries? Whether it’s going up or down? What it
would look like if we actually had access to the per person rates?
By now you’ve probably figured out the gimmick, but just to come totally clean
– cardiologists are wonderful people who as far as I know are no less ethical
than any other profession. I chose to pick on them at random – well, not quite
random, one of them yelled at me the other day because apparently contacting
the cardiologist on call late at night just because your patient is having a
serious heart-related emergency is some kind of huge medical faux pas. I don’t
think anyone has ever claimed that there’s any general issue with
cardiologists, and as far as I know there’s no evidence for such.

If you read Part I of this post and found yourself nodding along, thinking
“Wow, cardiologists are real creeps, there must be serious structural problems
in the cardiology profession, something must be done about them,” consider it
evidence that a sufficiently motivated individual – especially a journalist! –
can make you feel that way about any group.

All Debates Are Bravery Debates

I.

I read Atlas Shrugged probably about a decade ago, and felt turned off by its
promotion of selfishness as a moral ideal. I thought that was basically just
being a jerk. After all, if there’s one thing the world doesn’t need (I thought)
it’s more selfishness.

Then I talked to a friend who told me Atlas Shrugged had changed his life.
That he’d been raised in a really strict family that had told him that ever
enjoying himself was selfish and made him a bad person, that he had to be
working at every moment to make his family and other people happy or else
let them shame him to pieces. And the revelation that it was sometimes okay
to consider your own happiness gave him the strength to stand up to them and
turn his life around, while still keeping the basic human instinct of helping
others when he wanted to and he felt they deserved it (as, indeed, do Rand
characters).
II.

The religious and the irreligious alike enjoy making fun of Reddit’s r/atheism,
which combines an extreme strawmanning of religious positions with childish
insults and distasteful triumphalism. Recently the moderators themselves
have become a bit embarrassed by it and instituted some rules intended to
tone things down, leading to some of the most impressive Internet drama I
have ever seen. In its midst, some people started talking about what the old
strawmanning triumphalist r/atheism meant to them (see for example here).

A lot of them were raised in religious families where they would have been
disowned if they had admitted to their atheism. Some of them were disowned
for admitting to atheism, or lost boyfriends/girlfriends, or were terrified they
might go to Hell. And then they found r/atheism, and saw people making fun
of religion, and insulting it, in really REALLY offensive ways. And no one was
striking them down with lightning. No one was shouting them down. No one
was doing much of anything at all. And to see this taboo violated in the most
shocking possible way with no repercussions sort of broke the spell for them,
like as long as people were behaving respectfully to religion, even respectfully
disagreeing, it still had this aura of invincibility about it, but if some perfectly
normal person can post a a stupid comic where Jesus has gay sex with
Mohammed, then there’s this whole other world out there where religion
holds no power.

Gilbert tells the story of how when, as a young Christian struggling with doubt,
he would read r/atheism to remind himself that atheists could be pretty awful.
r/atheism is doing a bad job at being the sort of people who can convert
Gilbert, and the new mods’ policy of “you should have more civil and
intellectual discussions” might work better on him. I think it would work
better on me too.

But there is – previously unappreciated by me – a large population of people

for whom really dumb offensive strawmannish memes are exactly what they
need.
III.

A friend described his experiences in the Landmark Forum’s self-

improvement workshop. He said their modus operandi was to get people to
take responsibility for the outcome of their actions. His example was an office
worker who always did substandard work, and was always making excuses like
“My boss doesn’t support me” or “My computer system isn’t good enough” or
“My coworkers aren’t pulling their fair share.” Landmark says those kinds of
excuses are what’s keeping you back. And they taught (again, according to this
one person) that the solution was to treat everything that happens in your life
as your responsibility – no excuses, just “it was my fault” or “it’s to my credit”.

Then a few days later, I was reading a book on therapy which contained the
phrase (I copied it down to make sure I got it right) “Don’t be so hard on
yourself. No one else is as hard on yourself as you are. You are your own worst
critic.”

Notice that this encodes the exact opposite assumption. Landmark claims its
members are biased against ever thinking ill of themselves, even when they
deserve it. The therapy book claims that patients are biased towards always
thinking ill of themselves, even when they don’t deserve it.

And you know, both claims are probably spot on. There are definitely people
who are too hard on themselves. Ozy Frantz has done an amazing job of
getting me and many other people inclined towards skepticism about feminist
and transgender issues, engaging with us, and gradually convincing us to be
more respectful and aware through sheer kindness and willingness to engage
people reasonably on every part of the political spectrum. Two days ago some
people on Twitter – who were angry Ozy said one need not boycott everything
Orson Scott Card has ever written just because he’s against gay marriage –
told Ozy they weren’t a real transgender person and suggested lots of people
secretly disliked them. And instead of doing what I would do and telling the
trolls to go to hell, Ozy freaked out and worried they was doing everything
wrong and decided to delete everything they had ever written online. I know
Ozy is their own worst critic and if that therapy book was aimed at people like
them, it was entirely correct to say what it said.
On the other hand, I look at people like Amy’s Baking Company, who are
obviously terrible people, who get a high-status professional chef as well as
thousands of random joes informing them of exactly what they are doing
wrong, who are so clearly in the wrong that it seems impossible not to realize
it – and who then go on to attribute the negativity to a “conspiracy” against
them and deny any wrongdoing. They could probably use some Landmark.

IV.

In a recent essay I complained about bravery debates, arguments where

people boast about how brave they are to take an unorthodox and persecuted
position, and their opponents counter that they’re not persecuted heretics,
they’re a vast leviathan persecuting everyone else. But I think I
underestimated an important reason why some debates have to be bravery
debates.

Suppose there are two sides to an issue. Be more or less selfish. Post more or
less offensive atheist memes. Be more or less willing to blame and criticize
yourself.

There are some people who need to hear each side of the issue. Some people
really need to hear the advice “It’s okay to be selfish sometimes!” Other people
really need to hear the advice “You are being way too selfish and it’s not okay.”

It’s really hard to target advice at exactly the people who need it. You can’t go
around giving everyone surveys to see how selfish they are, and give half of
them Atlas Shrugged and half of them the collected works of Peter Singer. You
can’t even write really complicated books on how to tell whether you need
more or less selfishness in your life – they’re not going to be as buyable, as
readable, or as memorable as Atlas Shrugged. To a first approximation, all you
can do is saturate society with pro-selfishness or anti-selfishness messages,
and realize you’ll be hurting a select few people while helping the majority.

But in this case, it makes a really big deal what the majority actually is.

Suppose an Objectivist argues “Our culture has become too self-sacrificing!

Everyone is told their entire life that the only purpose of living is to work for
other people. As a result, people are miserable and no one is allowed to enjoy
themselves at all.” If they’re right, then helping spread Objectivism is probably
a good idea – it will help these legions of poor insufficiently-selfish people, but
there will be very few too-selfish-already people who will be screwed up by the
advice.

But suppose Peter Singer argues “We live in a culture of selfishness! Everyone
is always told to look out for number one, and the poor are completely
neglected!” Well, then we want to give everyone the collected works of Peter
Singer so we can solve this problem, and we don’t have to worry about
accidentally traumatizing the poor self-sacrificing people more, because we’ve
already agreed there aren’t very many of these at all.

It’s much easier to be charitable in political debates when you view the two
participants as coming from two different cultures that err on opposite sides,
each trying to propose advice that would help their own culture, each being
tragically unaware that the other culture exists.

A lot of the time this happens when one person is from a dysfunctional
community and suggesting very strong measures against some problem the
community faces, and the other person is from a functional community and
thinks the first person is being extreme, fanatical or persecutory.

This happens a lot among, once again, atheists. One guy is like “WE NEED TO
DESTROY RELIGION IT CORRUPTS EVERYTHING IT TOUCHES ANYONE
WHO MAKES ANY COMPROMISES WITH IT IS A TRAITOR KILL KILL
KILL.” And the other guy is like “Hello? Religion may not be literally true, but
it usually just makes people feel more comfortable and inspires them to do
nice things and we don’t want to look like huge jerks here.” Usually the first
guy was raised Jehovah’s Witness and the second guy was raised Moralistic
Therapeutic Deist.

But I’ve also sometimes had this issue when I talk to feminists. They’re like
“Guys need to be more concerned about women’s boundaries, and women
need to be willing to shame and embarrass guys who hit on them
inappropriately.” And maybe they spent high school hanging out with bros on
the football team who thought asking women’s consent was a boring
technicality, and I spent high school hanging out entirely with extremely
considerate but very shy geeks who spent their teenage years in a state of
nightmarish loneliness and depression because they were too scared to ask out
women because the woman might try to shame and embarrass them for it.

And the big one is trust. There are so many people from extremely functional
communities saying that people need to be more trusting and kind and take
people at their word more often, and so many people from dysfunctional
communities saying that’s not how it works. Both are no doubt backed by
ample advice from their own lives.

A blog like this one probably should promote the opinions and advice most
likely to be underrepresented in the blog-reading populace (which is totally
different from the populace at large). But this might convince “thought
leaders”, who then use it to inspire change in the populace at large, which will
probably be in the wrong direction. I think most of my friends are too leftist
but society as a whole is too rightist – should I spread leftist or rightist memes
among my friends?

I feel pretty okay about both being sort of a libertarian and writing an essay
arguing against libertarianism, because the world generally isn’t libertarian
enough but the sorts of people who read long online political essays generally
are way more libertarian than can possibly be healthy.

The Virtue of Silence

Leah Libresco writes a couple of essays (1, 2) on an ethical dilemma reported
in the New York Times. In the course of a confidential medical history, a
doctor hears her patient is suffering from stress-related complaints after
having sent an innocent man to prison. The doctor wants to know whether it is
ethical to report the matter to the police. The Times’ columnist says yes – it
would save the poor prisoner. Leah says no – violating medical confidentiality
creates an expectation that medical confidentiality will be violated in the
future, thus dooming patients who are too afraid to talk about drug use or gay
sex or other potentially embarrassing but important medical risk factors.

But both sides are ignoring the much bigger dilemma lurking one meta-level
up: is it ethical to debate this dilemma in the New York Times?
Let’s look more closely at that phrase “violating medical confidentiality creates
an expectation that medical confidentiality will be violated in the future.”
There’s a very abstruse angels-and-clockwork interpretation of “creates an
expectation” where, by making the decision to violate confidentiality, you are
altering the Platonic machinery of the Universe in a way that allows other
beings who know your source code to determine that you will do this. But
most people don’t have the decision theory to understand this, and anyway
most doctors do not publish their source code online.

The way “creates an expectation” pans out in our universe is that somebody
hears that a doctor violated medical confidentiality, and that person tells
someone else, and that person tells someone else, until eventually someone
who was going to tell their doctor about having gay sex with drugs remembers
having heard the story and decides not to.

How exactly would people hear about this doctor who revealed the innocence
of the prisoner? Through the ensuing court case? Nah. Most people wouldn’t
obsessively read the minutes of every single case at the local courthouse unless
of course it has something to do with gender. Really, the only way that
someone could hear about a doctor violating medical confidentiality is if she,
like, somehow got a description of her intention to do so published in
meticulous detail in the New York Times.

Oh, right.

The entire negative effect of the doctor breaking her promise is that it would
make people doubt medical confidentiality in the future. But whether or not
the doctor ends up breaking her promise, thousands of New York Times
readers now know that doctors strongly consider breaking medical
confidentiality, and that ethics columnists tell them it’s okay to do so. It seems
like the whether the doctor actually keeps her promise or not in this particular
case is of minuscule importance compared to the damage that the column has
already done.

Silence is a hard virtue. All the other virtues have the advantage that, when
you practice them, people will praise you. Sometimes if your moral system is
very different from your friends’ people will attack you for your virtues, but
getting attacked by sufficiently horrible people can sometimes be just as
gratifying as praise. But if you stay silent, there’s no praise and no attacks. By
definition, no one even knows you made a courageous moral choice.

(Eliezer mentioned in the comments of my Against Bravery Debates that he’s

spent a couple decades pushing ideas almost everyone else thinks are
crackpot, and he’s never appealed to bravery at all. He is one hundred percent
correct and I have one hundred percent never noticed despite reading almost
everything he’s written for several years. That’s the Virtue of Silence for you.)

(I had like five much better examples here, all of which would be very clever,
and each time I had to catch myself and say “Wait a second, by bringing that
up I’m violating the virtue I’m supposed to be pushing here, aren’t I?”)

One example of silence I deeply appreciate is people who don’t talk about the
latest viral issue. I’m trying to think of an example that’s not too destructive to
bring up…hmmmm…go for something old…Elevatorgate! Nearly everyone
who talked about Elevatorgate mentioned that it was outrageous that the
blogosphere was making such a big deal about it, missing the similarity to the
old adage that “you aren’t stuck in traffic, you are traffic.” Somewhere there
was someone who wanted to write about Elevatorgate, thought about it, and
decided not to. That person deserves the sincere thanks of a grateful Internet.

So having made the case for the other side of the confidentiality-newspaper
meta-dilemma, am I actually pushing the claim that it is a moral law not to
publicize information that could have bad consequences?

But I notice that this sort of thing almost always ends up making people angry
and having a perverse effect where demands not to draw Mohammed turn into
Everyone Draw Mohammed Day (see: Streisand Effect). It also sometimes
snowballs to the point where not only can you not talk about X, but you can’t
talk about the demand not to talk about X because that would be referring to X
obliquely, and you can’t talk about the demand not to talk about the demand
to talk about X, until eventually you climb up so many meta-levels that you
collapse from hypoxia and have to be rescued by Sherpas. Then you get a
“callout culture” where people try to gain easy Virtue Points by telling people
discussing issues that they Should Not Be Discussing Them and other people
try to gain easy Virtue Points by being the Brave Defender of Freedom of
Speech.
And maybe that’s useful if it’s something like gender where everyone wants to
talk about it all the time anyway, but we don’t really need to do that to medical
confidentiality, do we?

Maybe this is one of those rare cases where the word “supererogatory” might
be useful. Yelling at people who talk about violations of medical confidentiality
would just lead to “ARE OUR DISCUSSIONS OF MEDICAL
CONFIDENTIALITY BEING SILENCED??!?” on the front page of the New
York Times. And fretting over talking about it with your friends, or publishing
a blog article about it (cough) is probably on the moral level of those Jains who
walk everywhere with a broom in front of them so that they don’t accidentally
squash any bugs. But if someone is really really concerned about it and wants
to be a great person, then yeah, I think writing to the New York Times about it
requires a bit of thought.

And since I am publishing a blog article about it (VIRTUE OF SILENCE IS

REALLY HARD!) let me restore some Virtue Points by confirming that I will
not betray private patient information of this sort if such a dilemma comes up
except when legally required. Trust me, I’m a doctor.

Proving Too Much

The fallacy of Proving Too Much is when you challenge an argument because,
in addition to proving its intended conclusion, it also proves obviously false
conclusions. For example, if someone says “You can’t be an atheist, because
it’s impossible to disprove the existence of God”, you can answer “That
argument proves too much. If we accept it, we must also accept that you can’t
disbelieve in Bigfoot, since it’s impossible to disprove his existence as well.”

I love this tactic so much. I only learned it had a name quite recently, but it’s
been my default style of argument for years. It neatly cuts through
complicated issues that might otherwise be totally irresolvable.

Because here is a fundamental principle of the Dark Arts – you don’t need an
argument that can’t be disproven, only an argument that can’t be disproven in
the amount of time your opponent has available.
In a presidential debate, where your opponent has three minutes, that means
all you need to do is come up with an argument whose disproof is inferentially
distant enough from your audience that it will take your opponent more than
three minutes to explain it, or your audience more than three minutes’ worth
of mental effort to understand the explanation.

The noncentral fallacy is the easiest way to do this. “Martin Luther King was a
criminal!” “Although what you say is technically correct, categories don’t work
in the way your statement is impl – ” “Oh, sorry, time’s up.”

But pretty much anything that assumes a classical Aristotelian view of

concepts/objects is gold here. The same is true of any deontological rules your
audience might be attached to.

I tend to get stuck in the position of having to argue against those Dark Artsy
tactics pretty often. And the great thing about Proving Too Much is that it can
demolish an entire complicated argument based on all sorts of hard-to-tease-
apart axioms in a split second. For example, After Virtue gave (though it does
not endorse) this example of deontological reasoning:

I cannot will that my mother should have had an abortion when she was
pregnant with me, except perhaps if it had been certain that the embryo
was dead or gravely damaged. But if I cannot will this in my own case,
how can I consistently deny to others the right to life that I claim for
myself? I would break the so-called Golden Rule unless I denied that a
mother in general has a right to an abortion.

It seemed unfair for me to move on in the book without at least checking

whether this argument was correct and I should re-evaluate my pro-choice
position. But that would require sorting through all the weird baggage here,
like what it means to will something, and whether your obligations to potential
people are the same as your obligations to real people, and how to apply the
Golden Rule across different levels of potentiality.

Instead I just thought to myself: “Imagine my mother had raped my father,

leading to my conception. I cannot will that a policeman had prevented this
rape, but I also do not want to enshrine the general principle that policemen in
general have no right to prevent rape. Therefore, this argument proves too
much.” It took all of five seconds.

Sometimes a quick Proving Too Much can tear apart extremely subtle
philosophical arguments that have been debated for centuries. For example,
Pascal’s Wager also proves Pascal’s Mugging (they may both be correct, but
bringing the Mugging in at least proves ignoring their correctness to be a
reasonable and impossible-to-critique life choice). And Anselm’s Ontological
Argument seems much less foreboding when you realize it can double as a
method for creating jelly donuts on demand.

Interestingly, I think that one of the examples of proving too much on

Wikipedia can itself be demolished by a proving too much argument, but I’m
not going to say which one it is because I want to see if other people
independently come to the same conclusion.

Beware Isolated Demands For Rigor

I.

From Identity, Personal Identity, and the Self by John Perry:

There is something about practical things that knocks us off our

philosophical high horses. Perhaps Heraclitus really thought he couldn’t
step in the same river twice. Perhaps he even received tenure for that
contribution to philosophy. But suppose some other ancient had
claimed to have as much right as Heraclitus did to an ox Heraclitus had
bought, on the grounds that since the animal had changed, it wasn’t the
same one he had bought and so was up for grabs. Heraclitus would have
quickly come up with some ersatz, watered-down version of identity of
practical value for dealing with property rights, oxen, lyres, vineyards,
and the like. And then he might have wondered if that watered-down
vulgar sense of identity might be a considerably more valuable concept
than a pure and philosophical sort of identity that nothing has.

Okay, but I can think of something worse than that.

Imagine Heraclitus as a cattle rustler in the Old West. Every time a rancher
catches him at his nefarious business, he patiently explains to them that
identity doesn’t exist, and therefore the same argument against private
property as made above. Flummoxed, they’re unable to think of a response
before he rides off into the sunset.

But then when Heraclitus himself needs the concept of stable personal identity
for something – maybe he wants to deposit his ill-gotten gains in the bank
with certainty that the banker will give it back to him next time he shows up to
withdraw it, or maybe he wants to bribe the sheriff to ignore his activities for
the next while – all of a sudden Heraclitus is willing to tolerate the watered-
down vulgar sense of identity like everyone else.

(actually, I can think of something even worse than that, which is a TV western
based on this premise, where a roving band of pre-Socratic desperadoes
terrorizes Texas. The climax is no doubt when the hero strides onto Main
Street, revolver in hand, saying “There’s a new sheriff in town.” And
Parmenides gruffly responds “No, I’m pretty sure that’s impossible.”)

At its best, philosophy is a revolutionary pursuit that dissolves our common-

sense intuitions and exposes the possibility of much deeper structures behind
them. One can respond by becoming a saint or madman, or by becoming a
pragmatist who is willing to continue to participate in human society while
also understanding its theoretical limitations. Both are respectable career
paths.

The problem is when someone chooses to apply philosophical rigor selectively.

Heraclitus could drown in his deeper understanding of personal identity and

become a holy madman, eschewing material things and taking no care for the
morrow because he does not believe there is any consistent self to experience
it. Or he could engage with it from afar, becoming a wise scholar who
participating in earthly affairs while drawing equanimity from the realization
that there is a sense in which all his accomplishments will be impermanent.

But if he only applies his new theory when he wants other people’s cows, then
we have a problem. Philosophical rigor, usually a virtue, has been debased to
an isolated demand for rigor in cases where it benefits Heraclitus.
A fair use of philosophical rigor would prevent both Heraclitus and his victims
from owning property, and thus either collapse under its own impracticality or
usher in a revolutionary new form of economic thinking. An isolated demand
for philosophical rigor, applied by Heraclitus to other people but never the
other way around, would merely give Heraclitus an unfair advantage in the
existing system.

II.

A while ago I wrote a post called Military Strikes Are An Extremely Cheap Way
To Help Foreigners which was a response to a Matt Yglesias post called the
opposite. Yglesias was opposed to “humanitarian” military intervention (think
the air strikes on ISIS going on right now, justified under the cause of
preventing a genocide) and his argument was that this was extremely cost-
ineffective compared to just giving the money to GiveWell’s top-rated charity
– at the time he was writing, malaria prevention.

I argued he was wrong about his numbers. But I also argued he was unfairly
making an isolated demand for philosophical rigor.

Once you learn about utilitarianism and effective charity, you can become the
holy madman, donating every cent you have beyond what is strictly necessary
to survive and hold down a job to whatever the top rated charity is.

Or you can become the worldly scholar, continuing to fritter away your money
on things like “hot water” and “food other than gruel” but appreciating the
effective-utilitarian perspective and trying to make a few particularly
important concessions to it.

Or you can use it to steal other people’s cows. This is what I accused Matt
Yglesias of doing. Presumably there are lots of government programs Yglesias
supports – I suggested PBS – and he would never dream of demanding that
we defund them in the hopes of donating the money to malaria prevention.
But if for political reasons he doesn’t support air strikes, suddenly that plan
has to justify itself according to rigorous criteria that no government program
that exists could possibly pass.
Government spending seems to be a particularly fertile case for this problem. I
remember hearing some conservatives complain: sex education in public
schools is an outrage, because my tax dollars are going to support something I
believe is morally wrong.

This is, I guess, a demand for ethical rigor. That no one should ever be forced
to pay for something they don’t like. Apply it consistently, and conservatives
shouldn’t have to pay for sex ed, liberals shouldn’t have to pay for wars, and
libertarians shouldn’t have to pay for anything, except maybe a $9.99 tax bill
yearly to support the police and a minimal court system.

Applied consistently, you become the holy madman demanding either total
anarchy or some kind of weird system of tax earmarks which would actually be
pretty fun to think about. Or the worldly scholar with a strong appreciation for
libertarian ideas who needs a really strong foundational justification for
spending government money on things that a lot of people oppose.

Applied inconsistently, you’re just stealing cows again, coming up with a

clever argument against the programs you don’t like while defending the ones
you do.

III.

But this is the sort of uncouth behavior we expect of political partisans. What
about science?

Suppose there are scientists on both sides of a controversial issue – for

example, economists studying the minimum wage. One team that supports a
minimum wage comes up with a pretty good study showing with p < 0.05 that
minimum wages help the economy in some relevant way. The Science Czar (of
course we have a science czar! We're not monsters!) notes that p < 0.05 is
really a shoddy criterion that can prove anything and they should come back
when they have p < 0.01. I have a huge amount of sympathy with the Science
Czar on this one, by the way.

Soooo the team of economists spends another five years doing another study
and finds with p < 0.01 that the minimum wage helps the economy in some
important way. The Science Czar notes that their study was correlational only,
and that correlational studies suck. We really can't show that minimum wages
are any good without a randomized controlled trial. Luckily, the governments
of every country in the world are totally game for splitting their countries in
half and instituting different economic regimes in each part for ten years, so
after a decade it comes out that in the randomized controlled trial the
minimum wage helped the economy with p < 0.01. The Science Czar worries
about publication bias. What if there were a lot of other teams who got all the
countries in the world to split in half and institute different wage policies in
each of the two territories for one decade, but they weren't published because
their results weren't interesting enough? Everything the Science Czar has said
so far makes perfect sense and he is to be commended for his rigor and
commitment to the job. Science is really hard and even tiny methodological
mistakes can in principle invalidate an entire field.

But now suppose that a team shows that, in a sample of six restaurants in
Podunk Ohio, there was a nonsignificant trend towards the minimum wage
making things a little worse.

And the Science Czar says: awesome! That solves that debate, minimum wage
is bad, let’s move on to investigating nominal GDP targeting.

Now it looks like the Science Czar is just a jerk who’s really against minimum
wage. All his knowledge of the standards of scientific rigor are going not
towards bettering science, but toward worsening science. He’s not trying to
create a revolutionary new scientific regime, he’s taking pot shots.

I see this a lot in medicine. Someone jumps on a new study showing the
selenium or chromium or plutonium or whatever cures cancer. It is brought
up that no, really, the medical community has investigated this sort of thing
before, and it has always been found that it doesn’t.

“Well, maybe the medical community wasn’t investigating it the right way!
Maybe the investigators were biased! Maybe they didn’t randomize right!
Maybe they used a population unusually susceptible to cancer-getting! Ninety
percent of medical studies are wrong! Those twenty experiments showing a
lack of effect could be total bunk!”
Yes, maybe these things happened in each of the twenty studies that disagree
with you.

Or maybe they happened in the one contrarian study you are getting so excited
about.

IV.

The unholy combination of isolated demands for philosophical rigor and

isolated demands for scientific rigor is isolated demands for mathematical-
statistical-conceptual rigor, ie the sort of thing this blog has been talking about
all week.

I have already been made fun of for how many different things I am
metaphorically comparing IQ to – speed, blood pressure, comas – so I guess it
can’t hurt to add another example I only thought of today. How about crime?
It’s usually measured by crime rate – a made-up statistic that combines
subfactors like arson (maybe higher when fire insurance pays out better),
property damage (maybe higher during periods of ethnic tension and frequent
riots) and theft (maybe higher when income inequality is worse). There is
assumed to be a General Factor Of Crime (presumably caused by things like
poor policing, dark alleys, broken families, et cetera) but I would be extremely
surprised if anyone had ever proven Beyond A Shadow Of A Doubt that the
factor analysis works out here.

When Cosma Shalizi says he’s not sure about the factor analysis in IQ, I have
no quarrel with him, because Cosma Shalizi’s response to everything in the
world is to glare at it for not being sufficiently statistically rigorous.

But when other people are totally happy to talk about speed and blood
pressure and comas and the crime rate, and then suddenly switch to a position
that we can’t talk about IQ at all unless we have a perfect factor-analytical
proof of its obeying certain statistical rules, then I worry they’re just out to
steal cows.

Likewise, if someone were to just never acknowledge any sorts of groups of

objects except those that could be statistically proven to fall out into absolutely
separate clusters in which variance within each cluster is less than variance
between clusters, well, at least they would be fun to talk to at dinner parties.

But when people never even begin to question the idea of different cultures
but make exacting demands of anyone before they can talk about different
races – even though the two ideas are statistically isomorphic – then I think
they’re just out to steal cows.

So this is another technique for avoiding Eulering – is your interlocutor

equally willing to apply their complex mathematical argument to everything
else.

I think if I hadn’t known anything about Bayesian probability, I would have

examined the McGrews’ Bayesian argument for the Gospels by seeing if it
applied equally well to Mormonism, the control group for Christianity.

V.

The old man stamped his boot in the red dirt, kicking up a tiny cloud of dust.
“There’s a new sheriff in town,” he told them.

“No, I’m pretty sure that’s impossible,” says Parmenides. “There’s no such
thing as change, only the appearance thereof.”

“Well then,” says the old man, “I reckon you won’t mind the false illusion of
your surroundings appearing to change into a jail cell.” And he took out his
six-shooter and held it steady.

“Hold on,” said Thales. “We don’t want any trouble here. All is water, so all we
did was steal a little bit of water from people. We can give you some water
back, and everything will be even, right?” He gestured to a watering trough for
horses on the side of the street, which was full of the stuff.

“Just so long as you don’t mind being sprayed with some very hard water from
my squirt gun,” the old man answered, and the six-shooter was pointed at the
Milesian now.

“Ha!” said Zeno of Elea. “You don’t scare us. In order to hit Thales, your bullet
would have to get halfway to him, then half of the remaining distance, and so
on. But that would require an infinite number of steps, therefore it is
impossible.”

“Sorry,” said the old man, “I couldn’t hear you because it’s logically impossible
for the sound waves encoding your speech to reach my ears.”

“We’re not even the same people as the guys who stole those cattle!” said
Heraclitus. “Personal identity is an illusion!”

“Then you won’t mind coming to the courthouse with me,” replied the old man
“to help the judge imprison some other people who look just like you.”

The last of them, the tall one, said nothing. He just raised his revolver in a
fluid motion and shot at the old man.

The old man saw it coming and jumped out of the way. The air was briefly full
of bullets. Bang! Thales went down! Bang bang! Heraclitus! Bang bang!
Parmenides and Zeno. Bang bang bang! The old man was hit in the arm, but
still standing. Bang bang bang bang…

It was just the old man and the tall one now. The tall one picked up his gun
and fired. Nothing happened. Out of bullets.

The old man smiled wryly, his six-shooter still in his hand.

“I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking – did he fire six shots, or only
five? Well, you’ve got to ask yourself a question – do you feel lucky? Well, do
you, punk?”

The tall one didn’t budge. “Man is the measure of all things,” said Protagoras.
“If I believe you fired six shots, then by my personal epistemic standards, you
fired six shots.”

The old man didn’t say anything.

“You see,” the Sophist continued. “Out of all of them, I alone was truly
consistent. They all came up with clever theories, then abandoned them
whenever it conflicted with their self-interest. I was more honest. I just said at
the beginning that my self-interest determined truth, and so never suffered
any temptation to depart from my position.”

The old man took off the bandana covering his face. “Man may be the measure
of all things. But I’ve taken your measure, Protagoras, and found it wanting.”

“Socrates?!” the Sophist gasped.

“The only truly consistent people are the dead, Protagoras,” he said – and
squeezed the trigger.

Categorization and Concepts

Diseased thinking: dissolving questions about disease

Sandy is a morbidly obese woman looking for advice.

Her husband has no sympathy for her, and tells her she obviously needs to
stop eating like a pig, and would it kill her to go to the gym once in a while?

Her doctor tells her that obesity is primarily genetic, and recommends the diet
pill orlistat and a consultation with a surgeon about gastric bypass.

Her sister tells her that obesity is a perfectly valid lifestyle choice, and that fat-
ism, equivalent to racism, is society's way of keeping her down.

When she tells each of her friends about the opinions of the others, things
really start to heat up.
Her husband accuses her doctor and sister of absolving her of personal
responsibility with feel-good platitudes that in the end will only prevent her
from getting the willpower she needs to start a real diet.

Her doctor accuses her husband of ignorance of the real causes of obesity and
of the most effective treatments, and accuses her sister of legitimizing a
dangerous health risk that could end with Sandy in hospital or even dead.

Her sister accuses her husband of being a jerk, and her doctor of trying to
medicalize her behavior in order to turn it into a "condition" that will keep her
on pills for life and make lots of money for Big Pharma.

Sandy is fictional, but similar conversations happen every day, not only about
obesity but about a host of other marginal conditions that some consider
character flaws, others diseases, and still others normal variation in the
human condition. Attention deficit disorder, internet addiction, social anxiety
disorder (as one skeptic said, didn't we used to call this "shyness"?),
alcoholism, chronic fatigue, oppositional defiant disorder ("didn't we used to
call this being a teenager?"), compulsive gambling, homosexuality, Aspergers'
syndrome, antisocial personality, even depression have all been placed in two
or more of these categories by different people.

Sandy's sister may have a point, but this post will concentrate on the debate
between her husband and her doctor, with the understanding that the same
techniques will apply to evaluating her sister's opinion. The disagreement
between Sandy's husband and doctor centers around the idea of "disease". If
obesity, depression, alcoholism, and the like are diseases, most people default
to the doctor's point of view; if they are not diseases, they tend to agree with
the husband.

The debate over such marginal conditions is in many ways a debate over
whether or not they are "real" diseases. The usual surface level arguments
trotted out in favor of or against the proposition are generally inconclusive,
but this post will apply a host of techniques previously discussed on Less
Wrong to illuminate the issue.
What is Disease?

In Disguised Queries , Eliezer demonstrates how a word refers to a cluster of

objects related upon multiple axes. For example, in a company that sorts red
smooth translucent cubes full of vanadium from blue furry opaque eggs full of
palladium, you might invent the word "rube" to designate the red cubes, and
another "blegg", to designate the blue eggs. Both words are useful because
they "carve reality at the joints" - they refer to two completely separate classes
of things which it's practically useful to keep in separate categories. Calling
something a "blegg" is a quick and easy way to describe its color, shape,
opacity, texture, and chemical composition. It may be that the odd blegg might
be purple rather than blue, but in general the characteristics of a blegg remain
sufficiently correlated that "blegg" is a useful word. If they weren't so
correlated - if blue objects were equally likely to be palladium-containing-
cubes as vanadium-containing-eggs, then the word "blegg" would be a waste of
breath; the characteristics of the object would remain just as mysterious to
your partner after you said "blegg" as they were before.

"Disease", like "blegg", suggests that certain characteristics always come

together. A rough sketch of some of the characteristics we expect in a disease
might include:

1. Something caused by the sorts of thing you study in biology: proteins,

bacteria, ions, viruses, genes.
2. Something involuntary and completely immune to the operations of free
will
3. Something rare; the vast majority of people don't have it
4. Something unpleasant; when you have it, you want to get rid of it
5. Something discrete; a graph would show two widely separate
populations, one with the disease and one without, and not a normal
distribution.
6. Something commonly treated with science-y interventions like
chemicals and radiation.

Cancer satisfies every one of these criteria, and so we have no qualms

whatsoever about classifying it as a disease. It's a type specimen, the sparrow
as opposed to the ostrich. The same is true of heart attack, the flu, diabetes,
and many more.
Some conditions satisfy a few of the criteria, but not others. Dwarfism seems
to fail (5), and it might get its status as a disease only after studies show that
the supposed dwarf falls way out of normal human height variation. Despite
the best efforts of transhumanists, it's hard to convince people that aging is a
disease, partly because it fails (3). Calling homosexuality a disease is a poor
choice for many reasons, but one of them is certainly (4): it's not necessarily
unpleasant.

The marginal conditions mentioned above are also in this category. Obesity
arguably sort-of-satisfies criteria (1), (4), and (6), but it would be pretty hard
to make a case for (2), (3), and (5).

So, is obesity really a disease? Well, is Pluto really a planet? Once we state that
obesity satisfies some of the criteria but not others, it is meaningless to talk
about an additional fact of whether it "really deserves to be a disease" or not.

If it weren't for those pesky hidden inferences...

Hidden Inferences From Disease Concept

The state of the disease node, meaningless in itself, is used to predict several
other nodes with non-empirical content. In English: we make value decisions
based on whether we call something a "disease" or not.

If something is a real disease, the patient deserves our sympathy and support;
for example, cancer sufferers must universally be described as "brave". If it is
not a real disease, people are more likely to get our condemnation; for
example Sandy's husband who calls her a "pig" for her inability to control her
eating habits. The difference between "shyness" and "social anxiety disorder"
is that people with the first get called "weird" and told to man up, and people
with the second get special privileges and the sympathy of those around them.

And if something is a real disease, it is socially acceptable (maybe even

mandated) to seek medical treatment for it. If it's not a disease, medical
treatment gets derided as a "quick fix" or an "abdication of personal
responsibility". I have talked to several doctors who are uncomfortable
suggesting gastric bypass surgery, even in people for whom it is medically
indicated, because they believe it is morally wrong to turn to medicine to solve
a character issue.

While a condition's status as a "real disease" ought to be meaningless as a

"hanging node" after the status of all other nodes have been determined, it has
acquired political and philosophical implications because of its role in
determining whether patients receive sympathy and whether they are
permitted to seek medical treatment.

If we can determine whether a person should get sympathy, and whether they
should be allowed to seek medical treatment, independently of the central
node "disease" or of the criteria that feed into it, we will have successfully
unasked the question "are these marginal conditions real diseases" and
cleared up the confusion.

Sympathy or Condemnation?

Our attitudes toward people with marginal conditions mainly reflect a

deontologist libertarian (libertarian as in "free will", not as in "against
government") model of blame. In this concept, people make decisions using
their free will, a spiritual entity operating free from biology or circumstance.
People who make good decisions are intrinsically good people and deserve
good treatment; people who make bad decisions are intrinsically bad people
and deserve bad treatment. But people who make bad decisions for reasons
that are outside of their free will may not be intrinsically bad people, and may
therefore be absolved from deserving bad treatment. For example, if a
normally peaceful person has a brain tumor that affects areas involved in fear
and aggression, they go on a crazy killing spree, and then they have their brain
tumor removed and become a peaceful person again, many people would be
willing to accept that the killing spree does not reflect negatively on them or
open them up to deserving bad treatment, since it had biological and not
spiritual causes.

Under this model, deciding whether a condition is biological or spiritual

becomes very important, and the rationale for worrying over whether
something "is a real disease" or not is plain to see. Without figuring out this
extremely difficult question, we are at risk of either blaming people for things
they don't deserve, or else letting them off the hook when they commit a sin,
both of which, to libertarian deontologists, would be terrible things. But
determining whether marginal conditions like depression have a spiritual or
biological cause is difficult, and no one knows how to do it reliably.

Determinist consequentialists can do better. We believe it's biology all the way
down. Separating spiritual from biological illnesses is impossible and
unnecessary. Every condition, from brain tumors to poor taste in music, is
"biological" insofar as it is encoded in things like cells and proteins and follows
laws based on their structure.

But determinists don't just ignore the very important differences between
brain tumors and poor taste in music. Some biological phenomena, like poor
taste in music, are encoded in such a way that they are extremely vulnerable to
what we can call social influences: praise, condemnation, introspection, and
the like. Other biological phenomena, like brain tumors, are completely
immune to such influences. This allows us to develop a more useful model of
blame.

The consequentialist model of blame is very different from the deontological

model. Because all actions are biologically determined, none are more or less
metaphysically blameworthy than others, and none can mark anyone with the
metaphysical status of "bad person" and make them "deserve" bad treatment.
Consequentialists don't on a primary level want anyone to be treated badly,
full stop; thus is it written: "Saddam Hussein doesn't deserve so much as a
stubbed toe." But if consequentialists don't believe in punishment for its own
sake, they do believe in punishment for the sake of, well, consequences.
Hurting bank robbers may not be a good in and of itself, but it will prevent
banks from being robbed in the future. And, one might infer, although
alcoholics may not deserve condemnation, societal condemnation of alcoholics
makes alcoholism a less attractive option.

So here, at last, is a rule for which diseases we offer sympathy, and which we
offer condemnation: if giving condemnation instead of sympathy decreases
the incidence of the disease enough to be worth the hurt feelings, condemn;
otherwise, sympathize. Though the rule is based on philosophy that the
majority of the human race would disavow, it leads to intuitively correct
consequences. Yelling at a cancer patient, shouting "How dare you allow your
cells to divide in an uncontrolled manner like this; is that the way your mother
raised you??!" will probably make the patient feel pretty awful, but it's not
going to cure the cancer. Telling a lazy person "Get up and do some work, you
worthless bum," very well might cure the laziness. The cancer is a biological
condition immune to social influences; the laziness is a biological condition
susceptible to social influences, so we try to socially influence the laziness and
not the cancer.

The question "Do the obese deserve our sympathy or our condemnation,"
then, is asking whether condemnation is such a useful treatment for obesity
that its utility outweighs the disutility of hurting obese people's feelings. This
question may have different answers depending on the particular obese
person involved, the particular person doing the condemning, and the
availability of other methods for treating the obesity, which brings us to...

The Ethics of Treating Marginal Conditions

If a condition is susceptible to social intervention, but an effective biological

therapy for it also exists, is it okay for people to use the biological therapy
instead of figuring out a social solution? My gut answer is "Of course, why
wouldn't it be?", but apparently lots of people find this controversial for some
reason.
In a libertarian deontological system, throwing biological solutions at spiritual
problems might be disrespectful or dehumanizing, or a band-aid that doesn't
affect the deeper problem. To someone who believes it's biology all the way
down, this is much less of a concern.

Others complain that the existence of an easy medical solution prevents

people from learning personal responsibility. But here we see the status-quo
bias at work, and so can apply a preference reversal test. If people really
believe learning personal responsibility is more important than being not
addicted to heroin, we would expect these people to support deliberately
addicting schoolchildren to heroin so they can develop personal responsibility
by coming off of it. Anyone who disagrees with this somewhat shocking
proposal must believe, on some level, that having people who are not addicted
to heroin is more important than having people develop whatever measure of
personal responsibility comes from kicking their heroin habit the old-
fashioned way.

But the most convincing explanation I have read for why so many people are
opposed to medical solutions for social conditions is a signaling explanation
by Robin Hans...wait! no!...by Katja Grace. On her blog, she says:

...the situation reminds me of a pattern in similar cases I have noticed

before. It goes like this. Some people make personal sacrifices,
supposedly toward solving problems that don’t threaten them
personally. They sort recycling, buy free range eggs, buy fair trade,
campaign for wealth redistribution etc. Their actions are seen as
virtuous. They see those who don’t join them as uncaring and immoral.
A more efficient solution to the problem is suggested. It does not
require personal sacrifice. People who have not previously sacrificed
support it. Those who have previously sacrificed object on grounds that
it is an excuse for people to get out of making the sacrifice. The
supposed instrumental action, as the visible sign of caring, has become
virtuous in its own right. Solving the problem effectively is an attack
on the moral people.

A case in which some people eat less enjoyable foods and exercise hard to
avoid becoming obese, and then campaign against a pill that makes avoiding
obesity easy demonstrates some of the same principles.
There are several very reasonable objections to treating any condition with
drugs, whether it be a classical disease like cancer or a marginal condition like
alcoholism. The drugs can have side effects. They can be expensive. They can
build dependence. They may later be found to be placebos whose efficacy was
overhyped by dishonest pharmaceutical advertising.. They may raise ethical
issues with children, the mentally incapacitated, and other people who cannot
decide for themselves whether or not to take them. But these issues do not
magically become more dangerous in conditions typically regarded as
"character flaws" rather than "diseases", and the same good-enough solutions
that work for cancer or heart disease will work for alcoholism and other such
conditions (but see here).

I see no reason why people who want effective treatment for a condition
should be denied it or stigmatized for seeking it, whether it is traditionally
considered "medical" or not.

Summary

People commonly debate whether social and mental conditions are real
diseases. This masquerades as a medical question, but its implications are
mainly social and ethical. We use the concept of disease to decide who gets
sympathy, who gets blame, and who gets treatment.

Instead of continuing the fruitless "disease" argument, we should address

these questions directly. Taking a determinist consequentialist position allows
us to do so more effectively. We should blame and stigmatize people for
conditions where blame and stigma are the most useful methods for curing or
preventing the condition, and we should allow patients to seek treatment
whenever it is available and effective.

The Categories Were Made For Man, Not Man For The
Categories
I.

“Silliest internet atheist argument” is a hotly contested title, but I have a

special place in my heart for the people who occasionally try to prove Biblical
fallibility by pointing out whales are not a type of fish.

(this is going to end up being a metaphor for something, so bear with me)

The argument goes like this. Jonah got swallowed by a whale. But the Bible
says Jonah got swallowed by a big fish. So the Bible seems to think whales are
just big fish. Therefore the Bible is fallible. Therefore, the Bible was not
written by God.

The first problem here is that “whale” is just our own modern interpretation of
the Bible. For all we know, Jonah was swallowed by a really really really big
herring.

The second problem is that if the ancient Hebrews want to call whales a kind
of fish, let them call whales a kind of fish.

I’m not making the weak and boring claim that since they’d never discovered
genetics they don’t know better. I am making the much stronger claim that,
even if the ancient Hebrews had taken enough of a break from murdering
Philistines and building tabernacles to sequence the genomes of all known
species of aquatic animals, there’s nothing whatsoever wrong, false, or
incorrect with them calling a whale a fish.

Now, there’s something wrong with saying “whales are phylogenetically just as
closely related to bass, herring, and salmon as these three are related to each
other.” What’s wrong with the statement is that it’s false. But saying “whales
are a kind of fish” isn’t.

Suppose you travel back in time to ancient Israel and try to explain to King
Solomon that whales are a kind of mammal and not a kind of fish.

Your translator isn’t very good, so you pause to explain “fish” and “mammal”
to Solomon. You tell him that fish is “the sort of thing herring, bass, and
salmon are” and mammal is “the sort of thing cows, sheep, and pigs are”.
Solomon tells you that your word “fish” is Hebrew dag and your word
“mammal” is Hebrew behemah.

So you try again and say that a whale is a behemah, not a dag. Solomon laughs
at you and says you’re an idiot.

You explain that you’re not an idiot, that in fact all kinds of animals have
things called genes, and the genes of a whale are much closer to those of the
other behemah than those of the dag.

Solomon says he’s never heard of these gene things before, and that maybe
genetics is involved in your weird foreign words “fish” and “mammal”, but dag
are just finned creatures that swim in the sea, and behemah are just legged
creatures that walk on the Earth.

(like the kelev and the parah and the gavagai)

You try to explain that no, Solomon is wrong, dag are actually defined not by
their swimming-in-sea-with-fins-ness, but by their genes.

Solomon says you didn’t even know the word dag ten minutes ago, and now
suddenly you think you know what it means better than he does, who has been
using it his entire life? Who died and made you an expert on Biblical Hebrew?

You try to explain that whales actually have tiny little hairs, too small to even
see, just as cows and sheep and pigs have hair.

Solomon says oh God, you are so annoying, who the hell cares whether whales
have tiny little hairs or not. In fact, the only thing Solomon cares about is
whether responsibilities for his kingdom’s production of blubber and whale oil
should go under his Ministry of Dag or Ministry of Behemah. The Ministry of
Dag is based on the coast and has a lot of people who work on ships. The
Ministry of Behemah has a strong presence inland and lots of of people who
hunt on horseback. So please (he continues) keep going about how whales
have little tiny hairs.

It’s easy to see that Solomon has a point, and that if he wants to define
behemah as four-legged-land-dwellers that’s his right, and no better or worse
than your definition of “creatures in a certain part of the phylogenetic tree”.
Indeed, it might even be that if you spent ten years teaching Solomon all about
the theory of genetics and evolution (which would be hilarious – think how
annoyed the creationists would get) he might still say “That’s very interesting,
and I can see why we need a word to describe creatures closely related along
the phylogenetic tree, but make up your own word, because behemah already
means ‘four-legged-land-dweller’.”

Now imagine that instead of talking to King Solomon, you’re talking to that
guy from Duck Dynasty with the really crazy beard (I realize that may describe
more than one person), who stands in for all uneducated rednecks in the same
way King Solomon stands in for all Biblical Hebrews.

“Ah course a whale is a feesh, ya moron” he says in his heavy Southern accent.

“No it isn’t,” you say. “A fish is a creature phylogenetically related to various

other fish, and with certain defining anatomical features. It says so right here
in this biology textbook.”

“Well,” Crazy Beard Guy tells you, “Ah reckon that might be what a fish is, but
a feesh is some’in that swims in the orshun.”

With a sinking feeling in your stomach, you spend ten years turning Crazy
Beard Guy into a world expert on phylogenetics and evolutionary theory.
Although the Duck Dynasty show becomes much more interesting, you fail to
budge him a bit on the meaning of “feesh”.

It’s easy to see here that “fish” and “feesh” can be different just as “fish” and
“dag” can be different.

You can point out how many important professors of icthyology in fancy suits
use your definition, and how only a couple of people with really weird facial
hair use his. But now you’re making a status argument, not a factual
argument. Your argument is “conform to the way all the cool people use the
word ‘fish'”, not “a whale is really and truly not a fish”.

There are facts of the matter on each individual point – whether a whale has
fins, whether a whale lives in the ocean, whether a whale has tiny hairs, et
cetera. But there is no fact of the matter on whether a whale is a fish. The
argument is entirely semantic.
So this is the second reason why this particular objection to the Bible is silly. If
God wants to call a whale a big fish, stop telling God what to do.

(also, bats)

II.

When terms are not defined directly by God, we need our own methods of
dividing them into categories.

The essay “How An Algorithm Feels From The Inside” is a gift that keeps on
giving. You can get a reputation as a daring and original thinker just by copy-
pasting it at different arguments with a couple of appropriate words
substituted for one another, mad-libs like. It is the solution to something like
25% of extant philosophical problems.

It starts with a discussion of whether or not Pluto is a planet. Planets tend to

share many characteristics in common. For example, they are large, round,
have normal shaped orbits lined up with the plane of the ecliptic, have cleared
out a certain area of space, and are at least kind of close to the Sun as opposed
to way out in the Oort Cloud.

One could imagine a brain that thought about these characteristics like
Network 1 here:
Obligatory Less Wrong picture

One could imagine this model telling you everything you need to know. If an
object is larger, it’s more likely to be round and in cis-Neptunian space. If an
object has failed to clear its orbit of debris, it’s more likely to have a skewed
orbit relative to the plane of the ecliptic. We could give each of these
relationships Bayesian weights and say things like large objects have a 32%
chance of being in cis-Neptunian space and small objects an 86% chance. Or
whatever.

But Network 1 has some big problems. For one thing, if you inscribe it in
blood, you might accidentally summon the Devil. But for another, it’s
computationally very complicated. Each attribute affects each other attribute
which affects it in turn and so on in an infinite cycle, so that its behavior tends
to be chaotic and unpredictable.

What people actually seem to do is more like Network 2: sweep all common
correlations into one big category in the middle, thus dividing possibility-
space into large round normal-orbit solitary inner objects, and small irregular
skewed-orbit crowded outer objects. It calls the first category “planets” and
the second category “planetoids”.

You can then sweep minor irregularities under the rug. Neptune is pretty far
from the sun, but since it’s large, round, normal-orbit, and solitary, we know
which way the evidence is leaning.

When an object satisfies about half the criteria for planet and half the criteria
for planetoid, then it’s awkward. Pluto is the classic example. It’s relatively
large, round, skewed orbit, solitary…ish? and outer-ish. What do you do?

The practical answer is you convene some very expensive meeting of

prestigious astronomers and come to some official decision which everyone
agrees to follow so they’re all on the same page.

But the ideal answer is you say “Huh, the assumption encoded in the word
‘planet’ that the five red criteria always went together and the five blue criteria
always went together doesn’t hold. Whatever.”
Then you divide the solar system into three types of objects: planets,
planetoids, and dammit-our-categorization-scheme-wasn’t-as-good-as-we-
thought.

(psychiatry, whose philosophy of categorization is light years ahead of a lot of

the rest of the world, conveniently abbreviates this latter category as “NOS”)

The situation with whales and fish is properly understood in the same context.
Fish and mammals differ on a lot of axes. Fish generally live in the water,
breathe through gills, have tails and fins, possess a certain hydrodynamic
shape, lay eggs, and are in a certain part of the phylogenetic tree. Mammals
generally live on land, breathe through lungs, have legs, give live birth, and are
in another part of the phylogenetic tree. Most fish conform to all of the fish
desiderata, and most mammals conform to all of the mammal desiderata, so
there’s no question of how to categorize them. Occasionally you get something
weird (a platypus, a lungfish, or a whale) and it’s a judgment call which you
have to decide by fiat. In our case, that fiat is “use genetics and ignore all other
characteristics” but some other language, culture, or scientific community
might make a different fiat, and then the borders between their categories
would look a little bit different.

III.

Since I shifted to a borders metaphor, let’s follow that and see where it goes.

Imagine that Israel and Palestine agree to a two-state solution with the final
boundary to be drawn by the United Nations. You’re the head of the United
Nations committee involved, so you get out a map and a pencil. Both sides
have sworn by their respective gods to follow whatever you determine.

Your job is not to draw “the correct border”. There is no one correct border
between Israel and Palestine. There are a couple of very strong candidates (for
example, the pre-1967 line of control), but both countries have suggested
deviations from that (most people think an actual solution would involve
Palestine giving up some territory that has since been thoroughly settled by
Israel in exchange for some territory within Israel proper, or perhaps for a
continuous “land bridge” between the West Bank and Gaza). Even if you
wanted to use the pre-1967 line as a starting point, there would still be a lot of
work to do deciding what land swaps should and shouldn’t be made.

Instead you’d be making a series of trade-offs. Giving all of Jerusalem to the

Israelis would make them very happy but anger Palestine. Creating a
contiguous corridor between Gaza and the West Bank makes some sense, but
then you’d be cutting off Eilat from the rest of Israel. Giving all of the Israeli
settlements in the West Bank back to Palestine would satisfy a certain
conception of property rights, but also leave a lot of Jews homeless.

There are also much stupider decisions you could make. You could give Tel
Aviv to Palestine. You could make the Palestinian state a perfect circle five
miles in radius centered on Rishon LeZion. You could just split the territory in
half with a straight line, and give Israel the north and Palestine the south. All
of these things would be really dumb.

But, crucially, they would not be false. They would not be factually incorrect.
They would just be failing to achieve pretty much any of the goals that we
would expect a person solving land disputes in the Middle East to have. You
can think of alternative arrangements in which these wouldn’t be dumb. For
example, if you’re a despot, and you want to make it very clear to both the
Israelis and Palestinians that their opinions don’t matter and they should stop
bothering you with annoying requests for arbitration, maybe splitting the
country in half north-south is the way to go.

This is now unexpectedly a geography blog again.

The border between Turkey and Syria follows a mostly straight-ish line near-
ish the 36th parallel, except that about twenty miles south of the border
Turkey controls a couple of square meters in the middle of a Syrian village.
This is the tomb of the ancestor of the Ottoman Turks, and Turkey’s border
agreement with Syria stipulates that it will remain part of Turkey forever. And
the Turks take this very seriously; they maintain a platoon of special forces
there and have recently been threatening war against Syria if their “territory”
gets “invaded” in the current conflict.
Pictured: Turkey (inside fence), Syria (outside)

The border between Bangladesh and India is complicated at the best of times,
but it becomes absolutely ridiculous in a place called Cooch-Behar, which I
guess is as good a name as any for a place full of ridiculous things. In at least
one spot there is an ‘island’ of Indian territory within a larger island of
Bangladeshi territory within a larger island of Indian territory within
Bangladesh. According to mentalfloss.com:

So why’d the border get drawn like that? It can all be traced back to
power struggles between local kings hundreds of years ago, who would
try to claim pockets of land inside each other’s territories as a way to
leverage political power. When Bangladesh became independent from
India in 1947 (as East Pakistan until 1971), all those separate pockets of
land were divvied up. Hence the polka-dotted mess.
Namibia is a very weird-looking country with a very thin three-hundred-mile-
long panhandle (eg about twice as long as Oklahoma’s). Apparently during the
Scramble For Africa, the Germans who colonized Namibia really wanted
access to the Zambezi River so they could reach the Indian Ocean and trade
their colonial resources. They kept pestering the British who colonized
Botswana until the Brits finally agreed to give up a tiny but very long strip of
territory ending at the riverbank. This turned out to be not so useful, as just
after Namibia’s Zambezi access sits Victoria Falls, the largest waterfall in the
world – meaning that any Germans who tried to traverse the Zambezi to reach
the Indian Ocean would last a matter of minutes before suddenly
encountering a four hundred foot drop and falling to pretty much certain
death. The moral of the story is not to pester the British Empire too much,
especially if they’ve explored Africa and you haven’t.

But the other moral of the story is that borders are weird. Although we think
of borders as nice straight lines that separate people of different cultures, they
can form giant panhandles, distant islands, and enclaves-within-enclaves-
within-enclaves. They can depart from their usual course to pay honor to
national founders, to preserve records of ancient conquests, or to connect to
trade routes.

Hume’s ethics restrict “bad” to an instrumental criticism – you can condemn

something as a bad way to achieve a certain goal, but not as morally bad
independent of what the goal is. In the same way, borders can be bad at
fulfilling your goals in drawing them, but not bad in an absolute sense or
factually incorrect. Namibia’s border is bad from the perspective of Germans
who want access to the Indian Ocean. But it’s excellent from the perspective of
Englishmen who want to watch Germans plummet into the Lower Zambezi
and get eaten by hippos.

Breaking out of the metaphor, the same is true of conceptual boundaries. You
may draw the boundaries of the category “fish” any way you want. A category
“fish” containing herring, dragonflies, and asteroids is going to be stupid, but
only in the same sense that a Palestinian state centered around Tel Aviv would
be stupid – it fails to fulfill any conceivable goals of the person designing it.
Categories “fish” that do or don’t include whales may be appropriate for
different people’s purposes, the same way Palestinians might argue about
whether the borders of their state should be optimized for military
defensibility or for religious/cultural significance.

Statements like “the Zambezi River is full of angry hippos” are brute facts.
Statements like “the Zambezi River is the territory of Namibia” are negotiable.

In the same way, statements like “whales have little hairs” are brute facts.
Statements like “whales are not a kind of fish” are negotiable.

So it’s important to keep these two sorts of statements separate, and

remember that in no case can an agreed-upon set of borders or a category
boundary be factually incorrect.

IV.

I usually avoid arguing LGBT issues on here, not because I don’t have strong
opinions about them but because I assume so many of my readers already
agree with me that it would be a waste of time. I’m pretty sure I’m right about
this – on the recent survey, readers of this blog who were asked to rate their
opinion of gay marriage from 1 (strongly against) to 5 (strongly in favor) gave
an average rating of 4.32.

Nevertheless, I’ve seen enough anti-transgender comments recently that the

issue might be worth a look.

In particular, I’ve seen one anti-transgender argument around that I take very
seriously. The argument goes: we are rationalists. Our entire shtick is trying to
believe what’s actually true, not on what we wish were true, or what our
culture tells us is true, or what it’s popular to say is true. If a man thinks he’s a
woman, then we might (empathetically) wish he were a woman, other people
might demand we call him a woman, and we might be much more popular if
we say he’s a woman. But if we’re going to be rationalists who focus on
believing what’s actually true, then we’ve got to call him a man and take the
consequences.

Thus Abraham Lincoln’s famous riddle: “If you call a tail a leg, how many legs
does a dog have?” And the answer: “Four – because a tail isn’t a leg regardless
of what you call it.”

(if John Wilkes Booth had to suffer through that riddle, then I don’t blame
him)

I take this argument very seriously, because sticking to the truth really is
important. But having taken it seriously, I think it’s seriously wrong.

An alternative categorization system is not an error, and borders are not

objectively true or false.

Just as we can come up with criteria for a definition of “planet”, we can come
up with a definition of “man”. Absolutely typical men have Y chromosomes,
have male genitalia, appreciate manly things like sports and lumberjackery,
are romantically attracted to women, personally identify as male, wear male
clothing like blue jeans, sing baritone in the opera, et cetera.

Some people satisfy some criteria of manhood and not others, in much the
same way that Pluto satisfies only some criteria of planet-hood and whales
satisfy only some criteria of mammal-hood. For example, gay men might date
other men and behave in effeminate ways. People with congenital androgen
insensitivity syndrome might have female bodies, female external genitalia,
and have been raised female their entire life, but when you look into their cells
they have Y chromosomes.

Biologists defined by fiat that in cases of ambiguous animal grouping like

whales, phylogenetics will be the tiebreaker. This was useful to resolve
ambiguity, and it’s worth sticking to as a Schelling point so everyone’s using
their words the same way, but it’s kind of arbitrary and mostly based on
biologists caring a lot about phylogenetics. If we let King Solomon make the
decision, he might decide by fiat that whether animals lived in land or water
would be the tiebreaker, since he’s most interested in whether the animal is
hunted on horseback or by boat.

Likewise, astronomers decided by fiat that something would be a planet if and

only if meets the three criteria of orbiting, round, and orbit-clearing. But here
we have a pretty neat window into how these kinds of decisions take place –
you can read the history of the International Astronomical Union meeting
where they settled on the definition and learn about all the alternative
proposals that were floated and rejected and which particular politics resulted
in the present criteria being selected among all the different possibilities. Here
it is obvious that the decision was by fiat.

Without the input of any prestigious astronomers at all, most people seem to
assume that the ultimate tiebreaker in man vs. woman questions is presence
of a Y chromosome. I’m not sure this is a very principled decision, because I
expect most people would classify congenital androgen insensitivity patients
(XY people whose bodies are insensitive to the hormone that makes them look
male, and so end up looking 100% female their entire lives and often not even
knowing they have the condition) as women.

The project of the transgender movement is to propose a switch from using

chromosomes as a tiebreaker to using self-identification as a tiebreaker.

(This isn’t actually the whole story – some of the more sophisticated people
want to split “sex” and “gender”, so that people who want to talk about what
chromosomes they’ve got have a categorization system to do that with, and a
few people even want to split “chromosomal sex” and “anatomical sex” and
“gender” and goodness knows what else – and I support all of these as very
important examples of the virtue of precision – but to a first approximation,
they want to define gender as self-identification)

This is not something that can be “true” or “false”. It’s a boundary-redrawing

project. It can make for some boundaries that look a little bit weird – like a
small percent of men being able to get pregnant – but as far as weird
boundaries go that’s probably not as bad as having a tiny exclave of Turkish
territory in the middle of a Syrian village.

(Ozy tells me this is sort of what queer theory is getting at, but in a horrible
unreadable postmodernist way. They assure me you’re better off just reading
the darned Sequences.)

You draw category boundaries in specific ways to capture tradeoffs you care
about. If you care about the sanctity of the tomb of your country’s founder,
sometimes it’s worth having a slightly weird-looking boundary in order to
protect and honor it. And if you care about…

I’ve lived with a transgender person for six months, so I probably should have
written this earlier. But I’m writing it now because I just finished accepting a
transgender man to the mental hospital. He alternates between trying to kill
himself and trying to cut off various parts of his body because he’s so
distressed that he is biologically female. We’ve connected him with some
endocrinologists who can hopefully get him started on male hormones, after
which maybe he’ll stop doing that and hopefully be able to lead a normal life.

If I’m willing to accept an unexpected chunk of Turkey deep inside Syrian

territory to honor some random dead guy – and I better, or else a platoon of
Turkish special forces will want to have a word with me – then I ought to
accept an unexpected man or two deep inside the conceptual boundaries of
what would normally be considered female if it’ll save someone’s life. There’s
no rule of rationality saying that I shouldn’t, and there are plenty of rules of
human decency saying that I should.
V.

I’ve made this argument before and gotten a reply something like this:

“Transgender is a psychiatric disorder. When people have psychiatric

disorders, certainly it’s right to sympathize and feel sorry for them and want to
help them. But the way we try to help them is by treating their disorder, not by
indulging them in their delusion.”

I think these people expect me to argue that transgender “isn’t really a

psychiatric disorder” or something. But “psychiatric disorder” is just another
category boundary dispute, and one that I’ve already written enough about
elsewhere. At this point, I don’t care enough to say much more than “If it’s a
psychiatric disorder, then attempts to help transgender people get covered by
health insurance, and most of the ones I know seem to want that, so sure,
gender dysphoria is a psychiatric disorder.”

And then I think of the Hair Dryer Incident.

The Hair Dryer Incident was probably the biggest dispute I’ve seen in the
mental hospital where I work. Most of the time all the psychiatrists get along
and have pretty much the same opinion about important things, but people
were at each other’s throats about the Hair Dryer Incident.

Basically, this one obsessive compulsive woman would drive to work every
morning and worry she had left the hair dryer on and it was going to burn
down her house. So she’d drive back home to check that the hair dryer was off,
then drive back to work, then worry that maybe she hadn’t really checked well
enough, then drive back, and so on ten or twenty times a day.

It’s a pretty typical case of obsessive-compulsive disorder, but it was really

interfering with her life. She worked some high-powered job – I think a lawyer
– and she was constantly late to everything because of this driving back and
forth, to the point where her career was in a downspin and she thought she
would have to quit and go on disability. She wasn’t able to go out with friends,
she wasn’t even able to go to restaurants because she would keep fretting she
left the hair dryer on at home and have to rush back. She’d seen countless
psychiatrists, psychologists, and counselors, she’d done all sorts of therapy,
she’d taken every medication in the book, and none of them had helped.

So she came to my hospital and was seen by a colleague of mine, who told her
“Hey, have you thought about just bringing the hair dryer with you?”

And it worked.

She would be driving to work in the morning, and she’d start worrying she’d
left the hair dryer on and it was going to burn down her house, and so she’d
look at the seat next to her, and there would be the hair dryer, right there. And
she only had the one hair dryer, which was now accounted for. So she would
let out a sigh of relief and keep driving to work.

And approximately half the psychiatrists at my hospital thought this was

absolutely scandalous, and This Is Not How One Treats Obsessive Compulsive
Disorder, and what if it got out to the broader psychiatric community that
instead of giving all of these high-tech medications and sophisticated
therapies we were just telling people to put their hair dryers on the front seat
of their car?

I, on the other hand, thought it was the best fricking story I had ever heard
and the guy deserved a medal. Here’s someone who was totally untreatable by
the normal methods, with a debilitating condition, and a drop-dead simple
intervention that nobody else had thought of gave her her life back. 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, just to let everyone know where I stand on
this issue.

Miyamoto Musashi is quoted as saying:

The primary thing when you take a sword in your hands is your
intention to cut the enemy, whatever the means. Whenever you parry,
hit, spring, strike or touch the enemy’s cutting sword, you must cut the
enemy in the same movement. It is essential to attain this. If you think
only of hitting, springing, striking or touching the enemy, you will not be
able actually to cut him.
Likewise, the primary thing in psychiatry is to help the patient, whatever the
means. Someone can concern-troll that the hair dryer technique leaves
something to be desired in that it might have prevented the patient from
seeking a more thorough cure that would prevent her from having to bring the
hair dryer with her. But compared to the alternative of “nothing else works” it
seems clearly superior.

And that’s the position from which I think a psychiatrist should approach
gender dysphoria, too.

Imagine if we could give depressed people a much higher quality of life merely
by giving them cheap natural hormones. I don’t think there’s a psychiatrist in
the world who wouldn’t celebrate that as one of the biggest mental health
advances in a generation. Imagine if we could ameliorate schizophrenia with
one safe simple surgery, just snip snip you’re not schizophrenic anymore.
Pretty sure that would win all of the Nobel prizes. Imagine that we could make
a serious dent in bipolar disorder just by calling people different pronouns.
I’m pretty sure the entire mental health field would join together in
bludgeoning anybody who refused to do that. We would bludgeon them over
the head with big books about the side effects of lithium.

Really, are you sure you want your opposition to accepting transgender people
to be “I think it’s a mental disorder”?

VI.

Some people can’t leave well enough alone, and continue to push the mental
disorder angle. For example:
There are a lot of things I could say here.

I could point out that trans-Napoleonism seem to be mysteriously less

common than transgender.

I could relate this mysterious difference to the various heavily researched

apparent biological correlates of transgender, including unusual variants of
the androgen receptor, birth-sex-discordant sizes of various brain regions,
birth-sex-discordant responses to various pheromones, high rates of
something seemingly like body integrity identity disorder, and of course our
old friend altered digit ratios. If our hypothetical trans-Napoleon came out of
the womb wearing a French military uniform and clutching a list of 19th
century Grand Armee positions in his cute little baby hands, I think I’d take
him more seriously.

I could argue that questions about gender are questions about category
boundaries, whereas questions about Napoleon – absent some kind of
philosophical legwork that I would very much like to read – are questions of
fact.
I could point out that if the extent of somebody’s trans-Napoleonness was
wanting to wear a bicorne hat, and he was going to be suicidal his entire life if
he couldn’t but pretty happy if I could, let him wear the damn hat.

I could just link people to other sites’ pretty good objections to the same
argument.

But I think what I actually want to say is that there was once a time somebody
tried pretty much exactly this, silly hat and all. Society shrugged and played
along, he led a rich and fulfilling life, his grateful Imperial subjects came to
love him, and it’s one of the most heartwarming episodes in the history of one
of my favorite places in the world.

Sometimes when you make a little effort to be nice to people, even people you
might think are weird, really good things happen.

The noncentral fallacy - the worst argument in the world?

David Stove once ran a contest to find the Worst Argument In The World, but
he awarded the prize to his own entry, and one that shored up his politics to
boot. It hardly seems like an objective process.

If he can unilaterally declare a Worst Argument, then so can I. I declare the

Worst Argument In The World to be this: "X is in a category whose archetypal
member gives us a certain emotional reaction. Therefore, we should apply that
emotional reaction to X, even though it is not a central category member."

Call it the Noncentral Fallacy. It sounds dumb when you put it like that. Who
even does that, anyway?

It sounds dumb only because we are talking soberly of categories and features.
As soon as the argument gets framed in terms of words, it becomes so
powerful that somewhere between many and most of the bad arguments in
politics, philosophy and culture take some form of the noncentral fallacy.
Before we get to those, let's look at a simpler example.
Suppose someone wants to build a statue honoring Martin Luther King Jr. for
his nonviolent resistance to racism. An opponent of the statue objects: "But
Martin Luther King was a criminal!"

Any historian can confirm this is correct. A criminal is technically someone

who breaks the law, and King knowingly broke a law against peaceful anti-
segregation protest - hence his famous Letter from Birmingham Jail.

But in this case calling Martin Luther King a criminal is the noncentral. The
archetypal criminal is a mugger or bank robber. He is driven only by greed,
preys on the innocent, and weakens the fabric of society. Since we don't like
these things, calling someone a "criminal" naturally lowers our opinion of
them.

The opponent is saying "Because you don't like criminals, and Martin Luther
King is a criminal, you should stop liking Martin Luther King." But King
doesn't share the important criminal features of being driven by greed,
preying on the innocent, or weakening the fabric of society that made us
dislike criminals in the first place. Therefore, even though he is a criminal,
there is no reason to dislike King.

This all seems so nice and logical when it's presented in this format.
Unfortunately, it's also one hundred percent contrary to instinct: the urge is to
respond "Martin Luther King? A criminal? No he wasn't! You take that back!"
This is why the noncentral is so successful. As soon as you do that you've fallen
into their trap. Your argument is no longer about whether you should build a
statue, it's about whether King was a criminal. Since he was, you have now lost
the argument.

Ideally, you should just be able to say "Well, King was the good kind of
criminal." But that seems pretty tough as a debating maneuver, and it may be
even harder in some of the cases where the noncentral Fallacy is commonly
used.

Now I want to list some of these cases. Many will be political1, for which I
apologize, but it's hard to separate out a bad argument from its specific
instantiations. None of these examples are meant to imply that the position
they support is wrong (and in fact I myself hold some of them). They only
show that certain particular arguments for the position are flawed, such as:

"Abortion is murder!" The archetypal murder is Charles Manson breaking

into your house and shooting you. This sort of murder is bad for a number of
reasons: you prefer not to die, you have various thoughts and hopes and
dreams that would be snuffed out, your family and friends would be
heartbroken, and the rest of society has to live in fear until Manson gets
caught. If you define murder as "killing another human being", then abortion
is technically murder. But it has none of the downsides of murder Charles
Manson style. Although you can criticize abortion for many reasons, insofar as
"abortion is murder" is an invitation to apply one's feelings in the Manson case
directly to the abortion case, it ignores the latter's lack of the features that
generated those intuitions in the first place2.

"Genetic engineering to cure diseases is eugenics!" Okay, you've got

me there: since eugenics means "trying to improve the gene pool" that's clearly
right. But what's wrong with eugenics? "What's wrong with eugenics? Hitler
did eugenics! Those unethical scientists in the 1950s who sterilized black
women without their consent did eugenics!" "And what was wrong with what
Hitler and those unethical scientists did?" "What do you mean, what was
wrong with them? Hitler killed millions of people! Those unethical scientists
ruined people's lives." "And does using genetic engineering to cure diseases
kill millions of people, or ruin anyone's life?" "Well...not really." "Then what's
wrong with it?" "It's eugenics!"

"Evolutionary psychology is sexist!" If you define "sexist" as "believing

in some kind of difference between the sexes", this is true of at least some evo
psych. For example, Bateman's Principle states that in species where females
invest more energy in producing offspring, mating behavior will involve males
pursuing females; this posits a natural psychological difference between the
sexes. "Right, so you admit it's sexist!" "And why exactly is sexism bad?"
"Because sexism claims that men are better than women and that women
should have fewer rights!" "Does Bateman's principle claim that men are
better than women, or that women should have fewer rights?" "Well...not
really." "Then what's wrong with it?" "It's sexist!"
A second, subtler use of the noncentral fallacy goes like this: "X is in a category
whose archetypal member gives us an emotional reaction. Therefore, we
should apply that same emotional reaction to X even if X gives some benefit
that outweighs the harm."

"Capital punishment is murder!" Charles Manson-style murder is solely

harmful. This kind of murder produces really strong negative feelings. The
proponents of capital punishment believe that it might decrease crime, or have
some other attending benefits. In other words, they believe it's "the good kind
of murder"3, just like the introductory example concluded that Martin Luther
King was "the good kind of criminal". But since normal murder is so taboo, it's
really hard to take the phrase "the good kind of murder" seriously, and just
mentioning the word "murder" can call up exactly the same amount of
negative feelings we get from the textbook example.

"Affirmative action is racist!" True if you define racism as "favoring

certain people based on their race", but once again, our immediate negative
reaction to the archetypal example of racism (the Ku Klux Klan) cannot be
generalized to an immediate negative reaction to affirmative action. Before we
generalize it, we have to check first that the problems that make us hate the Ku
Klux Klan (violence, humiliation, divisiveness, lack of a meritocratic society)
are still there. Then, even if we do find that some of the problems persist (like
disruption of meritocracy, for example) we have to prove that it doesn't
produce benefits that outweigh these harms.

"Taxation is theft!" True if you define theft as "taking someone else's money
regardless of their consent", but though the archetypal case of theft (breaking
into someone's house and stealing their jewels) has nothing to recommend it,
taxation (arguably) does. In the archetypal case, theft is both unjust and
socially detrimental. Taxation keeps the first disadvantage, but arguably
subverts the second disadvantage if you believe being able to fund a
government has greater social value than leaving money in the hands of those
who earned it. The question then hinges on the relative importance of these
disadvantages. Therefore, you can't dismiss taxation without a second thought
just because you have a natural disgust reaction to theft in general. You would
also have to prove that the supposed benefits of this form of theft don't
outweigh the costs.
Now, because most arguments are rapid-fire debate-club style, sometimes it's
still useful to say "Taxation isn't theft!" At least it beats saying "Taxation is
theft but nevertheless good", then having the other side say "Apparently my
worthy opponent thinks that theft can be good; we here on this side would like
to bravely take a stance against theft", and then having the moderator call
time before you can explain yourself. If you're in a debate club, do what you
have to do. But if you have the luxury of philosophical clarity, you would do
better to forswear the Dark Arts and look a little deeper into what's going on.

Are there ever cases in which this argument pattern can be useful? Yes. For
example, it may be a groping attempt to suggest a Schelling fence; for
example, a principle that one must never commit theft even when it would be
beneficial because that would make it harder to distinguish and oppose the
really bad kinds of theft. Or it can be an attempt to spark conversation by
pointing out a potential contradiction: for example "Have you noticed that
taxation really does contain some of the features you dislike about more
typical instances of theft? Maybe you never even thought about that before?
Why do your moral intuitions differ in these two cases? Aren't you being kind
of hypocritical?" But this usage seems pretty limited - once your interlocutor
says "Yes, I considered that, but the two situations are different for reasons X,
Y, and Z" the conversation needs to move on; there's not much point in
continuing to insist "But it's theft!"

But in most cases, I think this is more of an emotional argument, or even an

argument from "You would look silly saying that". You really can't say "Oh,
he's the good kind of criminal", and so if you have a potentially judgmental
audience and not much time to explain yourself, you're pretty trapped. You
have been forced to round to the archetypal example of that word and subtract
exactly the information that's most relevant.

But in all other cases, the proper response to being asked to subtract relevant
information is "No, why should I?" - and that's why this is the worst argument
in the world.

Footnotes

1. On advice from the community, I have deliberately included three

mostly-liberal examples and three-mostly conservative examples, so
 save yourself the trouble of counting them up and trying to speculate on
this article's biases.
2. This should be distinguished from deontology, the belief that there is
some provable moral principle about how you can never murder. I don't
think this is too important a point to make, because only a tiny fraction
of the people who debate these issues have thought that far ahead, and
also because my personal and admittedly controversial opinion is that
much of deontology is just an attempt to formalize and justify this
fallacy.
3. Some people "solve" this problem by saying that "murder" only refers to
"non-lawful killing", which is exactly as creative a solution as redefining
"criminal" to mean "person who breaks the law and is not Martin Luther
King." Identifying the noncentral fallacy is a more complete solution: for
example, it covers the related (mostly sarcastic) objection that
"imprisonment is kidnapping".
4. EDIT 8/2013: I've edited this article a bit after getting some feedback
and complaints. In particular I tried to remove some LW jargon which
turned off some people who were being linked to this article but were
unfamiliar with the rest of the site.
5. EDIT 8/2013: The other complaint I kept getting is that this is an
uninteresting restatement of some other fallacy (no one can agree
which, but poisoning the well comes up particularly often). The question
doesn't seem too interesting to me - I never claimed particular
originality, a lot of fallacies blend into each other, and the which-fallacy-
is-which game isn't too exciting anyway - but for the record I don't think
it is. Poisoning the well is a presentation of two different facts, such as
"Martin Luther King was a plagiarist...oh, by the way, what do you think
of Martin Luther King's civil rights policies?" It may have no
relationship to categories, and it's usually something someone else does
to you as a conscious rhetorical trick. Noncentral fallacy is presenting a
single fact, but using category information to frame it in a misleading
way - and it's often something people do to themselves. The above
plagiarism example of poisoning the well is not noncentral fallacy. If you
think this essay is about bog-standard poisoning the well, then either
there is an alternative meaning to poisoning the well I'm not familiar
with, or you are missing the point.
Ethnic Tension And Meaningless Arguments

I.

Part of what bothers me – and apparently several others – about yesterday’s

motte-and-bailey discussion is that here’s a fallacy – a pretty successful fallacy
– that depends entirely on people not being entirely clear on what they’re
arguing about. Somebody says God doesn’t exist. Another person objects that
God is just a name for the order and beauty in the universe. Then this
somehow helps defend the position that God is a supernatural creator being.
How does that even happen?

“Sir, you’ve been accused of murdering your wife. We have three witnesses
who said you did it. What do you have to say for yourself?”

“Well, your honor, I think it’s quite clear I didn’t murder the President. For
one thing, he’s surrounded by Secret Service agents. For another, check the
news. The President’s still alive.”

“Huh. For some reason I vaguely remember thinking you didn’t have a case.
Yet now that I hear you talk, everything you say is incredibly persuasive.
You’re free to go.”

While motte-and-bailey is less subtle, it seems to require a similar sort of

misdirection. I’m not saying it’s impossible. I’m just saying it’s a fact that
needs to be explained.

When everything works the way it’s supposed to in philosophy textbooks,

arguments are supposed to go one of a couple of ways:

1. Questions of empirical fact, like “Is the Earth getting warmer?” or “Did
aliens build the pyramids?”. You debate these by presenting factual evidence,
like “An average of global weather station measurements show 2014 is the
hottest year on record” or “One of the bricks at Giza says ‘Made In Tau Ceti V’
on the bottom.” Then people try to refute these facts or present facts of their
own.
2. Questions of morality, like “Is it wrong to abort children?” or “Should you
refrain from downloading music you have not paid for?” You can only debate
these well if you’ve already agreed upon a moral framework, like a particular
version of natural law or consequentialism. But you can sort of debate them by
comparing to examples of agreed-upon moral questions and trying to
maintain consistency. For exmaple, “You wouldn’t kill a one day old baby, so
how is a nine month old fetus different?” or “You wouldn’t download a car.”

If you are very lucky, your philosophy textbook will also admit the existence
of:

3. Questions of policy, like “We should raise the minimum wage” or “We
should bomb Foreignistan”. These are combinations of competing factual
claims and competing values. For example, the minimum wage might hinge on
factual claims like “Raising the minimum wage would increase
unemployment” or “It is very difficult to live on the minimum wage nowadays,
and many poor families cannot afford food.” But it might also hinge on value
claims like “Corporations owe it to their workers to pay a living wage,” or “It is
more important that the poorest be protected than that the economy be
strong.” Bombing Foreignistan might depend on factual claims like “The
Foreignistanis are harboring terrorists”, and on value claims like “The safety
of our people is worth the risk of collateral damage.” If you can resolve all of
these factual and value claims, you should be able to agree on questions of
policy.

None of these seem to allow the sort of vagueness of topic mentioned above.

II.

A question: are you pro-Israel or pro-Palestine? Take a second, actually think

about it.

Some people probably answered pro-Israel. Other people probably answered

pro-Palestine. Other people probably said they were neutral because it’s a
complicated issue with good points on both sides.

Probably very few people answered: Huh? What?

This question doesn’t fall into any of the three Philosophy 101 forms of
argument. It’s not a question of fact. It’s not a question of particular moral
truths. It’s not even a question of policy. There are closely related policies, like
whether Palestine should be granted independence. But if I support a very
specific two-state solution where the border is drawn upon the somethingth
parallel, does that make me pro-Israel or pro-Palestine? At exactly which
parallel of border does the solution under consideration switch from pro-
Israeli to pro-Palestinian? Do you think the crowd of people shouting and
waving signs saying “SOLIDARITY WITH PALESTINE” have an answer to
that question?

But it’s even worse, because this question covers much more than just the
borders of an independent Palestinian state. Was Israel justified by
responding to Hamas’ rocket fire by bombing Gaza, even with the near-
certainty of collateral damage? Was Israel justified in building a wall across
the Palestinian territories to protect itself from potential terrorists, even
though it severely curtails Palestinian freedom of movement? Do Palestinians
have a “right of return” to territories taken in the 1948 war? Who should
control the Temple Mount?

These are four very different questions which one would think each deserve
independent consideration. But in reality, what percent of the variance in
people’s responses do you think is explained by a general “pro-Palestine vs.
pro-Israel” factor? 50%? 75%? More?

In a way, when we round people off to the Philosophy 101 kind of arguments,
we are failing to respect their self-description. People aren’t out on the streets
saying “By my cost-benefit analysis, Israel was in the right to invade Gaza,
although it may be in the wrong on many of its other actions.” They’re waving
little Israeli flags and holding up signs saying “ISRAEL: OUR STAUNCHEST
ALLY”. Maybe we should take them at face value.

This is starting to look related to the original question in (I). Why is it okay to
suddenly switch points in the middle of an argument? In the case of Israel and
Palestine, it might be because people’s support for any particular Israeli policy
is better explained by a General Factor Of Pro-Israeliness than by the policy
itself. As long as I’m arguing in favor of Israel in some way, it’s still considered
by everyone to be on topic.
III.

Some moral philosophers got fed up with nobody being able to explain what
the heck a moral truth was and invented emotivism. Emotivism says there are
no moral truths, just expressions of little personal bursts of emotion. When
you say “Donating to charity is good,” you don’t mean “Donating to charity
increases the sum total of utility in the world,” or “Donating to charity is in
keeping with the Platonic moral law” or “Donating to charity was commanded
by God” or even “I like donating to charity”. You’re just saying “Yay charity!”
and waving a little flag.

Seems a lot like how people handle the Israel question. “I’m pro-Israel”
doesn’t necessarily imply that you believe any empirical truths about Israel, or
believe any moral principles about Israel, or even support any Israeli policies.
It means you’re waving a little flag with a Star of David on it and cheering.

So here is Ethnic Tension: A Game For Two Players.

Pick a vague concept. “Israel” will do nicely for now.

Player 1 tries to associate the concept “Israel” with as much good karma as she
possibly can. Concepts get good karma by doing good moral things, by being
associated with good people, by being linked to the beloved in-group, and by
being oppressed underdogs in bravery debates.

“Israel is the freest and most democratic country in the Middle East. It is one
of America’s strongest allies and shares our Judeo-Christian values.

Player 2 tries to associate the concept “Israel” with as much bad karma as she
possibly can. Concepts get bad karma by committing atrocities, being
associated with bad people, being linked to the hated out-group, and by being
oppressive big-shots in bravery debates. Also, she obviously needs to
neutralize Player 1’s actions by disproving all of her arguments.

“Israel may have some level of freedom for its most privileged citizens, but
what about the millions of people in the Occupied Territories that have no
say? Israel is involved in various atrocities and has often killed innocent
protesters. They are essentially a neocolonialist state and have allied with
other neocolonialist states like South Africa.”
The prize for winning this game is the ability to win the other three types of
arguments. If Player 1 wins, the audience ends up with a strongly positive
General Factor Of Pro-Israeliness, and vice versa.

Remember, people’s capacity for motivated reasoning is pretty much infinite.

Remember, a motivated skeptic asks if the evidence compels them to accept
the conclusion; a motivated credulist asks if the evidence allows them to
accept the conclusion. Remember, Jonathan Haidt and his team hypnotized
people to have strong disgust reactions to the word “often”, and then tried to
hold in their laughter when people in the lab came up with convoluted yet
plausible-sounding arguments against any policy they proposed that included
the word “often” in the description.

I’ve never heard of the experiment being done the opposite way, but it sounds
like the sort of thing that might work. Hypnotize someone to have a very
positive reaction to the word “often” (for most hilarious results, have it give
people an orgasm). “Do you think governments should raise taxes more
often?” “Yes. Yes yes YES YES OH GOD YES!”

Once you finish the Ethnic Tension Game, you’re replicating Haidt’s
experiment with the word “Israel” instead of the word “often”. Win the game,
and any pro-Israel policy you propose will get a burst of positive feelings and
tempt people to try to find some explanation, any explanation, that will justify
it, whether it’s invading Gaza or building a wall or controlling the Temple
Mount.

So this is the fourth type of argument, the kind that doesn’t make it into
Philosophy 101 books. The trope namer is Ethnic Tension, but it applies to
anything that can be identified as a Vague Concept, or paired opposing Vague
Concepts, which you can use emotivist thinking to load with good or bad
karma.

IV.

Now motte-and-bailey stands revealed:

Somebody says God doesn’t exist. Another person objects that God is
just a name for the order and beauty in the universe. Then this somehow
 helps defend the position that God is a supernatural creator being. How
does that even happen?

The two-step works like this. First, load “religion” up with good karma by
pitching it as persuasively as possible. “Religion is just the belief that there’s
beauty and order in the universe.”

Wait, I think there’s beauty and order in the universe!

“Then you’re religious too. We’re all religious, in the end, because religion is
about the common values of humanity and meaning and compassion sacrifice
beauty of a sunrise Gandhi Buddha Sufis St. Francis awe complexity humility
wonder Tibet the Golden Rule love.”

Then, once somebody has a strongly positive General Factor Of Religion, it

doesn’t really matter whether someone believes in a creator God or not. If they
have any predisposition whatsoever to do so, they’ll find a reason to let
themselves. If they can’t manage it, they’ll say it’s true “metaphorically” and
continue to act upon every corollary of it being true.

(“God is just another name for the beauty and order in the universe. But Israel
definitely belongs to the Jews, because the beauty and order of the universe
promised it to them.”)

If you’re an atheist, you probably have a lot of important issues on which you
want people to consider non-religious answers and policies. And if somebody
can maintain good karma around the “religion” concept by believing God is
the order and beauty in the universe, then that can still be a victory for religion
even if it is done by jettisoning many traditionally “religious” beliefs. In this
case, it is useful to think of the “order and beauty” formulation as a “motte” for
the “supernatural creator” formulation, since it’s allowing the entire concept
to be defended.

But even this is giving people too much credit, because the existence of God is
a (sort of) factual question. From yesterday’s post:

Suppose we’re debating feminism, and I defend it by saying it really is

important that women are people, and you attack it by saying that it’s
not true that all men are terrible. What is the real feminism we should
 be debating? Why would you even ask that question? What is this, some
kind of dumb high school debate club? Who the heck thinks it would be
a good idea to say ‘Here’s a vague poorly-defined concept that mind-kills
everyone who touches it – quick, should you associate it with positive
affect or negative affect?!’

Who the heck thinks that? Everybody, all the time.

Once again, if I can load the concept of “feminism” with good karma by
making it so obvious nobody can disagree with it, then I have a massive “home
field advantage” when I’m trying to convince anyone of any particular policy
that can go under the name “feminism”, even if it’s unrelated to the arguments
that gave feminism good karma in the first place.

Or if I’m against feminism, I just post quotes from the ten worst feminists on
Tumblr again and again until the entire movement seems ridiculous and evil,
and then you’ll have trouble convincing anyone of anything feminist. “That
seems reasonable…but wait, isn’t that a feminist position? Aren’t those the
people I hate?”

(compare: most Americans oppose Obamacare, but most Americans support

each individual component of Obamacare when it is explained without using
the word “Obamacare”)

V.

Little flow diagram things make everything better. Let’s make a little flow
diagram thing.

We have our node “Israel”, which has either good or bad karma. Then there’s
another node close by marked “Palestine”. We would expect these two nodes
to be pretty anti-correlated. When Israel has strong good karma, Palestine has
strong bad karma, and vice versa.

Now suppose you listen to Noam Chomsky talk about how strongly he
supports the Palestinian cause and how much he dislikes Israel. One of two
things can happen:
“Wow, a great man such as Noam Chomsky supports the Palestinians! They
must be very deserving of support indeed!”

or

“That idiot Chomsky supports Palestine? Well, screw him. And screw them!”

So now there is a third node, Noam Chomsky, that connects to both Israel and
Palestine, and we have discovered it is positively correlated with Palestine and
negatively correlated with Israel. It probably has a pretty low weight, because
there are a lot of reasons to care about Israel and Palestine other than
Chomsky, and a lot of reasons to care about Chomsky other than Israel and
Palestine, but the connection is there.

I don’t know anything about neural nets, so maybe this system isn’t actually a
neural net, but whatever it is I’m thinking of, it’s a structure where eventually
the three nodes reach some kind of equilibrium. If we start with someone
liking Israel and Chomsky, but not Palestine, then either that’s going to shift a
little bit towards liking Palestine, or shift a little bit towards disliking
Chomsky.

Now we add more nodes. Cuba seems to really support Palestine, so they get a
positive connection with a little bit of weight there. And I think Noam
Chomsky supports Cuba, so we’ll add a connection there as well. Cuba is
socialist, and that’s one of the most salient facts about it, so there’s a heavily
weighted positive connection between Cuba and socialism. Palestine kind of
makes noises about socialism but I don’t think they have any particular
economic policy, so let’s say very weak direct connection. And Che is heavily
associated with Cuba, so you get a pretty big Che – Cuba connection, plus a
strong direct Che – socialism one. And those pro-Palestinian students who
threw rotten fruit at an Israeli speaker also get a little path connecting them to
“Palestine” – hey, why not – so that if you support Palestine you might be
willing to excuse what they did and if you oppose them you might be a little
less likely to support Palestine.

Back up. This model produces crazy results, like that people who like Che are
more likely to oppose Israel bombing Gaza. That’s such a weird, implausible
connection that it casts doubt upon the entire…
Oh. Wait. Yeah. Okay.

I think this kind of model, in its efforts to sort itself out into a ground state,
might settle on some kind of General Factor Of Politics, which would probably
correspond pretty well to the left-right axis.

In Five Case Studies On Politicization, I noted how fresh new unpoliticized

issues, like the Ebola epidemic, were gradually politicized by connecting them
to other ideas that were already part of a political narrative. For example, a
quarantine against Ebola would require closing the borders. So now there’s a
weak negative link between “Ebola quarantine” and “open borders”. If your
“open borders” node has good karma, now you’re a little less likely to support
an Ebola quarantine. If “open borders” has bad karma, a little more likely.

I also tried to point out how you could make different groups support different
things by changing your narrative a little:

Global warming has gotten inextricably tied up in the Blue Tribe

narrative: Global warming proves that unrestrained capitalism is
destroying the planet. Global warming disproportionately affects poor
countries and minorities. Global warming could have been prevented
with multilateral action, but we were too dumb to participate because of
stupid American cowboy diplomacy. Global warming is an important
cause that activists and NGOs should be lauded for highlighting. Global
warming shows that Republicans are science denialists and probably all
creationists. Two lousy sentences on “patriotism” aren’t going to break
through that.

If I were in charge of convincing the Red Tribe to line up behind fighting

global warming, here’s what I’d say:

In the 1950s, brave American scientists shunned by the climate

establishment of the day discovered that the Earth was warming as a
result of greenhouse gas emissions, leading to potentially devastating
natural disasters that could destroy American agriculture and flood
American cities. As a result, the country mobilized against the threat.
Strong government action by the Bush administration outlawed the
worst of these gases, and brilliant entrepreneurs were able to discover
 and manufacture new cleaner energy sources. As a result of these brave
decisions, our emissions stabilized and are currently declining.

Unfortunately, even as we do our part, the authoritarian governments of

Russia and China continue to industrialize and militarize rapidly as part
of their bid to challenge American supremacy. As a result, Communist
China is now by far the world’s largest greenhouse gas producer, with
the Russians close behind. Many analysts believe Putin secretly
welcomes global warming as a way to gain access to frozen Siberian
resources and weaken the more temperate United States at the same
time. These countries blow off huge disgusting globs of toxic gas, which
effortlessly cross American borders and disrupt the climate of the
United States. Although we have asked them to stop several times, they
refuse, perhaps egged on by major oil producers like Iran and Venezuela
who have the most to gain by keeping the world dependent on the fossil
fuels they produce and sell to prop up their dictatorships.

We need to take immediate action. While we cannot rule out the threat
of military force, we should start by using our diplomatic muscle to push
for firm action at top-level summits like the Kyoto Protocol. Second, we
should fight back against the liberals who are trying to hold up this
important work, from big government bureaucrats trying to regulate
clean energy to celebrities accusing people who believe in global
warming of being ‘racist’. Third, we need to continue working with
American industries to set an example for the world by decreasing our
own emissions in order to protect ourselves and our allies. Finally, we
need to punish people and institutions who, instead of cleaning up their
own carbon, try to parasitize off the rest of us and expect the federal
government to do it for them.

In the first paragraph, “global warming” gets positively connected to concepts

like “poor people and minorities” and “activists and NGOs”, and gets
negatively connected to concepts like “capitalism”, “American cowboy
diplomacy”, and “creationists”. That gives global warming really strong good
karma if (and only if) you like the first two concepts and hate the last three.

In the next three paragraphs, “global warming” gets positively connected to

“America”, “the Bush administration” and “entrepreneurs”, and negatively
connected to “Russia”, “China”, “oil producing dictatorships like Iran and
Venezuela”, “big government bureaucrats”, and “welfare parasites”. This is
going to appeal to, well, a different group.

Notice two things here. First, the exact connection isn’t that important, as long
as we can hammer in the existence of a connection. I could probably just say
GLOBAL WARMING! COMMUNISM! GLOBAL WARMING! COMMUNISM!
GLOBAL WARMING! COMMUNISM! several hundred times and have the
same effect if I could get away with it (this is the principle behind attack ads
which link a politician’s face to scary music and a very concerned voice).

Second, there is no attempt whatsoever to challenge the idea that the issue at
hand is the positive or negative valence of a concept called “global warming”.
At no point is it debated what the solution is, which countries the burden is
going to fall on, or whether any particular level of emission cuts would do
more harm than good. It’s just accepted as obvious by both sides that we
debate “for” or “against” global warming, and if the “for” side wins then they
get to choose some solution or other or whatever oh god that’s so boring can
we get back to Israel vs. Palestine.

Some of the scientists working on IQ have started talking about “hierarchical

factors”, meaning that there’s a general factor of geometry intelligence
partially correlated with other things into a general factor of mathematical
intelligence partially correlated with other things into a general factor of total
intelligence.

I would expect these sorts of things to work the same way. There’s a General
Factor Of Global Warming that affects attitudes toward pretty much all
proposed global warming solutions, which is very highly correlated with a lot
of other things to make a General Factor Of Environmentalism, which itself is
moderately highly correlated with other things into the General Factor Of
Politics.

VI.

Speaking of politics, a fruitful digression: what the heck was up with the
Ashley Todd mugging hoax in 2008?
Back in the 2008 election, a McCain campaigner claimed (falsely, it would
later turn out) to have been assaulted by an Obama supporter. She said he
slashed a “B” (for “Barack”) on her face with a knife. This got a lot of coverage,
and according to Wikipedia:

John Moody, executive vice president at Fox News, commented in a blog

on the network’s website that “this incident could become a watershed
event in the 11 days before the election,” but also warned that “if the
incident turns out to be a hoax, Senator McCain’s quest for the
presidency is over, forever linked to race-baiting.”

Wait. One Democrat, presumably not acting on Obama’s direct orders, attacks
a Republican woman. And this is supposed to alter the outcome of the entire
election? In what universe does one crime by a deranged psychopath change
whether Obama’s tax policy or job policy or bombing-scary-foreigners policy is
better or worse than McCain’s?

Even if we’re willing to make the irresponsible leap from “Obama is supported
by psychopaths, therefore he’s probably a bad guy,” there are like a hundred
million people on each side. Psychopaths are usually estimated at about 1% of
the population, so any movement with a million people will already have
10,000 psychopaths. Proving the existence of a single one changes nothing.

I think insofar as this affected the election – and everyone seems to have
agreed that it might have – it hit President Obama with a burst of bad karma.
Obama something something psychopath with a knife. Regardless of the exact
content of those something somethings, is that the kind of guy you want to
vote for?

Then when it was discovered to be a hoax, it was McCain something

something race-baiting hoaxer. Now he’s got the bad karma!

This sort of conflation between a cause and its supporters really only makes
sense in the emotivist model of arguing. I mean, this shouldn’t even get
dignified with the name ad hominem fallacy. Ad hominem fallacy is “McCain
had sex with a goat, therefore whatever he says about taxes is invalid.” At least
it’s still the same guy. This is something the philosophy textbooks can’t bring
themselves to believe really exists, even as a fallacy.
But if there’s a General Factor Of McCain, then anything bad remotely
connected to the guy – goat sex, lying campaigners, whatever – reflects on
everything else about him.

This is the same pattern we see in Israel and Palestine. How many times have
you seen a news story like this one: “Israeli speaker hounded off college
campus by pro-Palestinian partisans throwing fruit. Look at the intellectual
bankruptcy of the pro-Palestinian cause!” It’s clearly intended as an argument
for something other than just not throwing fruit at people. The causation
seems to go something like “These particular partisans are violating the usual
norms of civil discussion, therefore they are bad, therefore something
associated with Palestine is bad, therefore your General Factor of Pro-
Israeliness should become more strongly positive, therefore it’s okay for Israel
to bomb Gaza.” Not usually said in those exact words, but the thread can be
traced.

VII.

Here is a prediction of this model: we will be obsessed with what concepts we

can connect to other concepts, even when the connection is totally
meaningless.

Suppose I say: “Opposing Israel is anti-Semitic”. Why? Well, the Israelis are
mostly Jews, so in a sense by definition being anti- them is “anti-Semitic”,
broadly defined. Also, p(opposes Israel|is anti-Semitic) is probably pretty
high, which sort of lends some naive plausibility to the idea that p(is anti-
Semitic|opposes Israel) is at least higher than it otherwise could be.

Maybe we do our research and we find exactly what percent of opponents of

Israel endorse various anti-Semitic statements like “I hate all Jews” or “Hitler
had some bright ideas”. We’ve replaced the symbol with the substance.
Problem solved, right?

Maybe not. In the same sense that people can agree on all of the
characteristics of Pluto – its diameter, the eccentricity of its orbit, its number
of moons – and still disagree on the question “Is Pluto a planet”, one can agree
on every characteristic of every Israel opponent and still disagree on the
definitional question “Is opposing Israel anti-Semitic?”
(fact: it wasn’t until proofreading this essay that I realized I had originally
written “Is Israel a planet?” and “Is opposing Pluto anti-Semitic?” I would like
to see Jonathan Haidt hypnotize people until they can come up with positive
arguments for those propositions.)

What’s the point of this useless squabble over definitions?

I think it’s about drawing a line between the concept “anti-Semitism” and
“oppose Israel”. If your head is screwed on right, you assign anti-Semitism
some very bad karma. So if we can stick a thick line between “anti-Semitism”
and “oppose Israel”, then you’re going have very bad feelings about opposition
to Israel and your General Factor Of Pro-Israeliness will go up.

Notice that this model is transitive, but shouldn’t be.

That is, let’s say we’re arguing over the definition of anti-Semitism, and I say
“anti-Semitism just means anything that hurts Jews”. This is a dumb
definition, but let’s roll with it.

First, I load “anti-Semitism” with lots of negative affect. Hitler was anti-
Semitic. The pogroms in Russia were anti-Semitic. The Spanish Inquisition
was anti-Semitic. Okay, negative affect achieved.

Then I connect “wants to end the Israeli occupation of Palestine” to “anti-

Semitism”. Now wanting to end the Israeli occupation of Palestine has lots of
negative affect attached to it.

It sounds dumb when you put it like that, but when you put it like “You’re
anti-Semitic for wanting to end the occupation” it’s a pretty damaging
argument.

This is trying to be transitive. It’s trying to say “anti-occupation = anti-

Semitism, anti-Semitism = evil, therefore anti-occupation = evil”. If this were
arithmetic, it would work. But there’s no Transitive Property Of Concepts. If
anything, concepts are more like sets. The logic is “anti-occupation is a
member of the set anti-Semitic, the set anti-Semitic contains members that
are evil, therefore anti-occupation is evil”, which obviously doesn’t check out.
(compare: “I am a member of the set ‘humans’, the set ‘humans’ contains the
Pope, therefore I am the Pope”.)

Anti-Semitism is generally considered evil because a lot of anti-Semitic things

involve killing or dehumanizing Jews. Opposing the Israel occupation of
Palestine doesn’t kill or dehumanize Jews, so even if we call it “anti-Semitic”
by definition, there’s no reason for our usual bad karma around anti-Semitism
to transfer over. But by an unfortunate rhetorical trick, it does – you can
gather up bad karma into “anti-Semitic” and then shoot it at the “occupation
of Palestine” issue just by clever use of definitions.

This means that if you can come up with sufficiently clever definitions and
convince your opponent to accept them, you can win any argument by default
just by having a complex system of mirrors in place to reflect bad karma from
genuinely evil things to the things you want to tar as evil. This is essentially the
point I make in Words, Words, Words.

If we kinda tweak the definition of “anti-Semitism” to be “anything that

inconveniences Jews”, we can pull a trick where we leverage people’s dislike of
Hitler to make them support the Israeli occupation of Palestine – but in order
to do that, we need to get everyone on board with our slightly non-standard
definition. Likewise, the social justice movement insists on their own novel
definitions of words like “racism” that don’t match common usage, any
dictionary, or etymological history – but which do perfectly describe a mirror
that reflects bad karma toward opponents of social justice while making it
impossible to reflect any bad karma back. Overreliance on this mechanism
explains why so many social justice debates end up being about whether a
particular mirror can be deployed to transfer bad karma in a specific case (“are
trans people privileged?!”) rather than any feature of the real world.

But they are hardly alone. Compare: “Is such an such an organization a cult?”,
“Is such and such a policy socialist?”, “Is abortion or capital punishment or
war murder?” All entirely about whether we’re allowed to reflect bad karma
from known sources of evil to other topics under discussion.

Look around you. Just look around you. Have you worked out what we’re
looking for? Correct. The answer is The Worst Argument In The World. Only
now, we can explain why it works.
VIII.

From the self-esteem literature, I gather that the self is also a concept that can
have good or bad karma. From the cognitive dissonance literature, I gather
that the self is actively involved in maintaining good karma around itself
through as many biases as it can manage to deploy.

I’ve mentioned this study before. Researchers make victims participants fill
out a questionnaire about their romantic relationships. Then they pretend to
“grade” the questionnaire, actually assigning scores at random. Half the
participants are told their answers indicate they have the tendency to be very
faithful to their partner. The other half are told they have very low faithfulness
and their brains just aren’t built for fidelity. Then they ask the participants
victims their opinion on staying faithful in a relationship – very important,
moderately important, or not so important?

There is a strong signal of people who are told they are bad at fidelity to state
fidelity is unimportant, and another strong signal of people who are told they
are especially faithful stating that fidelity is a great and noble virtue that must
be protected.

The researchers conclude that people want to have high self-esteem. If I am

terrible at fidelity, and fidelity is the most important virtue, that makes me a
terrible person. If I am terrible at fidelity and fidelity doesn’t matter, I’m fine.
If I am great at fidelity, and fidelity is the most important virtue, I can feel
pretty good about myself.

This doesn’t seem too surprising. It’s just the more subtle version of the effect
where white people are a lot more likely to be white supremacists than
members of any other race. Everyone likes to hear that they’re great. The
question is whether they can defend it and fit it in with their other ideas. The
answer is “usually yes, because people are capable of pretty much any
contortion of logic you can imagine and a lot that you can’t”.

I had a bad experience when I was younger where a bunch of feminists

attacked and threatened me because of something I wrote. It left me kind of
scarred. More importantly, the shape of that scar was a big anticorrelated line
between self-esteem and the “feminism” concept. If feminism has lots of good
karma, then I have lots of bad karma, because I am a person feminists hate. If
feminists have lots of bad karma, then I look good by comparison, the same
way it’s pretty much a badge of honor to be disliked by Nazis. The result was a
permanent haze of bad karma around “feminism” unconnected to any specific
feminist idea, which I have to be constantly on the watch for if I want to be
able to evaluate anything related to feminism fairly or rationally.

Good or bad karma, when applied to yourself, looks like high or low self-
esteem; when applied to groups, it looks like high or low status. In the giant
muddle of a war for status that we politely call “society”, this makes beliefs
into weapons and the karma loading of concepts into the difference between
lionization and dehumanization.

The Trope Namer for emotivist arguments is “ethnic tension”, and although
it’s most obvious in the case of literal ethnicities like the Israelis and the
Palestinians, the ease with which concepts become attached to different
groups creates a whole lot of “proxy ethnicites”. I’ve written before about how
American liberals and conservatives are seeming less and less like people who
happen to have different policy prescriptions, and more like two different
tribes engaged in an ethnic conflict quickly approaching Middle East level
hostility. More recently, a friend on Facebook described the-thing-whose-
name-we-do-not-speak-lest-it-appear and-destroy-us-all, the one involving
reproductively viable worker ants, as looking more like an ethnic conflict
about who is oppressing whom than any real difference in opinions.

Once a concept has joined up with an ethnic group, either a real one or a
makeshift one, it’s impossible to oppose the concept without simultaneously
lowering the status of the ethnic group, which is going to start at least a little
bit of a war. Worse, once a concept has joined up with an ethnic group, one of
the best ways to argue against the concept is to dehumanize the ethnic group
it’s working with. Dehumanizing an ethnic group has always been easy – just
associate them with a disgust reaction, portray them as conventionally
unattractive and unlovable and full of all the worst human traits – and now it
is profitable as well, since it’s one of the fastest ways to load bad karma into an
idea you dislike.
IX.

According to The Virtues Of Rationality:

The tenth virtue is precision. One comes and says: The quantity is
between 1 and 100. Another says: the quantity is between 40 and 50. If
the quantity is 42 they are both correct, but the second prediction was
more useful and exposed itself to a stricter test. What is true of one
apple may not be true of another apple; thus more can be said about a
single apple than about all the apples in the world. The narrowest
statements slice deepest, the cutting edge of the blade. As with the map,
so too with the art of mapmaking: The Way is a precise Art. Do not walk
to the truth, but dance. On each and every step of that dance your foot
comes down in exactly the right spot. Each piece of evidence shifts your
beliefs by exactly the right amount, neither more nor less. What is
exactly the right amount? To calculate this you must study probability
theory. Even if you cannot do the math, knowing that the math exists
tells you that the dance step is precise and has no room in it for your
whims.

The official description is of literal precision, as specific numerical precision in

probability updates. But is there a secret interpretation of this virtue?

Precision as separation. Once you’re debating “religion”, you’ve already lost.

Precision as sticking to a precise question, like “Is the first chapter of Genesis
literally true?” or “Does Buddhist meditation help treat anxiety disorders?”
and trying to keep these issues as separate from any General Factor Of
Religiousness as humanly possible. Precision such that “God the supernatural
Creator exists” and “God the order and beauty in the Universe exists” are as
carefully sequestered from one another as “Did the defendant kill his wife?”
and “Did the defendant kill the President?”

I want to end by addressing a point a commenter made in my last post on

motte-and-bailey:

In the real world, the particular abstract questions aren’t what matter –
the groups and people are what matter. People get things done, and they
aren’t particularly married to particular abstract concepts, they are
 married to their values and their compatriots. In order to deal with
reality, we must attack and defend groups and individuals. That does
not mean forsaking logic. It requires dealing with obfuscating tactics like
those you outline above, but that’s not even a real downside, because if
you flee into the narrow, particular questions all you’re doing is covering
your eyes to avoid perceiving the monsters that will still make
mincemeat of your attempts to change things.

I don’t entirely disagree with this. But I think we’ve been over this territory
before.

The world is a scary place, full of bad people who want to hurt you, and in the
state of nature you’re pretty much obligated to engage in whatever it takes to
survive.

But instead of sticking with the state of nature, we have the ability to form
communities built on mutual disarmament and mutual cooperation. Despite
artificially limiting themselves, these communities become stronger than the
less-scrupulous people outside them, because they can work together
effectively and because they can boast a better quality of life that attracts their
would-be enemies to join them. At least in the short term, these communities
can resist races to the bottom and prevent the use of personally effective but
negative-sum strategies.

One such community is the kind where members try to stick to rational
discussion as much as possible. These communities are definitely better able
to work together, because they have a powerful method of resolving empirical
disputes. They’re definitely better quality of life, because you don’t have to
deal with constant insult wars and personal attacks. And the existence of such
communities provides positive externalities to the outside world, since they
are better able to resolve difficult issues and find truth.

But forming a rationalist community isn’t just about having the will to discuss
things well. It’s also about having the ability. Overcoming bias is really hard,
and so the members of such a community need to be constantly trying to
advance the art and figure out how to improve their discussion tactics.
As such, it’s acceptable to try to determine and discuss negative patterns of
argument, even if those patterns of argument are useful and necessary
weapons in a state of nature. If anything, understanding them makes them
easier to use if you’ve got to use them, and makes them easier to recognize and
counter from others, giving a slight advantage in battle if that’s the kind of
thing you like. But moving them from unconscious to conscious also gives you
the crucial choice of when to deploy them and allows people to try to root out
ethnic tension in particular communities.

Probability and Predictions

The Pyramid And The Garden

I.

A recent breakthrough in pseudoscience: the location of the Great Pyramid of

Giza encodes the speed of light to seven decimal places.

This is actually true. The speed of light in a vacuum is 299,792,458 meters per
second. The coordinates of the Great Pyramid are 29.9792458° N,
31.1342880° E (you can confirm with Google Maps that this gets you right on
top of the Pyramid). The speed of light and the latitude number there have all
the same digits. That’s a pretty impressive coincidence.

You might think this is idiotic because the meter was invented by 1600s
French people. If ancient aliens or Atlanteans built the pyramids, why would
they encode their secret wisdom using a unit of measurement from 1600s
France? But there’s a way around this objection: the 1600s French people
defined their meter as 1/10,000,000th the distance between the Equator and
the North Pole. If the aliens also thought that was an interesting way to
measure length, then they could have encoded their secret wisdom in it. So
you wouldn’t need aliens who could predict the thoughts of 1600s Frenchmen.
Just aliens who thought exactly like 1600s Frenchmen.

(actually, a different group of 1600s Frenchmen proposed a different version

of the meter, defined as the length of a pendulum with a half-period of one
second. This turned out to be 99.7% of the 1/10,000,000th-the-way-to-the-
North-Pole definition, so either one works unless you want super-exactness. I
think a much more interesting conspiracy theory would be that aliens
designed the Earth to encode secret wisdom about the periods of pendulums.)

But realistically, aliens who think suspiciously like French people probably
weren’t involved. So how do we explain the coincidence?

II.

The following is indebted to user mrfintoil’s great explanation on

metabunk.org.

First, it’s not a coincidence to seven decimal places. Yes, that particular nine-
digit sequence lands you atop the Great Pyramid. But that gives you way more
precision than you need – cutting off the last three digits actually gets you
closer rather than further from the center of the Pyramid. The only numbers
that are doing any work are the 29.9792° N. So you really only get four
decimal places worth of coincidence.

On the other hand, matching six digits is still pretty good. That’s literally a
one-in-a-million chance.

So here the explanation has to go to how hard the pseudoscientists worked to

find a coincidence of this magnitude; in other words, how many degrees of
freedom they had.

Here’s an obvious example; as far as I can tell, the longitude of the Great
Pyramid doesn’t encode anything interesting at all. So it’s not the equivalent of
winning a one-in-a-million lottery with a single ticket. It’s the equivalent of
winning a one-in-a-million lottery with two tickets.

A second issue: if the latitude of the Great Pyramid had been 10.7925 N, that
would be the speed of light in kilometers per hour, which would be an equally
impressive match.

So just taking these two degrees of freedom, we have four lottery tickets:

1. The one where the latitude is the speed of light in meters/second

2. The one where the longitude is the speed of light in meters/second
3. The one where the latitude is the speed of light in kilometers/hour
4. The one where the longitude is the speed of light in kilometers/hour

In other words, the number of lottery tickets increases exponentially as we get

more degrees of freedom.

Let me list out all the degrees of freedom I can think of and see where we end
up. I am going to try my best to be as fair as possible to the ancient aliens. For
example, I was considering saying that since there are three pyramids at Giza,
we have to multiply by three, but to be honest the Great Pyramid is clearly
greater than the other two, and it would be less elegant if Menkaure’s pyramid
encoded some amazing cosmic constant, so I won’t raise that objection. I am
going to try to be really fricking fair.

1. Latitude vs. longitude (2 options)

2. Speed of light in meters/second vs. kilometers/hour vs. cubits/second
vs. cubits/hour. I’m avoiding using feet/miles, because that’s even more
arbitrary than meters. But I think it would actually be even more
convincing if the calculation actually used the real Egyptian unit, which
I understand is the cubit. So let’s go with (4 options)
3. Great Pyramid vs. Sphinx. Like I said before, the other two pyramids at
Giza are noticeably less impressive than the Great Pyramid. But the
Sphinx is pretty impressive, and the ancient aliens folks talk about it just
as much as the Pyramid, so I think that would be an equally good hit if it
had been true. (2 options)
4. Use of a 90 degree latitude system vs. use of a 100 degree latitude
system. I’m a little split on this one, because it wouldn’t look anywhere
 near as impressive if the pseudoscience sites had to explain that they
found a really cool coincidence but it only worked if you converted
normal latitude into a different hypothetical latitude system that had
100 degrees. But since we know the aliens/Atlanteans use base 10
anyway (they’re encoding their wisdom in the base 10 representation of
the speed of light) it makes more sense for them to use a base 10 latitude
system instead of replicating our own bizarre custom of using base 10
for everything else but having latitude go from 0 to 90. On the other
hand, if these were Earth-based Atlanteans, they might have gotten the
custom of dividing the circle into 360 parts for the same reason we did –
there are about 360 days in a year. And if they were aliens, maybe we got
our bizarre latitude convention from them – the idea of 360 degree
circles is really old and lost in the mists of time. Overall I can see this
one going either way, so I’m going to give it as (2 options)
5. Decimal point placement. The latitude 29.9792 N matches the speed of
light exactly, but so would the latitudes 2.99792, 2.99792 S, and 29.9792
S. I checked these other sites at the same longitude as the Pyramid to see
if there were any mysterious features. But they seem to be, respectively,
a perfectly ordinary field in Uganda, a perfectly ordinary field in
Tanzania, and a perfectly ordinary patch of ocean. But a world where the
pyramid was in Uganda and the ordinary field was in Egypt would be
just as much of a hit as our current world. Therefore (4 options)

From these really simple things alone, we learn we’ve got 2 x 4 x 2 x 2 x 4 =

128 lottery tickets, reducing our 1/1 million chance of winning to something
more like 1/10,000. Progress!

There are a few other degrees of freedom that I think are a little harder to
judge, but still important:

6. What aspect of the Pyramid we’re looking at. That is, it would have been
equally interesting (maybe moreso!) if its height or width matched the
speed of light exactly. So that’s another (3 options). I guess if the ancient
aliens were really good at what they were doing, they could have given
the pyramid 299,792,458 sides, but I won’t hold that against them. This
should really make the multiplication more complicated because I can
no longer use all the different ways of representing latitude vs.
longitude, but I’ll stick with the simple method for now.
 7. Which site we’re looking at. This one is hard, because I don’t know if
anywhere else has the ancient alien-related credibility of the Great
Pyramid. The only equally mysterious site I can think of is Stonehenge,
and maybe the Nazca Lines. I don’t feel comfortable saying it would be
equally impressive if Tiwanaku or Yonaguni had the right coordinates.
I’ll just say (2 options) for Pyramids and Stonehenge.
8. Which constant we’re looking at. Sure, the Pyramid encoding the speed
of light is pretty cool, but what about the Planck length? Avagadro’s
number? I’m split on whether I want to include mathematical constants
like pi or e in here. I think if it encoded pi to some number of decimals
places then I would just think that the Egyptians were more advanced at
math than I thought but it wouldn’t necessarily be earth-shattering. The
Egyptians knowing e would be pretty shocking but still maybe not worth
believing in ancient aliens over. There really aren’t that many physical
constants as cool as the speed of light, so I might just arbitrarily call this
one (4 options).

So now we have a total of 128 x 3 x 2 x 4 = 3072 lottery tickets, for a 1/300

chance of winning the one-in-a-million lottery.

I would like to say “Ha ha, I sure proved those dumb conspiracy nuts wrong”,
except that a 1/300 chance is still a pretty impressive coincidence – what
scientists call p < 0.01. And now I've used up all my excuses. I think what’s
going on here is that I’m still accepting the terms of the game – comparing
only the exact categories used in the original calculation. Suppose that the
latitude of the Great Pyramid was exactly 30.0000? That too would be
impressive – it would prove that the pyramid builders knew the exact size and
shape of the Earth and were able to build their Pyramid one third of the way
between Equator and Pole. Suppose that the Great Pyramid was latitude
19.69724. That’s the date humankind first landed on the moon in yyyy/mm/
dd format – clearly the Pyramid was built by a time-traveling Nostradamus!
Suppose that the Pyramid was built of stones of four different colors, with blue
stones always paired opposite red stones, and yellow stones always paired
opposite green stones. Then the ancient Egyptians were trying to tell us about
the structure of DNA. What if the Pyramid, viewed from above, looked like a
human brain?
Is it fair to take all of that into account? If so, does the remaining coincidence
go away? I wish I were able to give these questions a more confident
affirmative answer.

III.

I still believe that pseudoscience is helpful for understanding regular science.

The loopholes that let people discover proofs of ESP or homeopathy are the
same ones that let them discover proofs of power posing and ego depletion.

In the same way, numerology is helpful for understanding statistics. You can
see the same factors at work, free from any lingering worry that maybe the
theory you’re investigating is true after all.

Andrew Gelman writes about the garden of forking paths. The idea is: the
scientific community accepts a discovery as meaningful if p < 0.05 - that is, if
equally extreme data would only occur by coincidence 5% of the time or less.
In other words, you need to win a lottery with a one-in-twenty chance if you
want to get credit for discovering something absent any real effect to be
discovered. But if a scientist forms their hypothesis after seeing their data,
they might massage the precise wording of their hypothesis to better fit their
data. If there are many different ways to frame the hypothesis, then they have
many lottery tickets to choose from and a win is no longer so surprising.
Gelman discusses a study claiming to find that women wear red or pink shirts
during the most fertile part of their menstrual cycle, which sometimes involves
red or pink coloration changes in primates. The study does detect the effect, p
< 0.05. But there were a couple of different ways the researchers could have
framed the problem. They could have looked at only red shirts. They could
have looked at only pink shirts. They chose days 7-14 as most fertile. But they
could also have chosen days 6-15 without really being wrong. They could have
looked only at the unmarried women most likely to be trying to attract mates.
A recent paper listed 34 different degrees of freedom that can be used in this
kind of thing. Add up enough of them, and you have more than twenty tickets
to the one-chance-in-twenty lottery and success is all but certain.

I used to call this the Elderly Hispanic Woman Effect, after drug studies where
the drug has no effect in general, no effect on a subgroup of just men, no effect
on a subgroup of just women, no effect on a subgroup of just blacks, no effect
on a subgroup of just whites…but when you get to a subgroup of elderly
Hispanic women, p < 0.05, apparently because it's synchronized with their
unique biological needs. This is pretty obvious. The lesson of the Pyramid-
lightspeed link is that sometimes it isn't. It just looks like some sudden and
shocking coincidence. The other lesson of the Pyramid is that I cannot
consistently figure this kind of thing out. I threw everything I had against the
correlation, and I still ended up with p = 0.003. I don’t think this is because
the Pyramid really was designed by aliens with a suspicious link to 1600s
France. I think it’s because I’m not creative enough to fully dissect
coincidences even when I’m looking for them.

This is always happening to me in real studies too. Something seems very

suspicious. But their effect size is very high and their p-value is very
significant. I can’t always figure out exactly what’s going on. But I should be
reluctant to dismiss the possibility that I’m missing something and that there’s
some reasonable explanation.

On Overconfidence
I.

A couple of days ago, the Global Priorities Project came out with a calculator
that allowed you to fill in your own numbers to estimate how concerned you
should be with AI risk. One question asked how likely you thought it was that
there would be dangerous superintelligences within a century, offering a drop
down menu with probabilities ranging from 90% to 0.01%. And so people
objected: there should be options to put in only one a million chance of AI
risk! One in a billion! One in a…

For example, a commenter writes that: “the best (worst) part: the probability
of AI risk is selected from a drop down list where the lowest probability
available is 0.01%!! Are you kidding me??” and then goes on to say his
estimate of the probability of human-level (not superintelligent!) AI this
century is “very very low, maybe 1 in a million or less”. Several people on
Facebook and Tumblr say the same thing – 1/10,000 chance just doesn’t
represent how sure they are that there’s no risk from AI, they want one in a
million or more.

Last week, I mentioned that Dylan Matthews’ suggestion that maybe there was
only 10^-67 chance you could affect AI risk was stupendously overconfident. I
mentioned that was thousands of lower than than the chance, per second, of
getting simultaneously hit by a tornado, meteor, and al-Qaeda bomb, while
also winning the lottery twice in a row. Unless you’re comfortable with that
level of improbability, you should stop using numbers like 10^-67.

But maybe it sounds like “one in a million” is much safer. That’s only 10^-6,
after all, way below the tornado-meteor-terrorist-double-lottery range…

So let’s talk about overconfidence.

Nearly everyone is very very very overconfident. We know this from

experiments where people answer true/false trivia questions, then are asked to
state how confident they are in their answer. If people’s confidence was well-
calibrated, someone who said they were 99% confident (ie only 1% chance
they’re wrong) would get the question wrong only 1% of the time. In fact,
people who say they are 99% confident get the question wrong about 20% of
the time.
It gets worse. People who say there’s only a 1 in 100,000 chance they’re
wrong? Wrong 15% of the time. One in a million? Wrong 5% of the time.
They’re not just overconfident, they are fifty thousand times as confident as
they should be.

This is not just a methodological issue. Test confidence in some other clever
way, and you get the same picture. For example, one experiment asked people
how many numbers there were in the Boston phone book. They were
instructed to set a range, such that the true number would be in their range
98% of the time (ie they would only be wrong 2% of the time). In fact, they
were wrong 40% of the time. Twenty times too confident! What do you want to
bet that if they’d been asked for a range so wide there was only a one in a
million chance they’d be wrong, at least five percent of them would have
bungled it?

Yet some people think they can predict the future course of AI with one in a
million accuracy!

Imagine if every time you said you were sure of something to the level of
999,999/1 million, and you were right, the Probability Gods gave you a dollar.
Every time you said this and you were wrong, you lost $1 million (if you don’t
have the cash on hand, the Probability Gods offer a generous payment plan at
low interest). You might feel like getting some free cash for the parking meter
by uttering statements like “The sun will rise in the east tomorrow” or “I won’t
get hit by a meteorite” without much risk. But would you feel comfortable
predicting the course of AI over the next century? What if you noticed that
most other people only managed to win $20 before they slipped up?
Remember, if you say even one false statement under such a deal, all of your
true statements you’ve said over years and years of perfect accuracy won’t be
worth the hole you’ve dug yourself.

Or – let me give you another intuition pump about how hard this is. Bayesian
and frequentist statistics are pretty much the same thing [citation needed] –
when I say “50% chance this coin will land heads”, that’s the same as saying “I
expect it to land heads about one out of every two times.” By the same token,
“There’s only a one in a million chance that I’m wrong about this” is the same
as “I expect to be wrong on only one of a million statements like this that I
make.”
What do a million statements look like? Suppose I can fit twenty-five
statements onto the page of an average-sized book. I start writing my
predictions about scientific and technological progress in the next century. “I
predict there will not be superintelligent AI.” “I predict there will be no simple
geoengineering fix for global warming.” “I predict no one will prove P = NP.”
War and Peace, one of the longest books ever written, is about 1500 pages.
After you write enough of these statements to fill a War and Peace sized book,
you’ve made 37,500. You would need to write about 27 War and Peace sized
books – enough to fill up a good-sized bookshelf – to have a million
statements.

So, if you want to be confident to the level of one-in-a-million that there won’t
be superintelligent AI next century, you need to believe that you can fill up 27
War and Peacesized books with similar predictions about the next hundred
years of technological progress – and be wrong – at most – once!

This is especially difficult because claims that a certain form of technological

progress will not occur have a very poor track record of success, even when
uttered by the most knowledgeable domain experts. Consider how Nobel-Prize
winning atomic scientist Ernest Rutherford dismissed the possibility of
nuclear power as “the merest moonshine” less than a day before Szilard
figured out how to produce such power. In 1901, Wilbur Wright told his
brother Orville that “man would not fly for fifty years” – two years later, they
flew, leading Wilbur to say that “ever since, I have distrusted myself and
avoided all predictions”. Astronomer Joseph de Lalande told the French
Academy that “it is impossible” to build a hot air balloon and “only a fool
would expect such a thing to be realized”; the Montgolfier brothers flew less
than a year later. This pattern has been so consistent throughout history that
sci-fi titan Arthur C. Clarke (whose own predictionswere often eerily accurate)
made a heuristic out of it under the name Clarke’s First Law: “When a
distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is
almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very
probably wrong.”

Also – one good heuristic is to look at what experts in a field think. According
to Muller and Bostrom (2014), a sample of the top 100 most-cited authors in
AI ascribed a > 70% probability to AI within a century, a 50% chance of
superintelligence conditional on human-level, and a 10% chance of existential
catastrophe conditional on human level AI. Multiply it out, and you get a
couple percent chance of superintelligence-related existential catastrophe in
the next century.

Note that my commenter wasn’t disagreeing with the 4% chance. They were
disagreeing with the possibility that there would be human-level AI at all, that
is, the 70% chance! That means that he was saying, essentially, that he was
confident he could write a million sentences – that is, twenty-seven War and
Peace‘s worth – all of which were trying to predict trends in a notoriously
difficult field, all of which contradicted a well-known heuristic about what
kind of predictions you should never try to make, all of which contradicted the
consensus opinion of the relevant experts – and only have one of the million
be wrong!

But if you feel superior to that because you don’t believe there’s only a one-in-
a-million chance of human-level AI, you just believe there’s a one-in-a-million
chance of existential catastrophe, you are missing the point. Okay, you’re not
300,000 times as confident as the experts, you’re only 40,000 times as
confident. Good job, here’s a sticker.

Seriously, when people talk about being able to defy the experts a million
times in a notoriously tricky area they don’t know much about and only be
wrong once – I don’t know what to think. Some people criticize Eliezer
Yudkowsky for being overconfident in his favored interpretation of quantum
mechanics, but he doesn’t even attach a number to that. For all I know, maybe
he’s only 99% sure he’s right, or only 99.9%, or something. If you are
absolutely outraged that he is claiming one-in-a-thousand certainty on
something that doesn’t much matter, shouldn’t you be literally a thousand
times more outraged when every day people are claiming one-in-a-million
level certainty on something that matters very much? It is almost impossible
for me to comprehend the mindsets of people who make a Federal Case out of
the former, but are totally on board with the latter.

Everyone is overconfident. When people say one-in-a-million, they are wrong

five percent of the time. And yet, people keep saying “There is only a one in a
million chance I am wrong” on issues of making really complicated predictions
about the future, where many top experts disagree with them, and where the
road in front of them is littered with the bones of the people who made similar
predictions before. HOW CAN YOU DO THAT?!

II.

I am of course eliding over an important issue. The experiments where people

offering one-in-a-million chances were wrong 5% of the time were on true-
false questions – those with only two possible answers. There are other
situations where people can often say “one in a million” and be right. For
example, I confidently predict that if you enter the lottery tomorrow, there’s
less than a one in a million chance you will win.

On the other hand, I feel like I can justify that. You want me to write twenty-
seven War and Peace volumes about it? Okay, here goes. “Aaron Aaronson of
Alabama will not win the lottery. Absalom Abramowtiz of Alaska will not win
the lottery. Achitophel Acemoglu of Arkansas will not win the lottery.” And so
on through the names of a million lottery ticket holders.

I think this is what statisticians mean when they talk about “having a model”.
Within the model where there are a hundred million ticket holders, and we
know exactly one will be chosen, our predictions are on very firm ground, and
our intuition pumps reflect that.

Another way to think of this is by analogy to dart throws. Suppose you have a
target that is half red and half blue; you are aiming for red. You would have to
be very very confident in your dart skills to say there is only a one in a million
chance you will miss it. But if there is a target that is 999,999 millionths red,
and 1 millionth blue, then you do not have to be at all good at darts to say
confidently that there is only a one in a million chance you will miss the red
area.

Suppose a Christian says “Jesus might be God. And he might not be God.
50-50 chance. So you would have to be incredibly overconfident to say you’re
sure he isn’t.” The atheist might respond “The target is full of all of these
zillions of hypotheses – Jesus is God, Allah is God, Ahura Mazda is God,
Vishnu is God, a random guy we’ve never heard of is God. You are taking a
tiny tiny submillimeter-sized fraction of a huge blue target, painting it red, and
saying that because there are two regions of the target, a blue region and a red
region, you have equal chance of hitting either.” Eliezer Yudkowsky calls this
“privileging the hypothesis”.

There’s a tougher case. Suppose the Christian says “Okay, I’m not sure about
Jesus. But either there is a Hell, or there isn’t. Fifty fifty. Right?”

I think the argument against this is that there are way more ways for there not
to be Hell than there are for there to be Hell. If you take a bunch of atoms and
shake them up, they usually end up as not-Hell, in much the same way as the
creationists’ fabled tornado-going-through-a-junkyard usually ends up as not-
a-Boeing-747. For there to be Hell you have to have some kind of mechanism
for judging good vs. evil – which is a small part of the space of all mechanisms,
let alone the space of all things – some mechanism for diverting the souls of
the evil to a specific place, which same, some mechanism for punishing them
– again same – et cetera. Most universes won’t have Hell unless you go
through a lot of work to put one there. Therefore, Hell existing is only a very
tiny part of the target. Making this argument correctly would require an in-
depth explanation of formalizations of Occam’s Razor, which is outside the
scope of this essay but which you can find on the LW Sequences.

But this kind of argumentation is really hard. Suppose I predict “Only one in
150 million chance Hillary Clinton will be elected President next year. After
all, there are about 150 million Americans eligible for the Presidency. It could
be any one of them. Therefore, Hillary covers only a tiny part of the target.”
Obviously this is wrong, but it’s harder to explain how. I would say that your
dart-aim is guided by an argument based on a concrete numerical model –
something like “She is ahead in the polls by X right now, and candidates who
are ahead in the polls by X usually win about 50% of the time, therefore, her
real probability is more like 50%.”

Or suppose I predict “Only one in a million chance that Pythagoras’ Theorem

will be proven wrong next year.” Can I get away with that? I can’t quite appeal
to “it’s been proven”, because there might have been a mistake in (all the)
proofs. But I could say: suppose there are five thousand great mathematical
theorems that have undergone something like the level of scrutiny as
Pythagoras’, and they’ve been known on average for two hundred years each.
None of them have ever been disproven. That’s a numerical argument that the
rate of theorem-disproving is less than one per million years, and I think it
holds.

Another way to do this might be “there are three hundred proofs of

Pythagoras’ theorem, so even accepting an absurdly high 10%-per-proof
chance of being wrong, the chance is now only 10^-300.” Or “If there’s a 10%
chance each mathematician reading a proof missing something, and one
million mathematicians have read the proof of Pythagoras’ Theorem, then the
probability that they all missed it is more like 10^-1,000,000.”

But this can get tricky. Suppose I argued “There’s a good chance Pythagoras’
Theorem will be disproven, because of all Pythagoras’ beliefs – reincarnation,
eating beans being super-evil, ability to magically inscribe things on the moon
– most have since been disproven. Therefore, the chance of a randomly
selected Pythagoras-innovation being wrong is > 50%.”

Or: “In 50 past presidential elections, none have been won by women. But
Hillary Clinton is a woman. Therefore, the chance of her winning this election
is less than 1/50.”

All of this stuff about adjusting for size of the target or for having good
mathematical models is really hard and easy to do wrong. And then you have
to add another question: are you sure, to a level of one-in-a-million, that you
didn’t mess up your choice of model at all?

Let’s bring this back to AI. Suppose that, given the complexity of the problem,
you predict with utter certainty that we will not be able to invent an AI this
century. But if the modal genome trick pushed by people like Greg Cochran
works out, within a few decades we might be able to genetically engineer
humans far smarter than any who have ever lived. Given tens of thousands of
such supergeniuses, might we be able to solve an otherwise impossible
problem? I don’t know. But if there’s a 1% chance that we can perform such
engineering, and a 1% chance that such supergeniuses can invent artificial
intelligence within a century, then the probability of AI within the next
century isn’t one in a million, it’s one in ten thousand.

Or: consider the theory that all the hard work of brain design has been done by
the time you have a rat brain, and after that it’s mostly just a matter of scaling
up. You can find my argument for the position in this post – search for “the
hard part is evolving so much as a tiny rat brain”. Suppose there’s a 10%
chance this theory is true, and a 10% chance that researchers can at least make
rat-level AI this century. Then the chance of human-level AI is not one in a
million, but one in a hundred.

Maybe you disagree with both of these claims. The question is: did you even
think about them before you gave your one in a million estimate? How many
other things are there that you never thought about? Now your estimate has,
somewhat bizarrely, committed you to saying there’s a less than one in a
million chance we will significantly enhance human intelligence over the next
century, and a less than one in a million chance that the basic-scale-up model
of intelligence is true. You may never have thought directly about these
problems, but by saying “one in a million chance of AI in the next hundred
years”, you are not only committing yourself to a position on them, but
committing yourself to a position with one-in-a-million level certainty even
though several domain experts who have studied these fields for their entire
lives disagree with you!

A claim like “one in a million chance of X” not only implies that your model is
strong enough to spit out those kinds of numbers, but that there’s only a one
in a million chance you’re using the wrong model, or missing something, or
screwing up the calculations.

A few years ago, a group of investment bankers came up with a model for
predicting the market, and used it to design a trading strategy which they said
would meet certain parameters. In fact, they said that there was only a one in
10^135 chance it would fail to meet those parameters during a given year. A
human just uttered the probability “1 in 10^135”, so you can probably guess
what happened. The very next year was the 2007 financial crisis, the model
wasn’t prepared to deal with the extraordinary fallout, the strategy didn’t meet
its parameters, and the investment bank got clobbered.

This is why I don’t like it when people say we shouldn’t talk about AI risk
because it involves “Knightian uncertainty”. In the real world, Knightian
uncertainty collapses back down to plain old regular uncertainty. When you
are an investment bank, the money you lose because of normal uncertainty
and the money you lose because of Knightian uncertainty are denominated in
the same dollars. Knightian uncertainty becomes just another reason not to be
overconfident.

III.

I came back to AI risk there, but this isn’t just about AI risk.

You might have read Scott Aaronson’s recent post about Aumann Agreement
Theorem, which says that rational agents should be able to agree with one
another. This is a nice utopian idea in principle, but in practice, well, nobody
seems to be very good at carrying it out.

I’d like to propose a more modest version of Aumann’s agreement theorem,

call it Aumann’s Less-Than-Total-Disagreement Theorem, which says that two
rational agents shouldn’t both end up with 99.9…% confidence on opposite
sides of the same problem.

The “proof” is pretty similar to the original. Suppose you are 99.9% confident
about something, and learn your equally educated, intelligent, and clear-
thinking friend is 99.9% confident of the opposite. Arguing with each other
and comparing your evidence fails to make either of you budge, and neither of
you can marshal the weight of a bunch of experts saying you’re right and the
other guy is wrong. Shouldn’t the fact that your friend, using a cognitive
engine about as powerful as your own, got so heavily different a conclusion
make you worry that you’re missing something?

But practically everyone is walking around holding 99.9…% probabilities on

the opposite sides of important issues! I checked the Less Wrong Survey,
which is as good a source as any for people’s confidence levels on various
tough questions. Of the 1400 respondents, about 80 were at least 99.9%
certain that there were intelligent aliens elsewhere in our galaxy; about 170
others were at least 99.9% certain that they weren’t. At least 80 people just
said they were certain to one part in a thousand and then got the answer
wrong! And some of the responses were things like “this box cannot fit as
many zeroes as it would take to say how certain I am”. Aside from stock
traders who are about to go bankrupt, who says that sort of thing??!
And speaking of aliens, imagine if an alien learned about this particular
human quirk. I can see them thinking “Yikes, what kind of a civilization
would you get with a species who routinely go around believing opposite
things, always with 99.99…% probability?”

Well, funny you should ask.

I write a lot about free speech, tolerance of dissenting ideas, open-

mindedness, et cetera. You know which posts I’m talking about. There are a lot
of reasons to support such a policy. But one of the big ones is – who the heck
would burn heretics if they thought there was a 5% chance the heretic was
right and they were wrong? Who would demand that dissenting opinions be
banned, if they were only about 90% sure of their

own? Who would start shrieking about “human garbage” on Twitter when they
fully expected that in some sizeable percent of cases, they would end up being
wrong and the garbage right?

Noah Smith recently asked why it was useful to study history. I think at least
one reason is to medicate your own overconfidence. I’m not just talking about
things like “would Stalin have really killed all those people if he had
considered that he was wrong about communism” – especially since I don’t
think Stalin worked that way. I’m talking about Neville Chamberlain
predicting “peace in our time”, or the centuries when Thomas Aquinas’
philosophy was the preeminent Official Explanation Of Everything. I’m talking
about Joseph “no one will ever build a working hot air balloon” Lalande. And
yes, I’m talking about what Muggeridge writes about, millions of intelligent
people thinking that Soviet Communism was great, and ending out
disastrously wrong. Until you see how often people just like you have been
wrong in the past, it’s hard to understand how uncertain you should be that
you are right in the present. If I had lived in 1920s Britain, I probably would
have been a Communist. What does that imply about how much I should trust
my beliefs today?

There’s a saying that “the majority is always wrong”. Taken literally it’s absurd
– the majority thinks the sky is blue, the majority don’t believe in the
Illuminati, et cetera. But what it might mean, is that in a world where
everyone is overconfident, the majority will always be wrong about which
direction to move the probability distribution in. That is, if an ideal reasoner
would ascribe 80% probability to the popular theory and 20% to the
unpopular theory, perhaps most real people say 99% popular, 1% unpopular.
In that case, if the popular people are urging you to believe the popular theory
more, and the unpopular people are urging you to believe the unpopular
theory more, the unpopular people are giving you better advice. This would
create a strange situation in which good reasoners are usually engaged in
disagreeing with the majority, and also usually “arguing for the wrong side” (if
you’re not good at thinking probablistically, and almost no one is), but remain
good reasoners and the ones with beliefs most likely to produce good
outcomes. Unless you count “why are all of our good reasoners being burned
as witches?” as a bad outcome.

I started off by saying this blog was about “the principle of charity”, but I had
trouble defining it and in retrospect I’m not that good at it anyway. What can
be salvaged from such a concept? I would say “behave the way you would if
you were less than insanely overconfident about most of your beliefs.” This is
the Way. The rest is just commentary.

Discussion Questions (followed by my own answers in ROT13)

1. What is your probability that there is a god? (Svir creprag)

2. What is your probability that psychic powers exist? (Bar va bar
gubhfnaq)
3. What is your probability that anthropogenic global warming will
increase temperatures by at least 1C by 2050? (Avargl creprag)
4. What is your probability that a pandemic kills at least one billion people
in a 5 year period by 2100? (Svsgrra creprag)
5. What is your probability that humans land on Mars by 2050? (Rvtugl
creprag)
6. What is your probability that superintelligent AI (=AI better than almost
every human at almost every cognitive task) exists by 2115? (Gjragl svir
creprag)

If It’s Worth Doing, It’s Worth Doing With Made-Up Statistics

I do not believe that the utility weights I worked on last week – the ones that
say living in North Korea is 37% as good as living in the First World – are
objectively correct or correspond to any sort of natural category. So why do I
find them so interesting?

A few weeks ago I got to go to a free CFAR tutorial (you can hear about these
kinds of things by signing up for their newsletter). During this particular
tutorial, Julia tried to explain Bayes’ Theorem to some, er, rationality virgins. I
record a heavily-edited-to-avoid-recognizable-details memory of the
conversation below:

Julia: So let’s try an example. Suppose there’s a five percent chance per
month your computer breaks down. In that case…

Student: Whoa. Hold on here. That’s not the chance my computer will
break down.

Julia: No? Well, what do you think the chance is?

Student: Who knows? It might happen, or it might not.

Julia: Right, but can you turn that into a number?

Student: No. I have no idea whether my computer will break. I’d be

making the number up.

Julia: Well, in a sense, yes. But you’d be communicating some

information. A 1% chance your computer will break down is very
different from a 99% chance.

Student: I don’t know the future. Why do you want to me to pretend I

do?

Julia: (who is heroically nice and patient) Okay, let’s back up. Suppose
you buy a sandwich. Is the sandwich probably poisoned, or probably not
poisoned?

Student: Exactly which sandwich are we talking about here?

In the context of a lesson on probability, this is a problem I think most people

would be able to avoid. But the student’s attitude, the one that rejects hokey
quantification of things we don’t actually know how to quantify, is a pretty
common one. And it informs a lot of the objections to utilitarianism – the
problem of quantifying exactly how bad North Korea shares some of the
pitfalls of quantifying exactly how likely your computer is to break (for
example, “we are kind of making this number up” is a pitfall).

The explanation that Julia and I tried to give the other student was that
imperfect information still beats zero information. Even if the number “five
percent” was made up (suppose that this is a new kind of computer being used
in a new way that cannot be easily compared to longevity data for previous
computers) it encodes our knowledge that computers are unlikely to break in
any given month. Even if we are wrong by a very large amount (let’s say we’re
off by a factor of four and the real number is 20%), if the insight we encoded
into the number is sane we’re still doing better than giving no information at
all (maybe model this as a random number generator which chooses anything
from 0 – 100?)

This is part of why I respect utilitarianism. Sure, the actual badness of North
Korea may not be exactly 37%. But it’s probably not twice as good as living in
the First World. Or even 90% as good. But it’s probably not two hundred times
worse than death either. There is definitely nonzero information transfer
going on here.

But the typical opponents of utilitarianism have a much stronger point than
the guy at the CFAR class. They’re not arguing that utilitarianism fails to
outperform zero information, they’re arguing that it fails to outperform our
natural intuitive ways of looking at things, the one where you just think “North
Korea? Sounds awful. The people there deserve our sympathy.”

Remember the Bayes mammogram problem? The correct answer is 7.8%;

most doctors (and others) intuitively feel like the answer should be about
80%. So doctors – who are specifically trained in having good intuitive
judgment about diseases – are wrong by an order of magnitude. And it “only”
being one order of magnitude is not to the doctors’ credit: by changing the
numbers in the problem we can make doctors’ answers as wrong as we want.

So the doctors probably would be better off explicitly doing the Bayesian
calculation. But suppose some doctor’s internet is down (you have NO IDEA
how much doctors secretly rely on the Internet) and she can’t remember the
prevalence of breast cancer. If the doctor thinks her guess will be off by less
than an order of magnitude, then making up a number and plugging it into
Bayes will be more accurate than just using a gut feeling about how likely the
test is to work. Even making up numbers based on basic knowledge like “Most
women do not have breast cancer at any given time” might be enough to make
Bayes Theorem outperform intuitive decision-making in many cases.

And a lot of intuitive decisions are off by way more than the make-up-numbers
ability is likely to be off by. Remember that scope insensitivity experiment
where people were willing to spend about the same amount of money to save
2,000 birds as 200,000 birds? And the experiment where people are willing to
work harder to save one impoverished child than fifty impoverished children?
And the one where judges give criminals several times more severe
punishments on average just before they eat lunch than just after they eat
lunch?

And it’s not just neutral biases. We’ve all seen people who approve wars under
Republican presidents but are horrified by the injustice and atrocity of wars
under Democratic presidents, even if it’s just the same war that carried over to
a different administration. If we forced them to stick a number on the amount
of suffering caused by war before they knew what the question was going to
be, that’s a bit harder.

Thus is it written: “It’s easy to lie with statistics, but it’s easier to lie without
them.”

Some things work okay on System 1 reasoning. Other things work badly.
Really really badly. Factor of a hundred badly, if you count the bird
experiment.

It’s hard to make a mistake in calculating the utility of living in North Korea
that’s off by a factor of a hundred. It’s hard to come up with values that make a
war suddenly become okay/abominable when the President changes parties.

Even if your data is completely made up, the way the 5% chance of breaking
your computer was made up, the fact that you can apply normal non-made-up
arithmetic to these made-up numbers will mean that you will very often still
be less wrong than if you had used your considered and thoughtful and
phronetic opinion.

On the other hand, it’s pretty easy to accidentally Pascal’s Mug yourself into
giving everything you own to a crazy cult, which System 1 is good at avoiding.
So it’s nice to have data from both systems.

In cases where we really don’t know what we’re doing, like utilitarianism, one
can still make System 1 decisions, but making them with the System 2 data in
front of you can change your mind. Like “Yes, do whatever you want here, just
be aware that X causes two thousand people to die and Y causes twenty people
an amount of pain which, in experiments, was rated about as bad as a stubbed
toe”.

And cases where we don’t really know what we’re doing have a wonderful
habit of developing into cases where we do know what we’re doing. Like in
medicine, people started out with “doctors’ clinical judgment obviously
trumps everything, but just in case some doctors forgot to order clinical
judgment, let’s make some toy algorithms”. And then people got better and
better at crunching numbers and now there are cases where doctors should
never use their clinical judgment under any circumstances. I can’t find the
article right now, but there are even cases where doctors armed with clinical
algorithms consistently do worse than clinical algorithms without doctors. So
it looks like at some point the diagnostic algorithm people figured out what
they were doing.

I generally support applying made-up models to pretty much any problem

possible, just to notice where our intuitions are going wrong and to get a
second opinion from a process that has no common sense but is also lacks
systematic bias (or else has unpredictable, different systematic bias).

This is why I’m disappointed that no one has ever tried expanding the QALY
concept to things outside health care before. It’s not that I think it will work.
It’s that I think it will fail to work in a different way than our naive opinions
fail to work, and we might learn something from it.

“Sometimes pulling numbers out of your arse and using them to

make a decision is better than pulling a decision out of your arse.”
Techniques for probability estimates
Utility maximization often requires determining a probability of a particular
statement being true. But humans are not utility maximizers and often refuse
to give precise numerical probabilities. Nevertheless, their actions reflect a
"hidden" probability. For example, even someone who refused to give a
precise probability for Barack Obama's re-election would probably jump at the
chance to take a bet in which ey lost $5 if Obama wasn't re-elected but won $5
million if he was; such decisions demand that the decider covertly be working
off of at least a vague probability.

When untrained people try to translate vague feelings like "It seems Obama
will probably be re-elected" into a precise numerical probability, they
commonly fall into certain traps and pitfalls that make their probability
estimates inaccurate. Calling a probability estimate "inaccurate" causes
philosophical problems, but these problems can be resolved by remembering
that probability is "subjectively objective" - that although a mind "hosts" a
probability estimate, that mind does not arbitrarily determine the estimate,
but rather calculates it according to mathematical laws from available
evidence. These calculations require too much computational power to use
outside the simplest hypothetical examples, but they provide a standard by
which to judge real probability estimates. They also suggest tests by which one
can judge probabilities as well-calibrated or poorly-calibrated: for example, a
person who constantly assigns 90% confidence to eir guesses but only guesses
the right answer half the time is poorly calibrated. So calling a probability
estimate "accurate" or "inaccurate" has a real philosophical grounding.

There exist several techniques that help people translate vague feelings of
probability into more accurate numerical estimates. Most of them translate
probabilities from forms without immediate consequences (which the brain
supposedly processes for signaling purposes) to forms with immediate
consequences (which the brain supposedly processes while focusing on those
consequences).

Prepare for Revelation

What would you expect if you believed the answer to your question were about
to be revealed to you?
In Belief in Belief, a man acts as if there is a dragon in his garage, but every
time his neighbor comes up with an idea to test it, he has a reason why the test
wouldn't work. If he imagined Omega (the superintelligence who is always
right) offered to reveal the answer to him, he might realize he was expecting
Omega to reveal the answer "No, there's no dragon". At the very least, he
might realize he was worried that Omega would reveal this, and so re-think
exactly how certain he was about the dragon issue.

This is a simple technique and has relatively few pitfalls.

Bet on it

At what odds would you be willing to bet on a proposition?

Suppose someone offers you a bet at even odds that Obama will be re-elected.
Would you take it? What about two-to-one odds? Ten-to-one? In theory, the
knowledge that money is at stake should make you consider the problem in
"near mode" and maximize your chances of winning.

The problem with this method is that it only works when utility is linear with
respect to money and you're not risk-averse. In the simplest case I should be
indifferent to a $100,000 bet at 50% odds that a fair coin would come up tails,
but in fact I would refuse it; winning $100,000 would be moderately good, but
losing $100,000 would put me deeply in debt and completely screw up my life.
When these sorts of consideration become paramount, imagining wagers will
tend to give inaccurate results.

Convert to a Frequency

How many situations would it take before you expected an event to occur?

Suppose you need to give a probability that the sun will rise tomorrow.
"999,999 in a million" doesn't immediately sound wrong; the sun seems likely
to rise, and a million is a very high number. But if tomorrow is an average day,
then your probability will be linked to the number of days it will take before
you expect that the sun will fail to rise on at least one. A million days is three
thousand years; the Earth has existed for far more than three thousand years
without the sun failing to rise. Therefore, 999,999 in a million is too low a
probability for this occurrence. If you think the sort of astronomical event that
might prevent the sun from rising happens only once every three billion years,
then you might consider a probability more like 999,999,999,999 in a trillion.

In addition to converting to a frequency across time, you can also convert to a

frequency across places or people. What's the probability that you will be
murdered tomorrow? The best guess would be to check the murder rate for
your area. What's the probability there will be a major fire in your city this
year? Check how many cities per year have major fires.

This method fails if your case is not typical: for example, if your city is on the
losing side of a war against an enemy known to use fire-bombing, the
probability of a fire there has nothing to do with the average probability across
cities. And if you think the reason the sun might not rise is a supervillain
building a high-tech sun-destroying machine, then consistent sunrises over
the past three thousand years of low technology will provide little consolation.

A special case of the above failure is converting to frequency across time when
considering an event that is known to take place at a certain distance from the
present. For example, if today is April 10th, then the probability that we hold a
Christmas celebration tomorrow is much lower than the 1/365 you get by
checking on what percentage of days we celebrate Christmas. In the same way,
although we know that the sun will fail to rise in a few billion years when it
burns out its nuclear fuel, this shouldn't affect its chance of rising tomorrow.

Find a Reference Class

How often have similar statements been true?

What is the probability that the latest crisis in Korea escalates to a full-blown
war? If there have been twenty crisis-level standoffs in the Korean peninsula
in the past 60 years, and only one of them has resulted in a major war, then
(war|crisis) = .05, so long as this crisis is equivalent to the twenty crises you're
using as your reference class.

But finding the reference class is itself a hard problem. What is the probability
Bigfoot exists? If one makes a reference class by saying that the yeti doesn't
exist, the Loch Ness monster doesn't exist, and so on, then the Bigfoot partisan
might accuse you of assuming the conclusion - after all, the likelihood of these
creatures existing is probably similar to and correlated with Bigfoot. The
partisan might suggest asking how many creatures previously believed not to
exist later turned out to exist - a list which includes real animals like the
orangutan and platypus - but then one will have to debate whether to include
creatures like dragons, orcs, and Pokemon on the list.

This works best when the reference class is more obvious, as in the Korea
example.

Make Multiple Statements

How many statements could you make of about the same uncertainty as a
given statement without being wrong once?

Suppose you believe France is larger than Italy. With what confidence should
you believe it? If you made ten similar statements (Germany is larger than
Austria, Britain is larger than Ireland, Spain is larger than Portugal, et cetera)
how many times do you think you would be wrong? A hundred similar
statements? If you think you'd be wrong only one time out of a hundred, you
can give the statement 99% confidence.

This is the most controversial probability assessment technique; it tends to

give lower levels of confidence than the others; for example, Eliezer wants to
say there's a less than one in a million chance the LHC would destroy the
world, but doubts he could make a million similar statements and only be
wrong once. Komponisto thinks this is a failure of imagination: we imagine
ourselves gradually growing tired and making mistakes, whereas this method
only works if the accuracy of the millionth statement is exactly the same as the
first.

In any case, the technique is only as good as the ability to judge which
statements are equally difficult to a given statement. If I start saying things
like "Russia is larger than Vatican City! Canada is larger than a speck of dust!"
then I may get all the statements right, but it won't mean much for my Italy-
France example - and if I get bogged down in difficult questions like "Burundi
is larger than Equatorial Guinea" then I might end up underconfident. In
cases where there is an obvious comparison ("Bob didn't cheat on his test",
"Sue didn't cheat on her test", "Alice didn't cheat on her test") this problem
disappears somewhat.

Imagine Hypothetical Evidence

How would your probabilities adjust given new evidence?

Suppose one day all the religious people and all the atheists get tired of
arguing and decide to settle the matter by experiment once and for all. The
plan is to roll an n-sided numbered die and have the faithful of all religions
pray for the die to land on "1". The experiment will be done once, with great
pomp and ceremony, and never repeated, lest the losers try for a better result.
All the resources of the world's skeptics and security forces will be deployed to
prevent any tampering with the die, and we assume their success is
guaranteed.

If the experimenters used a twenty-sided die, and the die comes up 1, would
this convince you that God probably did it, or would you dismiss the result as a
coincidence? What about a hundred-sided die? Million-sided? If a successful
result on a hundred-sided die wouldn't convince you, your probability of God's
existence must be less than one in a hundred; if a million-sided die would
convince you, it must be more than one in a million.

This technique has also been denounced as inaccurate, on the grounds that
our coincidence detectors are overactive and therefore in no state to be
calibrating anything else. It would feel very hard to dismiss a successful result
on a thousand-sided die, no matter how low the probability of God is. It might
also be difficult to visualize a hypothetical where the experiment can't possibly
be rigged, and it may be unfair to force subjects to imagine a hypothetical that
would practically never happen (like the million-sided die landing on one in a
world where God doesn't exist).

These techniques should be experimentally testable; any disagreement over

which do or do not work (at least for a specific individual) can be resolved by
going through a list of difficult questions, declaring confidence levels, and
scoring the results with log odds. Steven's blog has some good sets of test
questions (which I deliberately do not link here so as to not contaminate a
possible pool of test subjects); if many people are interested in participating
and there's a general consensus that an experiment would be useful, we can
try to design one.

Confidence levels inside and outside an argument

Suppose the people at FiveThirtyEight have created a model to predict the

results of an important election. After crunching poll data, area demographics,
and all the usual things one crunches in such a situation, their model returns a
greater than 999,999,999 in a billion chance that the incumbent wins the
election. Suppose further that the results of this model are your only data and
you know nothing else about the election. What is your confidence level that
the incumbent wins the election?

Mine would be significantly less than 999,999,999 in a billion.

When an argument gives a probability of 999,999,999 in a billion for an event,

then probably the majority of the probability of the event is no longer in "But
that still leaves a one in a billion chance, right?". The majority of the
probability is in "That argument is flawed". Even if you have no particular
reason to believe the argument is flawed, the background chance of an
argument being flawed is still greater than one in a billion.

More than one in a billion times a political scientist writes a model, ey will get
completely confused and write something with no relation to reality. More
than one in a billion times a programmer writes a program to crunch political
statistics, there will be a bug that completely invalidates the results. More than
one in a billion times a staffer at a website publishes the results of a political
calculation online, ey will accidentally switch which candidate goes with which
chance of winning.

So one must distinguish between levels of confidence internal and external to

a specific model or argument. Here the model's internal level of confidence is
999,999,999/billion. But my external level of confidence should be lower,
even if the model is my only evidence, by an amount proportional to my trust
in the model.
Is That Really True?

One might be tempted to respond "But there's an equal chance that the false
model is too high, versus that it is too low." Maybe there was a bug in the
computer program, but it prevented it from giving the incumbent's real
chances of 999,999,999,999 out of a trillion.

The prior probability of a candidate winning an election is 50%1. We need

information to push us away from this probability in either direction. To push
significantly away from this probability, we need strong information. Any
weakness in the information weakens its ability to push away from the prior. If
there's a flaw in FiveThirtyEight's model, that takes us away from their
probability of 999,999,999 in of a billion, and back closer to the prior
probability of 50%

We can confirm this with a quick sanity check. Suppose we know nothing
about the election (ie we still think it's 50-50) until an insane person reports a
hallucination that an angel has declared the incumbent to have a
999,999,999/billion chance. We would not be tempted to accept this figure on
the grounds that it is equally likely to be too high as too low.

A second objection covers situations such as a lottery. I would like to say the
chance that Bob wins a lottery with one billion players is 1/1 billion. Do I have
to adjust this upward to cover the possibility that my model for how lotteries
work is somehow flawed? No. Even if I am misunderstanding the lottery, I
have not departed from my prior. Here, new information really does have an
equal chance of going against Bob as of going in his favor. For example, the
lottery may be fixed (meaning my original model of how to determine lottery
winners is fatally flawed), but there is no greater reason to believe it is fixed in
favor of Bob than anyone else.2

Spotted in the Wild

The recent Pascal's Mugging thread spawned a discussion of the Large Hadron
Collider destroying the universe, which also got continued on an older LHC
thread from a few years ago. Everyone involved agreed the chances of the LHC
destroying the world were less than one in a million, but several people gave
extraordinarily low chances based on cosmic ray collisions. The argument was
that since cosmic rays have been performing particle collisions similar to the
LHC's zillions of times per year, the chance that the LHC will destroy the
world is either literally zero, or else a number related to the probability that
there's some chance of a cosmic ray destroying the world so miniscule that it
hasn't gotten actualized in zillions of cosmic ray collisions. Of the commenters
mentioning this argument, one gave a probability of 1/3*10^22, another
suggested 1/10^25, both of which may be good numbers for the internal
confidence of this argument.

But the connection between this argument and the general LHC argument
flows through statements like "collisions produced by cosmic rays will be
exactly like those produced by the LHC", "our understanding of the properties
of cosmic rays is largely correct", and "I'm not high on drugs right now, staring
at a package of M&Ms and mistaking it for a really intelligent argument that
bears on the LHC question", all of which are probably more likely than
1/10^20. So instead of saying "the probability of an LHC apocalypse is now
1/10^20", say "I have an argument that has an internal probability of an LHC
apocalypse as 1/10^20, which lowers my probability a bit depending on how
much I trust that argument".

In fact, the argument has a potential flaw: according to Giddings and

Mangano, the physicists officially tasked with investigating LHC risks, black
holes from cosmic rays might have enough momentum to fly through Earth
without harming it, and black holes from the LHC might not3. This was
predictable: this was a simple argument in a complex area trying to prove a
negative, and it would have been presumptous to believe with greater than
99% probability that it was flawless. If you can only give 99% probability to
the argument being sound, then it can only reduce your probability in the
conclusion by a factor of a hundred, not a factor of 10^20.

But it's hard for me to be properly outraged about this, since the LHC did not
destroy the world. A better example might be the following, taken from an
online discussion of creationism4 and apparently based off of something by
Fred Hoyle:

In order for a single cell to live, all of the parts of the cell must be
assembled before life starts. This involves 60,000 proteins that are
assembled in roughly 100 different combinations. The probability that
 these complex groupings of proteins could have happened just by
chance is extremely small. It is about 1 chance in 10 to the 4,478,296
power. The probability of a living cell being assembled just by chance is
so small, that you may as well consider it to be impossible. This means
that the probability that the living cell is created by an intelligent
creator, that designed it, is extremely large. The probability that God
created the living cell is 10 to the 4,478,296 power to 1.

Note that someone just gave a confidence level of 10^4478296 to one and was
wrong. This is the sort of thing that should never ever happen. This is possibly
the most wrong anyone has ever been.

It is hard to say in words exactly how wrong this is. Saying "This person would
be willing to bet the entire world GDP for a thousand years if evolution were
true against a one in one million chance of receiving a single penny if
creationism were true" doesn't even begin to cover it: a mere 1/10^25 would
suffice there. Saying "This person believes he could make one statement about
an issue as difficult as the origin of cellular life per Planck interval, every
Planck interval from the Big Bang to the present day, and not be wrong even
once" only brings us to 1/10^61 or so. If the chance of getting Ganser's
Syndrome, the extraordinarily rare psychiatric condition that manifests in a
compulsion to say false statements, is one in a hundred million, and the
world's top hundred thousand biologists all agree that evolution is true, then
this person should preferentially believe it is more likely that all hundred
thousand have simultaneously come down with Ganser's Syndrome than that
they are doing good biology5

This creationist's flaw wasn't mathematical; the math probably does return
that number. The flaw was confusing the internal probability (that complex
life would form completely at random in a way that can be represented with
this particular algorithm) with the external probability (that life could form
without God). He should have added a term representing the chance that his
knockdown argument just didn't apply.

Finally, consider the question of whether you can assign 100% certainty to a
mathematical theorem for which a proof exists. Eliezer has already examined
this issue and come out against it (citing as an example this story of Peter de
Blanc's). In fact, this is just the specific case of differentiating internal versus
external probability when internal probability is equal to 100%. Now your
probability that the theorem is false is entirely based on the probability that
you've made some mistake.

The many mathematical proofs that were later overturned provide practical
justification for this mindset.

This is not a fully general argument against giving very high levels of
confidence: very complex situations and situations with many exclusive
possible outcomes (like the lottery example) may still make it to the 1/10^20
level, albeit probably not the 1/10^4478296. But in other sorts of cases, giving
a very high level of confidence requires a check that you're not confusing the
probability inside one argument with the probability of the question as a
whole.

Footnotes

1. Although technically we know we're talking about an incumbent, who

typically has a much higher chance, around 90% in Congress.
2. A particularly devious objection might be "What if the lottery
commissioner, in a fit of political correctness, decides that "everyone is a
winner" and splits the jackpot a billion ways? If this would satisfy your
criteria for "winning the lottery", then this mere possibility should
indeed move your probability upward. In fact, since there is probably
greater than a one in one billion chance of this happening, the majority
of your probability for Bob winning the lottery should concentrate here!
3. Giddings and Mangano then go on to re-prove the original "won't cause
an apocalypse" argument using a more complicated method involving
white dwarf stars.
4. While searching creationist websites for the half-remembered argument
I was looking for, I found what may be my new favorite quote:
"Mathematicians generally agree that, statistically, any odds beyond 1 in
10 to the 50th have a zero probability of ever happening."
5. I'm a little worried that five years from now I'll see this quoted on some
creationist website as an actual argument.
Studies and Statistics

Beware The Man Of One Study

Aquinas famously said: beware the man of one book. I would add: beware the
man of one study.

For example, take medical research. Suppose a certain drug is weakly effective
against a certain disease. After a few years, a bunch of different research
groups have gotten their hands on it and done all sorts of different studies. In
the best case scenario the average study will find the true result – that it’s
weakly effective.

But there will also be random noise caused by inevitable variation and by
some of the experiments being better quality than others. In the end, we might
expect something looking kind of like a bell curve. The peak will be at “weakly
effective”, but there will be a few studies to either side. Something like this:
We see that the peak of the curve is somewhere to the right of neutral – ie
weakly effective – and that there are about 15 studies that find this correct
result.

But there are also about 5 studies that find that the drug is very good, and 5
studies missing the sign entirely and finding that the drug is actively bad.
There’s even 1 study finding that the drug is very bad, maybe seriously
dangerous.

This is before we get into fraud or statistical malpractice. I’m saying this is
what’s going to happen just by normal variation in experimental design. As we
increase experimental rigor, the bell curve might get squashed horizontally,
but there will still be a bell curve.

In practice it’s worse than this, because this is assuming everyone is

investigating exactly the same question.

Suppose that the graph is titled “Effectiveness Of This Drug In Treating

Bipolar Disorder”.

But maybe the drug is more effective in bipolar i than in bipolar ii (Depakote,
for example)

Or maybe the drug is very effective against bipolar mania, but much less
effective against bipolar depression (Depakote again).

Or maybe the drug is a good acute antimanic agent, but very poor at
maintenance treatment (let’s stick with Depakote).

If you have a graph titled “Effectiveness Of Depakote In Treating Bipolar

Disorder” plotting studies from “Very Bad” to “Very Good” – and you stick all
the studies – maintenence, manic, depressive, bipolar i, bipolar ii – on the
graph, then you’re going to end running the gamut from “very bad” to “very
good” even before you factor in noise and even before even before you factor in
bias and poor experimental design.

So here’s why you should beware the man of one study.

If you go to your better class of alternative medicine websites, they don’t tell
you “Studies are a logocentric phallocentric tool of Western medicine and the
Big Pharma conspiracy.”

They tell you “medical science has proved that this drug is terrible, but
ignorant doctors are pushing it on you anyway. Look, here’s a study by a
reputable institution proving that the drug is not only ineffective, but
harmful.”

And the study will exist, and the authors will be prestigious scientists, and it
will probably be about as rigorous and well-done as any other study.

And then a lot of people raised on the idea that some things have Evidence and
other things have No Evidence think holy s**t, they’re right!

On the other hand, your doctor isn’t going to a sketchy alternative medicine
website. She’s examining the entire literature and extracting careful and well-
informed conclusions from…

Haha, just kidding. She’s going to a luncheon at a really nice restaurant

sponsored by a pharmaceutical company, which assures her that they would
never take advantage of such an opportunity to shill their drug, they just want
to raise awareness of the latest study. And the latest study shows that their
drug is great! Super great! And your doctor nods along, because the authors of
the study are prestigious scientists, and it’s about as rigorous and well-done as
any other study.

But obviously the pharmaceutical company has selected one of the studies
from the “very good” end of the bell curve.

And I called this “Beware The Man of One Study”, but it’s easy to see that in
the little diagram there are like three or four studies showing that the drug is
“very good”, so if your doctor is a little skeptical, the pharmaceutical company
can say “You are right to be skeptical, one study doesn’t prove anything, but
look – here’s another group that finds the same thing, here’s yet another group
that finds the same thing, and here’s a replication that confirms both of them.”

And even though it looks like in our example the sketchy alternative medicine
website only has one “very bad” study to go off of, they could easily
supplement it with a bunch of merely “bad” studies. Or they could add all of
those studies about slightly different things. Depakote is ineffective at treating
bipolar depression. Depakote is ineffective at maintenance bipolar therapy.
Depakote is ineffective at bipolar ii.

So just sum it up as “Smith et al 1987 found the drug ineffective, yet doctors
continue to prescribe it anyway”. Even if you hunt down the original study
(which no one does), Smith et al won’t say specifically “Do remember that this
study is only looking at bipolar maintenance, which is a different topic from
bipolar acute antimanic treatment, and we’re not saying anything about that.”
It will just be titled something like “Depakote fails to separate from placebo in
six month trial of 91 patients” and trust that the responsible professionals
reading it are well aware of the difference between acute and maintenance
treatments (hahahahaha).

So it’s not so much “beware the man of one study” as “beware the man of any
number of studies less than a relatively complete and not-cherry-picked
survey of the research”.

II.

I think medical science is still pretty healthy, and that the consensus of doctors
and researchers is more-or-less right on most controversial medical issues.

(it’s the uncontroversial ones you have to worry about)

Politics doesn’t have this protection.

Like, take the minimum wage question (please). We all know about the
Krueger and Card study in New Jersey that found no evidence that high
minimum wages hurt the economy. We probably also know the counterclaims
that it was completely debunked as despicable dishonest statistical
malpractice. Maybe some of us know Card and Krueger wrote a pretty
convincing rebuttal of those claims. Or that a bunch of large and
methodologically advanced studies have come out since then, some finding no
effect like Dube, others finding strong effects like Rubinstein and Wither.
These are just examples; there are at least dozens and probably hundreds of
studies on both sides.
But we can solve this with meta-analyses and systemtic reviews, right?

Depends which one you want. Do you go with this meta-analysis of fourteen
studies that shows that any presumed negative effect of high minimum wages
is likely publication bias? With this meta-analysis of sixty-four studies that
finds the same thing and discovers no effect of minimum wage after correcting
for the problem? Or how about this meta-analysis of fifty-five countries that
does find effects in most of them? Maybe you prefer this systematic review of a
hundred or so studies that finds strong and consistent effects?

Can we trust news sources, think tanks, econblogs, and other institutions to
sum up the state of the evidence?

CNN claims that 85% of credible studies have shown the minimum wage
causes job loss. But raisetheminimumwage.com declares that “two decades of
rigorous economic research have found that raising the minimum wage does
not result in job loss…researchers and businesses alike agree today that the
weight of the evidence shows no reduction in employment resulting from
minimum wage increases.” Modeled Behavior says “the majority of the new
minimum wage research supports the hypothesis that the minimum wage
increases unemployment.” The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities says
“The common claim that raising the minimum wage reduces employment for
low-wage workers is one of the most extensively studied issues in empirical
economics. The weight of the evidence is that such impacts are small to none.”

Okay, fine. What about economists? They seem like experts. What do they
think?

Well, five hundred economists signed a letter to policy makers saying that the
science of economics shows increasing the minimum wage would be a bad
idea. That sounds like a promising consensus…

..except that six hundred economists signed a letter to policy makers saying
that the science of economics shows increasing the minimum wage would be a
good idea. (h/t Greg Mankiw)

Fine then. Let’s do a formal survey of economists. Now what?

raisetheminimumwage.com, an unbiased source if ever there was one,
confidently tells us that “indicative is a 2013 survey by the University of
Chicago’s Booth School of Business in which leading economists agreed by a
nearly 4 to 1 margin that the benefits of raising and indexing the minimum
wage outweigh the costs.”

But the Employment Policies Institute, which sounds like it’s trying way too
hard to sound like an unbiased source, tells us that “Over 73 percent of AEA
labor economists believe that a significant increase will lead to employment
losses and 68 percent think these employment losses fall disproportionately
on the least skilled. Only 6 percent feel that minimum wage hikes are an
efficient way to alleviate poverty.”

So the whole thing is fiendishly complicated. But unless you look very very
hard, you will never know that.

If you are a conservative, what you will find on the sites you trust will be
something like this:

Economic theory has always shown that minimum wage increases

decrease employment, but the Left has never been willing to accept this
basic fact. In 1992, they trumpeted a single study by Card and Krueger
that purported to show no negative effects from a minimum wage
increase. This study was immediately debunked and found to be based
on statistical malpractice and “massaging the numbers”. Since then,
dozens of studies have come out confirming what we knew all along –
that a high minimum wage is economic suicide. Systematic reviews and
meta-analyses (Neumark 2006, Boockman 2010) consistently show that
an overwhelming majority of the research agrees on this fact – as do
73% of economists. That’s why five hundred top economists recently
signed a letter urging policy makers not to buy into discredited liberal
minimum wage theories. Instead of listening to starry-eyed liberal woo,
listen to the empirical evidence and an overwhelming majority of
economists and oppose a raise in the minimum wage.

And if you are a leftist, what you will find on the sites you trust will be
something like this:
 People used to believe that the minimum wage decreased
unemployment. But Card and Krueger’s famous 1992 study exploded
that conventional wisdom. Since then, the results have been replicated
over fifty times, and further meta-analyses (Card and Krueger 1995,
Dube 2010) have found no evidence of any effect. Leading economists
agree by a 4 to 1 margin that the benefits of raising the minimum wage
outweigh the costs, and that’s why more than 600 of them have signed a
petition telling the government to do exactly that. Instead of listening to
conservative scare tactics based on long-debunked theories, listen to the
empirical evidence and the overwhelming majority of economists and
support a raise in the minimum wage.

Go ahead. Google the issue and see what stuff comes up. If it doesn’t quite
match what I said above, it’s usually because they can’t even muster that level
of scholarship. Half the sites just cite Card and Krueger and call it a day!

These sites with their long lists of studies and experts are super convincing.
And half of them are wrong.

At some point in their education, most smart people usually learn not to credit
arguments from authority. If someone says “Believe me about the minimum
wage because I seem like a trustworthy guy,” most of them will have at least
one neuron in their head that says “I should ask for some evidence”. If they’re
really smart, they’ll use the magic words “peer-reviewed experimental
studies.”

But I worry that most smart people have not learned that a list of dozens of
studies, several meta-analyses, hundreds of experts, and expert surveys
showing almost all academics support your thesis – can still be bullshit.

Which is too bad, because that’s exactly what people who want to bamboozle
an educated audience are going to use.

III.

I do not want to preach radical skepticism.

For example, on the minimum wage issue, I notice only one side has presented
a funnel plot. A funnel plot is usually used to investigate publication bias, but
it has another use as well – it’s pretty much an exact presentation of the “bell
curve” we talked about above.

This is more of a needle curve than a bell curve, but the point still stands. We
see it’s centered around 0, which means there’s some evidence that’s the real
signal among all this noise. The bell skews more to left than to the right, which
means more studies have found negative effects of the minimum wage than
positive effects of the minimum wage. But since the bell curve is asymmetrical,
we interpret that as probably publication bias. So all in all, I think there’s at
least some evidence that the liberals are right on this one.

Unless, of course, someone has realized that I’ve wised up to the studies and
meta-analyses and and expert surveys, and figured out a way to hack funnel
plots, which I am totally not ruling out.

(okay, I kind of want to preach radical skepticism)

Also, I should probably mention that it’s much more complicated than one
side being right, and that the minimum wage probably works differently
depending on what industry you’re talking about, whether it’s state wage or
federal wage, whether it’s a recession or a boom, whether we’re talking about
increasing from $5 to $6 or from $20 to $30, etc, etc, etc. There are eleven
studies on that plot showing an effect even worse than -5, and very possibly
they are all accurate for whatever subproblem they have chosen to study –
much like the example with Depakote where it might an effective antimanic
but a terrible antidepressant.

(radical skepticism actually sounds a lot better than figuring this all out).

IV.

But the question remains: what happens when (like in most cases) you don’t
have a funnel plot?

I don’t have a good positive answer. I do have several good negative answers.

Decrease your confidence about most things if you’re not sure that you’ve
investigated every piece of evidence.

Do not trust websites which are obviously biased (eg Free Republic, Daily Kos,
Dr. Oz) when they tell you they’re going to give you “the state of the evidence”
on a certain issue, even if the evidence seems very stately indeed. This goes
double for any site that contains a list of “myths and facts about X”, quadruple
for any site that uses phrases like “ingroup member uses actual FACTS to
DEMOLISH the outgroup’s lies about Y”, and octuple for RationalWiki.

Most important, even if someone gives you what seems like overwhelming
evidence in favor of a certain point of view, don’t trust it until you’ve done a
simple Google search to see if the opposite side has equally overwhelming
evidence.

Debunked And Well-Refuted

I.

As usual, I was insufficiently pessimistic.

I infer this from The Federalist‘s article on campus rape:

A new report on sexual assault released today by the U.S. Department of

Justice (DOJ) officially puts to bed the bogus statistic that one in five
women on college campuses are victims of sexual assault. In fact, non-
students are 25 percent more likely to be victims of sexual assault than
students, according to the data. And the real number of assault victims
is several orders of magnitude lower than one-in-five.

The article compares the older Campus Sexual Assault Survey (which found
14-20% of women were raped since entering college) to the just-released
National Crime Victmization Survey (which found that 0.6% of female college
students are raped per year). They write “Instead of 1 in 5, the real number is
0.03 in 5.”

So the first thing I will mock The Federalist for doing is directly comparing per
year sexual assault rates to per college career sexual assault rates, whereas
obviously these are very different things. You can’t quite just divide the latter
by four to get the former, but that’s going to work a heck of a lot better than
not doing it, so let’s estimate the real discrepancy as more like 0.5% per year
versus 5% per year.

But I can’t get too mad at them yet, because that’s still a pretty big
discrepancy.

However, faced with this discrepancy a reasonable person might say “Hmm,
we have two different studies that say two different things. I wonder what’s
going on here and which study we should believe?”

The Federalist staff said “Ha! There’s an old study with findings we didn’t like,
but now there’s a new study with different findings we do like. So the old study
is debunked!”
II.

My last essay, Beware The Man Of One Study, noted that one thing partisans
do to justify their bias is selectively acknowledge studies from only one side of
a complicated literature.

The reason it was insufficiently pessimistic is that there are also people like
the Federalist staff, who acknowledge the existence of opposing studies, but
only with the adjective “debunked” in front of them. By “debunked” they
usually mean one of two things:

1. Someone on my side published a study later that found something else

2. Someone on my side accused it of having methodological flaws

Since the Federalist has so amply demonstrated the first failure mode, let me
say a little more about the second. Did you know that anyone with a keyboard
can just type up any of the following things?

● “That study is a piece of garbage that’s not worth the paper it’s written
on.”
● “People in the know dismissed that study years ago.”
● “Nobody in the field takes that study seriously.”
● “That study uses methods that are laughable to anybody who knows
statistics.”
● “All the other research that has come out since discredits that study.”

They can say these things whether they are true or not. I’m kind of harping on
this point, but it’s because it’s something I didn’t realize until much later than
I should have.

There are many “questions” that are pretty much settled – evolution, global
warming, homeopathy. But taking these as representative closes your mind
and gives you a skewed picture of academia. On many issues, academics are
just as divided as anyone else, and their arguments can be just as acrimonious
as anyone else’s. The arguments usually take the form of one side publishing a
study, the other side ripping the study apart and publishing their own study
which they say is better, and the first side ripping the second study apart and
arguing that their study was better all along.
Every study has flaws. No study has perfect methodology. If you like a study,
you can say that it did the best it could on a difficult research area and has
improved upon even-worse predecessor studies. If you don’t like a study, you
can say “LOOK AT THESE FLAWS THESE PEOPLE ARE IDIOTS THE
CONCLUSION IS COMPLETELY INVALID”. All you need to do is make
enough isolated demands for rigor against anything you disagree with.

And so if the first level of confirmation bias is believing every study that
supports your views, the second layer of confirmation bias is believing every
supposed refutation that supports your views.

There are certainly things that have been “well-refuted” and “debunked”.
Andrew Wakefield’s study purporting to prove that vaccines cause autism is a
pretty good example. But you will notice that it had multiple failed
replications, journals published reports showing he falsified data, the study’s
co-authors retracted their support, the journal it was published in retracted it
and issued an apology, the General Medical Council convicted Wakefield of
sixteen counts of misconduct, and Wakefield was stripped of his medical
license and barred from practicing medicine ever again in the UK. The British
Medical Journal, one of the best-respected medical journals in the world,
published an editorial concluding:

Clear evidence of falsification of data should now close the door on this
damaging vaccine scare … Who perpetrated this fraud? There is no
doubt that it was Wakefield. Is it possible that he was wrong, but not
dishonest: that he was so incompetent that he was unable to fairly
describe the project, or to report even one of the 12 children’s cases
accurately? No.

Wakefield’s study has been “refuted”. The rape study has been “argued
against”.

III.

I saw this same dynamic at work the other day, looking through the minimum
wage literature.
The primordial titanomachy of the minimum wage literature goes like this. In
1994, two guys named Card and Krueger published a study showing the
minimum wage had if anything positive effects on New Jersey restaurants,
convincing many people that minimum wages were good. In 1996, two guys
named Neumark and Wascher reanalyzed the New Jersey data using a
different source and found that it showed the minimum wage had very bad
effects on New Jersey restaurants. In 2000, Card and Krueger responded,
saying that their analysis was better than Neumark and Wascher’s re-analysis,
and also they had done a re-analysis of their own which confirmed their
original position.

Let’s see how conservative sites present this picture:

“The support for this assertion is the oft-cited 1994 study by Card and
Krueger showing a positive correlation between an increased
minimum wage and employment in New Jersey. Many others have
thoroughly debunked this study.” (source)

“I was under the impression that the original study done by Card and
Krueger had been thoroughly debunked by Michigan State University
economist David Neumark and William Wascher” (source)

“The study … by Card and Krueger has been debunked by several

different people several different times. When other researchers re-
evaluated the study, they found that data collected using those records
‘lead to the opposite conclusion from that reached by’ Card and
Krueger.” (source)

“It was only a short time before the fantastic Card-Krueger findings
were challenged and debunked by several subsequent studies…in 1995,
economists David Neumark and David Wascher used actual payroll
records (instead of survey data used by Card and Krueger) and
published their results in an NBER paper with an amazing finding:
Demand curves for unskilled labor really do slope downward,
confirming 200 years of economic theory and mountains of empirical
evidence (source)

And now let’s look at how lefty sites present this picture:
 “…a long-debunked paper [by Neumark and Wascher]” (source)

“Note that your Mises heroes, Neumark and Wascher are roundly
debunked.” (source)

“Neumark’s living wage and minimum wage research have been found
to be seriously flawed…based on faulty methods which when corrected
refute his conclusion.” – (source)

“…Neumark and Wascher, a study which Elizabeth Warren debunked

in a Senate hearing”(source)

So if you’re conservative, Neumark and Wascher debunked Card and Krueger.

But if you’re liberal, Card and Krueger debunked Neumark and Wascher.

Both sides are no doubt very pleased with themselves. They’re not men of one
study. They look at all of the research – except of course the studies that have
been “debunked” or “well-refuted”. Why would you waste your time with
those?

IV.

Once again, I’m not preaching radical skepticism.

First of all, some studies are super-debunked. Wakefield is a good example.

Second of all, some studies that don’t quite meet Wakefield-level of awfulness
are indeed really bad and need refuting. I don’t think this is beyond the
intellectual capacities of most people. I think in many cases it’s easy to
understand why a study is wrong, you should try to do that, and once you do it
you can safely discount the results of the study.

I’m not against pointing out when you disagree with studies or think they’re
flawed. I’d be a giant hypocrite if I was.

But “debunked” and “refuted” aren’t saying you disagree with a study. They’re
making arguments from authority. They’re saying “the authority of the
scientific community has come together and said this is a piece of crap that
doesn’t count”.
And that’s fine if that’s actually happened. But you had better make sure that
you’re calling upon an ex cathedra statement by the community itself, and not
a single guy with an axe to grind. Or one side of a complicated an interminable
debate where both sides have about equal credentials and sway.

If you can’t do that, you say “I think that my side of the academic debate is in
the right, and here’s why,” not “your side has been debunked”.

Otherwise you’re going to end up like the minimum wage debaters, where
both sides claim to have debunked the other. Or like the Federalist article that
says a study has been “put to bed” as “bogus” just because another study said
something different.

I think this is part of my reply to the claim that empiricism is so great that no
one needs rationality.

A naive empiricist who swears off critical thinking because they can just
“follow the evidence” has no contingency plan for when the evidence gets
confusing. Their only recourse is to deny that the evidence is confusing, to
assert that one side or the other has been “debunked”. Since they’ve already
made a principled decision not to study confirmation bias, chances are it’s
going to be whichever side they don’t like that’s “already been debunked”. And
by “debunked” they mean “a scientist on my side said it was wrong, so now I
am relieved from the burden of thinking about it.”

On the original post, I wrote:

Life is made up of limited, confusing, contradictory, and maliciously

doctored facts. Anyone who says otherwise is either sticking to such
incredibly easy solved problems that they never encounter anything
outside their comfort level, or so closed-minded that they shut out any
evidence that challenges their beliefs.

In the absence of any actual debunking more damning than a

counterargument, “that’s been debunked” is the way “shuts out any evidence
that challenges their beliefs” feels from the inside.
V.

Somebody’s going to want to know what’s up with the original rape studies.
The answer is that a small part of the discrepancy is response bias on the
CSAS, but most of it is that the two surveys encourage respondents to define
“sexual assault” in very different ways. Vox has an excellent article on this
which for once I 100% endorse.

In other words, both are valid, both come together to form a more nuanced
picture of campus violence, and neither one “debunks” the other.

Noisy Poll Results And Reptilian Muslim Climatologists from Mars

Beware of Phantom Lizardmen

I have only done a little bit of social science research, but it was enough to
make me hate people. One study I helped with analyzed whether people from
different countries had different answers on a certain psychological test. So we
put up a website where people answered some questions about themselves
(like “what country are you from?”) and then took the psychological test.

And so of course people screwed it up in every conceivable way. There were

the merely dumb, like the guy who put “male” as his nationality and
“American” as his gender. But there were also the actively malicious or at least
annoying, like the people (yes, more than one) who wrote in “Martian”.

I think we all probably know someone like this, maybe a couple people like
this.

I also think most of us don’t know someone who believes reptilian aliens in
human form control all the major nations of Earth.

Public Policy Polling’s recent poll on conspiracy theories mostly showed up on

my Facebook feed as “Four percent of Americans believe lizardmen are
running the Earth”.

(of note, an additional 7% of Americans are “not sure” whether lizardmen are
running the Earth or not.)
Imagine the situation. You’re at home, eating dinner. You get a call from
someone who says “Hello, this is Public Policy Polling. Would you mind
answering some questions for us?” You say “Sure”. An extremely dignified
sounding voice says – and this is the exact wording of the question – “Do you
believe that shape-shifting reptilian people control our world by taking on
human form and gaining political power to manipulate our society, or not?”
Then it urges you to press 1 if yes, press 2 if no, press 3 if not sure.

So first we get the people who think “Wait, was 1 the one for if I did believe in
lizardmen, or if I didn’t? I’ll just press 1 and move on to the next question.”

Then we get the people who are like “I never heard it before, but if this nice
pollster thinks it’s true, I might as well go along with them.”

Then we get the people who are all “F#&k you, polling company, I don’t want
people calling me when I’m at dinner. You screw with me, I tell you what I’m
going to do. I’m going to tell you I believe lizard people are running the
planet.”

And then we get the people who put “Martian” as their nationality in
psychology experiments. Because some men just want to watch the world
burn.

Do these three groups total 4% of the US population? Seems plausible.

I really wish polls like these would include a control question, something
utterly implausible even by lizard-people standards, something like “Do you
believe Barack Obama is a hippopotamus?” Whatever percent of people
answer yes to the hippo question get subtracted out from the other questions.

Poll Answers As Attire

Alas, not all weird poll answers can be explained that easily. On the same poll,
13% of Americans claimed to believe Barack Obama was the Anti-Christ.
Subtracting our Lizardman’s Constant of 4%, that leaves 9% of Americans who
apparently gave this answer with something approaching sincerity.

(a friend on Facebook pointed out that 5% of Obama voters claimed to believe

that Obama was the Anti-Christ, which seems to be another piece of evidence
in favor of a Lizardman’s Constant of 4-5%. On the other hand, I do enjoy
picturing someone standing in a voting booth, thinking to themselves “Well,
on the one hand, Obama is the Anti-Christ. On the other, do I really want four
years of Romney?”)

Some pollsters are starting to consider these sorts of things symptomatic of

what they term symbolic belief, which seems to be kind of what the Less
Wrong sequences call Professing and Cheering or Belief As Attire. Basically,
people are being emotivists rather than realists about belief. “Obama is the
Anti-Christ” is another way of just saying “Boo Obama!”, rather than
expressing some sort of proposition about the world.

And the same is true of “Obama is a Muslim” or “Obama was not born in
America”.

Never Attribute To Stupidity What Can Be Adequately Explained By Malice

But sometimes it’s not some abstruse subtle bias. Sometimes it’s not a good-
natured joke. Sometimes people might just be actively working to corrupt your
data.

Another link I’ve seen on my Facebook wall a few times is this one: Are
Climate Change Sceptics More Likely To Be Conspiracy Theorists? It’s based
on a paper by Stephen Lewandowsky et al called NASA Faked The Moon
Landing, Therefore Climate Science Is A Hoax – An Analysis Of The Motivated
Rejection Of Science.

The paper’s thesis was that climate change skeptics are motivated by
conspiracy ideation – a belief that there are large groups of sinister people out
to deceive them. This seems sort of reasonable on the face of it – being a
climate change skeptic requires going against the belief of the entire scientific
establishment. My guess is that there probably is a significant link here
waiting to be discovered.

Unfortunately, it’s…possible Stephan Lewandowsky wasn’t the best person to

investigate this? Aside from being a professor of cognitive science, he also runs
Shaping Tomorrow’s World, a group that promotes “re-examining some of the
assumptions we make about our technological, social and economic systems”
and which seems to be largely about promoting global warming activism.
While I think it’s admirable that he is involved in that, it raises conflict of
interest questions. And the way his paper is written – starting with the over-
the-top title – doesn’t do him any favors.

(if the conflict of interest angle doesn’t make immediate and obvious sense to
you, imagine how sketchy it would be if a professional global warming denier
was involved in researching the motivations of global warming supporters)

But enough of my personal opinions. What’s the paper look like?

The methodology goes like this: they send requests to several popular climate
blogs, both believer and skeptic, asking them to link their readers to an online
survey. The survey asks people their beliefs on global warming and on lots of
conspiracy theories and fringe beliefs.

On first glance, the results are extremely damning. People who rejected
climate science were wildly more likely to reject pretty much every other form
of science as well, including the “theory” that HIV causes AIDS and the
“theory” that cigarettes cause cancer. They were more willing to believe aliens
landed at Roswell, that 9-11 was an inside job, and, yes, that NASA faked the
moon landing. The conclusion: climate skeptics are just really stupid people.

But a bunch of global warming skeptics started re-analyzing the data and
coming up with their own interpretations. They found that many large pro-
global-warming blogs posted the link to the survey, but very few anti-global-
warming blogs did. This then devolved into literally the worst flame war I have
ever seen on the Internet, centering around accusations about whether the
study authors deliberately excluded large anti-global warming blogs, or
whether the authors asked the writers of anti-global-warming blogs and these
writers just ignored the request (my impression is that most people now agree
it was the latter). In either case, it ended up with most people taking the
survey being from the pro-global-warming blogs, and only a few skeptics.

More interestingly, they found that pretty much all of the link between global
warming skepticism and stupidity was a couple of people (there were so few
skeptics, and so few conspiracy believers, that these couple of people made up
a pretty big proportion of them, and way more than enough to get a
“significant” difference with the global warming believers). Further, most of
these couple of people had given the maximally skeptical answer to every
single question about global warming, and the maximally credulous answer to
every single question about conspiracies.

The danger here now seems obvious. Global warming believer blogs publish a
link to this study, saying gleefully that it’s going to prove that global warming
skeptics are idiots who also think NASA faked the moon landing and the world
is run by lizardmen or whatever. Some global warming believers decide to help
this process along by pretending to be super-strong global warming skeptics
and filling in the stupidest answers they can to every question. The few real
global warming skeptics who take the survey aren’t enough signal to
completely drown out this noise. Therefore, they do the statistics and
triumphantly announce that global warming skepticism is linked to stupid
beliefs.

The global warming skeptic blogosphere has in my opinion done more than
enough work to present a very very strong case that this is what happened
(somebody else do an independent look at the controversy and double-check
this for me?) And Professor Lewandowsky’s answer was…

…to publish a second paper, saying his results had been confirmed because
climate skeptics were so obsessed with conspiracy theories that they had
accused his data proving they were obsessed with conspiracies of being part of
a conspiracy. The name of the paper? Recursive Fury. I have to hand it to him,
this is possibly the most chutzpah I have ever seen a single human being
display.

(the paper is now partially offline as the journal investigates it for ethical
something something)

The lesson from all three of the cases in this post seems clear. When we’re
talking about very unpopular beliefs, polls can only give a weak signal. Any
possible source of noise – jokesters, cognitive biases, or deliberate
misbehavior – can easily overwhelm the signal. Therefore, polls that rely on
detecting very weak signals should be taken with a grain of salt.

Two Dark Side Statistics Papers

I.

First we have False Positive Psychology: Undisclosed Flexibility In Data

Collection And Analysis Allows Presenting Anything As Significant (h/t Jonas
Vollmer).

The message is hardly unique: there are lots of tricks unscrupulous or

desperate scientists can use to artificially nudge results to the 5% significance
level. The clarity of the presentation is unique. They start by discussing four
particular tricks:

1. Measure multiple dependent variables, then report the ones that are
significant. For example, if you’re measuring whether treatment for a
certain psychiatric disorder improves life outcomes, you can collect five
different measures of life outcomes – let’s say educational attainment,
income, self-reported happiness, whether or not ever arrested, whether
or not in romantic relationship – and have a 25%-ish probability one of
them will come out at significance by chance. Then you can publish a
paper called “Psychiatric Treatment Found To Increase Educational
Attainment” without ever mentioning the four negative tests.
2. Artificially choose when to end your experiment. Suppose you want to
prove that yelling at a coin makes it more likely to come up tails. You
yell at a coin and flip it. It comes up heads. You try again. It comes up
tails. You try again. It comes up heads. You try again. It comes up tails.
You try again. It comes up tails again. You try again. It comes up tails
again. You note that it came up tails four out of six times – a 66%
success rate compared to expected 50% – and declare victory. Of course,
this result wouldn’t be significant, and it seems as if this should be a
general rule – that almost by the definition of significance, you shouldn’t
be able to obtain it just be stopping the experiment at the right point.
But the authors of the study perform several simulations to prove that
this trick is more successful than you’d think:
 3. Control for “confounders” (in practice, most often gender). I sometimes
call this the “Elderly Hispanic Woman Effect” after drug trials that find
that their drug doesn’t have significant effects in the general population,
but it does significantly help elderly Hispanic women. The trick is you
split the population into twenty subgroups (young white men, young
white women, elderly white men, elderly white women, young black
men, etc), in one of those subgroups it will achieve significance by pure
chance, and so you declare that your drug must just somehow be a
perfect fit for elderly Hispanic women’s unique body chemistry. This is
not always wrong (some antihypertensives have notably different
efficacy in white versus black populations) but it is usually suspicious.
4. Test different conditions and report the ones you like. For example,
suppose you are testing whether vegetable consumption affects
depression. You conduct the trial with three arms: low veggie diet,
medium veggie diet, and high veggie diet. You now have four possible
comparisons – low-medium, low-high, medium-high, low-medium-high
trend). One of them will be significant 20% of the time, so you can just
report that one: “People who eat a moderate amount of vegetables are
less likely to get depression than people who eat excess vegetables”
sounds like a perfectly reasonable result.

Then they run simulations to show exactly how much more likely you are to
get a significant result in random data by employing each trick:
The image demonstrates that by using all four tricks, you can squeeze random
data into a result significant at the p < 0.05 level about 61% of the time. The
authors then put their money where their mouth is by conducting two studies.
The first seems like a very very classic social psychology study. Subjects are
randomly assigned to listen to one of two songs - either a nondescript control
song or a child's nursery song. Then they are asked to rate how old they feel.
Sure enough, the subjects who listen to the child's song feel older (p = 0.03).
The second study is very similar, with one important exception. Once again,
subjects are randomly assigned to listen to one of two songs - either a
nondescript control song or a song about aging - "When I'm Sixty-Four" by
The Beatles. Then they are asked to put down their actual age, in years. People
who listened to the Beatles song became, on average, a year and a half younger
than the control group (p = 0.04). So either the experimental intervention
changed their subjects' ages, or the researchers were using statistical tricks.
Turns out it was the second one. They explain how they used the four
statistical tricks they explained above, and that without those tricks there
would have been (obviously) no significant difference. They go on to say that
their experiment meets the inclusion criteria for every major journal and that
under current reporting rules there's no way anyone could have detected their
data manipulation. They go on to list the changes they think the scientific
establishment needs to prevent papers like theirs from reaching print. They're
basically "don't do the things we just talked about", but as far as I can tell they
rely on the honor system. I think a broader meta-point is that on important
studies scientists should have to submit their experimental protocol to a
journal and get it accepted or rejected in advance so they can't change tactics
mid-stream or drop data. This would also force journals to publish more
negative results. See also their interesting discussion of why they think "use
Bayesian statistics" is a non-solution to the problem.

II.

Second we have How To Have A High Success Rate In Treatment: Advice For
Evaluators Of Alcoholism Programs.

This study is very close to my heart, because I’m working on my hospital’s

Substance Abuse Team this month. Every day we go see patients struggling
with alcoholism, heroin abuse, et cetera, and we offer them treatment at our
hospital’s intensive inpatient Chemical Dependency Unit. And every day, our
patients say thanks but no thanks, they heard of a program affiliated with their
local church that has a 60% success rate, or an 80% success rate, or in one
especially rosy-eyed case a frickin’ 97% success rate.

(meanwhile, real rehab programs still struggle to prove they have a success
rate greater than placebo)

My attending assumes these programs are scum but didn’t really have a good
evidence base for the claim, so I decided to search Google Scholar to find out
what was going on. I struck gold in this paper, which is framed as a sarcastic
how-to guide for unscrupulous drug treatment program directors who want to
inflate their success rates without technically lying.

By far the best way to do this is to choose your denominator carefully. For
example, it seems fair to only include the people who attended your full
treatment program, not the people who dropped out on Day One or never
showed up at all – you can hardly be blamed for that, right? So suppose that
your treatment program is one month intensive in rehab followed by a series
of weekly meetings continuing indefinitely. At the end of one year, you define
successful treatment completers as “the people who are still going to these
meetings now, at the end of the year”. But in general, people who relapse into
alcoholism are a whole lot less likely to continue attending their AA meetings
than people who stay sober. So all you have to do is go up to people at your AA
meeting, ask them if they’re still on the wagon, and your one-year success rate
looks really good.
Another way to hack your treatment population is to only accept the most
promising candidates to begin with (it works for private schools and it can
work for you). We know that middle-class, employed people with houses and
families have a much better prognosis than lower-class unemployed homeless
single people. Although someone would probably notice if you put up a sign
saying “MIDDLE-CLASS EMPLOYED PEOPLE WITH HOUSES AND
FAMILIES ONLY”, a very practical option is to just charge a lot of money and
let your client population select themselves. This is why for-profit private
rehabs will have a higher success rate than public hospitals and government
programs that deal with poor people.

Still another strategy is to follow the old proverb: “If at first you don’t succeed,
redefine success”. “Abstinence” is such a harsh word. Why not “drinking in
moderation”? This is a wonderful phrase, because you can just let the alcoholic
involved determine the definition of moderation. A year after the program
ends, you can send out little surveys saying “Remember when we told you God
really wants you not to drink? You listened to us and are drinking in
moderation now, right? Please check one: Y () N ()”. Who’s going to answer
‘no’ to that? Heck, some of the alcoholics I talk to say they’re drinking in
moderation while they are in the emergency room for alcohol poisoning.

If you can’t handle “moderation”, how about “drinking less than you were
before the treatment program”? This takes advantage of regression to the
mean – you’re going to enter a rehab program at the worst period of your life,
the time when your drinking finally spirals out of control. Just by coincidence,
most other parts of your life will include less drinking than when you first
came in to rehab, including the date a year after treatment when someone
sends you a survey. Clearly rehab was a success!

And why wait a year? My attending and myself actually looked up what was
going on with that one 97% success rate program our patient said he was going
to. Here’s what they do – it’s a three month residential program where you live
in a building just off the church and you’re not allowed to go out except on
group treatment activities. Obviously there is no alcohol allowed in the
building and you are surrounded by very earnest counselors and fellow
recovering addicts at all times. Then, at the end of the three months, while you
are still in the building, they ask you whether you’re drinking or not. You say
no. Boom – 97% success rate.
One other tactic I have actually seen in studies and it breaks my heart is
interval subdivision, which reminds me of some of the dirty tricks from the
first study above. At five years’ follow-up, you ask people “Did you drink
during Year 1? Did you drink during Year 2? Did you drink during Year 3?…”
and so on. Now you have five chances to find a significant difference between
treatment and control groups. I have literally seen studies that say “Our rehab
didn’t have an immediate effect, but by Year 4 our patients were doing better
than the controls.” Meanwhile, in years 1, 2, 3, and 5, for all we know the
controls were doing better than the patients.

But if all else fails, there’s always the old standby of poor researchers
everywhere – just don’t include a control group at all. This table really speaks
to me:

The great thing about this table isn’t just that it shows that seemingly
impressive results are exactly the same as placebo. The great thing it shows is
that results in the placebo groups in the four studies could be anywhere from a
22.5% success rate to an 87% success rate. These aren’t treatment differences
– all four groups are placebo! This is one hundred percent a difference in
study populations and in success measures used. In other words, depending
on your study protocol, you can prove that there is a 22.5% chance the average
untreated alcoholic will achieve remission, or an 87% chance the average
untreated alcoholic will achieve remission.
You can bet that rehabs use the study protocol that finds an 87% chance of
remission in the untreated. And then they go on to boast of their 90% success
rate. Good job, rehab!

The Control Group Is Out Of Control

I.

Allan Crossman calls parapsychology the control group for science.

That is, in let’s say a drug testing experiment, you give some people the drug
and they recover. That doesn’t tell you much until you give some other people
a placebo drug you know doesn’t work – but which they themselves believe in
– and see how many of themrecover. That number tells you how many people
will recover whether the drug works or not. Unless people on your real drug do
significantly better than people on the placebo drug, you haven’t found
anything.

On the meta-level, you’re studying some phenomenon and you get some
positive findings. That doesn’t tell you much until you take some other
researchers who are studying a phenomenon you know doesn’t exist – but
which they themselves believe in – and see how many of them get positive
findings. That number tells you how many studies will discover positive
results whether the phenomenon is real or not. Unless studies of the real
phenomenon do significantly better than studies of the placebo phenomenon,
you haven’t found anything.

Trying to set up placebo science would be a logistical nightmare. You’d have to

find a phenomenon that definitely doesn’t exist, somehow convince a whole
community of scientists across the world that it does, and fund them to study
it for a couple of decades without them figuring it out.

Luckily we have a natural experiment in terms of parapsychology – the study

of psychic phenomena – which most reasonable people believe don’t exist, but
which a community of practicing scientists believes in and publishes papers on
all the time.
The results are pretty dismal. Parapsychologists are able to produce
experimental evidence for psychic phenomena about as easily as normal
scientists are able to produce such evidence for normal, non-psychic
phenomena. This suggests the existence of a very large “placebo effect” in
science – ie with enough energy focused on a subject, you can always produce
“experimental evidence” for it that meets the usual scientific standards. As
Eliezer Yudkowsky puts it:

Parapsychologists are constantly protesting that they are playing by all

the standard scientific rules, and yet their results are being ignored –
that they are unfairly being held to higher standards than everyone else.
I’m willing to believe that. It just means that the standard statistical
methods of science are so weak and flawed as to permit a field of study
to sustain itself in the complete absence of any subject matter.

These sorts of thoughts have become more common lately in different fields.
Psychologists admit to a crisis of replication as some of their most interesting
findings turn out to be spurious. And in medicine, John Ioannides and others
have been criticizing the research for a decade now and telling everyone they
need to up their standards.

“Up your standards” has been a complicated demand that cashes out in a lot of
technical ways. But there is broad agreement among the most intelligent
voices I read (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) about a couple of promising directions we could go:

1. Demand very large sample size.

2. Demand replication, preferably exact replication, most preferably
multiple exact replications.
3. Trust systematic reviews and meta-analyses rather than individual
studies. Meta-analyses must prove homogeneity of the studies they
analyze.
4. Use Bayesian rather than frequentist analysis, or even combine both
techniques.
5. Stricter p-value criteria. It is far too easy to massage p-values to get less
than 0.05. Also, make meta-analyses look for “p-hacking” by examining
the distribution of p-values in the included studies.
6. Require pre-registration of trials.
 7. Address publication bias by searching for unpublished trials, displaying
funnel plots, and using statistics like “fail-safe N” to investigate the
possibility of suppressed research.
8. Do heterogeneity analyses or at least observe and account for differences
in the studies you analyze.
9. Demand randomized controlled trials. None of this “correlated even
after we adjust for confounders” BS.
10.Stricter effect size criteria. It’s easy to get small effect sizes in anything.

If we follow these ten commandments, then we avoid the problems that

allowed parapsychology and probably a whole host of other problems we don’t
know about to sneak past the scientific gatekeepers.

Well, what now, motherfuckers?

II.

Bem, Tressoldi, Rabeyron, and Duggan (2014), full text available for download
at the top bar of the link above, is parapsychology’s way of saying “thanks but
no thanks” to the idea of a more rigorous scientific paradigm making them
quietly wither away.

You might remember Bem as the prestigious establishment psychologist who

decided to try his hand at parapsychology and to his and everyone else’s
surprise got positive results. Everyone had a lot of criticisms, some of which
were very very good, and the study failed replication several times. Case
closed, right?

Earlier this month Bem came back with a meta-analysis of ninety replications
from tens of thousands of participants in thirty three laboratories in fourteen
countries confirming his original finding, p < 1.2 * -1010, Bayes factor 7.4 * 109,
funnel plot beautifully symmetrical, p-hacking curve nice and right-skewed,
Orwin fail-safe n of 559, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

By my count, Bem follows all of the commandments except [6] and [10]. He
apologizes for not using pre-registration, but says it’s okay because the studies
were exact replications of a previous study that makes it impossible for an
unsavory researcher to change the parameters halfway through and does
pretty much the same thing. And he apologizes for the small effect size but
points out that some effect sizes are legitimately very small, this is no smaller
than a lot of other commonly-accepted results, and that a high enough p-value
ought to make up for a low effect size.

This is far better than the average meta-analysis. Bem has always been pretty
careful and this is no exception. Yet its conclusion is that psychic powers exist.

So – once again – what now, motherfuckers?

III.

In retrospect, that list of ways to fix science above was a little optimistic.

The first nine items (large sample sizes, replications, low p-values, Bayesian
statistics, meta-analysis, pre-registration, publication bias, heterogeneity) all
try to solve the same problem: accidentally mistaking noise in the data for a
signal.

We’ve placed so much emphasis on not mistaking noise for signal that when
someone like Bem hands us a beautiful, perfectly clear signal on a silver
platter, it briefly stuns us. “Wow, of the three hundred different terrible ways
to mistake noise for signal, Bem has proven beyond a shadow of a doubt he
hasn’t done any of them.” And we get so stunned we’re likely to forget that this
is only part of the battle.

Bem definitely picked up a signal. The only question is whether it’s a signal of
psi, or a signal of poor experimental technique.

None of these commandments even touch poor experimental technique – or

confounding, or whatever you want to call it. If an experiment is confounded,
if it produces a strong signal even when its experimental hypothesis is true,
then using a larger sample size will just make that signal even stronger.

Replicating it will just reproduce the confounded results again.

Low p-values will be easy to get if you perform the confounded experiment on
a large enough scale.
Meta-analyses of confounded studies will obey the immortal law of “garbage
in, garbage out”.

Pre-registration only assures that your study will not get any worse than it was
the first time you thought of it, which may be very bad indeed.

Searching for publication bias only means you will get all of the confounded
studies, instead of just some of them.

Heterogeneity just tells you whether all of the studies were confounded about
the same amount.

Bayesian statistics, alone among these first eight, ought to be able to help with
this problem. After all, a good Bayesian should be able to say “Well, I got some
impressive results, but my prior for psi is very low, so this raises my belief in
psi slightly, but raises my belief that the experiments were confounded a lot.”

Unfortunately, good Bayesians are hard to come by, and the researchers here
seem to be making some serious mistakes. Here’s Bem:

An opportunity to calculate an approximate answer to this question

emerges from a Bayesian critique of Bem’s (2011) experiments by
Wagenmakers, Wetzels, Borsboom, & van der Maas (2011). Although
Wagenmakers et al. did not explicitly claim psi to be impossible, they
came very close by setting their prior odds at 10^20 against the psi
hypothesis. The Bayes Factor for our full database is approximately
10^9 in favor of the psi hypothesis (Table 1), which implies that our
meta-analysis should lower their posterior odds against the psi
hypothesis to 10^11

Let me shame both participants in this debate.

Bem, you are abusing Bayes factor. If Wagenmakers uses your 10^9 Bayes
factor to adjust from his prior of 10^-20 to 10^-11, then what happens the next
time you come up with another database of studies supporting your
hypothesis? We all know you will, because you’ve amply proven these results
weren’t due to chance, so whatever factor produced these results – whether
real psi or poor experimental technique – will no doubt keep producing them
for the next hundred replication attempts. When those come in, does
Wagenmakers have to adjust his probability from 10^-11 to 10^-2? When you
get another hundred studies, does he have to go from 10^-2 to 10^7? If so,
then by conservation of expected evidence he should just update to 10^+7
right now – or really to infinity, since you can keep coming up with more
studies till the cows come home. But in fact he shouldn’t do that, because at
some point his thought process becomes “Okay, I already know that studies of
this quality can consistently produce positive findings, so either psi is real or
studies of this quality aren’t good enough to disprove it”. This point should
probably happen well before he increases his probability by a factor of 10^9.
See Confidence Levels Inside And Outside An Argument for this argument
made in greater detail.

Wagenmakers, you are overconfident. Suppose God came down from Heaven
and said in a booming voice “EVERY SINGLE STUDY IN THIS META-
ANALYSIS WAS CONDUCTED PERFECTLY WITHOUT FLAWS OR BIAS, AS
WAS THE META-ANALYSIS ITSELF.” You would see a p-value of less than
1.2 * 10^-10 and think “I bet that was just coincidence”? And then they could
do another study of the same size, also God-certified, returning exactly the
same results, and you would say “I bet that was just coincidence too”? YOU
ARE NOT THAT CERTAIN OF ANYTHING. Seriously, read the @#!$ing
Sequences.

Bayesian statistics, at least the way they are done here, aren’t gong to be of
much use to anybody.

That leaves randomized controlled trials and effect sizes.

Randomized controlled trials are great. They eliminate most possible

confounders in one fell swoop, and are excellent at keeping experimenters
honest. Unfortunately, most of the studies in the Bem meta-analysis were
already randomized controlled trials.

High effect sizes are really the only thing the Bem study lacks. And it is very
hard to experimental technique so bad that it consistently produces a result
with a high effect size.

But as Bem points out, demanding high effect size limits our ability to detect
real but low-effect phenomena. Just to give an example, many physics
experiments – like the ones that detected the Higgs boson or neutrinos – rely
on detecting extremely small perturbations in the natural order, over millions
of different trials. Less esoterically, Bem mentions the example of aspirin
decreasing heart attack risk, which it definitely does and which is very
important, but which has an effect size lower than that of his psi results. If
humans have some kind of very weak psionic faculty that under regular
conditions operates poorly and inconsistently, but does indeed exist, then
excluding it by definition from the realm of things science can discover would
be a bad idea.

All of these techniques are about reducing the chance of confusing noise for
signal. But when we think of them as the be-all and end-all of scientific
legitimacy, we end up in awkward situations where they come out super-
confident in a study’s accuracy simply because the issue was one they weren’t
geared up to detect. Because a lot of the time the problem is something more
than just noise.

IV.

Wiseman & Schlitz’s Experimenter Effects And The Remote Detection Of

Staring is my favorite parapsychology paper ever and sends me into fits of
nervous laughter every time I read it.

The backstory: there is a classic parapsychological experiment where a subject

is placed in a room alone, hooked up to a video link. At random times, an
experimenter stares at them menacingly through the video link. The
hypothesis is that this causes their galvanic skin response (a physiological
measure of subconscious anxiety) to increase, even though there is no non-
psychic way the subject could know whether the experimenter was staring or
not.

Schiltz is a psi believer whose staring experiments had consistently supported

the presence of a psychic phenomenon. Wiseman, in accordance with
nominative determinism is a psi skeptic whose staring experiments keep
showing nothing and disproving psi. Since they were apparently the only two
people in all of parapsychology with a smidgen of curiosity or rationalist
virtue, they decided to team up and figure out why they kept getting such
different results.
The idea was to plan an experiment together, with both of them agreeing on
every single tiny detail. They would then go to a laboratory and set it up, again
both keeping close eyes on one another. Finally, they would conduct the
experiment in a series of different batches. Half the batches (randomly
assigned) would be conducted by Dr. Schlitz, the other half by Dr. Wiseman.
Because the two authors had very carefully standardized the setting, apparatus
and procedure beforehand, “conducted by” pretty much just meant greeting
the participants, giving the experimental instructions, and doing the staring.

The results? Schlitz’s trials found strong evidence of psychic powers,

Wiseman’s trials found no evidence whatsoever.

Take a second to reflect on how this makes no sense. Two experimenters in the
same laboratory, using the same apparatus, having no contact with the
subjects except to introduce themselves and flip a few switches – and whether
one or the other was there that day completely altered the result. For a good
time, watch the gymnastics they have to do to in the paper to make this sound
sufficiently sensical to even get published. This is the only journal article I’ve
ever read where, in the part of the Discussion section where you’re supposed
to propose possible reasons for your findings, both authors suggest maybe
their co-author hacked into the computer and altered the results.

While it’s nice to see people exploring Bem’s findings further, this is the
experiment people should be replicating ninety times. I expect something
would turn up.

As it is, Kennedy and Taddonio list ten similar studies with similar results.
One cannot help wondering about publication bias (if the skeptic and the
believer got similar results, who cares?). But the phenomenon is sufficiently
well known in parapsychology that it has led to its own host of theories about
how skeptics emit negative auras, or the enthusiasm of a proponent is a
necessary kindling for psychic powers.

Other fields don’t have this excuse. In psychotherapy, for example, practically
the only consistent finding is that whatever kind of psychotherapy the person
running the study likes is most effective. Thirty different meta-analyses on the
subject have confirmed this with strong effect size (d = 0.54) and good
significance (p = .001).
Then there’s Munder (2013), which is a meta-meta-analysis on whether meta-
analyses of confounding by researcher allegiance effect were themselves meta-
confounded by meta-researcher allegiance effect. He found that indeed, meta-
researchers who believed in researcher allegiance effect were more likely to
turn up positive results in their studies of researcher allegiance effect (p < .
002). It gets worse. There's a famous story about an experiment where a
scientist told teachers that his advanced psychometric methods had predicted
a couple of kids in their class were about to become geniuses (the students
were actually chosen at random). He followed the students for the year and
found that their intelligence actually increased. This was supposed to be a
Cautionary Tale About How Teachers’ Preconceptions Can Affect Children.

Less famous is that the same guy did the same thing with rats. He sent one
laboratory a box of rats saying they were specially bred to be ultra-intelligent,
and another lab a box of (identical) rats saying they were specially bred to be
slow and dumb. Then he had them do standard rat learning tasks, and sure
enough the first lab found very impressive results, the second lab very
disappointing ones.

This scientist – let’s give his name, Robert Rosenthal – then investigated three
hundred forty five different studies for evidence of the same phenomenon. He
found effect sizes of anywhere from 0.15 to 1.7, depending on the type of
experiment involved. Note that this could also be phrased as “between twice as
strong and twenty times as strong as Bem’s psi effect”. Mysteriously, animal
learning experiments displayed the highest effect size, supporting the folk
belief that animals are hypersensitive to subtle emotional cues.

Okay, fine. Subtle emotional cues. That’s way more scientific than saying
“negative auras”. But the question remains – what went wrong for Schlitz and
Wiseman? Even if Schlitz had done everything short of saying “The hypothesis
of this experiment is for your skin response to increase when you are being
stared at, please increase your skin response at that time,” and subjects had
tried to comply, the whole point was that they didn’t knowwhen they were
being stared at, because to find that out you’d have to be psychic. And how are
these rats figuring out what the experimenters’ subtle emotional cues mean
anyway? I can’t figure out people’s subtle emotional cues half the time!
I know that standard practice here is to tell the story of Clever Hans and then
say That Is Why We Do Double-Blind Studies. But first of all, I’m pretty sure
no one does double-blind studies with rats. Second of all, I think most social
psych studies aren’t double blind – I just checked the first one I thought of,
Aronson and Steele on stereotype threat, and it certainly wasn’t. Third of all,
this effect seems to be just as common in cases where it’s hard to imagine how
the researchers’ subtle emotional cues could make a difference. Like Schlitz
and Wiseman. Or like the psychotherapy experiments, where most of the
subjects were doing therapy with individual psychologists and never even saw
whatever prestigious professor was running the study behind the scenes.

I think it’s a combination of subconscious emotional cues, subconscious

statistical trickery, perfectly conscious fraud which for all we know happens
much more often than detected, and things we haven’t discovered yet which
are at least as weird as subconscious emotional cues. But rather than
speculate, I prefer to take it as a brute fact. Studies are going to be confounded
by the allegiance of the researcher. When researchers who don’t believe
something discover it, that’s when it’s worth looking into.

V.

So what exactly happened to Bem?

Although Bem looked hard to find unpublished material, I don’t know if he

succeeded. Unpublished material, in this context, has to mean “material
published enough for Bem to find it”, which in this case was mostly things
presented at conferences. What about results so boring that they were never
even mentioned?

And I predict people who believe in parapsychology are more likely to conduct
parapsychology experiments than skeptics. Suppose this is true. And further
suppose that for some reason, experimenter effect is real and powerful. That
means most of the experiments conducted will support Bem’s result. But this
is still a weird form of “publication bias” insofar as it ignores the contrary
results of hypotheticaly experiments that were never conducted.
And worst of all, maybe Bem really did do an excellent job of finding every
little two-bit experiment that no journal would take. How much can we trust
these non-peer-reviewed procedures?

I looked through his list of ninety studies for all the ones that were both exact
replications and had been peer-reviewed (with one caveat to be mentioned
later). I found only seven:

● Batthyany, Kranz, and Erber: .268

● Ritchie 1: 0.015
● Ritchie 2: -0.219
● Richie 3: -0.040
● Subbotsky 1: 0.279
● Subbotsky 2: 0.292
● Subbotsky 3: -.399

Three find large positive effects, two find approximate zero effects, and two
find large negative effects. Without doing any calculatin’, this seems pretty
darned close to chance for me.

Okay, back to that caveat about replications. One of Bem’s strongest points
was how many of the studies included were exact replications of his work. This
is important because if you do your own novel experiment, it leaves a lot of
wiggle room to keep changing the parameters and statistics a bunch of times
until you get the effect you want. This is why lots of people want experiments
to be preregistered with specific commitments about what you’re going to test
and how you’re going to do it. These experiments weren’t preregistered, but
conforming to a previously done experiment is a pretty good alternative.

Except that I think the criteria for “replication” here were exceptionally loose.
For example, Savva et al was listed as an “exact replication” of Bem, but it was
performed in 2004 – seven years before Bem’s original study took place. I
know Bem believes in precognition, but that’s going too far. As far as I can tell
“exact replication” here means “kinda similar psionic-y thing”. Also, Bem
classily lists his own experiments as exact replications of themselves, which
gives a big boost to the “exact replications return the same results as Bem’s
original studies” line. I would want to see much stricter criteria for replication
before I relax the “preregister your trials” requirement.
(Richard Wiseman – the same guy who provided the negative aura for the
Wiseman and Schiltz experiment – has started a pre-register site for Bem
replications. He says he has received five of them. This is very promising.
There is also a separate pre-register for parapsychology trials in general. I am
both extremely pleased at this victory for good science, and ashamed that my
own field is apparently behind parapsychology in the “scientific rigor”
department)

That is my best guess at what happened here – a bunch of poor-quality, peer-

unreviewed studies that weren’t as exact replications as we would like to
believe, all subject to mysterious experimenter effects.

This is not a criticism of Bem or a criticism of parapsychology. It’s something

that is inherent to the practice of meta-analysis, and even more, inherent to
the practice of science. Other than a few very exceptional large medical trials,
there is not a study in the world that would survive the level of criticism I am
throwing at Bem right now.

I think Bem is wrong. The level of criticism it would take to prove a wrong
study wrong is higher than that almost any existing study can withstand. That
is not encouraging for existing studies.

VI.

The motto of the Royal Society – Hooke, Boyle, Newton, some of the people
who arguably invented modern science – was nullus in verba, “take no one’s
word”.

This was a proper battle cry for seventeenth century scientists. Think about
the (admittedly kind of mythologized) history of Science. The scholastics
saying that matter was this, or that, and justifying themselves by long treatises
about how based on A, B, C, the word of the Bible, Aristotle, self-evident first
principles, and the Great Chain of Being all clearly proved their point. Then
other scholastics would write different long treatises on how D, E, and F,
Plato, St. Augustine, and the proper ordering of angels all indicated that
clearly matter was something different. Both groups were pretty sure that the
other had make a subtle error of reasoning somewhere, and both groups were
perfectly happy to spend centuries debating exactly which one of them it was.
And then Galileo said “Wait a second, instead of debating exactly how objects
fall, let’s just drop objects off of something really tall and see what happens”,
and after that, Science.

Yes, it’s kind of mythologized. But like all myths, it contains a core of truth.
People are terrible. If you let people debate things, they will do it forever, come
up with horrible ideas, get them entrenched, play politics with them, and
finally reach the point where they’re coming up with theories why people who
disagree with them are probably secretly in the pay of the Devil.

Imagine having to conduct the global warming debate, except that you
couldn’t appeal to scientific consensus and statistics because scientific
consensus and statistics hadn’t been invented yet. In a world without science,
everything would be like that.

Heck, just look at philosophy.

This is the principle behind the Pyramid of Scientific Evidence. The lowest
level is your personal opinions, no matter how ironclad you think the logic
behind them is. Just above that is expert opinion, because no matter how
expert someone is they’re still only human. Above that is anecdotal evidence
and case studies, because even though you’re finally getting out of people’s
heads, it’s still possible for the content of people’s heads to influence which
cases they pay attention to. At each level, we distill away more and more of the
human element, until presumably at the top the dross of humanity has been
purged away entirely and we end up with pure unadulterated reality.
 The Pyramid of Scientific Evidence

And for a while this went well. People would drop things off towers, or see
how quickly gases expanded, or observe chimpanzees, or whatever.

Then things started getting more complicated. People started investigating

more subtle effects, or effects that shifted with the observer. The scientific
community became bigger, everyone didn’t know everyone anymore, you
needed more journals to find out what other people had done. Statistics
became more complicated, allowing the study of noisier data but also bringing
more peril. And a lot of science done by smart and honest people ended up
being wrong, and we needed to figure out exactly which science that was.

And the result is a lot of essays like this one, where people who think they’re
smart take one side of a scientific “controversy” and say which studies you
should believe. And then other people take the other side and tell you why you
should believe different studies than the first person thought you should
believe. And there is much argument and many insults and citing of
authorities and interminable debate for, if not centuries, at least a pretty long
time.

The highest level of the Pyramid of Scientific Evidence is meta-analysis. But a

lot of meta-analyses are crap. This meta-analysis got p < 1.2 * 10^-10 for a
conclusion I'm pretty sure is false, and it isn’t even one of the crap ones. Crap
meta-analyses look more like this, or even worse.

How do I know it’s crap? Well, I use my personal judgment. How do I know
my personal judgment is right? Well, a smart well-credentialed person like
James Coyne agrees with me. How do I know James Coyne is smart? I can
think of lots of cases where he’s been right before. How do I know those
count? Well, John Ioannides has published a lot of studies analyzing the
problems with science, and confirmed that cases like the ones Coyne talks
about are pretty common. Why can I believe Ioannides’ studies? Well, there
have been good meta-analyses of them. But how do I know if those meta-
analyses are crap or not? Well…
 The Ouroboros of Scientific Evidence

Science! YOU WERE THE CHOSEN ONE! It was said that you would destroy
reliance on biased experts, not join them! Bring balance to epistemology, not
leave it in darkness!

I LOVED YOU!!!!
The Cowpox of Doubt
I remember hearing someone I know try to explain rationality to his friends.

He started with “It’s important to have correct beliefs. You might think this is
obvious, but think about creationists and homeopaths and people who think
the moon landing was a hoax.” And then further on in this vein.

And I thought: “NO NO NO NO NO NO NO!”

I will make a confession. Every time someone talks about the stupidity of
creationists, moon-hoaxers, and homeopaths, I cringe.

It’s not that moon-hoaxers, homeopaths et al aren’t dumb. They are. It’s not
even that these people don’t do real harm. They do.

(although probably less than people think; people rarely stop conventional
treatment in favor of homeopathy, and both a popular website and a review
article have a really hard time finding more than a handful of people genuinely
harmed by it. Moon hoaxes seem even less dangerous, unless of course you are
standing near Buzz Aldrin when you talk about them.)

What annoys me about the people who harp on moon-hoaxing and

homeopathy – without any interest in the rest of medicine or space history – is
that it seems like an attempt to Other irrationality.

(yes, I did just use “other” as a verb. Maybe I’ve been hanging around
Continental types too much lately.)

It’s saying “Look, over here! It’s irrational people, believing things that we can
instantly dismiss as dumb. Things we feel no temptation, not one bit, to
believe. It must be that they are defective and we are rational.”

But to me, the rationality movement is about Self-ing irrationality.

(yes, I did just use “self” as a verb. I don’t even have the excuse of it being part
of a philosophical tradition)
It is about realizing that you, yes you, might be wrong about the things that
you’re most certain of, and nothing can save you except maybe extreme
epistemic paranoia.

Talking about moon-hoaxers and homeopaths too much, at least the way we
do it, is counterproductive to this goal. Throw examples of obviously stupid
false beliefs at someone, and they start thinking all false beliefs are obvious.
Give too many examples of false beliefs that aren’t tempting to them, and they
start believing they’re immune to temptation.

And it raises sloppiness to a virtue.

Take homeopathy. I can’t even count the number of times I’ve heard people
say: “Homeopaths don’t realize beliefs require evidence. No study anywhere
has ever found homeopathy to be effective!”

But of course dozens of studies have found homeopathy to be effective.

“Well, sure, but they weren’t double-blind! What you don’t realize is that there
can be placebo effects from…”

But of course many of these studies have been large double-blinded

randomized controlled trials, or even meta-analyses of such.

“Okay, but not published in reputable journals.”

Is The Lancet reputable enough for you?

“But homeopaths don’t even realize that many of their concoctions don’t
contain even a single molecule of active substance!”

But of course almost all homeopaths realize this and their proposed
mechanism for homeopathic effects not only survives this criticism but relies
upon it.

“But all doctors and biologists agree that homeopathy doesn’t work!”

Have you ever spent the five seconds it would take to look up a survey of what
percent of doctors and biologists believe homeopathy doesn’t work? Or are
you just assuming that’s true because someone on your side told you so and it
seems right?

I am of course being mean here. Being open-minded to homeopaths – reading

all the research carefully, seeking out their own writings so you don’t
accidentally straw-man them, double-checking all of your seemingly “obvious”
assumptions – would be a waste of your time.

And someone who demands that you be open-minded about homeopathy

would not be your friend. They would probably be a shill for homeopathy and
best ignored.

But this is exactly the problem!

The more we concentrate on homeopathy, and moon hoaxes, and creationism

– the more people who have never felt any temptation towards these beliefs go
through the motions of “debunk”-ing them a hundred times to one another for
fun – the more we are driving home the message that these are a
representative sample of the kinds of problems we face.

And the more we do that, the more we are training people to make the correct
approach to homeopathy – ignoring poor research and straw men on your
own side while being very suspicious of anyone who tells us to be careful –
their standard approach to any controversy.

And then we get people believing all sorts of shoddy research – because after
all, the world is divided between things like homeopathy that Have Never
Been Supported By Any Evidence Ever, and things like conventional medicine
that Have Studies In Real Journals And Are Pushed By Real Scientists.

Or losing all subtlety and moderation in their political beliefs, never

questioning their own side’s claims, because the world is divided between
People Like Me Who Know The Right Answer, and Shills For The Other Side
Who Tell Me To Be Open-Minded As Part Of A Trap.

This post was partly inspired by Gruntled and Hinged’s You Probably Don’t
Want Peer-Reviewed Evidence For God (actually, I started writing it before
that was published – but since Bem has published evidence showing psi exists,
I must have just been precognitively inspired by it). But there’s another G&H
post that retrocausally got me thinking even more.

Inoculation is when you use a weak pathogen like cowpox to build immunity
against a stronger pathogen like smallpox. The inoculation effect in
psychology is when a person, upon being presented with several weak
arguments against a proposition, becomes immune to stronger arguments
against the same position.

Tell a religious person that Christianity is false because Jesus is just a blatant
ripoff of the warrior-god Mithras and they’ll open up a Near Eastern history
book, notice that’s not true at all, and then be that much more skeptical of the
next argument against their faith. “Oh, atheists. Those are those people who
think stupid things like Jesus = Mithras. I already figured out they’re not
worth taking seriously.” Except on a deeper level that precedes and is immune
to conscious thought.

So we take the intelligent Internet-reading public, and we throw a bunch of

incredibly dumb theories at them – moon-hoaxism, homeopathy, creationism,
anti-vaxxing, lizard people, that one guy who thought the rapture would come
a couple years ago, whatever. And they are easily debunked, and the stuff you
and all your friends believed was obviously true is, in fact, obviously true, and
any time you spent investigating whether you were wrong is time you wasted.

And I worry that we are vaccinating people against reading the research for
themselves instead of trusting smarmy bloggers who talk about how stupid the
other side is.

That we are vaccinating people against thinking there might be important

truths on both sides of an issue.

That we are vaccinating people against understanding how “scientific

evidence” is a really complicated concept, and that many things that are in
peer-reviewed journals will later turn out to be wrong.

That we are vaccinating people against the idea that many theories they find
absurd or repugnant at first will later turn out to be true, because nature
doesn’t respect our feelings.
That we are vaccinating people against doubt.

And maybe this is partly good. It’s probably a good idea to trust your doctor
and also a good idea to trust your climatologist, and rare is the field where I
would feel comfortable challenging expert consensus completely.

But there’s also this problem of hundreds of different religions and political
ideologies, and most people are born into ones that are at least somewhat
wrong. That makes this capacity for real doubt – doubting something even
though all your family and friends is telling you it’s obviously true and you
must be an idiot to question it at all – a tremendously important skill. It’s
especially important for the couple of rare individuals who will be in a position
to cause a paradigm shift in a science by doubting one of its fundamental
assumptions.

I don’t think that reading about lizard people or creationism will affect
people’s ability to distinguish between, let’s say, cyclic universe theory versus
multiverse theory, or other equally dispassionate debates.

But if ever you ever need to have a true crisis of faith, then any time you spend
thinking about homeopathy and moon hoaxes beyond the negligible effect
they have on your life will be time spent learning exactly the wrong mental
habits.

How Common Are Science Failures?

After a brief spurt of debate over the claim that “97% of relevant published
papers support anthropogenic climate change”, I think the picture has mostly
settled to an agreement that – although we can contest the methodology of
that particular study – there are multiple lines of evidence that the number is
somewhere in the nineties.

So if any doubt at all is to remain about climate change, it has to come from
the worry that sometimes entire scientific fields can get things near-
unanimously wrong, especially for political or conformity-related reasons.
In fact, I’d go so far as to say that if we are not climatologists ourselves, our
prior on climate change should be based upon how frequently entire scientific
fields get things terribly wrong for political or conformity-related reasons.

Skeptics mock the claim that science was wrong before, but skeptics mock
everything. A better plan might be to try to quantify the frequency of scientific
failures so we can see how good (or bad) the chances are for any given field.

Before we investigate, we should define our reference class properly. I think a

scientific mistake only counts as a reason for doubting climate change (or any
other commonly-accepted scientific paradigm) if:

1. It was made sometime in the recent past. Aristotle was wrong about all sorts
of things, and so were those doctors who thought everything had to do with
black bile, but the scientific community back then was a lot less rigorous than
our own. Let’s say it counts if it’s after 1900.

2. It was part of a really important theory, one of the fundamental paradigms

of an entire field. I’m sure some tiny group of biologists have been wrong
about how many chromosomes a shrew has, but that’s probably an easier
mistake to wander into than all of climatology screwing up simultaneously.

3. It was a stubborn resistance to the truth, rather than just a failure to have
come up with the correct theory immediately. People were geocentrists before
they were heliocentrists, but this wasn’t because the field of astronomy
became overly politicized and self-assured, it was because (aside from one
ancient Greek guy nobody really read) heliocentrism wasn’t invented until the
1500s, and after that it took people a couple of generations to catch on. In the
same way, Newton’s theory of gravity wasn’t quite as good as Einstein’s, but
this would not shame physicists in the same way climate change being wrong
would shame climatologists. Let’s say that in order to count, the correct theory
has to be very well known (the correct theory is allowed to be “this
phenomenon doesn’t exist at all and you are wasting your time”) and there is a
large group of people mostly outside the mainstream scientific establishment
pushing it (for approximately correct reasons) whom scientists just refuse to
listen to.
4. We now know that the past scientific establishment was definitely,
definitely wrong and everyone agrees about this and it is not seriously in
doubt. This criterion isn’t to be fair to the climatologists, this is to be fair to me
when I have to read the comments to this post and get a bunch of
“Nutritionists have yet to sign on to my pet theory of diet, that provessome
scientific fields are hopelessly corrupt!”

Do any such scientific failures exist?

If we want to play this game on Easy Mode, our first target will be Lysenkoism,
the completely bonkers theory of agriculture and genetics adopted by the
Soviet Union. A low-level agricultural biologist, Lysenko, came up with
questionable ways of increasing agricultural output through something kind of
like Lamarckian evolution. The Soviet government wanted to inspire people in
the middle of a famine, didn’t really like real scientists because they seemed
kind of bourgeois, and wanted to discredit genetics because heritability
seemed contrary to the idea of New Soviet Man. So they promoted Lysenko
enough times that everyone got the message that Lysenkoism was the road to
getting good positions. All the careerists switched over to the new paradigm,
and the holdouts who continued to believe in genetics were denounced as
fascists. According to Wikipedia, “in 1948, genetics was officially declared “a
bourgeois pseudoscience”; all geneticists were fired from their jobs (some
were also arrested), and all genetic research was discontinued.”

About twenty years later the Soviets quietly came to their senses and covered
up the whole thing.

I would argue that Stalinist Russia, where the government was very clearly
intervening in science and killing the people it didn’t like, isn’t a fair test case
for a theory today. But climate change opponents would probably respond that
the liberal world order is unfairly promoting scientists who support climate
change and persecuting those who oppose it. And Lysenkoism at least proves
that is the sort of thing which can in theory sometimes happen. So let’s
grumble a little but give it to them.

Now we turn the dial up to Hard Mode. Are there any cases of failure on a
similar level within a scientific community in a country not actively being
ruled by Stalin?
I can think of two: Freudian psychoanalysis and behaviorist psychology.

Freudian psychoanalysis needs no introduction. It dominated psychiatry – not

at all a small field – from about 1930 to 1980. As far as anyone can tell, the
entire gigantic edifice has no redeeming qualities. I mean, it correctly
describes the existence of a subconscious, and it may have some insightful
things to say on childhood trauma, but as far as a decent model of the brain or
of psychological treatment goes, it was a giant mistake.

I got a little better idea just how big a mistake doing some research for the
Anti-Reactionary FAQ. I wanted to see how homosexuals were viewed back in
the 1950s and ran across two New York Times articles about them (1, 2). It’s
really creepy to see them explaining how instead of holding on to folk beliefs
about how homosexuals are normal people just like you or me, people need to
start listening to the psychoanalytic experts, who know the real story behind
why some people are homosexual. The interviews with the experts in the
article are a little surreal.

Psychoanalysis wasn’t an honest mistake. The field already had a perfectly

good alternative – denouncing the whole thing as bunk – and sensible non-
psychoanalysts seemed to do exactly that. On the other hand, the more you got
“educated” about psychiatry in psychoanalytic institutions, and the more you
wanted to become a psychiatrist yourself, the more you got biased into think
psychoanalysis was obviously correct and dismissing the doubters as science
denalists or whatever it was they said back then.

So this seems like a genuine example of a scientific field failing.

Behaviorism in psychology was…well, this part will be controversial. A weak

version is “psychologists should not study thoughts or emotions because these
are unknowable by scientific methods; instead they should limit themselves to
behaviors”. A strong version is “thoughts and emotions don’t exist; they are
post hoc explanations invented by people to rationalize their behaviors”.
People are going to tell me that real psychologists only believed the weak
version, but having read more than a little 1950s psychology, I’m going to tell
them they’re wrong. I think a lot of people believed the strong version and that
in fact it was the dominant paradigm in the field.
And of course common people said this was stupid, of course we have
thoughts and emotions, and the experts just said that kind of drivel was
exactly what common people would think. Then came the cognitive revolution
and people realized thoughts and emotions were actually kind of easy to study.
And then we got MRI machines and are now a good chunk of the way to seeing
them.

So this too I will count as a scientific failure.

But – and this seems important – I can’t think of any others.

Suppose there are about fifty scientific fields approximately as important as

genetics or psychiatry or psychology. And suppose within the past century,
each of them had room for about five paradigms as important as
psychoanalysis or behaviorism or Lysenkoism.

That would mean there are about 250 possibilities for science failure, of which
three were actually science failures – for a failure rate of 1.2%.

This doesn’t seem much more encouraging for the anti-global-warming cause
than the 3% of papers that support them.

I think I’m being pretty fair here – after all, Lysenkoism was limited to one
extremely-screwed-up country, and people are going to yell that behaviorism
wasn’t as bad as I made it sound. And two of the three failures are in
psychology, a social science much fuzzier than climatology where we can
expect far more errors. A cynic might say if we include psychology we might as
well go all the way and include economics, sociology, and anthropology,
raising our error count to over nine thousand.

But if we want to be even fairer, we can admit that there are probably some
science failures that haven’t been detected yet. I can think of three that I very
strongly suspect are in that category, although I won’t tell you what they are so
as to not distract from the meta-level debate. That brings us to 2.4%. Admit
that maybe I’ve only caught half of the impending science failures out there,
and we get to 3.6%. Still not much of an improvement for the anti-AGW crowd
over having 3% of the literature.
Learning To Love Scientific Consensus

I.

There’s a list of scientific mavericks who were ridiculed by hidebound

reactionaries but later vindicated that’s been going viral. I examined the first
ten mavericks on the list to see if its claims held up. Overall I wasn’t too
impressed. Let me go over them in more detail.

SVANTE ARRHENIUS:

His idea that electrolytes are full of charged atoms was considered crazy.
The atomic theory was new at the time, and everyone “knew” that atoms
were indivisible (and hence they could not lose or gain any electric
charge.) Because of his heretical idea, he only received his university
degree by a very narrow margin.

Sure, the professors who were judging his PhD thesis weren’t too convinced.
So Arrhenius sent his proposal to the world’s top chemists at the time, and
they were super-interested and started fighting among themselves to work
with Arrhenius on it. Top chemist Wilhelm Ostwald received the paper the
same day his daughter was born, and suggested that the paper was the more
exciting of the two events. He journeyed to Arrhenius’ hometown of Uppsala,
Sweden to try to convince Arrhenius to work with him; Arrhenius refused for
personal reasons but later got a scholarship and worked with the top
physicists in Europe. Arrhenius became a professor in a prestigious university
about ten years after presenting his “ridiculed” paper, and won the Nobel Prize
ten years after that.

HANS ALFVEN:

Astronomers thought that gravity alone is important in solar systems, in

galaxies, etc. Alfven’s idea that plasma physics is of equal or greater
importance to gravity was derided for decades.

This isn’t a great description of Alfven’s conflict with the establishment, but
the list seems basically right insofar as Alfven’s ideas were ignored for thirty
years before being proven mostly correct. I will give them this one.
JOHN BAIRD:

When the first television system was demonstrated to the Royal Society
(British scientists,) they scoffed and ridiculed, calling Baird a swindler.

I can’t find any reference to this in various Baird articles and biographies. The
closest I can come is this article by someone who was there at the
demonstration, who said “They didn’t believe it…the pictures were a bit of a
blur but it was amazing, they were all absolutely flabbergasted by it.” It looks
like he is using “they didn’t believe it” in the colloquial way of “they thought it
was amazing”. A TIME magazine article from the time described the same
scientists as “deeply impressed”, though the wording is kind of unclear and
they might have been referring to a different demonstration a year later.

In any case, it seems very clear that within a year everyone agreed he was
legitimate and overcame their initial shock.

ROBERT BAKKER:

Everyone knows that dinosaurs are like Gila monsters or big tortoises:
large, slow, and intolerant of the cold. And they’re all colored olive drab
too! 🙂

Bakker did help produce the paradigm shift in paleontology from cold-blooded
dinosaurs to warm-blooded dinosaurs. But he was not a lone maverick being
ridiculed by everyone else. He learned that dinosaurs were warm-blooded
from his professor at Yale, who was also part of the minority-but-totally-
existing faction that believed dinosaurs were warm-blooded. He himself got a
PhD at Harvard from professors who were apparently sympathetic to the same
theory. And within seven years of his first paper being published, Scientific
American was calling his ideas “the dinosaur renaissance”, which doesn’t leave
a lot of time for him to be ridiculed and ignored in.

BARDEEN & BRATTAIN:

Not ridiculed, but their boss W. Shockley nixed their idea for a non-FET
“crystal triode” device. When they started investigating it, he made them
stop. They were supposed to be working on FETs instead.
 ARG, I GOT THIS WRONG, THIS PART BELOW IS A BELL LABS
STORY REGARDING ZONE REFINING OF SILICON, NOT THE BJT
TRANSISTOR PROJECT: So, they assembled their ZONE REFINING
experiment on a wheeled cart and continued. Whenever the boss was
scheduled to check up on them, they could shove it into an adjacent
unused lab.

Okay, it looks like the guy compiling the list admits he was wrong on this one.
Moving on…

BRETZ:

Endured decades of scorn as the laughingstock of the geology world. His

crime was to insist that enormous amounts of evidence showed that, in
Eastern Washington state, the “scabland” desert landscape had endured
an ancient catastrophy: a flood of staggering proportions. This was
outright heresy, since the geology community of the time had dogmatic
belief in a “uniformitarian” position, where all changes must take place
slowly and incrementally over vast time scales. Bretz’ ideas were entirely
vindicated by the 1950s. Quote: “All my enemies are dead, so I have no
one to gloat over.”

This one is basically right and I’ll give it to them.

CHANDRASEKHAR:

Chandra originated Black Hole theory and published several papers. He

was attacked viciously by his close colleague Sir Arthur Eddington, and
his theory was discredited in the eyes of the research community. They
were wrong, and Eddington apparently took such strong action based on
an incorrect pet theory of his own. In the end Chandra could not even
pursue a career in England, and he moved his research to the U. of
Chicago in 1937, laboring in relative obscurity for decades.

Sort of true, but he was hardly shunned by the scientific community. He made
his discoveries about black holes in the early 1930s, was well-received by many
people, and won a Bronze Medal in some physics competition. In 1935,
Eddington attacked his theory, possibly because Eddington was racist and
didn’t like Indian people. But many other scientists, including Niels Bohr and
Wolfgang Pauli, continued to support him (quietly, so as not to offend
Eddington, which will be a recurring theme in these kinds of situations).
Chandrasekhar was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1944, won the Royal
Astronomical Society Gold Medal in 1953, and generally led a long and
prestigious life. His theories were resurrected once people had better evidence
that black holes existed. I’ll give this one half a point.

CHLADNI:

The scientific community regarded Meteorites in the same way that

modern scientists regard UFO abductions and psychic phenomenon:
quaint superstitions only believed by peasant folk. All the eyewitness
reports were disbelieved. At one point the ridicule became so intense
that many museums with meteorites in their geology collections decided
to trash those valuable samples. (Sometimes hostile skepticism controls
reality, and the strongest evidence is edited to conform to concensus
disbeliefs.) Finally in the early 1800’s Ernst Chladni actually sat down
and inspected the evidence professionally, and found that claimed
meteorites were entirely unlike known earth rocks. His study changed
some minds. At the same time some large meteor falls were witnessed
by scientists, and the majority who insisted that only ignorant peasants
ever saw such things were shamed into silence.

As the quote points out, this is a kind of weird one as meteorite work was
ridiculed for a long time, but Chladni was taken seriously and helped change
minds. Looking at Wikipedia, a lucky meteorite fall two years after Chladni
first published his theory helped turn the tide in his favor, and by ten years
after publication Chladni’s meteorite theories were pretty well-regarded. Even
when people disagreed with him about meteorites, Chladni remained widely
respected for some of his other work in acoustics.

There is a story here, but it’s probably not right to center it around Chladni,
and his work was only scorned for a few years before everyone agreed it was
true. I’ll give this another half a point.

CRICK & WATSON

 Not ridiculed. But they were instructed to drop their research. They
continued it as “bootleg” research.

The list admits they were “not ridiculed”. They were told to stop their research
because there was all sorts of academic politics around who was going to be
the first to discover DNA, and the guy in charge of their university was rooting
for another team.

DOPPLER

Proposed a theory of the optical Doppler Effect in 1842, but was bitterly
opposed for two decades because it did not fit with the accepted physics
of the time (it contradicted the Luminiferous Aether theory.) Doppler
was finally proven right in 1868 when W. Huggins observed red shifts
and blue shifts in stellar spectra. Unfortunately this was fifteen years
after Doppler had died.

I haven’t been able to find anything about this in various short online
biographies of Doppler (1, 2). Doppler tested the effect himself by having
someone play a trumpet on a train (really), someone else successfully tested it
in 1845, and it was independently rediscovered in 1848. Doppler himself was
made the head of the Institute For Experimental Physics in Vienna and died
about as prestigious and beloved as a physicist can get.

So my impression is that only a third of these people really fit the pattern.
Most of them were doubted for very short periods, continued to be respected
in their fields for their other accomplishments even during those periods, or
were part of medium-sized movements rather than being lone geniuses. After
a few years – maybe an average of ten, very rarely as long as thirty – their
contributions were recognized and they assumed their rightful place in the
pantheon. Science isn’t perfect. But it is darned good.

[EDIT: Bill Beatty, author of the original list, responds here. My response to
the response here.]

II.

I bring this up in the context of my last post on progress in the rationalist

movement. There used to be a stereotype that rationalists were too quick to
challenge scientific consensus. I think that was exaggerated, but based on a
core of truth. Given that we’re interested in the ways that bias can prevent
people from accepting truth, it’s unsurprising that we would focus on cases
like these.

But I personally have changed my thinking on this a lot. Not in any way that I
can explain explicitly – I’ve always thought something like:

Scientific consensus is the best tool we have for seeking truth. It’s not
perfect, and it’s frequently overturned by later scientists, but this is
usually – albeit not literally always – the work of well-credentialed
insiders, operating pretty quickly after the evidence that should overturn
it becomes available. Any individual should be very doubtful of their
ability to beat it, while not being so doubtful that nobody ever improves
it and science can never progress.

– and I still think that. But I’ve shifted from being the sort of person who
shares viral lists of maligned geniuses, to the sort of person who debunks
those lists. I’ve started emphasizing the “best tool we have” part of the
sentence, and whispering the “isn’t perfect” part, rather than vice versa.

I’ve changed my mind on this because of personal experience. Rather than

trying to describe it, it might be more helpful to give the most salient
examples.

1. The Replication Crisis: I previously thought the scientific consensus was

flawed because it failed to take the replication crisis seriously enough. I later
learned that everyone else took the repliaction crisis exactly as seriously as I
did. A poll in Nature shows that 90% of scientists believe reproducibility
issues constitute a “crisis”, compared to only 3% (!) who don’t. For every
person complaining about “methodological terrorists”, there are a dozen who
are very concerned and trying to change the way they practice research.

This is especially impressive because as far as I can tell the whole shift
happened in about ten years. I would date the beginning of the crisis from
Ioannidis’ original 2005 paper, although it was only aimed at medicine. It got
into high gear in psychology sometime around 2011 with Simonsohn’s False
Positive Psychology. A Google Trends analysissuggests people only started
searching the relevant keywords around 2013.

I started thinking about this sort of thing in 2009 after reading this LW post.
At the time I thought this was some sort of exciting failure of modern science
that I alone had figured out. But this was well after sharp people like Ioannidis
were talking about it, and only a few years before everyone was talking about
it. Framing this as “I was right and scientific consensus was wrong” seems
grandiose. Better might be “I started betting on a winning horse about a
quarter of the way between the beginning of the race and when its victory
became blatantly obvious to everyone”.

2. Nutrition: The Bad Old Paradigm of nutrition says that obese people just
have poor impulse control, that weight is a simple matter of calories in vs.
calories out, and that all calories are equally good except fat, which for some
inexplicable reason is the Devil. Anybody who’s read a few good books about
nutrition science knows that the Bad Old Paradigm is woefully inadequate. I
read a few of those books and became convinced that I was right and scientific
consensus was wrong.

Unfortunately, this whole issue exploded when Gary Taubes published Good
Calories, Bad Calories, which as best I can tell combined the first publicly
available good critique of the Bad Old Paradigm with a flawed and basically
false attempt at a new paradigm. There were lots of confused attacks against
Taubes’ bad information which did collateral damage to his good information,
and lots of confused defenses of his good information which inadvertently
shielded his bad information from criticism. I previously focused on defend
the good parts, but recently shifted more towards criticizing the bad parts.

After reading some more good books here (one of which I hope to review
soon), my impression is that most nutrition scientists don’t believe in the Bad
Old Paradigm and haven’t for a while. At the very least, most of them seem to
believe in the lipostat and think it’s important, which is my proxy for “basically
has their heart in the right place”. Insofar as the Bad Old Paradigm continues
to be popular wisdom, it’s because of the diet industry, the government, social
inertia, and nobody really having a good new paradigm to replace it with. I’m
gradually seeing popular wisdom shift, and nutrition scientists themselves
seem to be helping this process rather than hurting it.
Maybe somebody in this area has discovered the new paradigm and is a
maverick being persecuted by hidebound reactionaries. But it isn’t Gary
Taubes. And it certainly isn’t me.

3. Social-Justice-Related Issues: Another narrative I used to believe was that a

lot of sketchy ideas were being flattered because they spoke to left-leading
academics’ biases in favor of social justice. Implicit association tests,
stereotype threat, the idea of zero meaningful psychological differences
between men and women, et cetera.

When I started worrying about implicit association tests, I thought I was

defying some kind of broad scientific consensus. But the meta-analyses
showing the Implicit Association Test didn’t do what people thought had been
around since 2009 and have only gotten more numerous since then, with
broad media coverage. Problems with stereotype threat research are getting
mainstream coverage and even airtime on NPR.

The problem here is that there was no equivalent of the Nature poll on the
replication crisis, so I didn’t realize any of this was happening until just
recently. For example, in 2016 this Voxsplainer made it sound like there was a
monolithic consensus in favor of Implicit Association Tests that no sane
person had ever disagreed with, even though by that point there were already
several big meta-analyses finding they weren’t practically useful. The correct
conclusion isn’t that this is really what scientific consensus thinks. The correct
conclusion is that Vox shouldn’t be trusted about any science more
complicated than the wedge vs. inclined plane. Once I realized that there was
all this intelligent analysis going on that I’d never heard about, my claim to be
boldly defying the scientific consensus evaporated.

Yes, Cordelia Fine is still around and is still writing books arguing against
gender differences. But she’s starting to sound really defensive, basically the
literary equivalent of “I know I’m going to be downvoted to hell for this,
but…”. Meanwhile, other scientists are doing a good job pointing out the flaws
in her books and conducting studies like this biggest-ever look at male vs.
female brain differences, this magisterial look at personality differences, et
cetera – not to mention great and widely-accepted work on how intersex
people take on more characteristics of their hormonal than their social gender
(honestly, we should probably thank transgender people for making this field
socially acceptable again). People talk a lot about how Larry Summers was
fired from Harvard for talking about male vs. female differences, but Steven
Pinker did a whole debate on this and remains a Harvard professor.

Even things about genetic psychological differences between population

groups are less bold and maverick-y than their proponents like to think. The
relevant surveys I know trying to elicit scientific consensus (1, 2, 3) all find
that, when asked anonymously, most scientists think these differences explain
about 25% – 50% of variance.

I hate to bring that up, because it’ll probably start a flame war in the
comments, but I think it’s important as a sign of exactly how hard it is to
politicize science. Global warming skeptics talk about how maybe the scientific
consensus on global warming is false because climatologists face political
pressure to bias their results in favor of the theory. But scientists studying
these areas face much more political pressure, and as long as you give the
surveys anonymously they’re happy to express horrendously taboo opinions.
This is about the strongest evidence in favor of the consensus on global
warming – and scientific consensus in general – that I could imagine.

4. Nuture Assumption and Blank Slatism: The prologue of the first edition of
The Nurture Assumption is Judith Rich Harris telling her “maverick genius
kept down by hidebound reactionaries” story. But the prologue of the second
edition is her being much more hopeful:

To some extent at least, times have changed…there is now more

acceptance of the idea that behavior is influenced by genes and that
individual differences in behavior are due in part to differnces in genes.
People are more willing to admit that children can inherit behavioral
quirks and personality characteristics…was it this cultural shift that led
to greater acceptance of my theory? Or was it the fact that new findings,
consistent with the theory, kept turning up? Over time, the early, angry
response to The Nurture Assumption has softened noticeably, both
within and outside of academia. Today, the book is widely cited in
textbooks and journal articles. It’s assigned and discussed in courses in
many colleges and universities; it shows up in exams…in his foreward to
the first ediction of The Nurture Assumption, Steven Pinker made a rash
prediction about the book: “I predict it will come to be seen as a turning
 point in the history of psychology”. Perhaps it is too soon to judge
whether psychology has rounded a bend; perhaps it will take the
perspective of twenty or thirty years. Even at this point, though, there
are signs of a slight shift in direction. Within developmental psychology,
I’ve noticed that descriptions of procedures and results are beginning to
sound a bit defensive. Greater progress has been made in other areas of
psychology. And the email I receive from students gives me high hopes
for the younger generation coming up.

There were ten years between the first and second editions of The Nurture
Assumption. In the almost ten years since the publication of the second
edition, my impression is that its ideas have become even more widely-
accepted. This month’s edition of the American Journal of Psychiatry, onbe
of the top journals in the field, has a great study showing that child abuse does
not cause cognitive disability, in contrast to several previous studies in the
area. It cites Deary, Plomin, and Ioannidis, hits all of the talking points about
genetic confounding of developmental outcomes, and receives glowing
endorsement in the journal’s editorial section, which says that “if our causal
explanations are wrong, we may be wasting our effort or even doing damage”.
Every single psychiatrist in the country is getting exposed to this way of
thinking.

And this has real results. I got to present a summary of behavioral genetics to
a meeting of psychiatrists, including a lot of psychoanalysts, and I was
shocked that most of them were at least a little receptive. I think they
misunderstood it. I think they carefully raised caveats in exactly the right
places to ensure they didn’t have to change anything they were doing. But the
overall response was “Oh, yeah, we’ve heard stuff like that, it seems plausible,
good thing that for various hard-to-explain reasons none of it applies to us.”
This is what the first stage of progress looks like.

5. Intelligence Explosion And AI Risk: This was another place where I and
many of my friends thought we were right and the consensus was wrong. It
was another place where a lot of self-appointed defenders of the consensus
told us we were crackpots and needed to listen to what real scientists thought.
And again, when I looked into it, there was no consensus against the idea and
lots of prominent researchers were in favor. Going to the Asilomar Conference
and seeing a bunch of people from MIT and Harvard talk about how
concerned they were really opened my eyes on this. Google now has an AI
Ethics Board, Berkeley, Oxford, and MIT have foundations working on it, and
people like Elon Musk and Bill Gates are involved. Bostrom’s survey of AI
researchers and some more recent and rigorous not-yet-published surveys I’ve
heard about confirm the impression. Nobody would ever say there’s a
scientific consensus in favor of Bostrom’s theories. But at this point I think it’s
also indefensible to say there’s a consensus against.

Bostrom first started writing about these sorts of things extensively in the
early 2000s, so there was really only a ten-year gap between entering the
intellectual environment and it becoming a (mostly) accepted part of the
established field. Those ten years felt pretty long while we were in them, but
the ability of a field to accept an on-the-face-of-it completely-insane-sounding
theory within ten years seems to me a very strong argument against the
hidebound-reactionaries theory and a very strong argument for considering
scientific consenses to be unreasonably effective.

6. IQ: Another case where I worried about apparent failure of scientific

consensus due to politically bias. I certainly encountered a lot of falsehoods
around this when I was younger. My high school psychology textbook included
a section claiming that all IQ tests were biased towards rich white people
because they were based entirely on questions like “how many shots below par
is a bogey?” Then it presented an “alternate IQ test” which “proved” that poor
minorities had higher IQs than rich whites by asking some other questions
with the opposite bias (I think they were about slang for drugs – certainly an
interesting way to fight stereotypes). This kind of thing naturally made me
assume that nobody had any idea what was actually in IQ tests and scientists
were idiots.

But more recently I’ve been reading actual surveys, which find that about 97%
of expert psychologists and 85% of applied psychologists agree that IQ tests
measure cognitive ability “reasonably well”. And 77% of expert psychologists
and 63% of applied psychologists agree IQ tests are culture-fair (with slightly
different numbers depending on how you ask the question, but always about
50% of both groups).

This seems like less of a problem with expert consensus, and more of a
problem of nobody else (including textbook writers!) listening to experts who
are continually trying to beat reality into people’s heads. But I have a vague
memory of having recently seen a survey (which I can’t find) that even experts
in softer fields like sociology are generally in favor of IQ and admit that it has
its uses. And even some left/liberal sources like Vox and Freddie deBoer are
aware of the consensus and willing to respect it.

At the same time, I’ve encountered some people like Borsboom and
Nostalgebraist who have relatively sophisticated (and limited) critiques of IQ,
and who have allowed me to round off other people’s less-well-framed
critiques to something more like what they are saying and less like the stupid
things my high school textbook said.

So it seems to me that generally experts agree with reasonable statements

about IQ, and where they seem to disagree they may hold reasonable
disagreements rather than unreasonable ones. Again, where this fails is not in
the experts but in the ability of people who don’t listen to the experts to get
disproportionate social power and hide the existence of the expert consensus.

III.

Last week I wrote about universally-known criticisms of economists, like

“they’re silly for assuming everyone behaves perfectly rationally”:

My impression is that economists not only know about these criticisms,

but invented them. During the last few paradigm shifts in economics,
the new guard levied these complaints against the old guard, mostly
won, and their arguments percolated down into the culture as The
Correct Arguments To Use Against Economics. Now the new guard is
doing their own thing – behavioral economics, experimental economics,
economics of effective government intervention. The new paradigm
probably has a lot of problems too, but it’s a pretty good bet that random
people you stop on the street aren’t going to know about them.

The same pattern explains a lot of my concerns above. I knew some criticisms
of a scientific paradigm. They seemed right. I concluded that scientists weren’t
very smart and maybe I was smarter. I should have concluded that some
cutting-edge scientists were making good criticisms of an old paradigm. I can
still flatter myself by saying that it’s no small achievement to recognize a new
paradigm early and bet on the winning horse. But the pattern I was seeing was
part of the process of science, not a condemnation of it.

Most people understand this intuitively about past paradigm shifts. When a
creationist says that we can’t trust science because it used to believe in
phlogiston and now it believes in combustion, we correctly respond that this is
exactly why we can trust science. But this lesson doesn’t always generalize
when you’re in the middle of a paradigm shift right nowand having trouble
seeing the other side.

I realize I’m (ironically) risking making my narrative of scientific success

unfalsifiable. Suppose someone wants to argue that scientific consensus is
wrong. If they point to something it used to be wrong about, I can respond
“Yes, but it self-corrected and it’s correct now, so that’s fine.” If they point to
something where cutting-edge scientists say it’s wrong but nobody else agrees,
I can respond “Yes, this is what the beginning of a paradigm shift looks like, so
that’s fine”. And if they point to something where nobody in the field thinks
it’s wrong, I can say “You’re a crackpot for going against all reputable
scientists; the problem is with you.” And if later they turn out to be right, and
everyone acknowledges it, I can say “Yes, but it self-corrected and it’s correct
now, so that’s fine.”

(and I’m making it even easier for myself in that I say “scientific consensus
for” when I probably mean “no scientific consensus against”. I don’t claim that
90%+ of scientists always believe true things, only that there are very few
cases where 90%+ of scientists believe things which smarter people know to
be false.)

Against this I can only offer a personal narrative: the only light I have by
which to judge scientific consensus is my own Inside View assessment of what
seems correct. Again and again I have tried to defy scientific consensus. And
every time, I either find that I am wrong, find that I am a few years ahead of a
trend that most scientists eventually agree with, or find that what I thought
was “scientific consensus” was actually a fiction peddled by biased industry or
media sources slandering a scientific community which actually had a much
more sophisticated picture. My history of trying to fight scientific consensus
has been a Man Who Was Thursday-esque series of embarassments as I find
again and again that my supposed enemy agrees with me and is even better at
what I am trying to do than I am.

Scientific consensus hasn’t just been accurate, it’s been unreasonably

accurate. Humans are fallible beings. They are not known for their ability the
change their mind, to willingly accept new information, or to put truth-seeking
above political squabbles. And our modern society is not exactly known for
being an apolitical philosopher-kingdom with strong truth-seeking
institutions completely immune from partisan pressure. I feel a deep
temptation to sympathize with global warming denialists who worry that the
climatological consensus is biased politicized crap, because that is exactly the
sort of thing which I would expect to come out of our biased politicized crappy
society. Yet again and again I have seen examples of scientific fields that have
maintained strong commitments to the truth in the face of pressure that
would shatter any lesser institution. I’ve seen fields where people believe
incredibly-bizarre sounding things that will get them mocked at cocktail
parties just because those things seem to be backed by the majority of the
evidence. I’ve even seen people change their minds, in spite of all the
incentives to the contrary. I can’t explain this. The idea that scientific
consensus is almost always an accurate reflection of the best knowledge we
have at the time seems even more flabbergasting than any particular idea that
scientists might or might not believe. But it seems to be true.

(note that I’m talking about “scientific consensus” to mean a very high-level
pattern, consisting of hundreds of scientists over the space of decades
evaluating a broad body of work. Any individual study is still probably total
garbage.)

Given how weird all of this is, I realize there’s another possible bias here that
should be taken very seriously – which is that I’m wrong about one or both
sides of this. Which is more likely: that Science always agrees with Truth? Or
that one guy’s perception of Science always agrees with that same guy’s
perception of Truth? The latter gives me two degrees of freedom: I can either
cherry-pick experts who agree with me and declare them to be Consensus, or I
can conform my opinions to consensus so slavishly that I end up discovering
only that Consensus agrees with itself. I don’t feel like I’m making this kind of
mistake. But then again, nobody ever feels like they’re being biased.
But if I’m making this mistake, I think it’s at least a better mistake than the
one where people dream up stories about being mavericks persecuted by
hidebound reactionaries. This mistake at least sets the terms of debate as “let’s
try to ascertain what the scientific community thinks” and forbids me from
believing completely crackpottish things. And it encourages trust in one of our
more trustworthy public institutions, always a prosocial sort of thing to do. I
would rather have a world of people debating who agrees with scientific
consensus or not, than a world of people debating whether scientific
consensus is even valuable.

There are two caveats to the above. First, I think it’s dangerous to promote a
norm of agreeing with scientific consensus, insofar as that helps encourage
exactly the mistakes about the nature of consensus that I discussed above.
When poorly-informed diet industry gurus support the Bad Old Paradigm,
their rallying cry is usually “You’re a stupid crackpot, bow to the scientific
consensus which agrees with me”. I gave three examples above of cases where
I would have gotten the scientific consensus 100% wrong if I didn’t have
access to a formal survey of scientific experts. In a world where these surveys
had never been done – or some existing field without these surveys – or some
field where these surveys have been done inaccurately or in a biased manner –
people will often believe the consensus to be the opposite of what it really is.
In those cases, demands that people respect consensus can be used to shut
down people who are actually right – the field-wide equivalent of calling true
facts you don’t like debunked and well-refuted. I see this happening all the
time and I worry that waxing too poetically about the unreasonable
effectiveness of scientific consensus will only serve to empower these people.
Goodhart’s Law says that a measure which becomes a target ceases to be a
useful measure, so we should be reluctant to target scientific consensus too
strongly.

And second, I think that even when the Outside View tells you that the
consensus is correct, you should continue pursuing your Inside View hunch
that it isn’t. This avoids awkward situations like every individual scientist
doubting the consensus, but suppressing their doubts because the “scientific
consensus” has to be right.

So maybe the things I’m saying about scientific consensus aren’t very
actionable. But respecting scientific consensus in a non-actionable way is a lot
less exhausting than believing yourself to be against it, and talking about how
you’re against it, and taking flak for being against it. And in the same way it’s
helpful to believe that God is good, even if He never really gets around to
doing much about it, so it’s reassuring to be able to have faith in our
institutions every so often.

Research and Reviews

Marijuana: Much More Than You Wanted To Know

This month I work on my hospital’s Substance Abuse Team, which means we
treat people who have been hospitalized for alcohol or drug-related problems
and then gingerly suggest that maybe they should use drugs a little less.

The two doctors leading the team are both very experienced and have kind of
seen it all, so it’s interesting to get a perspective on drug issues from people on
the front line. In particular, one of my attendings is an Obama-loving long-
haired hippie who nevertheless vehemently opposes medical marijuana or any
relaxation on marijuana’s status at all. He says that “just because I’m a
Democrat doesn’t mean I have to support stupid policies I know are wrong”
and he’s able to back up his opinion with an impressive variety of studies.

To be honest, I had kind of forgotten that the Universe was allowed to contain
negative consequences for legalizing drugs. What with all the mental energy it
took protesting the the Drug War and getting outraged at police brutality and
celebrating Colorado’s recently permitting recreational cannabis use and so
on, it had completely slipped my mind that the legalization of marijuana might
have negative consequences and that I couldn’t reject it out of hand until I had
done some research.

So I’ve been doing the research. Not to try to convince my attending of

anything – as the old saying goes, do not meddle in the affairs of attendings,
because you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup – but just to figure out
where exactly things stand.

I. Would Relaxation Of Penalties On Marijuana Increase Marijuana Use?

Starting in the 1970s, several states decriminalized possession of marijuana –

that is, possession could not be penalized by jail time. It could still be
penalized by fines and other smaller penalties, and manufacture and sale
could still be punished by jail time.

Starting in the 1990s, several states legalized medical marijuana. People with
medical marijuana cards, which in many cases were laughably easy to get with
or without good evidence of disease, were allowed to grow and use marijuana,
despite concerns that some of this would end up on the illegal market.

Starting last week, Colorado legalized recreational use of marijuana, as well as

cultivation and sale (subject to heavy regulations). Washington will follow
later this year, and other states will be placing measures on their ballots to do
the same.

One should be able to evaluate to what degree marijuana use rose after these
policy changes, and indeed, many people have tried – with greater or lesser
levels of statistical sophistication.

The worst arguments in favor of this proposition are those like this CADCA
paper, which note that states with more liberal marijuana laws have higher
rates of marijuana use among teenagers than states that do not. The proper
counterspell to such nonsense is Reverse Causal Arrows – could it not be that
states with more marijuana users are more likely to pass proposals liberalizing
marijuana laws? Yes it could. Even more likely, some third variable – let’s call
it “hippie attitudes” – could be behind both high rates of marijuana use and
support for liberal marijuana regimes. The states involved are places like
Colorado, California, Washington, and Oregon. I think that speaks for itself. In
case it doesn’t, someone went through the statistics and found that these
states had the highest rates of marijuana use among teens since well before
they relaxed drug-related punishments. Argument successfully debunked.

A slightly more sophisticated version – used by the DEA here – takes the
teenage marijuana use in a state one year before legalization of medical
marijuana and compares it to the teenage marijuana use in a state one (or
several years) after such legalization. They often find that it has increased, and
blame the increase on the new laws. For example, 28% of Californians used
marijuana before it was decriminalized in the 70s, compared to 35% a few
years after. This falls victim to a different confounder – marijuana use has
undergone some very large swings nationwide, so the rate of increase in
medical marijuana states may be the same as the rate anywhere else. Indeed,
this is what was going on in California – its marijuana use actually rose
slightly less than the national average.

What we want is a study that compares the average marijuana use in a set of
states before liberalization to the average marijuana use in the country as a
whole, and then does the same after liberalization to see if the ratio has
increased. There are several studies that purport to try this, of which by far the
best is Johnston, O’Malley & Bachman 1981, which monitored the effect of the
decriminalization campaigns of the 70s. They survey thousand of high school
seniors on marijuana use in seven states that decriminalize marijuana both
before and for five years after the decriminalization, and find absolutely no
sign of increased marijuana use (in fact, there is a negative trend). Several
other studies (eg Thies & Register 1993) confirm this finding.

There is only a hint of some different results. Saffer and Chaloukpa 1999 and
Chaloupka, Grossman & Tauras 1999 try to use complicated econometric
simulations to estimate the way marijuana demand will respond to different
variables. They simulate (as opposed to detecting in real evidence) that
marijuana decriminalization should raise past-year use by about 5 – 8%, but
have no effect on more frequent use (ie a few more people try it but do not
become regular users). More impressively, Model 1993 (a source of some
exasperationfor me earlier) finds that after decriminalization, marijuana-
related emergency room visits went up (trying to interpret their tables, I think
they went up by a whopping 90%, but I’m not sure of this). This is sufficiently
different from every other study that I don’t give it much weight, although
we’ll return to it later.

Overall I think the evidence is pretty strong that decriminalization probably

led to no increase in marijuana use among teens, and may at most have led to
a small single-digit increase.

Proponents of stricter marijuana penalties say the experiment isn’t fair. In

practice, decriminalization does not affect the average user very much – even
in states without decriminalization, marijuana possession very rarely leads to
jail time. The only hard number I have is from Australia, where in “non-
decriminalized” Australian states only 0.3% of marijuana arrests lead to jail
time, but a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests US numbers are
very similar. And even in supposedly decriminalized states, it’s not hard for a
cop who wants to get a pot user in jail to find a way (possession of even small
amounts can be “possession with intent to sell” if someone doesn’t like you).
So the overall real difference between decriminalized and not decriminalized
is small and it’s not surprising the results are small as well. I mostly agree with
them; decriminalization is fine as far as it goes, but it’s a bigger psychological
step than an actual one.

The next major milestone in cannabis history was the legalization of medical
marijuana. Anderson, Hansen & Rees (2012) did the same kind of study we
have seen above, and despite trying multiple different measures of youth
marijuana use found pretty much no evidence that medical marijuana
legalization caused it to increase. Other studies find pretty much the same.

This could potentially suffer from the same problems as decriminalization

studies – the laws don’t always change the facts on the ground. Indeed, for
about ten years after medical marijuana legalization, the federal government
kept on prosecuting marijuana users even when their use accorded with state
laws, and many states had so few dispensaries that in reality not a whole lot of
medical marijuana was being given out. I haven’t found any great studies that
purport to overcome these problems.

When we examined decriminalization, we found that the studies based on

surveys of teens looked pretty good, but that the one study that examined
outcomes – marijuana-related ER visits – was a lot less encouraging. We find
the same pattern here, and the rain on our parade is Chu 2013, who finds that
medical marijuana laws increased marijuana-related arrests by 15-20% and
marijuana-related drug rehab admissions by 10-15%.

So what’s going on here? I have two theories. First, maybe medical marijuana
use (and decriminalization) increase use among adults only. This could be
because the system is working – giving adults access to medical marijuana
while keeping it out of the hands of children – or because kids are dumb and
don’t understand consequences but adults are more responsive to incentives
and punishments. Second, we know that medical marijuana has twice as much
THC as street marijuana. Maybe everyone keeps using the same amount of
marijuana, but when medical marijuana inevitably gets diverted to the street,
addicts can’t handle it and end up behaving much worse than they expected.

Or the studies are wrong. Studies being wrong is always a pretty good bet.

I can’t close this section without mentioning the Colorado expulsion

controversy. Nearly everyone who teaches in Colorado says there has been an
explosion of marijuana-related problems since medical marijuana was
legalized. Meanwhile, the actual surveys of Colorado high school students say
that marijuana use, if anything, is going down. A Colorado drug warrior has
some strong objections to the survey results, but they center around not really
being able to prove that there is a real downward trend (which is an entirely
correct complaint) without denying that in fact they show no evidence at all of
going up.

The consensus on medical marijuana seems to be that it does not increase teen
marijuana use either, although there is some murky and suggestive evidence
that it might increase illicit or dangerous marijuana use among adults.

There is less information on the effects of full legalization of marijuana, which

has never been tried before in the United States. To make even wild guesses
we will have to look at a few foreign countries plus some econometric
simulations.

No one will be surprised to hear that the first foreign country involved is the
Netherlands, which was famously permissive of cannabis up until a crackdown
a few years ago. Despite popular belief they never fully legalized the drug and
they were still pretty harsh on production and manufacture; distribution, on
the other hand, could occur semi-openly in coffee shops. This is another case
where we have to be careful to distinguish legal regimes from actual effects,
but during the period when there were actually a lot of pot-serving coffee
shops, the Netherlands did experience an otherwise-inexplicable 35% rise in
marijuana consumption relative to the rest of Europe. This is true even among
teenagers, and covers both heavy use as well as occasional experimentation.
Some scientists studying the Netherlands’ example expect Colorado to see a
similar rise; others think it will be even larger because the legalization is
complete rather than partial.

The second foreign country involved is Portugal, which was maybe more of a
decriminalization than a legalization case but which is forever linked with the
idea of lax drug regimes in the minds of most Americans. They decriminalized
all drugs (including heroin and cocaine) in 2001, choosing to replace
punishment with increased treatment opportunities, and as we all have been
told, no one in Portugal ever used drugs ever again, or even remembers that
drugs exist. Except it turns out it’s more complicated; for example, the percent
of Portuguese who admit to lifetime use of drugs has doubled since the law
took effect. Two very patient scientists have sifted through all the conflicting
claims and found that in reality, the number of people who briefly experiment
with drugs has gone way up, but the number of addicts hasn’t, nor has the
number of bad outcomes like overdose-related deaths. There are many more
people receiving drug treatment, but that might just be because Portugal
upped its drug treatment game in a separate law at the same time they
decriminalized drugs. Overall they seem to have been a modest success –
neither really raising nor decreasing the number of addicts – but they seem
more related to decriminalization (which we’ve already determined doesn’t
have much effect) than to legalization per se.

Returning to America, what if you just ask people whether they would use
more marijuana if it’s legal? Coloradans were asked if they plan to smoke
marijuana once it becomes legal; comparing survey results to current usage
numbers suggests 40% more users above the age of 18; it is unclear what the
effect will be on younger teens and children.

Finally, we let the economists have their say. They crunch all the data and
predict an increase of 50 – 100% based solely on the likely price drop (even
with taxes factored in). And if there’s one group we can trust to make infallible
predictions about the future, it’s economists.

Overall I find the Dutch evidence most convincing, and predict a 25 – 50%
increase in adult marijuana use with legalization. I would expect a lower
increase – 15 – 30% – among youth, but the data are also perfectly consistent
with no increase at all.

Conclusion for this section: that decriminalization and legalization of medical

marijuana do not increase youth marijuana use rates, although there is some
shaky and indirect evidence they do increase adult use and bad behavior.
There is no good data yet on full legalization, but there’s good reason to think
it would substantially increase adult use and it might also increase youth use
somewhat.

II. Is Marijuana Bad For You?

About 9% of marijuana users eventually become addicted to the drug,

exposing them to various potential side effects.

Marijuana smoke contains a lot of the same chemicals in tobacco smoke and
so it would not be at all surprising if it had some of the same ill effects, like
cardiovascular disease and lung cancer. But when people look for these effects,
they can’t find any increase in mortality among marijuana smokers. I predict
that larger studies will one day pick something up, but for now let’s take this at
face value.

Much more concerning are the attempts to link marijuana to cognitive and
psychiatric side effects. Meier et al (2012) analyzed a study of a thousand
people in New Zealand and found that heavy marijuana use was linked to an
IQ decline of 8 points. Rogeberg 2012developed an alternative explanation –
poor people saw their IQs drop in their 20s more than rich people because
their IQs had been artificially inflated by schooling; what Meier et al had
thought to be an effect of cannabis was really an effect of poor people having
an apparent IQ drop and using cannabis more often. Meier et al pointed out
that actually, poor people didn’t use cannabis any more often than anyone else
and effects remained when controlled for class. Other studies, like Fried et al
(2002) find the same effect, and there is a plausible biological mechanism
(cannabinoids something something neurotransmitters something brain
maturation). As far as I can tell the finding still seems legit, and marijuana use
does decrease IQ. It is still unclear whether this only applies in teenagers (who
are undergoing a “sensitive period of brain development”) or full stop.

More serious still is the link with psychosis. A number of studies have found
that marijuana use is heavily correlated with development of schizophrenia
and related psychotic disorders later in life. Some of them find relative risks as
high as 2 – heavy marijuana use doubles your chance of getting schizophrenia,
which is already a moderately high 1%. But of course correlation is not
causation, and many people have come up with alternative theories. For
example, maybe people who are already kind of psychotic use marijuana to
self-medicate, or just make poor life choices like starting drugs. Maybe people
of low socioeconomic status who come from broken homes are more likely to
both use marijuana and get schizophrenia. Maybe some gene both makes
marijuana really pleasant and increases schizophrenia risk.

I know of three good studies attempting to tease out causation. Arseneault et

al (2004)checks to see which came first – the marijuana use or the psychotic
symptoms – and finds it was the marijuana use, thus supporting an increase
in risk from the drug. Griffith-Lendering et al (2012) try the same, and find
bidirectional causation – previous marijuana use seems to predict future
psychosis, but previous psychosis seems to predict future marijuana use. A
very new study from last month boxes clever and checks whether your
marijuana use can predict schizophrenia in your relatives, and find that it
does – presumably suggesting that genetic tendencies towards schizophrenia
cause marijuana use and not vice versa (although Ozy points out to meet that
the relatives of marijuana users are more likely to use marijuana themselves;
the plot thickens). When a meta-analysis tries to control for all of these
factors, they get a relative risk of 1.4 (they call it an odds ratio, but from their
discussion section I think they mean relative risk).

Is this true, or just the confounders they failed to pick up? One argument for
the latter is that marijuana use has increased very much over the past 50
years. If marijuana use caused schizophrenia, we would expect to see much
more schizophrenia, but in fact as far as anyone can tell (which is not very far)
schizophrenia incidence is decreasing. The decrease might be due (maybe! if it
even exists at all!) to obstetric advances which prevent fetal brain damage
which could later lead to the disease. The effect of this variable is insufficiently
known to pretend we can tease out some supposed contrary effect of increased
marijuana use. Also, some people say that schizophrenia is increasing in
young people, so who knows?

The exact nature of the marijuana-psychosis link is still very controversial.

Some people say that marijuana causes psychosis. Other people say it
“activates latent psychosis”, a term without a very good meaning but which
might mean that it pushes people on the borderline of psychosis – eg those
with a strong family history but who might otherwise have escaped – over the
edge. Still others say all it does is get people who would have developed
psychosis eventually to develop it a few years earlier. You can read a
comparison of all the different hypotheses here.

I’ve saved the most annoying for last: is marijuana a “gateway drug”? Would
legalizing it make it more or less of a “gateway drug”? This claim seems tailor-
made to torture statisticians. We know that marijuana users are definitely
more likely to use other drugs later – for example, marijuana users are 85x
more likely than non-marijuana users to use cocaine. but that could be either
because marijuana affects them in some way (implying that legalizing
marijuana would increase other drug use), because they have factors like
genetics or stressful life situation that makes them more likely to use all drugs
(implying that legalizing marijuana would not affect other drug use), or
because using illegal marijuana without ill effect connects them to the illegal
drug market and convinces them illegal drugs are okay (implying that
legalizing marijuana would decrease other drug use). RAND comes very close
to investigating this properly by saying that when the Dutch pseudo-legalized
marijuana, use of harder drugs stayed stable or went down, but all their study
actually shows is that the ratio of marijuana users : hard drug users went
down. This is to be expected when you make marijuana much easier to get, but
it’s still consistent with the absolute number of hard drug users going way up.
The best that can be said is that there is no direct causal evidence for the
gateway theory and some good alternative explanations for the effect. Let us
accept their word for it and never speak of this matter again.

Conclusion for this section: Marijuana does not have a detectable effect on
mortality and there is surprisingly scarce evidence of tobacco-like side effects.
It probably does decrease IQ if used early and often, possibly by as many as 8
IQ points. It may increase risk of psychosis by as much as 40%, but it’s not
clear who is at risk or whether the risk is even real. The gateway drug
hypothesis is too complicated to evaluate effectively but there is no clear
casual evidence in its support.

III. What Are The Costs Of The Drug War?

There are not really that many people in jail for using marijuana.

I learned this from Who’s Really In Prison For Marijuana?, a publication of

the National Office Of Drug Control Policy, which was clearly written by
someone with the same ability to take personal offense at bad statistics that
inspires my posts about Facebook. The whole thing seethes with indignation
and makes me want to hug the drug czar and tell him everything will be okay.

Only 1.6% of state prisoners are serving time for marijuana, only 0.7% are
serving for marijuana possession, and only 0.3% are first time offenders. Some
of those are “possession” in the sense of “possessing a warehouse full of
marijuana bales”, and others are people who committed much more
dangerous crimes but were nailed for marijuana, in the same sense that Al
Capone was nailed for tax evasion. The percent of normal law-abiding people
who just had a gram or two of marijuana and were thrown in jail is a rounding
error, and the stories of such you read in the news are extremely dishonest
(read the document for examples).

Federal numbers are even lower; in the entire federal prison system, they
could only find 63 people imprisoned with marijuana possession as the sole
crime, and those people were possessing a median of one hundred fifteen
pounds of marijuana (enough to make over 100,000 joints).

In total, federal + state prison and counting all the kingpins, dealers,
manufacturers, et cetera, there are probably about 16,000 people in prison
solely for marijuana-related offenses, serving average actual sentence lengths
of three year. But it’s anybody’s guess whether those people would be free
today if marijuana were legal, or whether their drug cartels would just switch
to something else.
Looking at the other side’s statistics, I don’t see much difference. NORML
claims thatthere are 40,000 people in prison for marijuana use, but they
admit that half of those people were arrested for using harder drugs and
marijuana was a tack-on charge, so they seem to agree with the Feds about
around 20,000 pure marijuana prisoners. SAM agreesthat only 0.5% of the
prison population is in there for marijuana possession alone. I see no reason
to doubt any of these numbers.

A much more serious problem is marijuana-related arrests, of which there are

700,000 a year. 90% of them are for simple possession, and the vast majority
do not end in prison terms; they do however result in criminal records,
community service, a couple days of jail time until a judge is available to hear
the case, heavy fines, high cost of legal representation, and moderate costs to
the state for funding the whole thing. Fines can be up to $1500, and legal
representation can cost up to $5000 (though I am suspicious of this paper and
think it may be exaggerating for effect). These costs are often borne by poor
people who will have to give up all their savings for years to pay them back.

Costs paid by the government, which cover everything from police officers to
trials to prison time, are estimated at about $2 billion by multiple sources.
This is only 3% of the total law enforcement budget, so legalizing marijuana
wouldn’t create some kind of sudden revolution in policing, but as the saying
goes, a billion here, a billion there, and eventually it adds up to real money.
And a Harvard economist claims that the total monetary benefits from
legalization, including potential tax revenues, could reach $14 billion.

Some people worry that legalizing marijuana would cause an increase in car
accidents by “stoned drivers”, who, like drunk drivers, have impaired reflexes
and poor judgment, and indeed there is a small but real problem of marijuana-
induced car accidents. But Chaloukpa and Laixuthai (1994) crunch the
numbers and find that decreased price/increased availability of marijuana is
actually associated with decreased car accidents, probably because marijuana
is substituting for alcohol in the “have impairing substances and then go
driving” population. This finding – that marijuana and alcohol substitute for
each other – has been spotted again and again. Anderson & Rees (2013) find
that states that legalize medical marijuana see a 5% drop in beer sales. There
are however a few dissenting opinions: Cameron & Williams (2001), in
complex econometric simulations that may or may not resemble the real world
in any respect, find that increasing the price of alcohol increases marijuana
use, but increasing the price of marijuana does not affect alcohol use, and the
same researcher finds that banning alcohol on a college campus also decreases
marijuana use. Also, possibly marijuana use increases smoking? This whole
area is confusing, but I am most sympathetic to to the Andersen and Rees
statistics which say that medical marijuana states are associated with 13%
fewer traffic fatalities.

Overall conclusion for this section: full legalization of marijuana would free
about 20,000 people from jail (although most of them would not be exactly
fine upstanding citizens), prevent 700,000 arrests not resulting in jail time
per year, save between 2 and 14 billion dollars, and possibly reduce traffic
fatalities a few percent (or, for all we know, increase them).

IV. An Irresponsible Utilitarian Analysis

Decriminalization and legalization of medical marijuana seem, if we are to

trust the statistics in (I) saying they do not increase use among youth, like
almost unalloyed good things. Although there are some nagging hints of
doubt, they are not especially quantifiable and therefore not amenable to
analysis. Without a very strong predisposition to try as hard as possible to fit
the evidence into a pessimistic picture, I don’t think there’s a great argument
against either of these two propositions. Let’s concentrate on legalization,
which would mean something like “People can grow and sell as much
marijuana as they want and it’s totally legal for people over 21, with the same
level of penalties as today for people under 21”.

Section (I) concludes that legalization could lead to an increase in adult

marijuana use up to 50%. There’s not a lot of evidence on what it could do to
teen marijuana use, but since it seems teen marijuana use is less responsive to
legal changes, I made up a number and said 20%. Lest you think I am being
unfair, note that this is well below the percent increase predicted by the survey
that asked 18 year olds if they would start using marijuana if it were legal.

Right now about 1.5 million teenagers use marijuana “heavily”. Most of the
detrimental effects of marijuana seem concentrated in teens and people in
their early twenties; I’m going to artificially round that up to 2 million to catch
the early 20 year olds. If this 2 million number increased 20%, 400,000 extra
teens would start heavily using marijuana.

Those 400,000 teens would lose 8 IQ points each. IQ increases your yearly
earnings by about $500 per point, so these people would lose about $4,000 a
year. Making very strong assumptions about salary being a measure of value
to society, society would lose about $1.6 billion a year directly, plus various
intangibles from potential artists and scientists losing the ability to create
masterpieces and inventions, plus various really intangibles like a slightly
dumber electorate.

We need to use a different number to calculate psychosis risk, since the

studies were done on “people who had used marijuana at least once”. The
appropriate number turns out to be 8 million teenagers; of those, 1%, or
80,000, would naturally develop schizophrenia. If the 1.4 relative risk number
is correct, marijuana use will increase that to 112,000, for a total increase of
32,000 people. Schizophrenia pretty much always presents in the 15 – 25 age
window, so we’ll say we get 3,200 extra cases per year.

There were 35000 road traffic accident fatalities in the US last year. If greater
availability of marijuana decreases those fatalities by 13% (note that I am
using the number from medical marijuana legalization and not for marijuana
legalization per se, solely because it is a number I actually have), that will
cause 4500 fewer road traffic deaths per year. There may be additional
positive effects of alcohol substitution from, for example, less liver disease. But
there may also be additional negative effects from increasing use of tobacco, so
let’s just pretend those cancel out.

So here is my guess at the yearly results of marijuana legalization:

● 20,000 fewer prisoners (but they might switch to other criminal

enterprises)
● 700,000 fewer arrests
● $2 billion less in law enforcement costs
● Some amount of positive gain (let’s say $5 billion) in taxes
● 4500 fewer road traffic deaths (if you believe the preliminary alcohol
substitution numbers)
● 400,000 people with lower IQ
 ● $2 billion in social costs from above dumber people
● 3,200 more cases of schizophrenia a year

We’ll proceed to calculate the nonmonetary burden of each of these in QALYs,

then add the monetary burden in dollars, then convert.

The searchable public database of utility weights for all diseases (God I love
the 21st century) tells me that schizophrenia has a QALY weight of 0.73. It
generally starts around 20 and lasts a lifetime, so each case of schizophrenia
costs us 0.27 * 50 or 13.5 QALYs. Therefore, the total burden of the 3,200
added schizophrenia cases is 43 kiloQALYs.

There’s no good way to calculate the QALY weight of having 4-8 fewer IQ
points, and unfortunately this is going to end up being among the most
important numbers in our results. If we say the lifetime cost of this problem is
3 QALYs, and divide the number by eight to represent eight years worth of
teenagers in our sample population, we end up with 400,000/8 * 3 = 150
kiloQALYs.

My own survey tells me that being in prison has a QALY weight around 0.5.
Marijuana sentences generally last an average of three years, which suggests
that 1/3 of these marijuana prisoners are arrested every year, so the total
burden of the ~6000ish marijuana imprisonments each year is 3 * ~6000 *
0.5 = 10 kiloQALYs.

Assume the average road traffic death occurs at age 30, costing 40 years of
potential future life. The total cost of 4500 road traffic deaths is 40 * 4500 =
180 kiloQALYs.

The arrests are going to require even more fudging than normal. Average jail
time for a marijuana arrest (when awaiting trial) is “one to five days” – let’s
round that off to two and then use our prison number to say that the jail from
each arrest is 2/365 * 0.5 = three-thousandths of a QALY. I am going to
arbitrarily round this up to one one-hundredth of a QALY to account for
emotional trauma and the burden of fines, then even more arbitrarily round
this up to a tenth of a QALY to account for possibility of getting a criminal
record. This sets the burden of 700,000 arrests at 70 kiloQALYs.

Now our accounting is:

Costs from legalization compared to current system: 200 kQALYs and $2
billion

Benefits from legalization compared to current system: 260 kQALYs and $7

billion

Although it’s not going to be necessary, we can interconvert QALYs and dollars
at the going health-care rate of about $100,000/QALY ($100 million/kQALY):

Costs from legalization compared to current system: 220 kQALYs

Benefits from legalization compared to current system: 330 kQALYs

And get:

Net benefits from legalization: +110 kQALYs

Except that this is extremely speculative and irresponsible. By far the largest
component of the benefits of legalization turned out to be the effect on road
traffic accidents, which is based on only two studies and which may on further
research turn out to be a cost. And by far the largest component of the costs of
legalization turned out to be the effect on IQ, and we had to totally-wild-guess
the QALY cost of an IQ point loss. The wiggle room in my ignorance and
assumptions is more than large enough to cover the small gap between the two
policies in the results.

So my actual conclusion is:

There is not a sufficiently obvious order-of-magnitude difference

between the costs and benefits of marijuana legalization for a
evidence-based utilitarian analysis of costs and benefits to inform the
debate. You may return to your regularly scheduled wild speculation
and shrill accusations.

But I wouldn’t say this exercise is useless. For example, it suggests that
whether marijuana legalization is positive or negative on net depends almost
entirely on small changes in the road traffic accident rate. This is something
I’ve never heard anyone else mention, but which in retrospect should be
obvious; the few debatable health effects and the couple of people given short
jail sentences absolutely can’t compare to the potential for thousands more (or
fewer) traffic accidents which leave people permanently dead.

So my actual actual conclusion is:

We should probably stop caring about health effects of marijuana and

about imprisonment for marijuana-related offenses, and concentrate
all of our research and political energy on how marijuana affects
driving.

This cements my previous intuitions on irresponsible use of statistics – it’s

unlikely to unilaterally solve the problem, but it can be very good at pointing
out where you’re being irrational and suggesting new ways of looking at a
question.

EDIT: People in the comments have pointed out several important factors left
out, including:

● Some people enjoy smoking marijuana

● The opening of a permanent criminal record may mean arrests are
worse than I estimate. I can’t find good statistics on how often this
happens, but do note that decriminalization prevents a record from
being opened.
● Loss of 8 IQ points may have wider social effects than I estimate, since
IQ affects for example crime rate.
● Legalizing marijuana might remove a source of funding for organized
crime

Wheat: Much More Than You Wanted To Know

After hearing conflicting advice from diet books and the medical community, I
decided to look into wheat.

There are two sets of arguments against including wheat in the diet. First,
wheat is a carbohydrate, and some people support low carbohydrate diets.
Second, something might be especially dangerous about wheat itself.
It was much easier to figure out the state of the evidence on low-carbohydrate
diets. They seem to be at least as good and maybe a little better for weight loss
than traditional diets, but this might just be because there are lots of
carbohydrates that taste very good and when forced to avoid them, people eat
less stuff. They may or may not positively affect metabolic parameters and
quality of life. (1, 2, 3, 4). They don’t seem to cause either major health
benefits or major health risks in the medium term, which is the longest term
for which there is good data available – for example, they have no effect on
cancer rates. Overall they seem solid but unspectacular. But there’s a long way
between “low carbohydrate diet” and “stop eating wheat”.

So I was more interested in figuring out what was going on with wheat in
particular.

Wheat contains chemicals [citation needed]. The ones that keep cropping up
(no pun intended) in these kinds of discussions are phytates, lectins, gluten,
gliadin, and agglutinin, the last three of which for your convenience have been
given names that all sound alike.

Various claims have been made about these chemicals’ effects on health. These
have some prima facie plausibility. Plants don’t want to be eaten [citation
needed] and they sometimes fill their grains with toxins to discourage animals
from eating them. Ricin, a lectin in the seeds of the castor oil plant so toxic it
gets used in chemical warfare, is a pretty good example. Most toxins are less
dramatic, and most animals have enzymes that break down the toxins in their
preferred food sources effectively. But if humans are insufficiently good at
this, maybe because they didn’t evolve to eat wheat, some of these chemicals
could be toxic to humans.

On the other hand, this same argument covers every pretty much every grain
and vegetable and a lot of legumes – pretty much every plant-based food
source except edible fruits. So we need a lot more evidence to start worrying
about wheat.

I found the following claims about negative effects of wheat:

1. Some people without celiac disease are nevertheless sensitive to gluten.

 2. Wheat increases intestinal permeability, causing a leaky gut and
autoimmune disease.
3. Digestion of wheat produces opiates, which get you addicted to wheat.
4. Wheat something something something autism and schizophrenia.
5. Wheat has been genetically modified recently in ways that make it much
worse for you.
6. The lectins in wheat interfere with leptin receptors, making people
leptin resistant and therefore obese.

I’ll try to look at each of those and then turn to the positive claims made about
wheat to see if they’re strong enough to counteract them.

Some People Without Celiac Disease Are Sensitive To Gluten – Mostly

true but of limited significance

Celiac disease is one source of concern. Everybody on all sides of the wheat
debate agree about the basic facts of this condition, which affects a little less
than 1% of the population. They have severe reactions to the gluten in wheat.
Celiac disease is mostly marked by gastroentereological complaints –
diarrhea, bloating, abdominal pain – but it is also associated with vitamin
deficiencies, anaemia, skin reactions, infertility, and “malaise”. It can be pretty
straightforwardly detected by blood tests and gut biopsies and is not subtle.

People start to disagree about the existence of “gluten sensitivity”, which if it

existed would be a bad reaction to gluten even in people who don’t test
positive for celiac disease. Many people believe they have gastrointestinal (or
other) symptoms that go away when they eat gluten-free diets, but science
can’t find anything wrong with their intestines that could be causing the
problems.

A recent study somewhat vindicated these people. Biesiekierski 2011 describes

a double-blind randomized controlled trial: people who said they had “gluten-
sensitive” irritable bowel syndrome were put on otherwise gluten-free diets
and then randomly given either gluten or a placebo. They found that the
patients given gluten reported symptoms (mostly bowel-related and tiredness)
much more than those given placebo (p = 0.0001) but did not demonstrate
any of the chemical, immunological, or histological markers usually associated
with celiac disease. A similar Italian study found the same thing, except that
they did find a higher rate of anti-gluten antibodies in their patients. Another
study found that non-celiacs with antibodies to gluten had higher rates of
mortality. And another study did find a histological change in bowel barrier
function on this group of patients with the introduction of gluten. And another
study from the same group found that maybe FODMAPs, another component
of wheat, are equally or more responsible.

The journal Gastroenterology, which you may not be surprised to learn is the
leading journal in the field of gastroenterology, proclaims:

The current working definition of nonceliac gluten sensitivity (NCGS) is the

occurrence of irritable bowel syndrome (IBS)-like symptoms after the
ingestion of gluten and improvement after gluten withdrawal from the diet
after exclusion of celiac disease based on negative celiac serologies and/or
normal intestinal architecture and negative immunoglobulin (Ig)E-mediated
allergy tests to wheat. Symptoms reported to be consistent with NCGS are
both intestinal (diarrhea, abdominal discomfort or pain, bloating, and
flatulence) and extra-intestinal (headache, lethargy, poor concentration,
ataxia, or recurrent oral ulceration). These criteria strongly and conveniently
suggest that NCGS is best understood as a subset of IBS or perhaps a closely
related but distinct functional disorder. Although the existence of NCGS has
been slowly gaining ground with physicians and scientists, NCGS has enjoyed
rapid and widespread adoption by the general public.

But even this isn’t really that interesting. Maybe some people with irritable
bowel syndrome or certain positive antibodies should try avoiding gluten to
see if it helps their specific and very real symptoms. At most ten percent of
people are positive antibody testing, and not all of those even have symptoms.
That’s still a far cry from saying no one should eat wheat.

But the anti-wheat crowd says an alternative more sensitive antibody test
could raise sensitivity as high as a third of the population. The test seems to
have been developed by a well-respected and legitimate doctor, but it hasn’t as
far as I can tell been submitted for peer review or been confirmed by any other
source. Meh.

That’s boring anyway. The real excitement comes from sweeping declarations
that the entire population is sensitive to wheat.
Wheat Increases Intestinal Permeability Causing A Leaky Gut –
Probably true, of uncertain significance

There are gluten-induced mucosal changes in subjects without small bowel

disease. And gliadin increases intestinal permeability in the test tube, which
should be extremely concerning to any test tubes reading this.

But probably the bigger worry here are lectins, which include wheat germ
agglutinin. WGA affects the intestinal permeability of rats, which should be
extremely concerning to any rats reading this. The same substance has been
found to produce pro-inflammatory cytokines and interfere with the growth of
various organs including the gut.

So there’s pretty good evidence that chemicals in wheat can increase intestinal
permeability. Who cares?

For years, “leaky gut syndrome” was an alternative medicine diagnosis that
was soundly mocked by the mainstream medical establishment. Then the
mainstream medical establishment confirmed it existed and did that thing
where they totally excused their own mocking of it but were ABSOLUTELY
OUTRAGED that the alternative medicine community might have in some
cases been overenthusiastic about it.

Maybe I’m being too harsh. The alternative medicine community often does
take “leaky gut syndrome” way too far.

On the other hand, it’s probably real and Nature Clinical Practice is now
publishing papers saying it is “a key ingredient in the pathogenesis of
autoimmune diseases” and “offers innovative, unexplored approaches for the
treatment of these devastating diseases” and gut health has been deemed “a
new objective in medicine”. Preliminary changes to intestinal permeability
have been found in asthma, in diabetes, and even in depression.

But it’s not yet clear if this is cause and effect. Maybe the stress of having
asthma increases intestinal permeability somehow. Or maybe high intestinal
permeability causes asthma somehow. It sure seems like the latter might work
– all sorts of weird antigens and stuff from food can make it into the
bloodstream and alarm the immune system – but right now this is all
speculative.

So what we have is some preliminary evidence that wheat increases intestinal

permeability, and some preliminary evidence that increased intestinal
permeability is bad for you in a variety of ways.

And I don’t doubt that those two facts are true, but my knowledge of this
whole area is so weak that I wonder how much to worry.

What other foods increase intestinal permeability? Do they do it more or less

than wheat? Has anyone been investigating this? Are there common things
that affect intestinal permeability a thousand times more than wheat does,
such that everything done by wheat is totally irrelevant in comparison?

Do people without autoimmune diseases suffer any danger from increased

intestinal permeability? How much? Is it enough to offset the many known
benefits of eating wheat (to be discussed later?) Fiber seems to decrease
intestinal permeability and most people get their fiber from bread; would
decreasing bread consumption make leaky gut even worse?

I find this topic really interesting, but in a “I hope they do more research” sort
of way, not an “I shall never eat bread ever again” sort of way.

Digestion Of Wheat Produces Opiates, Which Get You Addicted To

Wheat – Probably false, but just true enough to be weird

Dr. William Davis, a cardiologist, most famously makes this claim in his book
Wheat Belly. He says that gliadin (a component of gluten) gets digested into
opiates, chemicals similar to morphine and heroin with a variety of bioactive
effects. This makes you addicted to food in general and wheat in particular,
the same way you would get addicted to morphine or heroin. This is why
people are getting fat nowadays – they’re eating not because they’re hungry,
but because they’re addicted. He notes that drugs that block opiates make
people want wheat less.

Does Wheat Make Us Fat And Sick, a review published in the Journal of
Cereal Science(they have journals for everything nowadays) is a good rebuttal
to some of Davis’ claims and a good pro-wheat resource in general.
They say that although gliadin does digest into opiates, those opiates are seven
unit peptides and so too big to be absorbed from the gut to the bloodstream.

(note that having opiates in your gut isn’t a great idea either since there are
lots of nerves there controlling digestion that can be affected by these drugs)

But I’m not sure this statement about absorption is even true. First, large
proteins can sometimes make it into the gut. Second, if all that leaky gut
syndrome stuff above is right, maybe the gut is unusually permeable after
wheat consumption. Third, there have been sporadically reported cases of
gliadin-derived opiates found in the urine, which implied they got absorbed
somehow.

There’s a better counterargument on the blog The Curious Coconut. She notes
that there’s no evidence these peptides can cross the blood-brain barrier, a
precondition for having any psychological effects. And although the opiate-
blocker naloxone does decrease appetite, this effect is not preferential for
wheat, and probably more related to the fact that opiates are the way the brain
reminds itself it’s enjoying itself (so that opiate-blocked people can’t enjoy
eating as much).

And then there’s the usual absence of qualifiers. Lots of things are “chemically
related” to other chemicals without having the same effect; are gliadin-derived
opiates addictive? Are they produced in quantities high enough to be relevant
in real life? Corn, spinach, and maybe meat can all get digested into opiates –
is there any evidence wheat-derived opiates are worse? This is really sketchy.

The most convincing counterargument is that as far as anyone can tell, wheat
makes people eat less, not more:

Prospective studies suggest that weight gain and increases in abdominal

adiposity over time are lower in people who consume more whole
grains. Analyses of the Physicians’ Health Study (27) and the Nurses’
Health Study (26) showed that those who consumed more whole grain
foods consistently weighed less than those who consumed fewer whole
grain foods at each follow-up period of the study. Koh-Banerjee et al.
(27) estimated that for every 40-g increase in daily whole grain intake,
the 8-y weight gain was lower by 1.1 kg.
I’ll discuss this in more detail later, but it does seem like a nail in the coffin for
the “people eat too much because they’re addicted to wheat” theory.

Still, who would have thought that wheat being digested into opiates was even
a little true?

Wheat Something Something Something Autism And Schizophrenia –

Definitely weird

Since gluten-free diets get tried for everything, and everything gets tried for
autism, it was overdetermined that people would try gluten-free diets for
autism.

All three of the issues mentioned above – immune reactivity to gluten, leaky
guts, and gliadin-derived opiates – have been suggested as mechanisms for
why gluten free diets might be useful in autism.

Of studies that have investigated, a review found that seven reported positive
results, four negative results, and two mixed results – but that all of the
studies involved were terrible and the ones that were slightly less terrible
seemed to be more negative. The authors described this as evidence against
gluten-free diets for autism, although someone with the opposite bias could
have equally well looked at the same review and described it as supportive.

However, a very large epidemiological study found (popular article, study

abstract) that people with antibodies to gluten had three times the incidence
of autism spectrum disease than people without, and that the antibodies
preceded the development of the condition.

Also, those wheat-derived opioids from the last section – as well as milk-
derived opioids called casomorphins – seem to be detected at much higher
rates in autistic people.

Both of these factors may have less to do with wheat in particular and more to
do with some general dysregulation of peptide metabolism in autism. If for
some reason the gut kept throwing peptides into the body inappropriately, this
would disrupt neurodevelopment, lead to more peptides in the urine, and give
the immune system more chance to react to gluten.
The most important thing to remember here is that it would be really wrong to
say wheat might be “the cause” of autism. Most likely people do not improve
on gluten-free diets. While there’s room to argue that people might have
picked up a small signal of them improving a little, the idea that this totally
removes the condition is right out. If we were doing this same study with
celiac disease, we wouldn’t be wasting our time with marginally significant
results. Besides, we know autism is multifactorial, and we know it probably
begins in utero.

Schizophrenia right now is in a similar place. Schizophrenics are five to seven

times more likely to have anti-gliadin antibodies as the general population. We
can come up with all sorts of weird confounders – maybe antipsychotic
medications increase gut permeability? – but that’s a really strong result. And
schizophrenics have frank celiac disease at five to ten times the rate of the
general population. Furthermore, a certain subset of schizophrenics sees a
dramatic reduction in symptoms when put on a strict gluten-free diet (this is
psychiatrically useless, both because we don’t know which subset, and because
given how much trouble we have getting schizophrenics to swallow one lousy
pill every morning, the chance we can get them to stick to a gluten-free diet is
basically nil). And like those with autism, schizophrenics show increased levels
of weird peptides in their urine.

But a lot of patients with schizophrenia don’t have reactions to gluten, a lot
don’t improve on a gluten free diet, and other studies question the research
showing that any of them at all do.

The situation here looks a lot like autism – a complex multifactorial process
that probably isn’t caused by gluten but where we see interesting things going
on in the vague territory of gluten/celiac/immune response/gut permeability/
peptides, with goodness only knows which ones come first and which are
causal.
Wheat Has Been Genetically Modified Recently In Ways That Make It
Much Worse For You – Probably true, especially if genetically modified
means “not genetically modified” and “recently” means “nine thousand
years ago”

If you want to blame the “obesity epidemic” or “autism epidemic” or any other
epidemic on wheat, at some point you have to deal with people eating wheat
for nine thousand years and not getting epidemics of these things. Dr. Davis
and other wheat opponents have turned to claims that wheat has been
“genetically modified” in ways that improve crop yield but also make it more
dangerous. Is this true?

Wheat has not been genetically modified in the classic sense, the one where
mad scientists with a god complex inject genes from jellyfish into wheat and
all of a sudden your bread has tentacles and every time you try to eat it it
stings you. But it has been modified in the same way as all of our livestock,
crops, and domestic pets – by selective breeding. Modern agricultural wheat
doesn’t look much like its ancient wild ancestors.

The Journal Of Cereal Science folk don’t seem to think this is terribly relevant.
They say:

Gliadins are present in all wheat lines and in related wild species. In addition,
seeds of certain ancient types of tetraploid wheat have even greater amounts
of total gliadin than modern accessions…There is no evidence that selective
breeding has resulted in detrimental effects on the nutritional properties or
health benefits of the wheat grain, with the exception that the dilution of other
components with starch occurs in modern high yielding lines (starch
comprising about 80% of the grain dry weight). Selection for high protein
content has been carried out for bread making, with modern bread making
varieties generally containing about 1–2% more protein (on a grain dry weight
basis) than varieties bred for livestock feed when grown under the same
conditions. However, this genetically determined difference in protein content
is less than can be achieved by application of nitrogen fertilizer. We consider
that statements made in the book of Davis, as well as in related interviews,
cannot be substantiated based on published scientific studies.
In support of this proposition, in the test tube ancient grains were just as bad
for celiac patients’ immune systems as modern ones.

And yet in one double-blind randomized-controlled trial, people with irritable

bowel syndrome felt better on a diet of ancient grains than modern ones (p <
0.0001); and in another, people on an ancient grain diet had lower
inflammatory markers and generally better nutritional parameters than
people on a modern grain one. Isn’t that interesting?

Even though it’s a little bit weird and I don’t think anyone understands the
exact nutrients at work, sure, let’s give this one to the ancient grain people.

The Lectins In Wheat Interfere With Leptin Receptors, Making People

Leptin Resistant And Therefore Obese – Currently at “mere assertion”
level until I hear some evidence

So here’s the argument. Your brain has receptors for the hormone leptin,
which tells you when to stop eating. But “lectin” sounds a lot like “leptin”, and
this confuses the receptors, so they give up and tell you to just eat as much as
you want.

Okay, this probably isn’t the real argument. But even though a lot of wheat
opponents cite the heck out of this theory, the only presentation of evidence I
can find is Jonsson et al (2005), which points out that there are a lot of
diseases of civilization, they seem to revolve around leptin, something
common to civilization must be causing them, and maybe that thing could be
lectin.

But civilization actually contains more things than a certain class of proteins
found in grains! There’s poor evidence of lectin actually interfering with the
leptin receptor in humans. The only piece of evidence they provide is a
nonsignificant trend toward more cardiovascular disease in people who eat
more whole grains in one study, and as we will see, that is wildly contradicted
by all other studies.

This one does not impress me much.

Wheat Is Actually Super Good For You And You Should Have It All The
Time – Probably more evidence than the other claims on this list

Before I mention any evidence, let me tell you what we’re going to find.

We’re going to find very, very many large studies finding conclusively that
whole grains are great in a lot of different ways.

And we’re not going to know whether it’s at all applicable to the current
question.

Pretty much all these studies show that people with some high level of “whole
grain consumption” are much healthier than people with some lower level of
same. That sounds impressive.

But what none of these studies are going to do a good job ruling out is that
whole grain is just funging against refined grain which is even worse. Like
maybe the people who report low whole grain consumption are eating lots of
refined grain, and so more total grain, and the high-whole-grain-consumption
people are actually eating less grain total.

They’re also not going to rule out the universal problem that if something is
widely known to be healthy (like eating whole grains) then the same health-
conscious people who exercise and eat lots of vegetables will start doing it, so
when we find that the people doing it are healthier, for all we know it’s just
that the people doing it are exercising and eating vegetables.

That having been said, eating lots of whole grain decreases BMI, metabolic
risk factors, fasting insulin, and body weight (1, 2, 3, 4,5.)

The American Society For Nutrition Symposium says:

Several mechanisms have been suggested to explain why whole grain

intake may play a role in body weight management. Fiber content of
whole grain foods may influence food volume and energy density,
gastric emptying, and glycemic response. Whole grains has also been
proposed to play an important role in promoting satiety; individuals
who eat more whole grain foods may eat less because they feel satisfied
with less food. Some studies comparing feelings of fullness or actual
food intake after ingestion of certain whole grains, such as barley, oats,
buckwheat, or quinoa, compared with refined grain controls indicated a
trend toward increased satiety with whole grains. These data are in
accordance with analyses determining the satiety index of a large
number of foods, which showed that the satiety index of traditional
white bread was lower than that of whole grain breads. However, in
general, these satiety studies have not observed a reduction in energy
intake; hence, further research is needed to better understand the
satiety effects of whole grains and their impact on weight management.

Whole grains, in some studies, have also been observed to lower the
glycemic and insulin responses, affect hunger hormones, and reduce
subsequent food intake in adults. Ingestion of specific whole grains has
been shown to influence hormones that affect appetite and fullness,
such as ghrelin, peptide YY, glucose-dependent insulinotropic
polypeptide, glucagon-like peptide 1, and cholecystokinin. Whole grain
foods with fiber, such as wheat bran or functional doses of high
molecular weight β-glucans, compared with lower fiber or refined
counterparts have been observed to alter gastric emptying rates.
Although it is likely that whole grains and dietary fiber may have similar
effects on satiety, fullness, and energy intake, further research is needed
to elucidate how, and to what degree, short-term satiety influences body
weight in all age groups.

Differences in particle size of whole grain foods may have an effect on

satiety, glycemic response, and other metabolic and biochemical (leptin,
insulin, etc.) responses. Additionally, whole grains have been suggested
to have prebiotic effects. For example, the presence of oligosaccharides,
RS, and other fermentable carbohydrates may increase the number of
fecal bifidobacteria and lactobacilli (49), thus potentially increasing the
SCFA production and thereby potentially altering the metabolic and
physiological responses that affect body weight regulation.

In summary, the current evidence among a predominantly Caucasian

population suggests that consuming 3 or more servings of whole grains
per day is associated with lower BMI, lower abdominal adiposity, and
trends toward lower weight gain over time. However, intervention
studies have been inconsistent regarding weight loss
The studies that combined whole and refined grains are notably fewer. But
Dietary Intake Of Whole And Refined Grain Breakfast Cereals And Weight
Gain In Men finds that among 18,000 male doctors, those who ate breakfast
cereal (regardless of whether it was whole and refined) were less likely to
become overweight several years later than those who did not (p = 0.01). A
book with many international studies report several that find a health benefit
of whole grains, several that find a health benefit of all grains (Swedes who ate
more grains had lower abdominal obesity; Greeks who ate a grain-rich diet
were less likely to become obese; Koreans who ate a “Westernized” bread-and-
dairy diet were less likely to have abdominal obesity) and no studies that
showed any positive association between grains and obesity, whether whole or
refined.

I cannot find good interventional trials on what happens when a population

replaces non-grain with grain.

On the other hand, Dr. Davis and his book Wheat Belly claim:

Typically, people who say goodbye to wheat lose a pound a day for the
first 10 days. Weight loss then slows to yield 25-30 pounds over the
subsequent 3-6 months (differing depending on body size, quality of diet
at the start, male vs. female, etc.)

Recall that people who are wheat-free consume, on average, 400

calories less per day and are not driven by the 90-120 minute cycle of
hunger that is common to wheat. It means you eat when you are hungry
and you eat less. It means a breakfast of 3 eggs with green peppers and
sundried tomatoes, olive oil, and mozzarella cheese for breakfast at 7 am
and you’re not hungry until 1 pm. That’s an entirely different experience
than the shredded wheat cereal in skim milk at 7 am, hungry for a snack
at 9 am, hungry again at 11 am, counting the minutes until lunch. Eat
lunch at noon, sleepy by 2 pm, etc. All of this goes away by banning
wheat from the diet, provided the lost calories are replaced with real
healthy foods.”

Needless to say, he has no studies supporting this assertion. But the weird
thing is, his message board is full of people who report having exactly this
experience, my friends who have gone paleo have reported exactly this
experience, and when I experimented with it, I had pretty much exactly this
experience. Even the blogger from whom I took some of the strongest evidence
criticizing Davis says she had exactly this experience.

The first and most likely explanation is that anecdotal evidence sucks and we
should shut the hell up. Are there other, less satisfying explanations?

Maybe completely removing wheat from the diet has a nonlinear effect relative
to cutting down on it? For example, in celiac disease there is no such thing as
“partially gluten free” – if you have any gluten at all, your disease comes back
in full force. This probably wouldn’t explain Dr. Davis’ observation – neither I
nor my other wheatless-experimentation friends were as scrupulous as a celiac
would have to be. But maybe there’s a nonlinear discrepancy between people
who have 75% the wheat of a normal person and 10% the wheat of a normal
person?

Maybe there’s an effect where people who like wheat but remove it from the
diet are eating things they don’t like, and so eat less of them? But people who
don’t like wheat like other stuff, and so eat lots of that?

Maybe wheat in those studies is totally 100% a confounder for whether people
are generally healthy and follow their doctor’s advice, and the rest of the
doctor’s advice is really good but the wheat itself is terrible?

Maybe cutting out wheat has really positive short-term effects, but neutral to
negative long-term effects?

Maybe as usual in these sorts of situations, the simplest explanation is best.

Final Thoughts

Non-celiac gluten sensitivity is clearly a real thing. It seems to produce

irritable bowel type symptoms. If you have irritable bowel type symptoms, it
might be worth trying a gluten-free diet for a while. But the excellent evidence
for its existence doesn’t seem to carry over to the normal population who don’t
experience bowel symptoms.

What these people have are vague strands of evidence. Something seems to be
going on with autism and schizophrenia – but most people don’t have autism
or schizophrenia. The intestinal barrier seems to become more permeable with
possible implications for autoimmune diseases – but most people don’t have
autoimmune disease. Some bad things seem to happen in rats and test tubes –
but most people aren’t rats or test tubes.

You’d have to want to take a position of maximum caution – wheat seems to

do all these things, and even though none of them in particular obviously hurt
me directly, all of them together make it look like the body just doesn’t do very
well with this substance, and probably other ways the body doesn’t do very
well with this substance will turn up, and some of them probably affect me.

There’s honor in a position of maximum caution, especially in a field as

confusing as nutrition. It would not surprise me if the leaky gut connection
turned into something very big that had general implications for, for example,
mental health. And then people who ate grain might regret it.

But stack that up against the pro-wheat studies. None of them are great, but
they mostly do something the anti-wheat studies don’t: show direct effect on
things that are important to you. Most people don’t have autism or
schizophrenia, but most people do have to worry about cardiovascular disease.
We do have medium-term data that wheat doesn’t cause cancer, or increase
obesity, or contribute to diabetes, or any of that stuff, and at this point solely
based on the empirical data it seems much more likely to help with those
things than hurt.

I hope the role of intestinal permeability in autoimmune disease gets the

attention it deserves – and when it does, I might have to change my mind. I
hope people stop being jerks about gluten sensitivity, admit it exists, and find
better ways to deal with it. And if people find that eliminating bread from their
diet makes them feel better or lose weight faster, cool.

But as far as I can tell the best evidence is on the pro-wheat side of things for
most people at most times.

[EDIT: An especially good summary of the anti-wheat position is 6 Ways

Wheat Can Destroy Your Health. An especially good pro-wheat summary is
Does Wheat Make Us Fat And Sick?]
SSRIs: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
The claim that “SSRIs don’t work” or “SSRIs are mostly just placebo” is most
commonly associated with Irving Kirsch, a man with the awesome job title of
“Associate Director Of The Program For Placebo Studies at Harvard”.

(fun fact: there’s actually no such thing as “Placebo Studies”, but Professor
Kirsch’s belief that he directs a Harvard department inspires him to create
much higher-quality research.)

In 1998, he published a meta-analysis of 19 placebo-controlled drug trials that

suggested that almost all of the benefits of antidepressants were due to the
placebo effect. Psychiatrists denounced him, saying that you can choose pretty
much whatever studies you want for a meta-analysis.

After biding his time for a decade, in 2008 he struck back with another meta-
analysis, this being one of the first papers in all of medical science to take the
audacious step of demanding all the FDA’s data through the Freedom of
Information Act. Since drug companies are required to report all their studies
to the FDA, this theoretically provides a rare and wonderful publication-bias-
free data set. Using this set, he found that, although antidepressants did seem
to outperform placebo, the effect was not “clinically significant” except “at the
upper end of very severe depression”.

This launched a minor war between supporters and detractors. Probably the
strongest support he received was a big 2010 meta-analysis by Fournier et al,
which found that

The magnitude of benefit of antidepressant medication compared with

placebo increases with severity of depression symptoms and may be
minimal or nonexistent, on average, in patients with mild or moderate
symptoms. For patients with very severe depression, the benefit of
medications over placebo is substantial.

Of course, a very large number of antidepressants are given to people with

mild or moderate depression. So what now?

Let me sort the debate about antidepressants into a series of complaints:

 1. Antidepressants were oversold and painted as having more biochemical
backing than was really justified
2. Modern SSRI antidepressants are no better than older tricyclic and
MAOI antidepressants, but are prescribed much more because of said
overselling
3. There is large publication bias in the antidepressant literature
4. The effect size of antidepressants is clinically insignificant
5. And it only becomes significant in the most severe depression
6. And even the effects found are only noticed by doctors, not the patients
themselves
7. And even that unsatisfying effect might be a result of “active placebo”
rather than successful treatment
8. And antidepressants have much worse side effects than you have been
led to believe
9. Therefore, we should give up on antidepressants (except maybe in the
sickest patients) and use psychotherapy instead

1. Antidepressants were oversold and painted as having more

biochemical backing than was really justified – Totally true

It is starting to become slightly better known that the standard story –

depression is a deficiency of serotonin, antidepressants restore serotonin and
therefore make you well again – is kind of made up.

There was never much more evidence for the serotonin hypothesis than that
chemicals that increased serotonin tended to treat depression – making the
argument that “antidepressants are biochemically justified because they treat
the low serotonin that is causing your depression” kind of circular. Saying
“Serotonin treats depression, therefore depression is, at root, a serotonin
deficiency” is about as scientifically grounded as saying “Playing with puppies
makes depressed people feel better, therefore depression is, at root, a puppy
deficiency”.

The whole thing became less tenable with the discovery that several chemicals
that didn’t increase serotonin were also effective antidepressants – not to
mention one chemical, tianeptine, that decreases serotonin. Now the
conventional wisdom is that depression is a very complicated disturbance in
several networks and systems within the brain, and serotonin is one of the
inputs and/or outputs of those systems.

Likewise, a whole bunch of early ’90s claims: that modern antidepressants

have no side effects, that they produce miraculous improvements in everyone,
that they make you better than well – seem kind of silly now. I don’t think
anyone is arguing against the proposition that there was an embarrassing
amount of hype that has now been backed away from.

2. Modern SSRI antidepressants are no better than older tricyclic and

MAOI antidepressants, but are prescribed much more because of said
overselling – First part true, second part less so

Most studies find SSRI antidepressants to be no more effective in treating

depression than older tricyclic and MAOI antidepressants. Most studies aren’t
really powered to do this. It seems clear that there aren’t spectacular
differences, and hunting for small differences has proven very hard.

If you’re a geek about these sorts of things, you know that a few studies have
found non-significant advantages for Prozac and Paxil over older drugs like
clomipramine, and marginally-significant advantages for Effexor over SSRIs.
But conventional wisdom is that tricyclics can be even more powerful than
SSRIs for certain very severe hospitalized depression cases, and a lot of people
think MAOIs worked better than anything out there today.

But none of this is very important because the real reason SSRIs are so
popular is the side effect profile. While it is an exaggeration to say they have
no side effects (see above) they are an obvious improvement over older classes
of medication in this regard.

Tricyclics had a bad habit of causing fatal arrythmias when taken at high
doses. This is really really bad in depression, because depressed people tend to
attempt suicide and the most popular method of suicide attempt is overdosing
on your pills. So if you give depressed people a pill that is highly fatal in
overdose, you’re basically enabling suicidality. This alone made the risk-
benefit calculation for tricyclics unattractive in a lot of cases. Add in dry
mouth, constipation, urinary problems, cognitive impairment, blurry vision,
and the occasional tendency to cause heart arrythmias even when taken
correctly, and you have a drug you’re not going to give people who just say
they’re feeling a little down.

MAOIs have their own problems. If you’re using MAOIs and you eat cheese,
beer, chocolate, beans, liver, yogurt, soy, kimchi, avocados, coconuts, et cetera,
et cetera, et cetera, you have a chance of precipitating a “hypertensive crisis”,
which is exactly as fun as it sounds. As a result, people who are already
miserable and already starving themselves are told they can’t eat like half of
food. And once again, if you tell people “Eat these foods with this drug and you
die” and a week later the person wants to kill themselves and has some cheese
in the house, then you’re back to enabling suicide. There are some MAOIs that
get around these restrictions in various clever ways, but they tend to be less
effective.

SSRIs were the first class of antidepressants that mostly avoided these
problems and so were pretty well-placed to launch a prescribing explosion
even apart from being pushed by Big Pharma.

3. There is large publication bias in the antidepressant literature –

True, but not as important as some people think

People became more aware of publication bias a couple of years after serious
research into antidepressants started, and it’s not surprising that these were a
prime target. When this issue rose to scientific consciousness, several
researchers tried to avoid the publication bias problem by using only FDA
studies of antidepressants. The FDA mandates that its studies be pre-
registered and the results reported no matter what they are. This provides a
“control group” by which accusations of publication bias can be investigated.
The results haven’t been good. From Gibbons et al:

Recent reports suggest that efficacy of antidepressant medications

versus placebo may be overstated, due to publication bias and less
efficacy for mildly depressed patients. For example, of 74 FDA-
registered randomized controlled trials (RCTs) involving 12
antidepressants in 12,564 patients, 94% of published trials were positive
whereas only 51% of all FDA registered studies were positive.

Turner et al express the same data a different way:

 The FDA deemed 38 of the 74 studies (51%) positive, and all but 1 of the
38 were published. The remaining 36 studies (49%) were deemed to be
either negative (24 studies) or questionable (12). Of these 36 studies, 3
were published as not positive, whereas the remaining 33 either were
not published (22 studies) or were published, in our opinion, as positive
(11) and therefore conflicted with the FDA’s conclusion. Overall, the
studies that the FDA judged as positive were approximately 12 times as
likely to be published in a way that agreed with the FDA analysis as were
studies with nonpositive results according to the FDA (risk ratio, 11.7;
95% confidence interval [CI], 6.2 to 22.0; P<0.001). This association of
publication status with study outcome remained significant when we
excluded questionable studies and when we examined publication status
without regard to whether the published conclusions and the FDA
conclusions were in agreement

The same source tells us about the effect this bias had on effect size:

For each of the 12 drugs, the effect size derived from the journal articles
exceeded the effect size derived from the FDA reviews (sign test,
P<0.001). The magnitude of the increases in effect size between the FDA
reviews and the published reports ranged from 11 to 69%, with a median
increase of 32%. A 32% increase was also observed in the weighted
mean effect size for all drugs combined, from 0.31 (95% CI, 0.27 to 0.35)
to 0.41 (95% CI, 0.36 to 0.45).

I think a lot of this has since been taken on board, and most of the rest of the
research I’ll be talking about uses FDA data rather than published data. But as
you can see, the overall change in effect size – from 0.31 to 0.41 – is not that
terribly large.

4. The effect size of antidepressants is clinically insignificant –

Depends what you mean by “clinically insignificant”

As mentioned above, when you try to control for publication bias, the effect
size of antidepressant over placebo is 0.31.

This number can actually be broken down further. According to McAllister

and Williams, who are working off of slightly different data and so get slightly
different numbers, the effect size of placebo is 0.92 and the effect size of
antidepressants is 1.24, which means antidepressants have a 0.32 SD benefit
over placebo. Several different studies get similar numbers, including the
Kirsch meta-analysis that started this whole debate.

Effect size is a hard statistic to work with (albeit extremely fun). The guy who
invented effect size suggested that 0.2 be called “small”, 0.5 be called
“medium”, and 0.8 be called “large”. NICE, a UK health research group,
somewhat randomly declared that effect sizes greater than 0.5 be called
“clinically significant” and effect sizes less than 0.5 be called “not clinically
significant”, but their reasoning was basically that 0.5 was a nice round
number, and a few years later they changed their mind and admitted they had
no reason behind their decision.

Despite these somewhat haphazard standards, some people have decided that
antidepressants’ effect size of 0.3 means they are “clinically insignificant”.

(please note that “clinically insignificant” is very different from “statistically

insignificant” aka “has a p-value less than 0.05.” Nearly everyone agrees
antidepressants have a statistically significant effect – they do something. The
dispute is over whether they have a clinically significant effect – the something
they do is enough to make a real difference to real people)

There have been a couple of attempts to rescue antidepressants by raising the

effect size. For example, Horder et al note that Kirsch incorrectly took the
difference between the average effect of drugs and the average effect of
placebos, rather than the average drug-placebo difference (did you follow
that?) When you correct that mistake, the drug-placebo difference rises
significantly to about 0.4.

They also note that Kirsch’s study lumps all antidepressants together. This
isn’t necessarily wrong. But it isn’t necessarily right, either. For example, his
study used both Serzone (believed to be a weak antidepressant, rarely used)
and Paxil (believed to be a stronger antidepressant, commonly used). And in
fact, by his study, Paxil showed an effect size of 0.47, compared to Serzone’s
0.21. But since the difference was not statistically significant, he averaged
them together and said that “antidepressants are ineffective”. In fact, his study
showed that Paxil was effective, but when you average it together with a very
ineffective drug, the effect disappears. He can get away with this because of
the arcana of statistical significance, but by the same arcana I can get away
with not doing that.

So right now we have three different effect sizes. 1.2 for placebo + drug, 0.5 for
drug alone if we’re being statistically merciful, 0.3 for drug alone if we’re being
harsh and letting the harshest critic of antidepressants pull out all his
statistical tricks.

The reason effect size is extremely fun is that it allows you to compare effects
in totally different domains. I will now attempt to do this in order to see if I
can give you an intuitive appreciation for what it means for antidepressants.

Suppose antidepressants were in fact a weight loss pill.

An effect size of 1.2 is equivalent to the pill making you lose 32 lb.

An effect size of 0.5 is equivalent to the pill making you lose 14 lb.

An effect size of 0.3 is equivalent to the pill making you lose 8.5 lb.

Or suppose that antidepressants were a growth hormone pill taken by short

people.

An effect size of 1.2 is equivalent to the pill making you grow 3.4 in.

An effect size of 0.5 is equivalent to the pill making you grow 1.4 in.

An effect size of 0.3 is equivalent to the pill making you grow 0.8 in.

Or suppose that antidepressants were a cognitive enhancer to boost IQ. This

site gives us some context about occupations.

An effect size of 1.2 is equivalent to the pill making you gain 18 IQ points, ie
from the average farm laborer to the average college professor.

An effect size of 0.5 is equivalent to the pill making you gain 7.5 IQ points, ie
from the average farm laborer to the average elementary school teacher.
An effect size of 0.3 is equivalent to the pill making you gain 5 IQ points, ie
from the average farm laborer to the average police officer.

To me, these kinds of comparisons are a little more revealing than NICE
arbitrarily saying that anything below 0.5 doesn’t count. If you could take a
pill that helps your depression as much as gaining 1.4 inches would help a self-
conscious short person, would you do it? I’d say it sounds pretty good.

5. The effect of antidepressants only becomes significant in the most

severe depression – Everything about this statement is terrible and
everyone involved should feel bad

So we’ve already found that saying antidepressants have an “insignificant”

effect size is kind of arbitrary. But what about the second part of the claim –
that they only have measurable effects in “the most severe depression”?

A lot of depression research uses a test called the HAM-D, which scores
depression from 0 (none) to 52 (max). Kirsch found that the effect size of
antidepressants increased as HAM-D scores increased, meaning
antidepressants become more powerful as depression gets worse. He was only
able to find a “clinically significant” effect size (d > 0.5) for people with HAM-
D scores greater than 28. People have come up with various different
mappings of HAM-D scores to words. For example, the APA says:

(0-7) No depression

(8-13) Mild depression

(14-18) Moderate depression

(19-22) Severe depression

(>=23) Very severe depression

Needless to say, a score of 28 sounds pretty bad.

We saw that Horder et al corrected some statistical deficiencies in Kirsch’s

original paper which made antidepressants improve slightly. With their
methodology, antidepressants reach our arbitrary 0.5 threshold around HAM-
D score 26. Another similar “antidepressants don’t work” study got the
number 25.

Needless to say, when anything over 23 is “very severe”, 25 or 26 still sounds

pretty bad.

Luckily, people completely disagree on the meanings of basic words! Very

Severely Stupidis a cute article on Neuroskeptic that demonstrates that five
different people and organizations suggest five different systems for rating
HAM-D scores. Bech 1996 calls our 26 cutoff “major”; Funakawa 2007 calls it
“moderate”; NICE 2009 calls it “severe”. APA is unique in calling it very
severe. NICE’s scale is actually the exact same as the APA scale with every
category renamed to sound one level less threatening. Facepalm.

Ghaemi and Vohringer(2011) go further and say that the real problem is that
Kirsch is using the standard for depressive symptoms, but that real clinical
practice involves depressive episodes. That is, all this “no depression” to
“severe” stuff is about whether someone can be diagnosed with depression;
presumably the people on antidepressants are definitely depressed and we
need a new model of severity to determine just how depressed they are. As
they put it:

the authors of the meta-analysis claimed to use the American

Psychiatric Association’s criteria for severity of symptoms…in so doing,
they ignore the obvious fact that symptoms differ from episodes: the
typical major depressive episode (MDE) produced HDRS scores of at
least 18 or above. Thus, by using symptom criteria, all MDEs are by
definition severe or very severe. Clinicians know that some patients
meet MDE criteria and are still able to work; indeed others frequently
may not even recognize that such a person is clinically depressed. Other
patients are so severe they function poorly at work so that others
recognize something is wrong; some clinically depressed patients cannot
work at all; and still others cannot even get out of bed for weeks or
months on end. Clearly, there are gradations of severity within MDEs,
and the entire debate in the above meta-analysis is about MDEs, not
depressive symptoms, since all patients had to meet MDE criteria in all
the studiesincluded in the meta-analysis (conducted by pharmaceutical
companies for FDA approval for treatment of MDEs).
 The question, therefore, is not about severity of depressive symptoms,
but severity of depressive episodes, assuming that someone meets DSM-
IV criteria for a major depressive episode. On that question, a number of
prior studies have examined the matter with the HDRS and with other
depression rating scales, and the three groupings shown in table 2
correspond rather closely with validated and replicated definitions of
mild (HDRS <24), moderate="" (hdrs="" 24–28),="" and=""
severe="">28) major depressive episodes.

So, depending on whether we use APA criteria or G&V criteria, an HRDS of 23

is either “mild” (G&V) or “very severe” (APA).

Clear as mud? I agree that in one sense this is terrible. But in another sense it’s
actually a very important point. Kirsch’s sample was really only “severe” in the
context of everyone, both those who were clinically diagnosable with major
depression and those who weren’t. When we get to people really having a
major depressive episode, a score of 26 to 28 isn’t so stratospheric. But
meanwhile:

The APA seem to have ignored the fact that the HAMD did not
statistically significantly distinguish between “Severe” and “Moderate”
depression anyway (p=0.1)

Oh. That gives us some perspective, I guess. Also, some other people make the
opposite critique and say that the HAM-D can’t distinguish very well at the
low end. Suppose HAM-Ds less than ten are meaningless and random. This
would look a lot like antidepressants not working in mild depression.

Getting back to Ghaemi and Vohringer, they try a different tack and suggest
that there is a statistical floor effect. They quite reasonably say that if someone
had a HAM-D score of 30, and antidepressants solved 10% of their problem,
they would lose 3 HAM-D points, which looks impressive. But if someone had
a HAM-D score of 10, and antidepressants (still) solved 10% of their problem,
they would only lose 1 HAM-D point, which sounds disappointing. But either
way, the antidepressants are doing the same amount of work. If you adjust
everything for baseline severity, it’s easy to see that antidepressants here
would have the same efficacy in severe and mild depression, even though it
doesn’t look that way at first.
I am confused that this works for effect sizes, because I expect effect sizes to be
relative to the standard deviation in a sample. However, several important
people tell me that it does, and that when you do this Kirsch’s effect size goes
from 0.32 to 0.40.

(I think these people are saying the exact same thing, but so overly
mathematically that I’ve been staring at it for an hour and I’m still not certain)

More important, Ghaemi and Vohringer say once you do this, antidepressants
reach the magic 0.5 number not only in severe depression, but also in
moderate depression. However, when I look at this claim closely, almost all
the work is done by G&V’s adjusted scale in which Kirsch’s “very severe”
corresponds to their “mild”.

(personal aside: I got an opportunity to talk to Dr. Ghaemi about this paper
and clear up some of my confusion. Well, not exactly an opportunity to talk
about it, per se. Actually, he was supposed to be giving me a job interview at
the time. I guess we both got distracted. This may be one of several reasons I
do not currently work at Tufts.)

So. In conclusion, everyone has mapped HAM-D numbers into words like
“moderate” in totally contradictory ways, such that one person’s “mild” is
another person’s “very severe”. Another person randomly decided that we can
only call things “clinically significant” if they go above the nice round number
of 0.5, then retracted this. So when people say “the effects of antidepressants
are only clinically significant in severe depression”, what they mean is “the
effects of antidepressants only reach a totally arbitrary number one guy made
up and then retracted, in people whose HAM-D score is above whatever
number I make up right now.” Depending on what number you choose and
what word you make up to describe it, you can find that antidepressants are
useful in moderate depression, or severe depression, or super-duper double-
dog-severe depression, or whatever.

Science!
6. The beneficial effects of antidepressants are only noticed by
doctors, not the patients themselves – Partly true but okay

So your HAM-D score has gone down and you’re no longer officially in super-
duper double-dog severe depression anymore. What does that mean for the
patient?

There are consistent gripes that antidepressant studies that use patients rating
their own mood show less improvement than studies where doctors rate how
they think a patient is doing, or standardized tests like the HAM-D.

Some people try to turn this into a conspiracy, where doctors who have
somehow broken the double-blinding of studies try to report that patients
have done better because doctors like medications and want them to succeed.

The reality is more prosaic. It has been known for forty years that people’s
feelings are the last thing to improve during recovery from depression.

This might sound weird – what is depression except people’s feelings? But the
answer is “quite a lot”. Depressed people often eat less, sleep more, have less
energy, and of course are more likely to attempt suicide. If a patient gets
treated with an antidepressant, and they start smiling more and talking more
and getting out of the house and are no longer thinking about suicide, their
doctor might notice – but the patient herself might still feel really down-in-
the-dumps.

I am going to get angry comments from people saying I am declaring

psychiatric patients too stupid to notice their own recovery or something like
that, but it is a very commonly observed phenomenon. Patients have access to
internal feelings which they tend to weight much more heavily than external
factors like how much they are able to get done during a day or how many
crying spells they have, sometimes so much so that they completely miss these
factors. Doctors (or family members, or other outside observers) who don’t see
these internal feelings, are better able to notice outward signs. As a result, it is
pretty universally believed that doctors spot signs of recovery in patients long
before the patients themselves think they are recovering. This isn’t just
imaginary – it’s found it datasets where the doctors are presumably blinded
and with good inter-rater reliability.
Because most antidepressant trials are short, a lot of them reach the point
where doctors notice improvement but not the point where patients notice
quite as much improvement.

7. The apparent benefits of antidepressant over placebo may be an

“active placebo” effect rather than a drug effect – Unlikely

Active placebo is the uncomfortable idea that no study can really have a blind
control group because of side effects. That is, sugar pills have no side effects,
real drugs generally do, and we all know side effects are how you know that a
drug is working!

(there is a counterargument that placebos very often have placebo side effects,
but most likely the real drug will at least have more side effects, saving the
argument)

The solution is to use active placebo, a drug that has side effects but, as far as
anyone knows, doesn’t treat the experimental condition (in this case,
depression). The preliminary results from this sort of study don’t look good for
antidepressants:

Thomson reviewed 68 double-blind studies of tricyclics that used an

inert placebo and seven that used an active placebo (44). He found drug
efficacy was demonstrated in 59% of studies that employed inert
placebo, but only 14% of those that used active placebo (?2=5.08, df=1,
p=0.02). This appears to demonstrate that in the presence of a side-
effect-inducing control condition, placebo cannot be discriminated from
drug, thus affirming the null hypothesis.

Luckily, Quitkin et al (2000) solve this problem so we don’t have to:

Does the use of active placebo increase the placebo response rate? This
is not the case. After pooling data from those studies in which a
judgment could be made about the proportion of responders, it was
found that 22% of patients (N=69 of 308) given active placebos were
rated as responders. To adopt a conservative stance, one outlier study
(50) with a low placebo response rate of 7% (N=6 of 90) was eliminated
because its placebo response rate was unusually low (typical placebo
 response rates in studies of depressed outpatients are 25%–35%). Even
after removing this possibly aberrant placebo group, the aggregate
response rate was 29% (N=63 of 218), typical of an inactive placebo. The
active placebo theory gains no support from these data.

Closer scrutiny suggests that the “failure” of these 10 early studies to

find typical drug-placebo differences is attributable to design errors that
characterize studies done during psychopharmacology’s infancy. Eight
of the 10 studies had at least one of four types of methodological
weaknesses: inadequate sample size, inadequate dose, inadequate
duration, and diagnostic heterogeneity. The flaws in medication
prescription that characterize these studies are outlined in Table 3. In
fact, in spite of design measurement and power problems, six of these 10
studies still suggested that antidepressants are more effective than
active placebo.

In summary, these reviews failed to note that the active placebo

response rate fell easily within the rate observed for inactive placebo,
and the reviewers relied on pioneer studies, the historical context of
which limits them.

In other words, active placebo research has fallen out of favor in the modern
world. Most studies that used active placebo are very old studies that were not
very well conducted. Those studies failed to find an active-placebo-vs.-drug
difference because they weren’t good enough to do this. But they also failed to
find an active-placebo-vs.-inactive-placebo difference. So they provide no
support for the idea that active placebos are stronger than inactive placebos in
depression and in fact somewhat weigh against it.

8. Antidepressants have much worse side effects than you were led to
believe – Depends how bad you were led to believe the side effects were

As discussed in Part 2, the biggest advantage of SSRIs and other new

antidepressants over the old antidepressants was their decreased side effect
profile. This seems to be quite real. For example, Brambilla finds a relative
risk of adverse events on SSRIs only 60% of that on TCAs, p = 0.003 (although
there are some conflicting numbers in that paper I’m not really clear about).
Montgomery et al 1994 finds that fewer patients stop taking SSRIs than
tricyclics (usually a good “revealed preference”-style measure of side effects
since sufficiently bad side effects make you stop using the drug).

The charmingly named Cascade, Kalali, and Kennedy (2009) investigated side
effect frequency in a set of 700 patients on SSRIs and found the following:

● 56% decreased sexual functioning

● 53% drowsiness
● 49% weight gain
● 19% dry mouth
● 16% insomnia
● 14% fatigue
● 14% nausea
● 13% light-headedness
● 12% tremor

However, it is very important to note that this study was not placebo
controlled. Placebos can cause terrible side effects. Anybody who experiments
with nootropics know that the average totally-useless inactive nootropic
causes you to suddenly imagine all sorts of horrible things going on with your
body, or attribute some of the things that happen anyway (“I’m tired”) to the
effects of the pill. It’s not really clear how much of the stuff in this study is
placebo effect versus drug effect.

Nevertheless, it is worth mentioning that 34% of patients declare side effects

“not at all” or “a litte” bothersome, 40% “somewhat” bothersome, and 26%
“very” or “extremely” bothersome. That’s much worse than I would have
expected.

Aside from the sort of side effects that you expect with any drug, there are
three side effects of SSRIs that I consider especially worrisome and worthy of
further discussion. These are weight gain, sexual side effects, and emotional
blunting.

Weight gain is often listed as one of the most common and debilitating effects
of SSRIs. But amusingly, when a placebo-controlled double-blinded study was
finally run, SSRIs produced less weight gain than placebo. After a year of pill-
taking, people on Prozac had gained 3.1 kg; people on placebo had gained 4.3.
There is now some talk of SSRIs as a weak but statistically significant agent for
weight loss.

What happened? One symptom of depression is not eating. People get put on
SSRIs when they’re really depressed. Then they get better, either because the
drugs worked, because of placebo, or just out of regression to the mean. When
you go from not eating to eating, you gain weight. In the one-year study,
almost everyone’s depression remitted (even untreated depressive episodes
rarely last a whole year), so everyone went from a disease that makes them eat
less, to remission from that disease, so everyone gained weight.

Sexual side effects are a less sanguine story. Here the direction was opposite:
the medical community went from thinking this was a minor problem to
finding it near-universal. The problem was that doctors usually just ask “any
side effects?”, and off Tumblr people generally don’t volunteer information
about their penis or vagina to a stranger. When they switched to the closed-
ended question “Are you having any sexual side effects?”, a lot of people who
denied side effects in general suddenly started talking.

Numbers I have heard for the percent of people on SSRIs with sexual side
effects include 14, 24, 37, 58, 59, and 70 (several of those come from here.
After having read quite a bit of this research, I suspect you’ve got at least a
50-50 chance (they say men are more likely to get them, but they’re worse in
women). Of people who develop sexual side effects, 40% say they caused
serious distress, 35% some distress, and 25% no distress.

So I think it is fair to say that if you are sexually active, your chances with
SSRIs are not great. Researchers investigating the topic suggest people
worried about sexual side effects should switch to alternative sexual-side-
effect-free antidepressant Serzone. You may remember that as the
antidepressant that worked worst in the efficacy studies and brought the
efficacy of all the other ones down with it. Also, it causes liver damage. In my
opinion, a better choice would be bupropion, another antidepressant which
has been found many times not to cause sexual side effects and which may
even improve your sex life.

(“Bupropion lacks this side effect” is going to be a common theme throughout

this section. Bupropion causes insomnia, decreased appetite, and in certain
rare cases of populations at risk, seizures. It is generally a good choice for
people who are worried about SSRI side effects and would prefer a totally
different set of side effects.)

There is a certain feeling that, okay, these drugs may have very very common,
possibly-majority-of-user sexual side effects, but depressed people probably
aren’t screwing like rabbits anyway. So after you recover, you can wait the
appropriate amount of time, come off the drugs (or switch to a different drug
or dose for maintenance) and no harm done.

The situation no longer seems so innocuous. Despite a lack of systematic

investigation, there are multiple reports from researchers and clinicians – not
to mention random people on the Internet – of permanent SSRI-induced
sexual dysfunction that does not remit once the drug is stopped. This is
definitely not the norm and as far as we know it is so rare as to be unstudyable
beyond the occasional case report.

On the other hand, I have this. I took SSRIs for about five to ten years as a kid,
and now I have approximately the pattern of sexual dysfunction associated
with SSRIs and consider myself asexual. Because I started the SSRIs too early
to observe my sexuality without them, I can’t officially blame the drugs. But I
am very suspicious. I feel like this provides moderate anthropic evidence that
it is not as rare as everyone thinks.

The last side effect worth looking at is emotional blunting. A lot of people say
they have trouble feeling intense emotions (sometimes: any emotions at all)
when on SSRIs. Sansone and Sansone (2010) report:

As for prevalence rates, according to a study by Bolling and Kohlenberg,

approximately 20 percent of 161 patients who were prescribed an SSRI
reported apathy and 16.1 percent described a loss of ambition. In a study
by Fava et al, which consisted of participants in both the United States
and Italy, nearly one-third on any antidepressant reported apathy, with
7.7 percent describing moderate-to-severe impairment, and nearly 40
percent acknowledged the loss of motivation, with 12.0 percent
describing moderate-to-severe impairment.

A practicing clinician working off observation finds about the same numbers:
 The sort of emotional “flattening” I have described with SSRIs may
occur, in my experience, in perhaps 10-20% of patients who take these
medications…I do want to emphasize that most patients who take
antidepressant medication under careful medical supervision do not
wind up feeling “flat” or unable to experience life’s normal ups and
downs. Rather, they find that–in contrast to their periods of severe
depression–they are able to enjoy life again, with all its joys and
sorrows.

Many patients who experience this side effect note that when you’re
depressed, “experiencing all your emotions fully and intensely” is not very
high on your list of priorities, since your emotions tend to be terrible. There is
a subgroup of depressed patients whose depression takes the form of not
being able to feel anything at all, and I worry this effect would exacerbate their
problem, but I have never heard this from anyone and SSRIs do not seem less
effective in that subgroup, so these might be two different things that only
sound alike. A couple of people discussing this issue have talked about how
decreased emotions help them navigate interpersonal relationships that
otherwise might involve angry fights or horrible loss – which sounds plausible
but also really sad.

According to Barnhart et al (2004), “this adverse effect has been noted to be

dose-dependent and reversible” – in other words, it will get better if you cut
your dose, and go away completely when you stop taking the medication. I
have not been able to find any case studies or testimonials by people who say
this effect has been permanent.

My own experience was that I did notice this (even before I knew it was an
official side effect) that it did go away after a while when I stopped the
medications, and that since my period of antidepressant use corresponded
with an important period of childhood socialization I ended out completely
unprepared for having normal emotions and having to do a delicate social
balancing act while I figured out how to cope with them. Your results may
vary.

There is also a large research on suicidality as a potential side effect of SSRIs,

but this looks like it would require another ten thousand words just on its
own, so let’s agree it’s a risk and leave it for another day.
9. Therefore, we should give up on medication and use
psychotherapy instead – Makes sense right up until you run placebo-
controlled trials of psychotherapy

The conclusion of these studies that claim antidepressants don’t outperform

placebo is usually that we should repudiate Big Pharma, toss the pills, and go
back to using psychotherapy.

The implication is that doctors use pills because they think they’re much more
effective than therapy. But that’s not really true. The conventional wisdom in
psychiatry is that antidepressants and psychotherapy are about equally
effective.

SSRIs get used more than psychotherapy for the same reason they get used
more than tricyclics and MAOIs – not because they’re better but because they
have fewer problems. The problem with psychotherapy is you’ve got to get
severely mentally ill people to go to a place and talk to a person several times a
week. Depressed people are not generally known for their boundless
enthusiasm for performing difficult tasks consistently. Also, Prozac costs like
50 cents a pill. Guess how much an hour of a highly educated professional’s
time costs? More than 50c, that’s for sure. If they are about equal in
effectiveness, you probably don’t want to pay extra and your insurance
definitely doesn’t want to pay extra.

Contrary to popular wisdom, it is almost never the doctor pushing pills on a

patient who would prefer therapy. If anything it’s more likely to be the
opposite.

However, given that we’re acknowledging antidepressants have an effect size

of only about 0.3 to 0.5, is it time to give psychotherapy a second look?

No. Using very similar methodology, a team involving Mind The Brain blogger
James Coyne found that psychotherapy decreases HAM-D scores by about
2.66, very similar to the 2.7 number obtained by re-analysis of Kirsch’s data on
antidepressants. It concludes:

Although there are differences between the role of placebo in psychotherapy

and pharmacotherapy research, psychotherapy has an effect size that is
comparable to that of antidepressant medications. Whether these effects
should be deemed clinically relevant remains open to debate.

Another study by the same team finds psychotherapy has an effect size of 0.22
compared to antidepressants’ 0.3 – 0.5, though no one has tried to check if
that difference is statistically significant and this does not give you the right to
say antidepressants have “outperformed” psychotherapy.

If a patient has the time, money, and motivation for psychotherapy, it may be
a good option – though I would only be comfortable using it as a monotherapy
if the depression was relatively mild.

10. Further complications

What if the small but positive effect size of antidepressants wasn’t because
they had small positive effects on everyone, but because they had very large
positive effects on some people, and negative effects on others, such that it
averaged out to small positive effects? This could explain the clinical
observations of psychiatrists (that patients seem to do much better on
antidepressants) without throwing away the findings of researchers (that
antidepressants have only small benefits over placebo) by bringing in the
corollary that some psychiatrists notice some patients doing poorly on
antidepressants and stop them in those patients (which researchers of course
would not do).

This is the claim of Gueorguieva and Krystal 2011, who used “growth
modeling” to analyze seven studies of new-generation-antidepressant
Cymbalta and found statistically significant differences between two
“trajectories” for the drug, but not for placebo. 66% of people were in the
“responder” trajectory and outperformed placebo by 6 HAM-D points
(remember, previous studies estimated HAM-D benefits over placebo at about
2.7). 33% of people were nonresponders and did about 6 HAM-D points worse
than placebo. Average it out, and people did about 3 HAM-D points better on
drug and placebo, pretty close to the previous 2.7 point estimate.

I don’t know enough about growth modeling to be sure that the researchers
didn’t just divide the subjects into two groups based on treatment efficacy and
say “Look! The subsection of the population whom we selected for doing well
did well!” but they use many complicated statistics words throughout the
study that I think are supposed to indicate they’re not doing this.

If true, this is very promising. It means psychiatrists who are smart enough to
notice people getting worse on antidepressants can take them off (or switch to
another class of medication) and expect the remainder to get much, much
better. I await further research with this methodology.

What if there were actually no such thing as the placebo effect? I know
dropping this in around the end of an essay that assumes 75% of gains related
to antidepressants are due to the placebo effect is a bit jarring, but it is the
very-hard-to-escape conclusion of Hróbjartsson and Gøtzsche’s meta-analysis
on placebo. They find that three-armed studies – ie those that have a no-
treatment group, a placebo-treatment group, and a real-drug-treatment group
– rarely find much of a difference between no-treatment and placebo. This
was challenged by Wampold et al here and here, but defended against those
challenges by the long-name-Scandinavian-people here. Kirsch, who between
all his antidepressant work is still Associate Director of Placebo Studies, finds
here that 75% of the apparent placebo effect in antidepressant studies is
probably a real placebo effect, but his methodology is a valiant attempt to
make the most out of a total lack of data rather than a properly-directed study
per se.

If placebo pills don’t do much, what explains the vast improvements seen in
both placebo and treatment groups in antidepressant trials? It could be the
feeling of cared-for-ness and special-ness of getting to see a psychiatrist and
talk with her about your problems, and the feeling of getting-to-contribute-
something you get from participating in a scientific study. Or it could just be
regression to the mean – most people start taking drugs when they feel very
depressed, and at some point you have nowhere to go but up. Most depression
gets better after six months or so – which is a much longer period than the six
week length of the average drug trial, but maybe some people only volunteered
for the study four months and two weeks after their depression started.

If Hróbjartsson and Gøtzsche were right, and Kirsch and the psychiatric
establishment wrong, what would be the implications? Well, the good
implication is that we no longer have to worry about problem 7 – that
antidepressants are merely an active placebo – since active placebos shouldn’t
do anything. That means we can be more confident they really work. The more
complicated implication is that psychiatrists lose one excuse for asking people
to take the drugs – “Sure, the drug effect may be small, but the placebo effect
is so strong that it’s still worth it.” I don’t know how many psychiatrists
actually think this way, but I sometimes think this way.

What if the reason people have so much trouble finding good effects from
antidepressants is that they’re giving the medications wrong? Psychiatric
Times points out that:

The Kirsch meta-analysis looked only at studies carried out before 1999.
The much-publicized Fournier study examined a total of 6
antidepressant trials (n=718) using just 2 antidepressants, paroxetine
and imipramine. Two of the imipramine studies used doses that were
either subtherapeutic (100 mg/day) or less than optimal (100 to 200
mg/day)

What if we’ve forgotten the most important part? Antidepressants are used
not only to treat acute episodes of depression, but to prevent them from
coming back (maintenance therapy). This they apparently do very well, and I
have seen very few studies that attempt to call this effect into question.
Although it is always possible that someone will find the same kind of
ambiguity around maintenance antidepressant treatment as now clouds acute
antidepressant treatment, so far as far as I know this has not happened.

What if we don’t understand what’s going on with the placebo effect in our
studies? Placebo effect has consistently gotten stronger over the past few
decades, such that the difference between certain early tricyclic studies (which
often found strong advantages for the medication) and modern SSRI studies
(which often find only weak advantages for the medication) is not weaker
medication effect, but stronger placebo effect (that is, if medication always has
an effect of 10, but placebo goes from 0 to 9, apparent drug-placebo difference
gets much lower). Wired has a good article on this. Theories range from the
good – drug company advertising and increasing prestige and awareness of
psychiatry have raised people’s expectations of psychiatric drugs – to the bad
– increasing scientific competence and awareness have improved blinding and
other facets of trial design – to the ugly – modern studies recruit paid
participants with advertisements, so some unscrupulous people may be
entering studies and then claiming to get better, hoping that this sounds
sufficiently like the outcome the researchers want that everyone will be happy
and they’ll get their money on schedule.

If placebos are genuinely getting better because of raised expectations, that’s

good news for doctors and patients but bad news for researchers and drug
companies. The patient will be happy because they get better no matter how
terrible a prescribing decision the doctor makes; the doctor will be happy
because they get credit. But for researchers and drug companies, it means it’s
harder to prove a difference between drug and placebo in a study. You can
invent an excellent new drug and still have it fail to outperform placebo by
very much if everyone in the placebo group improves dramatically.

Conclusion

An important point I want to start the conclusion section with: no matter what
else you believe, antidepressants are not literally ineffective. Even the most
critical study – Kirsch 2008 – finds antidepressants to outperform placebo
with p < .0001 significance.

An equally important point: everyone except those two Scandinavian guys

with the long names agree that, if you count the placebo effect,
antidepressants are extremely impressive. The difference between a person
who gets an antidepressant and a person who gets no treatment at all is like
night and day.

The debate takes place within the bounds set by those two statements.

Antidepressants give a very modest benefit over placebo. Whether this benefit
is so modest as to not be worth talking about depends on what level of benefits
you consider so modest as to not be worth talking about. If you are as
depressed as the average person who participates in studies of
antidepressants, you can expect an antidepressant to have an over-placebo-
benefit with an effect size of 0.3 to 0.5. That's the equivalent of a diet pill that
gives you an average weight loss of 9 to 14 pounds, or a growth hormone that
makes you grow on average 0.8 to 1.4 inches.
You may be able to get more than that if you focus on the antidepressants, like
paroxetine and venlafaxine, that perform best in studies, but we don't have the
statistical power to say that officially. It may be the case that most people who
get antidepressants do much better than that but a few people who have
paradoxical negative responses bring down the average, but right now this
result has not been replicated.

This sounds moderately helpful and probably well worth it if the pills are
cheap (which generic versions almost always are) and you are not worried
about side effects. Unfortunately, SSRIs do have some serious side effects.
Some of the supposed side effects, like weight gain, seem to be mostly
mythical. Others, like sexual dysfunction, seem to be very common and
legitimately very worrying. You can avoid most of these side effects by taking
other antidepressants like bupropion, but even these are not totally side-effect
free.

Overall I think antidepressants come out of this definitely not looking like
perfectly safe miracle drugs, but as a reasonable option for many people with
moderate (aka "mild", aka "extremely super severe") depression, especially if
they understand the side effects and prepare for them.

Alcoholics Anonymous: Much More Than You Wanted To Know

I’ve worked with doctors who think Alcoholics Anonymous is so important for
the treatment of alcoholism that anyone who refuses to go at least three times
a week is in denial about their problem and can’t benefit from further
treatment.

I’ve also worked with doctors who are so against the organization that they
describe it as a “cult” and say that a physician who recommends it is no better
than one who recommends crystal healing or dianetics.

I finally got so exasperated that I put on my Research Cap and started looking
through the evidence base.

My conclusion, after several hours of study, is that now I understand why

most people don’t do this.
The studies surrounding Alcoholics Anonymous are some of the most
convoluted, hilariously screwed-up research I have ever seen. They go wrong
in ways I didn’t even realize research could go wrong before. Just to give some
examples:

● In several studies, subjects in the “not attending Alcoholics Anonymous”

condition attended Alcoholics Anonymous more than subjects in the
“attending Alcoholics Anonymous” condition.
● Almost everyone’s belief about AA’s retention rate is off by a factor of
five because one person long ago misread a really confusing graph and
everyone else copied them without double-checking.
● The largest study ever in the field, a $30 million effort over 8 years
following thousands of patients, had no untreated control group.

Not only are the studies poor, but the people interpreting them are heavily
politicized. The entire field of addiction medicine has gotten stuck in the
middle of some of the most divisive issues in our culture, like whether
addiction is a biological disease or a failure of willpower, whether problems
should be solved by community and peer groups or by highly trained
professionals, and whether there’s a role for appealing to a higher power in
any public organization. AA’s supporters see it as a scruffy grassroots
organization of real people willing to get their hands dirty, who can cure
addicts failed time and time again by a system of glitzy rehabs run by arrogant
doctors who think their medical degrees make them better than people who
have personally fought their own battles. Opponents see it as this awful cult
that doesn’t provide any real treatment and just tells addicts that they’re
terrible people who will never get better unless they sacrifice their identity to
the collective.

As a result, the few sparks of light the research kindles are ignored, taken out
of context, or misinterpreted.

The entire situation is complicated by a bigger question. We will soon find that
AA usually does not work better or worse than various other substance abuse
interventions. That leaves the sort of question that all those fancy-shmancy
people with control groups in their studies don’t have to worry about – does
anything work at all?
I.

We can start by just taking a big survey of people in Alcoholics Anonymous

and seeing how they’re doing. On the one hand, we don’t have a control group.
On the other hand…well, there really is no other hand, but people keep doing
it.

According to AA’s own surveys, one-third of new members drop out by the end
of their first month, half by the end of their third month, and three-quarters
by the end of their first year. “Drop out” means they don’t go to AA meetings
anymore, which could be for any reason including (if we’re feeling optimistic)
them being so completely cured they no longer feel they need it.

There is an alternate reference going around that only 5% (rather than 25%) of
AA members remain after their first year. This is a mistake caused by
misinterpreting a graph showing that only five percent of members in their
first year were in their twelfth month of membership, which is obviously
completely different. Nevertheless, a large number of AA hate sites (and large
rehabs!) cite the incorrect interpretation, for example the Orange Papers and
RationalWiki’s page on Alcoholics Anonymous. In fact, just to keep things
short, assume RationalWiki’s AA page makes every single mistake I warn
against in the rest of this article, then use that to judge them in general. On the
other hand, Wikipedia gets it right and I continue to encourage everyone to
use it as one of the most reliable sources of medical information available to
the public (I wish I was joking).

This retention information isn’t very helpful, since people can remain in AA
without successfully quitting drinking, and people may successfully quit
drinking without being in AA. However, various different sources suggest that,
of people who stay in AA a reasonable amount of time, about half stop being
alcoholic. These numbers can change wildly depending on how you define
“reasonable amount of time” and “stop being alcoholic”. Here is a table, which
I have cited on this blog before and will probably cite again:
Behold. Treatments that look very impressive (80% improved after six
months!) turn out to be the same or worse as the control group. And
comparing control group to control group, you can find that “no treatment”
can appear to give wildly different outcomes (from 20% to 80% “recovery”)
depending on what population you’re looking at and how you define
“recovery”.

Twenty years ago, it was extremely edgy and taboo for a reputable scientist to
claim that alcoholics could recover on their own. This has given way to the
current status quo, in which pretty much everyone in the field writes journal
articles all the time about how alcoholics can recover on their own, but make
sure to harp upon how edgy and taboo they are for doing so. From these sorts
of articles, we learn that about 80% of recovered alcoholics have gotten better
without treatment, and many of them are currently able to drink moderately
without immediately relapsing (something else it used to be extremely taboo
to mention). Kate recently shared an good article about this: Most People With
Addiction Simply Grow Out Of It: Why Is This Widely Denied?

Anyway, all this stuff about not being able to compare different populations,
and the possibility of spontaneous recovery, just mean that we need controlled
experiments. The largest number of these take a group of alcoholics, follow
them closely, and then evaluate all of them – the AA-attending and the non-
AA-attending – according to the same criteria. For example Morgenstern et al
(1997), Humphreys et al (1997) and Moos (2006). Emrick et al (1993) is a
meta-analyses of a hundred seventy three of these. All of these find that the
alcoholics who end up going to AA meetings are much more likely to get better
than those who don’t. So that’s good evidence the group is effective, right?

Bzzzt! No! Wrong! Selection bias!

People who want to quit drinking are more likely to go to AA than people who
don’t want to quit drinking. People who want to quit drinking are more likely
to actually quit drinking than those who don’t want to. This is a serious
problem. Imagine if it is common wisdom that AA is the best, maybe the only,
way to quit drinking. Then 100% of people who really want to quit would
attend compared to 0% of people who didn’t want to quit. And suppose
everyone who wants to quit succeeds, because secretly, quitting alcohol is
really easy. Then 100% of AA members would quit, compared to 0% of non-
members – the most striking result it is mathematically possible to have. And
yet AA would not have made a smidgeon of difference.

But it’s worse than this, because attending AA isn’t just about wanting to quit.
It’s also about having the resources to make it to AA. That is, wealthier people
are more likely to hear about AA (better information networks, more likely to
go to doctor or counselor who can recommend) and more likely to be able to
attend AA (better access to transportation, more flexible job schedules). But
wealthier people are also known to be better at quitting alcohol than poor
people – either because the same positive personal qualities that helped them
achieve success elsewhere help them in this battle as well, or just because they
have fewer other stressors going on in their lives driving them to drink.

Finally, perseverance is a confounder. To go to AA, and to keep going for

months and months, means you’ve got the willpower to drag yourself off the
couch to do a potentially unpleasant thing. That’s probably the same willpower
that helps you stay away from the bar.

And then there’s a confounder going the opposite direction. The worse your
alcoholism is, the more likely you are to, as the organization itself puts it,
“admit you have a problem”.

These sorts of longitudinal studies are almost useless and the field has mostly
moved away from them. Nevertheless, if you look on the pro-AA sites, you will
find them in droves, and all of them “prove” the organization’s effectiveness.
III.

It looks like we need randomized controlled trials. And we have them. Sort of.

Brandsma (1980) is the study beloved of the AA hate groups, since it

purports to show that people in Alcoholics Anonymous not only don’t get
better, but are nine times more likely to binge drink than people who don’t go
into AA at all.

There are a number of problems with this conclusion. First of all, if you
actually look at the study, this is one of about fifty different findings. The other
findings are things like “88% of treated subjects reported a reduction in
drinking, compared to 50% of the untreated control group”.

Second of all, the increased binge drinking was significant at the 6 month
followup period. It was not significant at the end of treatment, the 3 month
followup period, the 9 month followup period, or the 12 month followup
period. Remember, taking a single followup result out of the context of the
other followup results is a classic piece of Dark Side Statistics and will send
you to Science Hell.

Of multiple different endpoints, Alcoholics Anonymous did better than no

treatment on almost all of them. It did worse than other treatments on some
of them (dropout rates, binge drinking, MMPI scale) and the same as other
treatments on others (abstinent days, total abstinence).

If you are pro-AA, you can say “Brandsma study proves AA works!”. If you are
anti-AA, you can say “Brandsma study proves AA works worse than other
treatments!”, although in practice most of these people prefer to quote
extremely selective endpoints out of context.

However, most of the patients in the Brandsma study were people convicted of
alcohol-related crimes ordered to attend treatment as part of their sentence.
Advocates of AA make a good point that this population might be a bad fit for
AA. They may not feel any personal motivation to treatment, which might be
okay if you’re going to listen to a psychologist do therapy with you, but fatal
for a self-help group. Since the whole point of AA is being in a community of
like-minded individuals, if you don’t actually feel any personal connection to
the project of quitting alcohol, it will just make you feel uncomfortable and out
of place.

Also, uh, this just in, Brandsma didn’t use a real AA group, because the real
AA groups make people be anonymous which makes it inconvenient to
research stuff. He just sort of started his own non-anonymous group, let’s call
it A, with no help from the rest of the fellowship, and had it do Alcoholics
Anonymous-like stuff. On the other hand, many members of his control group
went out into the community and…attended a real Alcoholics Anonymous,
because Brandsma can’t exactly ethically tell them not to. So technically, there
were more people in AA in the no-AA group than in the AA group. Without
knowing more about Alcoholics Anonymous, I can’t know whether this
objection is valid and whether Brandsma’s group did or didn’t capture the
essence of the organization. Still, not the sort of thing you want to hear about a
study.

Walsh et al (1991) is a similar study with similar confounders and similar

results. Workers in an industrial plant who were in trouble for coming in
drunk were randomly assigned either to an inpatient treatment program or to
Alcoholics Anonymous. After a year of followup, 60% of the inpatient-treated
workers had stayed sober, but only 30% of the AA-treated workers had.

The pro-AA side made three objections to this study, of which one is bad and
two are good.

The bad objection was that AA is cheaper than hospitalization, so even if

hospitalization is good, AA might be more efficient – after all, we can’t afford
to hospitalize everyone. It’s a bad objection because the authors of the study
did the math and found out that hospitalization was so much better than AA
that it decreased the level of further medical treatment needed and saved the
health system more money than it cost.

The first good objection: like the Brandsma study, this study uses people
under coercion – in this case, workers who would lose their job if they refused.
Fine.

The second good objection, and this one is really interesting: a lot of inpatient
hospital rehab is AA. That is, when you go to an hospital for inpatient drug
treatment, you attend AA groups every day, and when you leave, they make
you keep going to the AA groups. In fact, the study says that “at the 12 month
and 24 month assessments, the rates of AA affiliation and attendance in the
past 6 months did not differ significantly among the groups.” Given that the
hospital patients got hospital AA + regular AA, they were actually getting more
AA than the AA group!

So all that this study proves is that AA + more AA + other things is better than
AA. There was no “no AA” group, which makes it impossible to discuss how
well AA does or doesn’t work. Frick.

Timko (2006) is the only study I can hesitantly half-endorse. This one has a
sort of clever methodological trick to get around the limitation that doctors
can’t ethically refuse to refer alcoholics to treatment. In this study, researchers
at a Veterans’ Affairs hospital randomly assigned alcoholic patients to
“referral” or “intensive referral”. In “referral”, the staff asked the patients to go
to AA. In “intensive referral”, the researchers asked REALLY NICELY for the
patients to go to AA, and gave them nice glossy brochures on how great AA
was, and wouldn’t shut up about it, and arranged for them to meet people at
their first AA meeting so they could have friends in AA, et cetera, et cetera.
The hope was that more people in the “intensive referral” group would end out
in AA, and that indeed happened scratch that, I just re-read the study and the
same number of people in both groups went to AA and the intensive group
actually completed a lower number of the 12 Steps on average, have I
mentioned I hate all research and this entire field is terrible? But the intensive
referral people were more likely to have “had a spiritual awakening” and “have
a sponsor”, so it was decided the study wasn’t a complete loss and when it was
found the intensive referral condition had slightly less alcohol use the authors
decided to declare victory.

So, whereas before we found that AA + More AA was better than AA, and that
proved AA didn’t work, in this study we find that AA + More AA was better
than AA, and that proves AA does work. You know, did I say I hesitantly half-
endorsed this study? Scratch that. I hate this study too.
IV.

All right, @#%^ this $@!&*. We need a real study, everything all lined up in a
row, none of this garbage. Let’s just hire half the substance abuse scientists in
the country, throw a gigantic wad of money at them, give them as many
patients as they need, let them take as long as they want, but barricade the
doors of their office and not let them out until they’ve proven something
important beyond a shadow of a doubt.

This was about how the scientific community felt in 1989, when they launched
Project MATCH. This eight-year, $30 million dollar, multi-thousand patient
trial was supposed to solve everything.

The people going into Project MATCH might have been a little overconfident.
Maybe “not even Zeus could prevent this study from determining the optimal
treatment for alcohol addiction” overconfident. This might have been a
mistake.

The study was designed with three arms, one for each of the popular
alcoholism treatments of the day. The first arm would be “twelve step
facilitation”, a form of therapy based off of Alcoholics Anonymous. The second
arm would be cognitive behavioral therapy, the most bog-standard
psychotherapy in the world and one which by ancient tradition must be
included in any kind of study like this. The third arm would be motivational
enhancement therapy, which is a very short intervention where your doctor
tells you all the reasons you should quit alcohol and tries to get you to
convince yourself.

There wasn’t a “no treatment” arm. This is where the overconfidence might
have come in. Everyone knew alcohol treatment worked. Surely you couldn’t
dispute that. They just wanted to see which treatment worked best for which
people. So you would enroll a bunch of different people – rich, poor, black,
white, married, single, chronic alcoholic, new alcoholic, highly motivated,
unmotivated – and see which of these people did best in which therapy. The
result would be an algorithm for deciding where to send each of your patients.
Rich black single chronic unmotivated alcoholic? We’ve found with p <
0.00001 that the best place for someone like that is in motivational
enhancement therapy. Such was the dream. So, eight years and thirty million
dollars and the careers of several prestigious researchers later, the results
come in, and - yeah, everyone does exactly the same on every kind of therapy
(with one minor, possibly coincidental exception). Awkward. “Everybody has
won and all must have prizes!”. If you’re an optimist, you can say all
treatments work and everyone can keep doing whatever they like best. If
you’re a pessimist, you might start wondering whether anything works at all.

By my understanding this is also the confusing conclusion of Ferri, Amato &

Davoli (2006), the Cochrane Collaboration’s attempt to get in on the AA
action. Like all Cochrane Collaboration studies since the beginning of time,
they find there is insufficient evidence to demonstrate the effectiveness of the
intervention being investigated. This has been oft-quoted in the anti-AA
literature. But by my reading, they had no control groups and were comparing
AA to different types of treatment:

Three studies compared AA combined with other interventions against

other treatments and found few differences in the amount of drinks and
percentage of drinking days. Severity of addiction and drinking
consequence did not seem to be differentially influenced by TSF versus
comparison treatment interventions, and no conclusive differences in
treatment drop out rates were reported.

So the two best sources we have – Project MATCH and Cochrane – don’t find
any significant differences between AA and other types of therapy. Now, to be
fair, the inpatient treatment mentioned in Walsh et al wasn’t included, and
inpatient treatment might be the gold standard here. But sticking to various
forms of outpatient intervention, they all seem to be about the same.

So, the $64,000 question: do all of them work well, or do all of them work
poorly?

V.

Alcoholism studies avoid control groups like they are on fire, presumably
because it’s unethical not to give alcoholics treatment or something. However,
there is one class of studies that doesn’t have that problem. These are the ones
on “brief opportunistic intervention”, which is much like a turbocharged even
shorter version of “motivational enhancement therapy”. Your doctor tells you
‘HELLO HAVE YOU CONSIDERED QUITTING ALCOHOL??!!’ and sees what
happens.

Brief opportunistic intervention is the most trollish medical intervention ever,

because here are all these brilliant psychologists and counselors trying to
unravel the deepest mysteries of the human psyche in order to convince
people to stop drinking, and then someone comes along and asks “Hey, have
you tried just asking them politely?”. And it works.

Not consistently. But it works for about one in eight people. And the theory is
that since it only takes a minute or two of a doctor’s time, it scales a lot faster
than some sort of hideously complex hospital-based program that takes
thousands of dollars and dozens of hours from everyone involved. If doctors
would just spend five minutes with each alcoholic patient reminding them that
no, really, alcoholism is really bad, we could cut the alcoholism rate by 1/8.

(this also works for smoking, by the way. I do this with every single one of my
outpatients who smoke, and most of the time they roll their eyes, because their
doctor is giving them that speech, but every so often one of them tells me that
yeah, I’m right, they know they really should quit smoking and they’ll give it
another try. I have never saved anyone’s life by dramatically removing their
appendix at the last possible moment, but I have gotten enough patients to
promise me they’ll try quitting smoking that I think I’ve saved at least one life
just by obsessively doing brief interventions every chance I get. This is
probably the most effective life-saving thing you can do as a doctor, enough so
that if you understand it you may be licensed to ignore 80,000 Hours’
arguments on doctor replaceability)

Anyway, for some reason, it’s okay to do these studies with control groups.
And they are so fast and easy to study that everyone studies them all the time.
A meta-analysis of 19 studies is unequivocal that they definitely work.

Why do these work? My guess is that they do two things. First, they hit people
who honestly didn’t realize they had a problem, and inform them that they do.
Second, the doctor usually says they’ll “follow up on how they’re doing” the
next appointment. This means that a respected authority figure is suddenly
monitoring their drinking and will glare at them if they stay they’re still
alcoholic. As someone who has gone into a panic because he has a dentist’s
appointment in a week and he hasn’t been flossing enough – and then flossed
until his teeth were bloody so the dentist wouldn’t be disappointed – I can
sympathize with this.

But for our purposes, the brief opportunistic intervention sets a lower bound.
It says “Here’s a really minimal thing that seems to work. Do other things
work better than this?”

The “brief treatment” is the next step up from brief intervention. It’s an hour-
or-so-long session (or sometimes a couple such sessions) with a doctor or
counselor where they tell you some tips for staying off alcohol. I bring it up
here because the brief treatment research community spends its time doing
studies that show that brief treatments are just as good as much more intense
treatments. This might be most comparable to the “motivational enhancement
therapy” in the MATCH study.

Chapman and Huygens (1988) find that a single interview with a health
professional is just as good as six weeks of inpatient treatment (I don’t know
about their hospital in New Zealand, but for reference six weeks of inpatient
treatment in my hospital costs about $40,000.)

Edwards (1977) finds that in a trial comparing “conventional inpatient or

outpatient treatment complete with the full panoply of services available at a
leading psychiatric institution and lasting several months” versus an hour with
a doc, both groups do the same at one and two year followup.

And so on.

All of this is starting to make my head hurt, but it’s a familiar sort of hurt. It’s
the way my head hurts when Scott Aaronson talks about complexity classes.
We have all of these different categories of things, and some of them are the
same as others and others are bigger than others but we’re not sure exactly
where all of them stand.

We have classes “no treatment”, “brief opportunistic intervention”, “brief

treatment”, “Alcoholics Anonymous”, “psychotherapy”, and “inpatient”.
We can prove that BOI > NT, and that AA = PT. Also that BT = IP = PT. We
also have that IP > AA, which unfortunately we can use to prove a
contradiction, so let’s throw it out for now.

So the hierarchy of classes seems to be (NT) < (BOI) ? (BT, IP, AA, PT) - in
other words, no treatment is the worst, brief opportunistic intervention is
better, and then somewherein there we have this class of everything else that
is the same.

Can we prove that BOI = BT?

We have some good evidence for this, once again from our Handbook. A study
in Edinburgh finds that five minutes of psychiatrist advice (brief opportunistic
intervention) does the same as sixty minutes of advice plus motivational
interviewing (brief treatment).

So if we take all this seriously, then it looks like every psychosocial treatment
(including brief opportunistic intervention) is the same, and all are better than
no treatment. This is a common finding in psychiatry and psychology – for
example, all common antidepressants are better than no treatment but work
about equally well; all psychotherapies are better than no treatment but work
about equally well, et cetera. It’s still an open question what this says about
our science and our medicine.

The strongest counterexample to this is Walsh et al which finds the inpatient

hospital stay works better than the AA referral, but this study looks kind of
lonely compared to the evidence on the other side. And even the authors admit
they were surprised by the effectiveness of the hospital there.

And let’s go back to Project MATCH. There wasn’t a control group. But there
were the people who dropped out of the study, who said they’d go to AA or
psychotherapy but never got around to it. Cutter and Fishbain (2005) take a
look at what happened to these folks. They find that the dropouts did 75% as
well as the people in any of the therapy groups, and that most of the effect of
the therapy groups occurred in the first week (ie people dropped out after one
week did about 95% as well as people who stayed in).

To me this suggests two things. First, therapy is only a little helpful over most
people quitting on their own. Second, insofar as therapy is helpful, the tiniest
brush with therapy is enough to make someone think “Okay, I’ve had some
therapy, I’ll be better now”. Just like with the brief opportunistic
interventions, five minutes of almost anything is enough.

This is a weird conclusion, but I think it’s the one supported by the data.

VI.

I should include a brief word about this giant table.

I see it everywhere. It looks very authoritative and impressive and, of course,
giant. I believe the source is Miller’s Handbook of Alcoholism Treatment
Approaches: Effective Alternatives, 3rd Edition, the author of which is known
as a very careful scholar whom I cannot help but respect.
And the table does a good thing in discussing medications like acamprosate
and naltrexone, which are very important and effective interventions but
which will not otherwise be showing up in this post.

However, the therapy part of the table looks really wrong to me.

First of all, I notice acupuncture is ranked 17 out of 48, putting in a much,

much better showing than treatments like psychotherapy, counseling, or
education. Seems fishy.

Second of all, I notice that motivational enhancement (#2), cognitive therapy

(#13), and twelve-step (#37) are all about as far apart as could be, but the
largest and most powerful trial ever, Project MATCH, found all three to be
about equal in effectiveness.

Third of all, I notice that cognitive therapy is at #13, but psychotherapy is at

#46. But cognitive therapy is a kind of psychotherapy.

Fourth of all, I notice that brief interventions, motivational enhancement,

confrontational counseling, psychotherapy, general alcoholism counseling,
and education are all over. But a lot of these are hard to differentiate from one
another.

The table seems messed up to me. Part of it is because it is about evidence

base rather than effectiveness (consider that handguns have a stronger
evidence base than the atomic bomb, since they have been used many more
times in much better controlled conditions, but the atomic bomb is more
effective) and therefore acupuncture, which is poorly studied, can rank quite
high compared to things which have even one negative study.

But part of it just seems wrong. I haven’t read the full book, but I blame the
tendency to conflate studies showing “X does not work better than anything
else” with “X does not work”.

Remember, whenever there are meta-analyses that contradict single very large
well-run studies, go with the single very large well-run study, especially when
the meta-analysis is as weird as this one. Project MATCH is the single very
large well-run study, and it says this is balderdash. I’m guessing it’s trying to
use some weird algorithmic methodology to automatically rate and judge each
study, but that’s no substitute for careful human review.

VII.

In conclusion, as best I can tell – and it is not very well, because the studies
that could really prove anything robustly haven’t been done – most alcoholics
get better on their own. All treatments for alcoholism, including Alcoholics
Anonymous, psychotherapy, and just a few minutes with a doctor explaining
why she thinks you need to quit, increase this already-high chance of recovery
a small but nonzero amount. Furthermore, they are equally effective after only
a tiny dose: your first couple of meetings, your first therapy session. Some
studies suggest that inpatient treatment with outpatient followup may be
better than outpatient treatment alone, but other studies contradict this and I
am not confident in the assumption.

So does Alcoholics Anonymous work? Though I cannot say anything

authoritatively, my impression is: Yes, but only a tiny bit, and for many people
five minutes with a doctor may work just as well as years completing the
twelve steps. As such, individual alcoholics may want to consider attending if
they don’t have easier options; doctors might be better off just talking to their
patients themselves.

If this is true – and right now I don’t have much confidence that it is, it’s just a
direction that weak and contradictory data are pointing – it would be really
awkward for the multibazillion-dollar treatment industry.

More worrying, I am afraid of what it would do to the War On Drugs. Right

now one of the rallying cries for the anti-Drug-War movement is “treatment,
not prison”. And although I haven’t looked seriously at the data for any drug
besides alcohol. I think some data there are similar. There’s very good
medication for drugs – for example methadone and suboxone for opiate abuse
– but in terms of psychotherapy it’s mostly the same stuff you get for alcohol.
Rehabs, whether they work or not, seem to serve an important sort of ritual
function, where if you can send a drug abuser to a rehab you at least feel like
something has been done. Deny people that ritual, and it might make prison
the only politically acceptable option.
In terms of things to actually treat alcoholism, I remain enamoured of the
Sinclair Method, which has done crazy outrageous stuff like conduct an
experiment with an actual control group. But I haven’t investigated enough to
know whether my early excitement about them looks likely to pan out or not.

I would not recommend quitting any form of alcohol treatment that works for
you, or refusing to try a form of treatment your doctor recommends, based on
any of this information.

Prescriptions, Paradoxes, and Perversities

I.

I’ve been playing around with data from Internet databases that aggregate
patient reviews of medications.

Are these any good? I looked at four of the largest such databases –
Drugs.com, WebMD, AskAPatient, and DrugLib – as well as psychiatry-
specific site CrazyMeds – and took their data on twenty-three major
antidepressants. Then I correlated them with one another to see if the five
sites mostly agreed.

Correlations between Drugs.com, AskAPatient, and WebMD were generally

large and positive (around 0.7). Correlations between CrazyMeds and DrugLib
were generally small or negative. In retrospect this makes sense, because these
two sites didn’t allow separation of ratings by condition, so for example
Seroquel-for-depression was being mixed with Seroquel-for-schizophrenia.

So I threw out the two offending sites and kept Drugs.com, AskAPatient, and
WebMD. I normalized all the data, then took the weighted average of all three
sites. From this huge sample (the least-reviewed drug had 35 ratings, the
most-reviewed drug 4,797) I obtained a unified opinion of patients’ favorite
and least favorite antidepressants.
This doesn’t surprise me at all. Everyone secretly knows Nardil and Parnate
(the two commonly-used drugs in the MAOI class) are excellent
antidepressants1. Oh, nobody will prescribe them, because of the dynamic
discussed here, but in their hearts they know it’s true.

Likewise, I feel pretty good to see that Serzone, which I recently defended, is
number five. I’ve had terrible luck with Viibryd, and it just seems to make
people taking it more annoying, which is not a listed side effect but which I
swear has happened.

The table also matches the evidence from chemistry – drugs with similar
molecular structure get similar ratings, as do drugs with similar function. This
is, I think, a good list.
Which is too bad, because it makes the next part that much more terrifying.

II.

There is a sixth major Internet database of drug ratings. It is called RateRx,

and it differs from the other five in an important way: it solicits ratings from
doctors, not patients. It’s a great idea – if you trust your doctor to tell you
which drug is best, why not take advantage of wisdom-of-crowds and trust all
the doctors?

The RateRX logo. Spoiler: this is going to seem really ironic in about thirty
seconds.

RateRx has a modest but respectable sample size – the drugs on my list got
between 32 and 70 doctor reviews. There’s only one problem.

You remember patient reviews on the big three sites correlated about +0.7
with each other, right? So patients pretty much agree on which drugs are good
and which are bad?

Doctor reviews on RateRx correlated at -0.21 with patient reviews. The

negative relationship is nonsignificant, but that just means that at best, doctor
reviews are totally uncorrelated with patient consensus.
This has an obvious but very disturbing corollary. I couldn’t get good numbers
on how times each of the antidepressants on my list were prescribed, because
the information I’ve seen only gives prescription numbers for a few top-selling
drugs, plus we’ve got the same problem of not being able to distinguish
depression prescriptions from anxiety prescriptions from psychosis
prescriptions. But total number of online reviews makes a pretty good proxy.
After all, the more patients are using a drug, the more are likely to review it.

Quick sanity check: the most reviewed drug on my list was Cymbalta.
Cymbalta was also the best selling antidepressant of 2014. Although my list
doesn’t exactly track the best-sellers, that seems to be a function of how long a
drug has been out – a best-seller that came out last year might have only
1/10th the number of reviews as a best-seller that came out ten years ago. So
number of reviews seems to be a decent correlate for amount a drug is used.

In that case, amount a drug is used correlates highly (+0.67, p = 0.005) with
doctors’ opinion of the drug, which makes perfect sense since doctors are the
ones prescribing it. But amount the drug gets used correlates negatively with
patient rating of the drug (-0.34, p = ns), which of course is to be expected
given the negative correlation between doctor opinion and patient opinion.

So the more patients like a drug, the less likely it is to be prescribed2.

III.

There’s one more act in this horror show.

Anyone familiar with these medications reading the table above has probably
already noticed this one, but I figured I might as well make it official.

I correlated the average rating of each drug with the year it came on the
market. The correlation was -0.71 (p < .001). That is, the newer a drug was,
the less patients liked it3.

This pattern absolutely jumps out of the data. First- and second- place winners
Nardil and Parnate came out in 1960 and 1961, respectively; I can’t find the
exact year third-place winner Anafranil came out, but the first reference to its
trade name I can find in the literature is from 1967, so I used that. In contrast,
last-place winner Viibryd came out in 2011, second-to-last place winner Abilify
got its depression indication in 2007, and third-to-last place winner Brintellix
is as recent as 2013.

This result is robust to various different methods of analysis, including

declaring MAOIs to be an unfair advantage for Team Old and removing all of
them, changing which minor tricylics I do and don’t include in the data, and
altering whether Deprenyl, a drug that technically came out in 1970 but
received a gritty reboot under the name Emsam in 2006, is counted as older or
newer.

So if you want to know what medication will make you happiest, at least
according to this analysis your best bet isn’t to ask your doctor, check what’s
most popular, or even check any individual online rating database. It’s to look
at the approval date on the label and choose the one that came out first.

IV.

What the hell is going on with these data?

I would like to dismiss this as confounded, but I have to admit that any
reasonable person would expect the confounders to go the opposite way.

That is: older, less popular drugs are usually brought out only when newer,
more popular drugs have failed. MAOIs, the clear winner of this analysis, are
very clearly reserved in the guidelines for “treatment-resistant depression”, ie
depression you’ve already thrown everything you’ve got at. But these are
precisely the depressions that are hardest to treat.

Imagine you are testing the fighting ability of three people via ten boxing
matches. You ask Alice to fight a Chihuahua, Bob to fight a Doberman, and
Carol to fight Cthulhu. You would expect this test to be biased in favor of Alice
and against Carol. But MAOIs and all these other older rarer drugs are
practically never brought out except against Cthulhu. Yet they still have the
best win-loss record.
Here are the only things I can think of that might be confounding these
results.

Perhaps because these drugs are so rare and unpopular, psychiatrists only use
them when they have really really good reason. That is, the most popular drug
of the year they pretty much cluster-bomb everybody with. But every so often,
they see some patient who seems absolutely 100% perfect for clomipramine, a
patient who practically screams“clomipramine!” at them, and then they give
this patient clomipramine, and she does really well on it.

(but psychiatrists aren’t actually that good at personalizing antidepressant

treatments. The only thing even sort of like that is that MAOIs are extra-good
for a subtype called atypical depression. But that’s like a third of the depressed
population, which doesn’t leave much room for this super-precise-targeting
hypothesis.)

Or perhaps once drugs have been on the market longer, patients figure out
what they like. Brintellix is so new that the Brintellix patients are the ones
whose doctors said “Hey, let’s try you on Brintellix” and they said “Whatever”.
MAOIs have been on the market so long that presumably MAOI patients are
ones who tried a dozen antidepressants before and stayed on MAOIs because
they were the only ones that worked.

(but Prozac has been on the market 25 years now. This should only apply to a
couple of very new drugs, not the whole list.)

Or perhaps the older drugs have so many side effects that no one would stay
on them unless they’re absolutely perfect, whereas people are happy to stay on
the newer drugs even if they’re not doing much because whatever, it’s not like
they’re causing any trouble.

(but Seroquel and Abilify, two very new drugs, have awful side effects, yet are
down at the bottom along with all the other new drugs)

Or perhaps patients on very rare weird drugs get a special placebo effect,
because they feel that their psychiatrist cares enough about them to
personalize treatment. Perhaps they identify with the drug – “I am special, I’m
one of the only people in the world who’s on nefazodone!” and they become
attached to it and want to preach its greatness to the world.
(but drugs that are rare because they are especially new don’t get that benefit.
I would expect people to also get excited about being given the latest, flashiest
thing. But only drugs that are rare because they are old get the benefit, not
drugs that are rare because they are new.)

Or perhaps psychiatrists tend to prescribe the drugs they “imprinted on” in

medical school and residency, so older psychiatrists prescribe older drugs and
the newest psychiatrists prescribe the newest drugs. But older psychiatrists
are probably much more experienced and better at what they do, which could
affect patients in other ways – the placebo effect of being with a doctor who
radiates competence, or maybe the more experienced psychiatrists are really
good at psychotherapy, and that makes the patient better, and they attribute it
to the drug.

(but read on…)

V.

Or perhaps we should take this data at face value and assume our
antidepressants have been getting worse and worse over the past fifty years.

This is not entirely as outlandish as it sounds. The history of the past fifty
years has been a history of moving from drugs with more side effects to drugs
with fewer side effects, with what I consider somewhat less than due diligence
in making sure the drugs were quite as effective in the applicable population.
This is a very complicated and controversial statement which I will be happy
to defend in the comments if someone asks.

The big problem is: drugs go off-patent after twenty years. Drug companies
want to push new, on-patent medications, and most research is funded by
drug companies. So lots and lots of research is aimed at proving that newer
medications invented in the past twenty years (which make drug companies
money) are better than older medications (which don’t).

I’ll give one example. There is only a single study in the entire literature
directly comparing the MAOIs – the very old antidepressants that did best on
the patient ratings – to SSRIs, the antidepressants of the modern day4. This
study found that phenelzine, a typical MAOI, was no better than Prozac, a
typical SSRI. Since Prozac had fewer side effects, that made the choice in favor
of Prozac easy.

Did you know you can look up the authors of scientific studies on LinkedIn
and sometimes get very relevant information? For example, the lead author of
this study has a resume that clearly lists him as working for Eli Lilly at the
time the study was conducted (spoiler: Eli Lilly is the company that makes
Prozac). The second author’s LinkedIn profile shows he is also an operations
manager for Eli Lilly. Googling the fifth author’s name links to a news article
about Eli Lilly making a $750,000 donation to his clinic. Also there’s a little
blurb at the bottom of the paper saying “Supported by a research grant by Eli
Lilly and company”, then thanking several Eli Lilly executives by name for
their assistance.

This is the sort of study which I kind of wish had gotten replicated before we
decided to throw away an entire generation of antidepressants based on the
result.

But who will come to phenelzine’s defense? Not Parke-Davis , the company
that made it: their patent expired sometime in the seventies, and then they
were bought out by Pfizer5. And not Pfizer – without a patent they can’t make
any money off Nardil, and besides, Nardil is competing with their own on-
patent SSRI drug Zoloft, so Pfizer has as much incentive as everyone else to
push the “SSRIs are best, better than all the rest” line.

Every twenty years, pharmaceutical companies have an incentive to suddenly

declare that all their old antidepressants were awful and you should never use
them, but whatever new antidepressant they managed to dredge up is super
awesome and you should use it all the time. This sort of does seem like the sort
of situation that might lead to older medications being better than newer ones.
A couple of people have been pushing this line for years – I was introduced to
it by Dr. Ken Gillman from Psychotropical Research, whose recommendation
of MAOIs and Anafranil as most effective match the patient data very well,
and whose essay Why Most New Antidepressants Are Ineffective is worth a
read.

I’m not sure I go as far as he does – even if new antidepressants aren’t worse
outright, they might still trade less efficacy for better safety. Even if they
handled the tradeoff well, it would look like a net loss on patient rating data.
After all, assume Drug A is 10% more effective than Drug B, but also kills 1% of
its users per year, while Drug B kills nobody. Here there’s a good case that
Drug B is much better and a true advance. But Drug A’s ratings would look
better, since dead men tell no tales and don’t get to put their objections into
online drug rating sites. Even if victims’ families did give the drug the lowest
possible rating, 1% of people giving a very low rating might still not counteract
99% of people giving it a higher rating.

And once again, I’m not sure the tradeoff is handled very well at all.6.

VI.

In order to distinguish between all these hypotheses, I decided to get a lot

more data.

I grabbed all the popular antipsychotics, antihypertensives, antidiabetics, and

anticonvulsants from the three databases, for a total of 55,498 ratings of 74
different drugs. I ran the same analysis on the whole set.

The three databases still correlate with each other at respectable levels of
+0.46, +0.54, and +0.53. All of these correlations are highly significant, p <
0.01. The negative correlation between patient rating and doctor rating
remains and is now a highly significant -0.344, p < 0.01. This is robust even if
antidepressants are removed from the analysis, and is notable in both
psychiatric and nonpsychiatric drugs.
The correlation between patient rating and year of release is a no-longer-
significant -0.191. This is heterogenous; antidepressants and antipsychotics
show a strong bias in favor of older medications, and antidiabetics,
antihypertensives, and anticonvulsants show a slight nonsignificant bias in
favor of newer medications. So it would seem like the older-is-better effect is
purely psychiatric.

I conclude that for some reason, there really is a highly significant effect across
all classes of drugs that makes doctors love the drugs patients hate, and vice
versa.

I also conclude that older psychiatric drugs seem to be liked much better by
patients, and that this is not some kind of simple artifact or bias, since if such
an artifact or bias existed we would expect it to repeat in other kinds of drugs,
which it doesn’t.
VII.

Please feel free to check my results. Here is a spreadsheet (.xls) containing all
of the data I used for this analysis. Drugs are marked by class: 1 is
antidepressants, 2 is antidiabetics, 3 is antipsychotics, 4 is antihypertensives,
and 5 is anticonvulsants. You should be able to navigate the rest of it pretty
easily.

One analysis that needs doing is to separate out drug effectiveness versus side
effects. The numbers I used were combined satisfaction ratings, but a few
databases – most notably WebMD – give you both separately. Looking more
closely at those numbers might help confirm or disconfirm some of the
theories above.

If anyone with the necessary credentials is interested in doing the hard work
to publish this as a scientific paper, drop me an email and we can talk.

Footnotes

1. Technically, MAOI superiority has only been proven for atypical depression,
the type of depression where you can still have changing moods but you are
unhappy on net. But I’d speculate that right now most patients diagnosed with
depression have atypical depression, far more than the studies would indicate,
simply because we’re diagnosing less and less severe cases these days, and less
severe cases seem more atypical.

2. First-place winner Nardil has only 16% as many reviews as last-place

winner Viibryd, even though Nardil has been on the market fifty years and
Viibryd for four. Despite its observed superiority, Nardil may very possibly be
prescribed less than 1% as often as Viibryd.

3. Pretty much the same thing is true if, instead of looking at the year they
came out, you just rank them in order from earliest to latest.

4. On the other hand, what we do have is a lot of studies comparing MAOIs to

imipramine, and a lot of other studies comparing modern antidepressants to
imipramine. For atypical depression and dysthymia, MAOIs beat imipramine
handily, but the modern antidepressants are about equal to imipramine. This
strongly implies the MAOIs beat the modern antidepressants in these
categories.

5. Interesting Parke-Davis facts: Parke-Davis got rich by being the people to

market cocaine back in the old days when people treated it as a
pharmaceutical, which must have been kind of like a license to print money.
They also worked on hallucinogens with no less a figure than Aleister Crowley,
who got a nice tour of their facilities in Detroit.

6. Consider: Seminars In General Psychiatry estimates that MAOIs kill one

person per 100,000 patient years. A third of all depressions are atypical.
MAOIs are 25 percentage points more likely to treat atypical depression than
other antidepressants. So for every 100,000 patients you give a MAOI instead
of a normal antidepressant, you kill one and cure 8,250 who wouldn’t
otherwise be cured. The QALY database says that a year of moderate
depression is worth about 0.6 QALYs. So for every 100,000 patients you give
MAOIs, you’re losing about 30 QALYs and gaining about 3,300.

Guns And States

I.

From a Vox article on America’s Gun Problem, Explained: “On Wednesday, it

happened again: There was a mass shooting — this time, in San Bernardino,
California. And once again on Sunday, President Barack Obama called for
measures that make it harder for would-be shooters to buy deadly firearms.”

Then it goes on to say that “more guns mean more gun deaths, period. The
research on this is overwhelmingly clear. No matter how you look at the data,
more guns mean more gun deaths.” It cites the following chart:
…then uses the graph as a lead in to talk about active shooter situations, gun-
homicide relationships, and outrage over gun massacres.

Did you notice that the axis of this graph says “gun deaths”, and that this is a
totally different thing from gun murders?

(this isn’t an isolated incident: Vox does the same thing here and here)

Gun deaths are a combined measure of gun homicides and gun suicides. Here
is a graph of guns vs. gun homicides:
And here is a graph of guns vs. gun suicides:
The relationship between gun ownership and homicide is weak (and appears
negative), the relationship between gun ownership and suicide is strong and
positive. The entire effect Vox highlights in their graph is due to gun suicides,
but they are using it to imply conclusions about gun homicides. This is why
you shouldn’t make a category combining two unlike things.

II.

I am not the first person to notice this. The Washington Examiner makes the
same criticism of Vox’s statistics that I do. And Robert VerBruggen of National
Review does the same analysis decomposing gun deaths into suicides and
homicides, and like me finds no correlation with homicides.

German Lopez of Vox responds here. He argues that VerBruggen can’t just do
a raw uncontrolled correlation of state gun ownership with state murder rates
without adjusting for confounders. This is true, although given that Vox has
done this time and time again for months on end and all VerBruggen is doing
is correctly pointing out a flaw in their methods, it feels kind of like an isolated
demand for rigor.
So let’s look at the more-carefully-controlled studies. Lopez suggests the ones
at the Harvard Injury Control Research Center, which has done several
statistical analyses of gun violence. They list two such analyses comparing gun
ownership versus homicide rates across US states: Miller Azrael & Hemenway
(2002), and Miller Azrael & Hemenway (2007).

(does it count as nominative determinism when someone named Azrael goes

into homicide research?)

We start with MA&H 2002. This study does indeed conclude that higher gun
ownership rates are correlated with higher murder rates after adjusting for
confounders. But suspiciously, it in fact finds that higher gun ownership rates
are correlated with higher murder rates even before adjusting for
confounders, something that we already found wasn’t true! Furthermore, even
after adjusting for confounders it finds in several age categories that higher
gun ownership rates are correlated with higher non-gun homicide rates (eg
the rates at which people are murdered by knives or crowbars or whatever) at
p less than 0.001. This is really suspicious! Unless guns are exerting some kind
of malign pro-murder influence that makes people commit more knife
murders, some sort of confounding influence has remained. Let’s look closer.

The study gets its murder rate numbers from the National Center for Health
Statistics, which seems like a trustworthy source. It gets its gun ownership
numbers from…oh, that’s interesting, it doesn’t actually have any gun
ownership numbers. It says that there is no way to figure out what percent of
people in a given state own guns, so as a proxy for gun ownership numbers, it
will use a measure called FS/S, ie the number of firearm suicides in a state
divided by the total number of suicides.

This makes some intuitive sense. Among people who want to commit suicide,
suppose a fixed percent prefer to use guns compared to other methods. In that
case, the determining factor for whether or not they use a gun will be whether
or not they have a gun. Hospitals diligently record statistics about suicide
victims including method of suicide, so if our assumption holds this should be
a decent proxy for gun ownership within a state.

There’s only one problem – I checked this against an actual measure of gun
ownership per state that came out after this study was published – the CDC
asking 200,000 people how many guns they had as part of the Behavioral Risk
Factor Surveillance System Survey – and the FS/S measure fails. When I
repeat all of their analyses with their own FS/S measure, I get all of their same
positive correlations, including the ones with non-gun homicides. When I
repeat it with the real gun ownership data, all of these positive correlations
disappear. When I look at exactly why this happens, it’s because FS/S is
muchmore biased towards Southern states than actual gun ownership is. Real
gun ownership correlates very modestly – 0.25 – with 538’s ranking of the
Southern-ness of states. FS/S correlates at a fantastically high 0.62. For some
reason, suicidal Southerners are much more likely to kill themselves with guns
than suicidal people from the rest of the States, even when you control for
whether they have a gun or not. That means that MA&H 2002 thought it was
measuring gun ownership, but was actually measuring Southern-ness. This is
why they found higher homicide rates, including higher rates of non-gun
homicide.

So we move on to MA&H 2007. This study was published after the CDC’s risk
survey, so they have access to the same superior gun ownership numbers I
used to pick apart their last study. They also have wised up to the fact that
Southern-ness is important, and they include a dummy variable for it in their
calculations. They also control for non-gun crime rate, Gini coefficient,
income, and alcohol use. They do not control for urbanization level or race,
but when I re-analyze their data including these factors doesn’t change
anything, likely because they are already baked in to the crime rate.

They find that even after controlling for all of this stuff, there is still a
significant correlation between gun ownership level and gun homicide rate.
Further, this time they are using good statistics, and there is not a significant
correlation between gun ownership and non-gun-homicide rate. Further,
there is a correlation between gun ownership and total homicide rate,
suggesting that the gun-gun-homicide correlation was not just an artifact of
people switching from inferior weapons to guns while still committing the
same number of murders. Further, this is robust to a lot of different decisions
about what to control or not to control, and what to include or not to include.

I repeated all of their analyses using two different sources of gun ownership
data, a couple different sources of homicide and crime rate data, and a bunch
of different plausible and implausible confounders – thanks a lot to Tumblr
user su3su2u1 for walking me through some of the harder analyses. I was able
to replicate their results. Pro-gun researcher John Lott had many complaints
about this study, including that it was insensitive to including DC and that it
was based entirely on the questionable choice of controlling for robbery rate –
but I was unable to replicate his concerns and found that the guns-homicide
correlation remained even after DC was included and even when I chose a
group of confounders not including robbery rate. I was unable to use their
methodology to replicate the effect in places where it shouldn’t replicate (I
tried to convince it to tell me tractors caused homicide, since I was suspicious
that it was just picking up an urban/rural thing, but it very appropriately
refused to fall for it). Overall I am about as sure of this study as I have ever
been of any social science study, ie somewhat.

This study doesn’t prove causation; while one interpretation is that guns cause
homicide, another is that homicide causes guns – for example, by making
people feel unsafe so they buy guns to protect themselves. However, I doubt
the reverse causation aspect in this case. The study controlled for robbery rate;
ie it was looking at whether guns predicted homicides above and beyond those
that could be expected given the level of non-homicide crime. My guess is that
people feeling unsafe is based more on the general crime rate than on the
homicide rate per se, which would make it hard for the homicide rate to cause
increased gun ownership independently of the crime rate.

If guns are in fact correlated with more homicide, how come me and
VerBruggen found the opposite in our simpler scatterplot analysis? This is
complicated, but I think the biggest part of the answer is the urban/rural
divide. Rural people have more guns. Murder rates are higher in urban areas.
Race also plays a part: whites have more guns, but black areas have higher
murder rates. Finally, the North and West seem to have more guns, but
murder rates are highest in the South (which is what produced the bogus
effect on the last study). All of these differences are large enough to cancel out
the gun/no-gun difference and make the raw scatterplot look like nothing.
This study didn’t address all those things directly, but its decision to control
for non-gun crime rate and poverty took care of them nevertheless. As the old
saying goes, guns don’t kill people; guns controlled for robbery rate,
alcoholism, income, a dummy variable for Southernness, and a combined
measure of social deprivation kill people.
If this is all true, how come I spent so much time yelling at that first study with
worse data? Because I worry that if people only see the good studies, they’ll get
complacent. Vox posted these two studies as proof that there was a state-level
gun-murder correlation. The first one was deeply flawed, but the second one
turned out to be okay. Do you think Vox realized this? Do you think they
would have written that article any differently in a world where both studies
were flawed? As long as you trust every scientific paper you see – let alone
every scientific paper you see on your side in a highly politicized field – even
when you’re right it will often just be by luck.

III.

Vox also voxsplains to us about America’s unusually high gun homicide rate.

Having presented this graph, they say that “To understand why that is, there’s
another important statistic: The US has by far the highest number of privately
owned guns in the world.”

Even granting, as we saw above, that gun ownership does indeed increase
homicide rates, this is not the most important factor in explaining America’s
higher homicide rate, or even close to the most important factor. Let me give a
few arguments for why this must be the case:

1. The United States’ homicide rate of 3.8 is clearly higher than that of eg
France (1.0), Germany (0.8), Australia (1.1), or Canada (1.4). However, as per
the FBI, only 11,208 of our 16,121 murders were committed with firearms, eg
69%. By my calculations, that means our nonfirearm murder rate is 1.2. In
other words, our non-firearm homicide rate alone is higher than France,
Germany, and Australia’s total homicide rate. Nor does this mean that if we
banned all guns we would go down to 1.2 – there is likely a substitution effect
where some murderers are intent on murdering and would prefer to use
convenient firearms but will switch to other methods if they have to. 1.2
should be considered an absolute lower bound. And it is still higher than the
countries we want to compare ourselves to.

2. There are many US states that combine very high firearm ownership with
very low murder rates. The highest gun-ownership state in the nation is
Wyoming, where 59.7% of households have a gun (really!). But Wyoming has a
murder rate of only 1.4 – the same as right across the border in more gun-
controlled Canada, and only about a third of that of the nation as a whole. It
seems likely that the same factors giving Canada a low murder rate give
Wyoming a low murder rate, and that the factors differentiating the rest of
America from Wyoming are the same factors that differentiate the rest of
America from Canada (and Germany, and France…). But this does not include
lower gun ownership.

3. There are many US states that combine very low firearm ownership with
very high murder rates. The highest murder rate in the country is that of
Washington, DC, which has a murder rate of 21.8, more than twenty times
that of most European countries. But DC also has the strictest gun bans and
the lowest gun ownership rate in the country, with gun ownership numbers
less than in many European states! It seems likely that the factors making DC
so deadly are part of the story of why America as a whole is so deadly, but
these cannot include high gun ownership.

If not gun ownership, what is the factor making America so much more deadly
than Europe and other First World countries? The traditional answer I always
heard to this question was that America had a “culture of violence”. I always
hated this answer, because it seemed so vague and meaningless as to be
untestable by design. If the NRA waves their hands and says “eh, culture of
violence”, how are you going to tell them they’re wrong?

But we can work with this if we assume the culture of violence (or, if you want
to be official about it, “honor culture”) is more common in some populations
and areas than others. Some of the groups most frequently talked about
during these lines are Southerners and various nonwhite minorities. This
provides a testable theory: if we compare American non-Southern whites to
European countries mostly made up of non-Southern whites, we’ll find similar
murder rates. But first, some scatter plots:

This is murder rate by state, correlated with perceived Southernness of that

state as per 538’s poll. I’ve removed DC as an outlier on all of the following.

And this is murder rate by state correlated with percent black population:
This would seem to support the “culture of violence” theory.

Can we adjust for this and see what the murder rate is for non-Southern
whites? Sort of. The Economist gives a white-only murder rate of 2.5 (this is
based on white victims, whereas we probably want white perpetrators, but the
vast majority of murders are within-race so it doesn’t make much difference).
And Audacious Epigone has put together a collection of white murder rates by
state. I can’t find anything on non-Southern white murder rates per se, but
one hack would be to take the white murder rate in non-Southern states and
assume there aren’t any Southerners there.

Our main confounder will be urbanization. Western Europe is about 80%

urban, so let’s look at states at a similar level. The four northern states that are
closest to 80% urban are Colorado, Oregon, Washington, and Connecticut. I’m
throwing out Colorado because it has a large Latino population who can’t be
statistically differentiated from whites. That leaves, Washington (2.4),
Connecticut (2.0), and Oregon (2.0). So possibly adjusting out Southerners
brings us down from 2.5 (all whites) to 2.1 or so (non-Southern whites)?
Again, compare to Germany at 0.8, Canada at 1.4, and America at 3.8.
There’s one more factor that needs to be considered:

This is a plot of the gun death rate vs. the robbery rate. There’s a strong
correlation (r = 0.78). Robbery is heavily correlated with percent black,
percent Southern, and urbanization, so it’s probably coming from the same
place. Nevertheless, it seems to correlate with murder better than any of them
alone, maybe because it’s combining all three measures together. I was able to
make a linear model using those three measures that correlated at r = 0.79
with murder, about the same amount that robbery does. I should also mention
that robbery correlates negatively with gun ownership at r = – 0.52, but this
disappeared when controlled for urbanization.

So my very tentative conclusion is that although the US murder rate is much

higher than that of other First World countries, this is partly due to the
existence of various cultural factors not present in those other nations. When
we adjust those away, America’s murder rate falls from 3.8 to 2.1. Which is
still higher than Germany’s 0.8 or Canada’s 1.4.

Is that extra due to guns?

IV.

According to MA&H 2007, each absolute percentage point in gun ownership

was related to a 2.2 relative percentage point difference in homicide. This part
of the study was beyond my ability to check, and I’m not sure why they
switched from absolute to relative percents there, but suppose we take it
seriously.

America has a gun ownership rate of 32%, so if we somehow decreased that to

zero, we would naively expect about a 70% decrease in homicides.
Unfortunately, only 67% of American homicides involve guns, so we’re back to
pretending that eliminating guns will not only have zero substitution effect but
also magically prevent non-gun homicides. This shows the dangers of
extrapolating a figure determined by small local differences all the way to the
edge of the graph (I’M TALKING TO YOU, RAY KURZWEIL).

Maybe we can be more modest? Canada has a gun ownership rate of aboot
26%, so…

…wait a second. I thought we’ve been told that the US has a gun ownership
rate seven zillion times that of any other country in the world, and that is why
we are so completely unique in our level of gun crime? And now they’re telling
us that Canada has 26% compared to our 32%? What?

Don’t trust me too much here, because I’ve never seen anyone else analyze this
and it seems like the sort of thing there should be loads of analyses of if it’s
true, but I think the difference is between percent of households with guns vs.
guns per capita. US and Canada don’t differ very much in percent of
households with guns, but America has about four times as many guns per
capita. Why? I have no idea, but the obvious implication is that Canadians
mostly stop at one gun, whereas Americans with guns buy lots and lots of
them. In retrospect this makes sense; I am looking at gun enthusiast bulletin
boards, and they’re advising other gun enthusiasts that six guns is really the
bare minimum it’s possible to get by with (see also “How many guns can you
have before it’s okay to call your collection an ‘arsenal’?”, which I have to
admit is not a question that I as a boring coastal liberal have ever considered).
So if the guy asking that question decides he needs 100 guns before he gets his
arsenal merit badge, that’s a lot more guns per capita without increasing
percent household gun ownership. This should actually be another argument
that guns are not a major factor in differentiating US vs. Canadian murder
rates, since unless you’re going on a mass shooting (WHICH IS REALLY
RARE) you wouldn’t expect more murders from any gun in a household
beyond the first. That means that the small difference between US and
Canadian household percent gun ownership rates (32% vs. 26%) would have
to drive the large difference between US and Canadian murder rates (1.4 vs.
3.8), which just isn’t believable.

…okay, sorry, where were we? Canada has a gun ownership rate of about 26%,
so if America were to get its gun ownership as low as Canada, that would be -6
absolute percentage points = a 13% relative decrease in murder rate = the
murder rate going from 3.8 to 3.3 = a 0.5 point decrease in the murder rate.
That’s pretty close to the difference between our 2.1 US-sans-culture-of-
violence estimate and the 1.4 Canadian rate – so maybe beyond the cultures of
violence, the rest of the US/Canada difference really is due to guns?

(I’m not sure whether I should be subtracting 13% from 2.1 rather than 3.8
here)

In Germany, 9% of households own firearms (wait, really? European gun

control is less strict than I thought!) Using MA&H’s equation, we predict that
if the US had the same gun ownership rate as Germany, its murder rate would
drop 50%, eg from 3.8 to 1.9. Adjust out the culture of violence, and we’re
actually pretty close to real Germany’s murder rate of 0.8.

How much would gun control actually cut US gun ownership? That obviously
depends on the gun control, but a lot of people talk about Australia’s gun
buyback program as a model to be emulated. These people say it decreased
gun ownership from 7% of people to 5% of people (why is this number so
much lower than Canada and Germany? I think because it’s people rather than
households – if a gun owner is married to a non-gun-owner, they count as one
gun-owner and one non-owner, as opposed to a single gun-owning household.
The Australian household number seems to be 19% or so). So the gun buyback
program in Australia decreased gun ownership by (relative) 30% or so. If a
similar program decreased gun ownership in America by (relative) 30%, it
would decrease it by (absolute) 10% and decrease the homicide rate by
(absolute) 22%. Since there are about 13000 homicides in the US per year,
that would save about 3000 lives – or avert about one 9/11 worth of deaths per
year.

(note that our murder rate would still be 3.0, compared to Germany’s 0.8 and
Canada’s 1.4. Seriously, I’m telling you, the murder rate difference is not
primarily driven by guns!)

Is that worth it? That obviously depends on how much you like being able to
have guns. But let me try to put this number into perspective in a couple of
different ways:

Last time anyone checked, which was 1995, about 618,000 people died young
(ie before age 65) in the US per year. Suppose that the vast majority of
homicides are of people below 65. That means that instituting gun control
would decrease the number of premature deaths to about 615,000 – in other
words, by about half a percentage point. I’m having to borrow this data from
the UK, but if it carries over, the average person my age (early 30s) has a
1/1850 chance of death each year. Gun control would decrease that to about
1/1860. I’m very very unsure about the exact numbers, but it seems like the
magnitude is very low.

On the other hand, lives are very valuable. In fact, the statistical value of a
human life in the First World – ie the value that groups use to decide whether
various life-saving interventions are worth it or not – is $7.4 million. That
means that gun control would “save” $22 billion dollars a year. Americans buy
about 20 million guns per year (really)! If we were to tax guns to cover the
“externality” of gun homicides preventable by Australia-level gun control, we
would have to slap a $1000 tax on each gun sold. While I have no doubt that
some people, probably including our arsenal collector above, would be willing
to pay that, my guess is that most people would not. This suggests that most
people probably do not enjoy guns enough to justify keeping them around
despite their costs.

Or if all gun enthusiasts wanted to band together for some grand Coasian
bargain to buy off the potential victims of gun violence, each would have to
contribute $220/year to the group effort – not totally impossible, but also not
something I can really see happening.
This is very, very, very, very very tentative, but based on this line of reasoning
alone, without looking into the experimental studies or anything else, it
appears that Australia-style gun control would probably be worth it, if it were
possible.

(I didn’t price in the advantages of guns in terms of preventing state tyranny

and protecting freedom, which might be worth subsidizing, but my guess is
that if 32% gun ownership is enough to maintain freedom, 22% gun ownership
is as well)

V.

In summary, with my personal confidence levels:

1. Scatterplots showing raw correlations between gun ownership and “gun

deaths” are entirely driven by suicide, and therefore dishonest to use to
prove that guns cause murder (~100% confidence)
2. But if you adjust for all relevant confounders, there is a positive
correlation between gun ownership and homicide rates (~90%
confidence). This relationship is likely causal (~66% confidence).
3. The majority of the difference between America’s murder rate and that
of other First World countries is not because of easier access to guns in
America (~90% confidence).
4. But some of it is due to easier access to guns. This is probably about 0.5
murders/100K/year.
5. An Australian-style gun control program that worked and had no side
effects would probably prevent about 2,000 murders in the US. It would
also prevent a much larger number of suicides. I am otherwise ignoring
suicides in this piece because discussing them would make me too
angry.
6. Probably the amount of lost gun-related enjoyment an Australian-style
gun control program would cause do not outweigh the benefits.
7. This is not really enough analysis to make me have a strong opinion
about gun control, since this just looks at the correlational evidence and
doesn’t really investigate the experimental evidence. Contrary to what
everyone always tells you, experimental evidence doesn’t always trump
correlational – there are cases where each has its strengths – but it
wouldn’t be responsible to have a real opinion on this until I look into
 that too. Nevertheless, these data are at least highly consistent with
Australia-style gun control being a good idea for the US.

If you want to look into this more, here is a CSV version of all the relevant
data.

Teachers: Much More Than You Wanted To Know

I.

Newspapers report that having a better teacher for even a single grade (for
example, a better fourth-grade teacher) can improve a child’s lifetime earning
prospects by $80,000. Meanwhile, behavioral genetics studies suggest that a
child’s parents have minimal (non-genetic) impact on their future earnings. So
one year with your fourth-grade teacher making you learn fractions has vast
effects on your prospects, but twenty-odd years with your parents shaping you
at every moment doesn’t? Huh? I decided to try to figure this out by looking
into the research on teacher effectiveness more closely.

First, how much do teachers matter compared to other things? To find out,
researchers take a district full of kids with varying standardized test scores
and try to figure out how much of the variance can be predicted by what
school the kids are in, what teacher’s class the kids are in, and other
demographic factors about the kids. So for example if the test scores of two
kids in the same teacher’s class were on average no more similar than the test
scores of two kids in two different teachers’ classes, then teachers can’t matter
very much. But if we were consistently seeing things like everybody in Teacher
A’s class getting A+s and everyone in Teacher B’s class getting Ds, that would
suggest that good teachers are very important.

Here are the results from three teams that tried this (source, source, source):
These differ a little in that the first one assumes away all noise (“unexplained
variance”) and the latter two keep it in. But they all agree pretty well that
individual factors are most important, followed by school and teacher factors
of roughly equal size. Teacher factors explain somewhere between 5% and
20% of the variance. Other studies seem to agree, usually a little to the lower
end. For example, Goldhaber, Brewer, and Anderson (1999)find teachers
explain 9% of variance; Nye, Konstantopoulos, and Hedges (2004) find they
explain 13% of variance for math and 7% for reading. The American Statistical
Association summarizes the research as “teachers account for about 1% to 14%
of the variability in test scores”, which seems about right.

So put more simply – on average, individual students’ level of ability grit is

what makes the difference. Good schools and teachers may push that a little
higher, and bad ones bring it a little lower, but they don’t work miracles.

(remember that right now we’re talking about same-year standardized test
scores. That is, we’re talking about how much your fourth-grade history
teacher affects your performance on a fourth-grade history test. If teacher
effects show up anywhere, this is where it’s going to be.)

Just as it’s much easier to say “this is 40% genetic” than to identify particular
genes, so it’s much easier to say “this is 10% dependent on school-level factors
and 10% based on teacher-level factors” then to identify what those school-
level and teacher-level factors are. The Goldhaber study above tries its best,
but the only school-level variable they can pin down is that having lots of
white kids in your school improves test scores. And as far as I can tell, they
don’t look at socioeconomic status of the school or its neighborhood, which is
probably what the white kids are serving as a proxy for. Even though these
“school level effects” are supposed to be things like “the school is well-funded”
or “the school has a great principal”, I worry that they’re capturing student
effects by accident. That is, if you go to a school where everyone else is a rich
white kid, chances are that means you’re a rich white kid yourself. Although
they try to control for this, having a couple of quantifiable variables like race
and income probably doesn’t entirely capture the complexities of
neighborhood sorting by social class.

In terms of observable teacher-level effects, the only one they can find that
makes a difference is gender (female teachers are better). Teacher
certification, years of experience, certification, degrees, et cetera have no
effect. This is consistent with most other research, such as Miller, McKenna,
and McKenna (1998). A few studies that we’ll get to later do suggest teacher
experience matters; almost nobody wants to claim certifications or degrees do
much.

One measurable variable not mentioned here does seem to have a strong
ability to predict successful teachers. I’m not able to access these studies
directly, but according to the site of the US Assistant Secretary of Education:

The most robust finding in the research literature is the effect of teacher
verbal and cognitive ability on student achievement. Every study that
has included a valid measure of teacher verbal or cognitive ability has
found that it accounts for more variance in student achievement than
any other measured characteristic of teachers (e.g., Greenwald, Hedges,
& Lane, 1996; Ferguson & Ladd, 1996; Kain & Singleton, 1996;
Ehrenberg & Brewer, 1994).

So far most of this is straightforward and uncontroversial. Teachers account

for about 10% of variance in student test scores, it’s hard to predict which
teachers do better by their characteristics alone, and schools account for a
little more but that might be confounded. In order to say more than this we
have to have a more precise way of identifying exactly which teachers are
good, which is going to be more complicated.

II.

Suppose you want to figure out which teachers in a certain district are the
best. You know that the only thing truly important in life is standardized test
scores [citation needed], so you calculate the average test score for each
teacher’s class, then crown whoever has the highest average as Teacher Of The
Year. What could go wrong?

But you’ll probably just give the award to whoever teaches the gifted class.
Teachers have classes with very different ability, and we already determined
that innate ability grit explains more variance than teacher skill, so teachers
who teach disadvantaged children will be at a big, uh, disadvantage.

So okay, back up. Instead of judging teachers by average test score, we can
judge them by the average change in test score. If they start with a bunch of
kids who have always scored around twentieth percentile, and they teach them
so much that now the kids score at the fortieth percentile, then even though
their kids are still below average they’ve clearly done some good work. Rank
how many percentile points on average a teacher’s students go up or down
during the year, and you should be able to identify the best teachers for real
this time.

Add like fifty layers of incomprehensible statistics and this is the basic idea
behind VAM (value-added modeling), the latest Exciting Educational Trend
and the lynchpin of President Obama’s educational reforms. If you use VAM to
find out which teachers are better than others, you can pay the good ones
more to encourage them to stick around. As for the bad ones, VAM opponents
are only being slightly unfair when they describe the plan as “firing your way
to educational excellence”.

A claim like “VAM accurately predicts test scores” is kind of circular, since test
scores are what we used to determine VAM. But I think the people in this field
try to use the VAM of class c to predict the student performance of class c + 1,
or other more complicated techniques, and Chetty, Rothstein, and Rivkin,
Hanushek, and Kane all find that a one standard deviation increase in teacher
VAM corresponds to about a 0.1 standard deviation increase in student test
scores.

Let’s try putting this in English. Consider an average student with an average
teacher. We expect her to score at exactly the 50th percentile on her tests. Now
imagine she switched to the best teacher in the whole school. My elementary
school had about forty teachers, so this is 97.5th percentile eg two standard
deviations above the mean. A teacher whose VAM is two standard deviations
above the mean should have students who score on average 0.2 standard
deviations above the mean. Instead of scoring at the 50th percentile, now
she’ll score at the 58th percentile.

Or consider the SAT, which is not the sort of standardized test involved in
VAM but which at least everybody knows about. Each of its subtests is normed
to a mean of 500 and an SD of 110. Our hypothetical well-taught student
would go from an SAT of 500 to an SAT of 522. Meanwhile, average SAT
subtest score needed to get into Harvard is still somewhere around 740. So
this effect is nonzero but not very impressive.

But what happens if we compound this and give this student the best teachers
many years in a row? Sanders and Rivers (also Jordan, Mendro, and
Weerasinghe) argue the effects are impressive and cumulative. They compare
students in Tennessee who got good teachers three years in a row to similar
students who got bad teachers three years in a row (good = top quintile; bad =
bottom quintile, so only 1/125 students was lucky or unlucky enough to
qualify). The average bad-bad-bad student got scores in the 29th percentile;
the average good-good-good student got scores in the 83rd percentile – which
based on the single-teacher results looks super-additive. This is starting to
sound a lot more impressive, and maybe Harvard-worthy after all. In fact,
occasionally it is quoted as “four consecutive good teachers would close the
black-white achievement gap” (I’m not sure whether this formulation requires
also assigning whites to four consecutive bad teachers).

A RAND education report criticizes these studies as “using ad hoc methods”

and argue that they’re vulnerable to double-counting student achievement.
That is, we know that this teacher is the best because her students get great
test scores; then later on we return and get excited over the discovery that the
best teachers’ students get great test scores. Sanders and Rivers did some
complicated things that ought to adjust for that; RAND runs simulations and
finds that depending on the true size of teacher effects vs. student effects,
those complicated things may or may not work. They conclude that “[Sanders
and Rivers] provide evidence of the existence and persistence of teacher or
classroom effects, but the size of the effects is likely to be somewhat
overstated”.
Gary Rubinstein thinks he’s debunked Sanders and Rivers style studies. I
strongly disagree with his methods – he seems to be saying that the
correlation between good teaching and good test scores isn’t exactly one and
therefore doesn’t matter – but he offers some useful data. Just by eyeballing
and playing around with it, it looks like most of the gain from these “three
consecutive great teachers” actually comes from the last great teacher. So the
superadditivity might not be quite right, and Sanders and Rivers might just be
genuinely finding bigger teacher effects than anybody else.

At what rate do these gains from good teachers decay?

They decay pretty fast. Jacob, Lefgren and Sims find that only 25% of gains
carry on to the next year, and only 15% to the year after that. That is, if you
had a great fourth grade teacher who raised your test scores by x points, in
fifth grade your test scores will be 0.25x higher than they would otherwise
have been. Kane and Rothstein find much the same. A RAND report suggests
20% persistence after one year and 10% persistence after two. Jacob, Lefgren,
and Sims find that only 25% of gains remain after one year, and about 13%
after two years, after which it drops off much more slowly. All of this
contradicts Sanders and Rivers pretty badly.

None of these studies can tell us whether the gains go all the way to zero after
a long enough time. Chetty does these calculations and finds that they stabilize
at 25% of their original value. But this number is higher than the two-year
number for most of the other studies, plus Chetty is famous for getting results
that are much more spectacular and convenient than anybody else’s. I am
really skeptical here. I remember a lot more things about last year than I do
about twenty years ago, and even though I am pretty sure that my sixth grade
teacher (for some weird reason) taught our class line dancing, I can’t
remember a single dance step. And remember Louis Benezet’s early 20th
century experiments with not teaching kids any math at all until middle school
– after a year or two they were just as good as anyone else, suggesting a dim
view of how useful elementary school math teachers must be. And even Chetty
doesn’t really seem to want to argue the point, saying that his results “[align]
with existing evidence that improvements in education raise
contemporaneous scores, then fade out in later scores”.
In summary, I think there’s pretty strong evidence that a +1 SD increase in
teacher VAM can increase same-year test scores by + 0.1 SD, but that 50% –
75% of this effect decays in the first two years. I’m less certain how much these
numbers change when one gets multiple good or bad teachers in a row, or how
fully they decay after the first two years.

III.

When I started looking for evidence about how teachers affected children, I
expected teachers’ groups and education specialists to be pushing all the
positive results. After all, what could be better for them than solid statistical
proof that good teachers are super valuable?

In fact, these groups are the strongest opponents of the above studies – not
because they doubt good teachers have an effect, but because in order to prove
that effect you have to concede that good teaching is easy to measure, which
tends to turn into proposals to use VAM to measure teacher performance and
then fire underperformers. They argue that VAM is biased and likely to
unfairly pull down teachers who get assigned less intelligentlower-grit kids.

It’s always fun to watch rancorous academic dramas from the outside, and the
drama around VAM is really a level above anything else I’ve seen. A typical
example is the blog VAMboozled! with its oddly hypnotic logo and a steady
stream of posts like Kane Is At It Again: “Statistically Significant” Claims
Exaggerated To Influence Policy. Historian/researcher Diane Ravitch doesn’t
have quite as cute an aesthetic, but she writes things like:

VAM is Junk Science. Looking at children as machine-made widgets and

looking at learning solely as standardized test scores may thrill some
econometricians, but it has nothing to do with the real world of children,
learning, and teaching. It is a grand theory that might net its authors a
Nobel Prize for its grandiosity, but it is both meaningless in relation to
any genuine concept of education and harmful in its mechanistic and
reductive view of humanity.

But tell us how you really feel.

I was originally skeptical of this, but after reading enough of these sites I think
they have some good points about how VAM isn’t always a good measure.

First, it seems to depend a lot on student characteristics; for example, it’s

harder to get a high VAM in a class full of English as a Second Language
students. It makes perfect sense that ESL students would get low test scores,
but since VAM controls for prior achievement you might expect them to get
the same VAM anyway. They don’t. Also, a lot of VAM models control for
student race, gender, socioeconomic status, et cetera. I guess this is better
than not doing this, but it seems to show a lack of confidence – if controlling
for prior achievement was enough, you wouldn’t need to control for these
other things. But apparently people do feel the need to control for this stuff,
and at that point I bring up my usual objection that you can never control for
confounders enough, and also all to some degree these things are probably
just lossy proxies for genetics which you definitelycan’t control for enough.

Maybe because of this, there’s a lot of noise in VAM estimates. Goldhaber &
Hansen (2013) finds that a teacher’s VAM in year t is correlated at about 0.3
with their VAM in year t + 1. A Gates Foundation study also found reliabilities
from 0.19 to 0.4, averaging about 0.3. Newton et al get slightly higher
numbers from 0.4 to 0.6; Bessolo a wider range from 0.2 to 0.6. But these are
all in the same ballpark, and Goldhaber and Hanson snarkily note that
standardized tests aimed to assess students usually need correlations of 0.8 to
0.9 to be considered valid (the SAT, for example, is around 0.87). Although
this suggests there’s some component of VAM which is stable, it can’t be
considered to be “assessing” teachers in the same way normal tests assess
students.

Even if VAM is a very noisy estimate, can’t the noise be toned down by
averaging it out over many years? I think the answer is yes, and I think the
most careful advocates of VAM want to do this, but President Obama wants to
improve education now and a lot of teachers don’t have ten years worth of
VAM estimates.

Also, some teachers complain that even averaging it out wouldn’t work if there
are consistent differences in student assignment. For example, if Ms. Andrews
always got the best students, and Mr. Brown always got the worst students,
then averaging ten years is just going to average ten years of biased data.
Proponents argue that aside from a few obvious cases (the teacher of the gifted
class, the teacher of the ESL class) this shouldn’t happen. They can add
school-fixed effects into their models (eg control for average performance of
students at a particular school), leaving behind only teacher effects. And, they
argue, which student in a school gets assigned which teacher ought to be
random. Opponents argue that it might not be, and cite Paufler and Amrein-
Beardsley‘s survey of principals, in which the principals all admit they don’t
assign students to classes randomly. But if you look at the study, the principals
say that they’re trying to be super-random – ie deliberately make sure that all
classes are as balanced as possible. Even if they don’t 100% achieve this goal,
shouldn’t the remaining differences be pretty minimal?

Maybe not. Rothstein (2009) tries to “predict” students’ fourth-grade test

scores using their fifth-grade teacher’s VAM and finds that this totally works.
Either schools are defying the laws of time and space, or for some reason the
kids who do well in fourth-grade are getting the best fifth-grade teachers.
Briggs and Domingue not only replicate these effects, but find that a fifth-
grade teacher’s “effects” on her students in fourth-grade is just as big as her
effect on her students when she is actually teaching them, which would
suggest that 100% of VAM is bias. Goldhaber has an argument for why there
are statistical reasons this might not be so damning, which I unfortunately
don’t have enough understanding grit to evaluate.

Genetics might also play a role in explaining these results (h/t Spotted Toad’s
excellent post on the subject). A twin study by Robert Plomin does the
classical behavioral genetics thing to VAM and finds that individual students’
nth grade VAM is about 40% to 50% heritable. That is, the change in your test
scores between third to fourth grade will probably be more like the change in
your identical twin’s test scores than like the change in your fraternal twin’s
test scores.

At first glance, this doesn’t make sense – since VAM controls for past
performance, shouldn’t it be a pretty pure measure of your teacher’s
effectiveness? Toad argues otherwise. One of those Ten Replicated Findings
From Behavioral Genetics is that IQ is more shared environmental in younger
kids and more genetic in older kids. In other words, when you’re really young,
how smart you are depends on how enriched your environment is; as you grow
older, it becomes more genetically determined.
So suppose that your environment is predisposing you to an IQ of 100, but
your genes are predisposing you to an IQ of 120. And suppose (pardon the
oversimplification) that at age 5 your IQ is 100, at age 15 it’s 120, and change
between those ages is linear. Then every year you could expect to gain 2 IQ
points. Now suppose there’s another kid whose environment is predisposing
her to an IQ of 130, but whose genes are predisposing her to an IQ of 90. At
age 5 her IQ is 130, at age 15 it’s 90, and so every year she is losing 4 IQ points.
And finally, suppose that your score on standardized tests is exactly 100%
predicted by your IQ. Since you gain two points every year, in fifth grade you’ll
gain two points on your test, and your teacher will look pretty good. She’ll get
a good VAM, a raise, and a promotion. Since your friend loses four points
every year, in fifth grade she’ll lose four points on her test, and her teacher will
look incompetent and be assigned remedial training.

This critique meshes nicely with the Rothstein test. Since you’re gaining 2
points every year, Prof. Rothstein can use your 5th grade gains of +2 points to
accurately predict your fourth grade gain of +2 points. Then he can use your
friend’s 5th grade loss of -4 points to accurately predict her fourth grade loss
of -4 points.

This is a very neat explanation. My only concern is that it doesn’t explain

decay effects very well. If a fifth grade teacher’s time-bending effect on
students in fourth grade is exactly the same as her non-time-bending effect on
students in fifth grade, how come her effect on her students once they
graduate to sixth grade will only be 25% as large as her fifth grade effects?
How come her seventh-grade effects will be smaller still? Somebody here has
to be really wrong.

It would be nice to be able to draw all of this together by saying that teachers
have almost no persistent effects, and the genetic component identified by
Plomin and pointed at by Rothstein represents the 15 – 25% “permanent” gain
identified by Chetty and others which so contradicts my lack of line dancing
memories. But that would be just throwing out Briggs and Domingue’s finding
that the Rothstein effect explains 100% of identified VAM.

One thing I kept seeing in the best papers on this was an acknowledgement
that instead of arguing “VAMs are biased!” versus “VAMs are great!”, people
should probably just agree that VAMs are biased, just like everything else, and
start figuring out ways to measure exactly how biased they are, then use that
number to determine what purposes they are or aren’t appropriate for. But I
haven’t seen anybody doing this in a way I can understand.

In summary, there are many reasons to be skeptical of VAM. But some of

these reasons contradict each other, and it’s not clear that we should be
infinitely skeptical. A big part of VAM is bias, but there might also be some
signal within the noise, especially when it’s averaged out over many years.

IV.

So let’s go back to that study that says that a good fourth grade teacher can
earn you $89,000. The study itself is Chetty, Friedman, and Rockoff (part 1,
part 2). You may recognize Chetty as a name that keeps coming up, usually
attached to findings about as unbelievable as these ones.

Bloomberg said that “a truly great” teacher could improve a child’s earnings by
$80,000, but I think this is mostly extrapolation. The number I see in the
paper is a claim that a 1 SD better fourth-grade teacher can improve lifetime
earnings by $39,000, so let’s stick with that.

This sounds impressive, but imagine the average kid works 40 years. That
means it’s improving yearly earnings by about $1,000. Of note, the study
didn’t find this. They found that such teachers improved yearly earnings by
about $300, but their study population was mostly in their late twenties and
not making very much, and they extrapolated that if good teachers could
increase the earnings of entry-level workers by $300, eventually they could
increase the earnings of workers with a little more experience by $1000. The
authors use a lot of statistics to justify this assumption which I’m not qualified
to assess. But really, who cares? The fact that having a good fourth grade
teacher can improve your adult earnings any measurable amount is the weird
claim here. Once I accept that, I might as well accept $300, $1,000, or
$500,000.

And here’s the other weird thing. Everyone else has found that teacher effects
on test scores decay very quickly over time. Chetty has sort of found that up to
25% of them persist, but he doesn’t really seem interested in defending that
claim and agrees that probably test scores just fade away. Yet as he himself
admits, good teachers’ impact on earnings works as if there were zero fadeout
of teacher effects. He and his co-authors write:

Our conclusion that teachers have long-lasting impacts may be

surprising given evidence that teachers’ impacts on test scores “fade out”
very rapidly in subsequent grades (Rothstein 2010, Carrell and West
2010, Jacob, Lefgren, and Sims 2010). We confirm this rapid fade-out in
our data, but find that teachers’ impacts on earnings are similar to what
one would predict based on the cross-sectional correlation between
earnings and contemporaneous test score gains.

They later go on to call this a “pattern of fade-out and re-emergence”, but this
is a little misleading. The VAM never re-emerges on test scores. It only shows
up in the earnings numbers.

All of this is really dubious, and it seems like Section III gives us an easy way
out. There’s probably a component of year-to-year stable bias in VAM, such
that it captures something about student quality, maybe even innate ability,
rather than just teacher quality. It sounds very easy to just say that this is the
component producing Chetty’s finding of income gains at age 28; students
who have higher innate ability in fourth grade will probably still have it in
their twenties.

Chetty is aware of this argument and tries to close it off. He conducts a quasi-
experiment which he thinks replicates and confirms his original point: what
happens when new teachers enter the school?

The thing we’re most worried about is bias in student selection to teachers. If
we take an entire grade of a school (for example, if a certain school has three
fifth-grade teachers, we take all three of them as a unit) this should be
immune to such effects. So Chetty looks at entire grades as old teachers retire
and new teachers enter. In particular, he looks at such grades when a new
teacher transfers from a different school. That new transfer teacher already
has a VAM which we know from his work at the other school, which will be
either higher or lower than the average VAM of his new school. If it’s higher
and VAM is real, we should expect the average VAM of that grade of his new
school to go up a proportionate amount. If it’s lower and VAM is real, we
should expect the average VAM of that grade of his new school to go down a
proportionate amount. Chetty investigates this with all of the transfer teachers
in his data, finds this is in fact what happens, and finds that if he estimates
VAM from these transfers he gets the same number (+ $1000 in earnings) that
he got from the normal data. This is impressive. Maybe even too impressive.
Really? The same number? So there’s no bias in the normal data? I thought
there was a lot of evidence that most of it was bias?

Rothstein is able to replicate Chetty’s findings using data from a different

district, but then he goes on to do the same thing on Chetty’s quasi-
experiment as he did on the normal VAMs, with the same results. That is, you
can use the amount a school improves when a great new fifth-grade teacher
transfers in to predict that teacher’s students’ fourth-grade performance. Not
perfectly. But a little. For some reason, teacher transfers are having the same
freaky time-bending effects as other VAM. Rothstein mostly explains this by
saying that Chetty incorrectly excluded certain classes and teachers from his
sample, although I don’t fully understand this argument. He also gives one
other example of when this might happen: suppose that a neighborhood is
gentrifying. The new teachers who transfer in after the original teachers retire
will probably be a better class of professional lured in by the improving
neighborhood. And the school’s student body will also probably be more
genetically and socioeconomically advantaged. So better transfer teachers will
be correlated with higher-achieving kids, but they won’t have caused such high
achievement.

After this came an increasingly complicated exchange between Rothstein and

Chetty that I wasn’t able to follow. Chetty, Friedman, and Rockoff wrote a 52
page Response To Rothstein where they argued that Rothstein’s methodology
would find retro-causal effects even in a fair experiment where none should
exist. According to a 538 article on the debate, a couple of smart people (albeit
smart people who already support VAMs and might be biased) think that
Chetty’s response makes sense, and even Rothstein agrees it “could be” true.
538 definitely thought the advantage in this exchange went to Chetty. But
Rothstein responded with a re-replication of his results that he says addresses
Chetty’s criticisms but still finds the retro-causal effects indicating bias; as far
as I know Chetty has not responded and nobody has weighed in to give me an
expert opinion on whether or not it’s right.
My temptation would usually be to say – here are some really weird results
that can’t possibly be true which we want to explain away, here’s a widely-
respected Berkeley professor of economics who says he’s explained them
away, great, let’s forget about the whole thing. But there’s one more
experiment which I can’t dismiss so easily.

V.

Project STAR (Student Teacher Achievement Ratio) was a big educational

experiment in the 80s and 90s to see whether or not smaller class size
improved student performance. That’s a whole different can of worms, but the
point is that in order to do this experiment for a while they randomized
children to kindergarten classes within schools across 79 different schools.
Since one of the biggest possible sources of bias for these last few studies has
been possible nonrandom assignment of students to teachers, these Tennessee
schools were an opportunity to get much better data than were available
anywhere else.

So Chetty, Friedman, Higer, Saez, Schanzenbach, and Yagan analyzed the

STAR data. They tried to do a lot of things with predicting earnings based on
teacher experience, teacher credentials, and other characteristics, and it’s a bit
controversial whether they succeeded or not – see Bryan Caplan’s analysis (1,
2) for more. Caplan is skeptical of a lot of the study, but one part he didn’t
address – and which I find most convincing – is based on something a lot like
VAM.

Because of the random assignment, Chetty et al don’t have to do full VAM

here. It looks like their measure of kindergarten teacher quality is just the
average of all their students’ test scores (wait, kindergarteners are taking
standardized tests now? I guess so.) When they’re using teacher quality to
predict the success of specific students, they use the average of all the test
scores except that of the student being predicted, in order to keep it fair.

They find that the average test score of all the other students in your class,
compared against the average score of all the students in other randomly
assigned classes in your school, predicts your own test score. “A one percentile
increase in entry-year class quality is estimated to raise own test scores by
0.68 percentiles, confirming that test scores are highly correlated across
students within a classroom”. This fades to approximately zero by fourth
grade, confirming that the test-score-related benefits of having a good teacher
are transient and decay quickly. But, students assigned to a one-percentile-
higher class have average earnings that are 0.4% higher at age 25-27! And they
say that this relationship is linear! So for example, the best kindergarten
teacher in their dataset caused her class to perform at the 70th percentile on
average, and these students earned about $17000 on average (remember,
these are young entry-level workers in Tennessee) compared to the $15500 or
so of their more average-kindergarten-teacher-having peers. Just their
kindergarten teacher, totally apart from any other teacher in their life history,
increased their average income 10%. Really, Chetty et al? Really?

But as crazy as it is, this study is hard to poke holes in. Even in arguing against
it, Caplan notes that “it’s an extremely impressive piece” that “the authors are
very careful”, and that it’s “one of the most impressive empirical papers ever
written”. The experimental randomization means we can’t apply most of the
usual anti-VAM measures to it. I don’t know, man. I just don’t know.

Okay, fine. I have one really long-shot possibility. Chetty et al derive their
measure for teacher quality from the performance of all of the students in a
class, excluding each student in turn as they try to predict his or her results.
But this is only exogenous if the student doesn’t affect his or her peers’ test
scores. But it’s possible some students do affect their peers’ test scores. If a
student is a behavioral problem, they can screw up the whole rest of their
class. Carrell finds that “exposure to a disruptive peer in classes of 25 during
elementary school reduces earnings at age 26 by 3 to 4 percent”. Now, this in
itself is a crazy, hard-to-believe study. But if we accept this second crazy hard-
to-believe study, it might provide us with a way of attacking the first crazy
hard-to-believe study. Suppose we have a really screwed-up student who is
always misbehaving in class and disrupting the lesson. This lowers all his
peers’ test scores and makes the teacher look low-quality. Then that kid grows
up and remains screwed-up and misbehaving and doesn’t get as good a job. If
this is a big factor in the differences in performances between classes, then so-
called “teacher quality” might be conflated with a measure of how many
children in their classes are behavioral problems, and apparent effects of
teacher quality on earnings might just represent that misbehaving kids tend to
become low-earning adults. I’m not sure if the magnitude of this effect checks
out, but it might be a possibility.
But if we can’t make that work, we’re stuck believing that good kindergarten
teachers can increase your yearly earnings by thousands of dollars. What do
we make of that?

Again, everybody finds that test score gains do not last nearly that long. So it
can’t be that kindergarten teachers provide you with a useful fund of
knowledge which you build upon later. It can’t even be that kindergarten
teachers stimulate and enrich you which raises your IQ or makes you love
learning or anything like that. It has to be something orthogonal to test scores
and measurable intellectual ability.

Chetty et al’s explanation is that teachers also teach “non-cognitive skills”. I

can’t understand the regressions they use, but they say that although a one
percentile increase in kindergarten class quality has a statistically insignificant
increase (+ 0.05 percentiles) on 8th grade test scores, it has a statistically
significant increase (+0.15 percentiles) on 8th grade non-cognitive scores
(“non-cognitive scores” in this case are a survey where 8th grade teachers
answer questions like “does this student annoy others?”) They then proceed to
demonstrate that the persistence of these non-cognitive effects do a better job
of predicting the earning gains than the test scores do. They try to break these
non-cognitive effects into four categories: “effort”, “initiative”, “engagement”
and “whether the student values school”, but the results are pretty boring and
about equally loaded on all of them.

This does go together really well with my “behavioral problem” theory of the
kindergarten class-earnings effect. The “quality” of a student’s kindergarten
class, which might have more to do with the number of students who were
behavioral problems in it than anything else, doesn’t correlate with future test
scores but does correlate with future behavioral problems. It also seems to
match Plomin’s point about how very early test scores are determined by
environment, but later test scores are determined by genetics. A poor learning
environment might be a really big deal in kindergarten, but stop mattering as
much later on.

But this also goes together with some other studies that have found the same.
The test scores gains from pre-K are notorious for vanishing after a couple of
years, but a few really big preschool studies like the Perry Preschool Program
found that such programs do not boost IQ but may have other effects (though
to complicate matters, apparently Perry did boost later-life standardized test
scores, just not IQ scores, and to further complicate matters, other studies find
children who went to pre-K have worse behavior). This also sort of reminds
me of some of the very preliminary research I’ve been linking to recently
suggesting that excessively early school starting ages seem to produce an
ADHD-like pattern of bad behavior and later-life bad effects, which I was
vaguely willing to attribute to overchallenging kids’ brains too early while
they’re still developing. If I wanted to be very mean (and I do!) I could even
say that all kindergarten is a neurological insult that destroys later life
prospects because of forcing students to overclock their young brains
concentrating on boring things, but good teachers can make this less bad than
it might otherwise be by making their classes a little more enjoyable.

But even if this is true, it loops back to the question I started with: there’s
strong evidence that parents have relatively little non-genetic impact on their
childrens’ life outcomes, but now we’re saying that even a kindergarten
teacher they only see for a year does have such an impact? And what’s more,
it’s not even in the kindergarten teacher’s unique area of comparative
advantage (teaching academic subjects), but in the domain of behavioral
problems, something that parents have like one zillion times more exposure to
and power over?

I don’t know. I still find these studies unbelievable, but don’t have the sort of
knock-down evidence to dismiss them that I’d like. I’m really impressed with
everybody participating in this debate, with the quality of the data, and with
the ability to avoid a lot of the usual failure modes. It’s just not enough to
convince me of anything yet.

VI.

In summary: teacher quality probably explains 10% of the variation in same-

year test scores. A +1 SD better teacher might cause a +0.1 SD year-on-year
improvement in test scores. This decays quickly with time and is probably
disappears entirely after four or five years, though there may also be small
lingering effects. It’s hard to rule out the possibility that other factors, like
endogenous sorting of students, or students’ genetic potential, contributes to
this as an artifact, and most people agree that these sorts of scores combine
some signal with a lot of noise. For some reason, even though teachers’ effects
on test scores decay very quickly, studies have shown that they have
significant impact on earning as much as 20 or 25 years later, so much so that
kindergarten teacher quality can predict thousands of dollars of difference in
adult income. This seemingly unbelievable finding has been replicated in
quasi-experiments and even in real experiments and is difficult to banish.
Since it does not happen through standardized test scores, the most likely
explanation is that it involves non-cognitive factors like behavior. I really don’t
know whether to believe this and right now I say 50-50 odds that this is a real
effect or not – mostly based on low priors rather than on any weakness of the
studies themselves. I don’t understand this field very well and place low
confidence in anything I have to say about it.

Further reading: Institute of Education Science summary, Edward Haertel’s

summary, TTI report, Adler’s critique of Chetty, American Statistical Society’s
critique of Chetty/VAM, Chetty’s response, Ballou’s critique of Chetty

Antidepressant Pharmacogenomics: Much More Than You

Wanted To Know

I.

There are many antidepressants in common use. With a few exceptions, none
are globally better than any others. The conventional wisdom says patients
should keep trying antidepressants until they find one that works for them. If
we knew beforehand which antidepressants would work for which patients, it
would save everyone a lot of time, money, and misery. This is the allure of
pharmacogenomics, the new field of genetically-guided medication
prescription.

Everybody has various different types of cytochrome enzymes which

metabolize medication. Some of them play major roles in metabolizing
antidepressants; usually it’s really complicated and several different enzymes
can affect the same antidepressant at different stages. But sometimes one or
another dominates; for example, Prozac is mostly metabolized by one enzyme
called CYP2D6, and Zoloft is mostly metabolized by a different enzyme called
CYP2C19.
Suppose (say the pharmacogenomicists) that my individual genetics code for a
normal CYP2D6, but a hyperactive CYP2C19 that works ten times faster than
usual. Then maybe Prozac would work normally for me, but every drop of
Zoloft would get shredded by my enzymes before it can even get to my brain. A
genetic test could tell my psychiatrist this, and then she would know to give
me Prozac and not Zoloft. Some tests like this are already commercially
available. Preliminary results look encouraging. As always, the key words are
“preliminary” and “look”, and did I mention that these results were mostly
produced by pharma companies pushing their products?

But let me dream for a just a second. There’s been this uneasy tension in
psychopharmacology. Clinical psychiatrists give their patients antidepressants
and see them get better. Then research psychiatrists do studies and show that
antidepressant effect sizes are so small as to be practically unnoticeable. The
clinicians say “Something must be wrong with your studies, we see our
patients on antidepressants get much better all the time”. The researchers
counter with “The plural of anecdote isn’t ‘data’, your intuitions deceive you,
antidepressant effects are almost imperceptibly weak.” At this point we
prescribe antidepressants anyway, because – what else are you going to do
when someone comes into your office in tears and begs for help? – but we feel
kind of bad about it.

Pharmacogenomics offers a way out of this conundrum. Suppose half of the

time patients get antidepressants, their enzymes shred the medicine before it
can even get to the brain, and there’s no effect. In the other half, the patients
have normal enzymes, the medications reach the brain, and the patient gets
better. Researchers would average together all these patients and conclude
“Antidepressants have an effect, but on average it’s very small”. Clinicians
would keep the patients who get good effects, keep switching drugs for the
patients who get bad effects until they find something that works, and say
“Eventually, most of my patients seem to have good effects from
antidepressants”.

There’s a little bit of support for this in studies. STAR*D found that only 33%
of patients improved on their first antidepressant, but that if you kept
changing antidepressants, about 66% of patients would eventually find one
that helped them improve. Gueorguieva & Mallinckrodt (2011) find something
similar by modelling “growth trajectories” of antidepressants in previous
studies. If it were true, it would be a big relief for everybody.

It might also mean that pharmacogenomic testing would solve the whole
problem forever and lets everyone be on an antidepressant that works well for
them. Such is the dream.

But pharmacogenomics still very young. And due to a complicated series of

legal loopholes, it isn’t regulated by the FDA. I’m mostly in favor of more
things avoiding FDA regulation, but it means the rest of us have to be much
more vigilant.

A few days ago I got to talk to a representative of the company that makes
GeneSight, the biggest name in pharmacogenomic testing. They sell a $2000
test which analyzes seven genes, then produces a report on which psychotropic
medications you might do best or worst on. It’s exactly the sort of thing that
would be great if it worked – so let’s look at it in more depth.

II.

GeneSight tests seven genes. Five are cytochrome enzymes like the ones
discussed above. The other two are HTR2A, a serotonin receptor, and
SLC6A4, a serotonin transporter. These are obvious and reasonable targets if
you’re worried about serotonergic drugs. But is there evidence that they
predict medication response?

GeneSight looks at the rs6313 SNP in HTR2A, which they say determines “side
effects”. I think they’re thinking of Murphy et al (2003), who found that
patients with the (C,C) genotype had worse side effects on Paxil. The study
followed 122 patients on Paxil, of whom 41 were (C,C) and 81 were something
else. 46% of the (C,C) patients hated Paxil so much they stopped taking it,
compared to only 16% of the others (p = 0.001). There was no similar effect on
a nonserotonergic drug, Remeron. This study is interesting, but it’s small and
it’s never been replicated. The closest thing to replication is this study which
focused on nausea, the most common Paxil side effect; it found the gene had
no effect. This study looked at Prozac and found that the gene didn’t affect
Prozac response, but it didn’t look at side effects and didn’t explain how it
handled dropouts from the study. I am really surprised they’re including a
gene here based on a small study from fifteen years ago that was never
replicated.

They also look at SLC6A4, specifically the difference between the “long” versus
“short” allele. This has been studied ad nauseum – which isn’t to say anyone
has come to any conclusions. According to Fabbri, Di Girolamo, & Serretti,
there are 25 studies saying the long allele of the gene is better, 9 studies saying
the short allele is better, and 20 studies showing no difference. Two meta-
analyses (1 n = 1435, 2 n = 5479) come out in favor of the long allele; two
others (1 n = 4309, 2, n = 1914) fail to find any effect. But even the people who
find the effect admit it’s pretty small – the Italian group estimates 3.2%. This
would both explain why so many people miss it, and relieve us of the burden of
caring about it at all.

The Carlat Report has a conspiracy theory that GeneSight really only uses the
liver enzyme genes, but they add in a few serotonin-related genes so they can
look cool; presumably there’s more of a “wow” factor in directly understanding
the target receptors in the brain than in mucking around with liver enzymes. I
like this theory. Certainly the results on both these genes are small enough and
weak enough that it would be weird to make a commercial test out of them.
The liver enzymes seem to be where it’s at. Let’s move on to those.

The Italian group that did the pharmacogenomics review mentioned above are
not sanguine about liver enzymes. They write (as of 2012, presumably based
on Genetic Polymorphisms Of Cytochrome P450 Enzymes And
Antidepressant Metabolism“>this previous review):

Available data do not support a correlation between antidepressant

plasma levels and response for most antidepressants (with the exception
of TCAs) and this is probably linked to the lack of association between
response and CYP450 genetic polymorphisms found by the most part of
previous studies. In all facts, the first CYP2D6 and CYP2C19 genotyping
test (AmpliChip) approved by the Food and Drug Administration has
not been recommended by guidelines because of lack of evidence linking
this test to clinical outcomes and cost-effectiveness studies.

What does it even mean to say that there’s no relationship between SSRI
plasma level and therapeutic effect? Doesn’t the drug only work when it’s in
your body? And shouldn’t the amount in your body determine the effective
dose? The only people I’ve found who even begin to answer this question are
Papakostas & Fava, who say that there are complicated individual factors
determining how much SSRI makes it from the plasma to the CNS, and how
much of it binds to the serotonin transporter versus other stuff. This would be
a lot more reassuring if amount of SSRI bound to the serotonin transporter
correlated with clinical effects, which studies seem very uncertain about. I’m
not really sure how to fit this together with SSRIs having a dose-dependent
effect, and I worry that somebody must be very confused. But taking all of this
at face value, it doesn’t really look good for using cytochrome enzymes
predicting response.

I talked to the GeneSight rep about this, and he agreed; their internal tests
don’t show strong effects for any of the candidate genes alone, because they all
interact with each other in complicated ways. It’s only when you look at all of
them together, using the proprietary algorithm based off of their proprietary
panel, that everything starts to come together.

This is possible, but given the poor results of everyone else in the field I think
we should take it with a grain of salt.

III.

We might also want to zoom out and take a broader picture: should we expect
these genes to matter?

It’s much easier to find the total effect of genetics than it is to find the effect of
any individual gene; this is the principle behind twin studies and GCTAs.
Tansey et al do a GCTA on antidepressant response and find that all the
genetic variants tested, combined, explain 42% of individual differences in
antidepressant response. Their methodology allowed them to break it down
chromosome-by-chromosome, and they found that genetic effects were pretty
evenly distributed across chromosomes, with longer chromosomes counting
more. This is consistent with massively polygenic structure where there are
hundreds of thousands of genes, each of small effects – much like height or
IQ. But typically even the strongest IQ or height genes only explain about 1%
of the variance. So an antidepressant response test containing only seven
genes isn’t likely to do very much even if those genes are correctly chosen and
well-understood.

SLC6A4 is a great example of this. It’s on chromosome 17. According to

Tansey, chromosome 17 explains less than 1% of variance in antidepressant
effect. So unless Tansey is very wrong, SLC6A4 must also explain less than 1%
of the variance, which means it’s clinically useless. The other six genes on the
test aren’t looking great either.

Does this mean that the GeneSight panel must be useless? I’m not sure. For
one thing, the genetic structure of which antidepressant you respond to might
be different from the structure of antidepressant response generally (though
the study found similar structures to any-antidepressant response and SSRI-
only response). For another, for complicated reasons sometimes exploiting
variance is easier than predicting variance; I don’t understand this enough to
be sure that this isn’t one of these cases, though it doesn’t look that way to me.

I don’t think this is a knock-down argument against anything. But I think it

means we should take any claims that a seven (or ten, or fifty) gene panel can
predict very much with another grain of salt.

IV.

But assuming that there are relatively few genes, and we figure out what they
are, then we’re basically good, right? Wrong.

Warfarin is a drug used to prevent blood clots. It’s notorious among doctors
for being finicky, confusing, difficult to dose, and making people to bleed to
death if you get it wrong. This made it a very promising candidate for
pharmacogenomics: what if we could predict everyone’s individualized
optimal warfarin dose and take out the guesswork?

Early efforts showed promise. Much of the variability was traced to two genes,
VKORC1 and CYP2C9. Companies created pharmacogenomic panels that
could predict warfarin levels pretty well based off of those genes. Doctors were
urged to set warfarin doses based on the results. Some initial studies looked
positive. Caraco et al and Primohamed et alboth found in randomized
controlled trials with decent sample sizes that warfarin patients did better on
the genetically-guided algorithm, p < 0.001. A 2014 meta-analysislooked at
nine studies of the algorithm, over 2812 patients, and found that it didn’t
work. Whether you used the genetic test or not didn’t affect number of blood
clots, percent chance of having your blood within normal clotting parameters,
or likelihood of major bleeding. There wasn’t even a marginally significant
trend. Another 2015 meta-analysisfound the same thing. Confusingly, a
Chinese group did a third meta-analysis that did find advantages in some
areas, but Chinese studies tend to use shady research practices, and besides,
it’s two to one.

UpToDate, the canonical medical evidence aggregation site for doctors,

concludes:

We suggest not using pharmacogenomic testing (ie, genotyping for

polymorphisms that affect metabolism of warfarin and vitamin K-
dependent coagulation factors) to guide initial dosing of the vitamin K
antagonists (VKAs). Two meta-analyses of randomized trials (both
involving approximately 3000 patients) found that dosing incorporating
hepatic cytochrome P-450 2C9 (CYP2C9) or vitamin K epoxide
reductase complex (VKORC1) genotype did not reduce rates of bleeding
or thromboembolism.

I mention this to add another grain of salt. Warfarin is the perfect candidate
for pharmacogenomics. It’s got a lot of really complicated interpersonal
variation that often leads to disaster. We know this is due to only a few genes,
and we know exactly which genes they are. We understand pretty much every
aspect of its chemistry perfectly. Preliminary studies showed amazing effects.

And yet pharmacogenomic testing for warfarin basically doesn’t work. There
are a few special cases where it can be helpful, and I think the guidelines say
something like “if you have your patient’s genotype already for some reason,
you might as well use it”. But overall the promise has failed to pan out.

Antidepressants are in a worse place than warfarin. We have only a vague idea
how they work, only a vague idea what genes are involved, and plasma levels
don’t even consistently correlate with function. It would be very strange if
antidepressant testing worked where warfarin testing failed. But, of course, it’s
not impossible, so let’s keep our grains of salt and keep going.
V.

Why didn’t the warfarin pharmacogenomics work? They had the genes right,
didn’t they?

I’m not too sure what’s going on, but maybe it just didn’t work better than
doctors titrating the dose the old-fashioned way. Warfarin is a blood thinner.
You can take blood and check how thin it is, usually measured with a number
called INR. Most warfarin users are aiming for an INR between 2 and 3. So
suppose (to oversimplify) you give your patient a dose of 3 mg, and find that
the INR is 1.7. It seems like maybe the patient needs a little more warfarin, so
you increase the dose to 4 mg. You take the INR later and it’s 2.3, so you
declare victory and move on.

Maybe if you had a high-tech genetic test you could read the microscopic
letters of the code of life itself, run the results through a supercomputer, and
determine from the outset that 4 mg was the optimal dose. But all it would do
is save you a little time.

There’s something similar going on with depression. Starting dose of Prozac is

supposedly 20 mg, but I sometimes start it as low as 10 to make sure people
won’t have side effects. And maximum dose is 80 mg. So there’s almost an
order of magnitude between the highest and lowest Prozac doses. Most people
stay on 20 to 40, and that dose seems to work pretty well.

Suppose I have a patient with a mutation that slows down their metabolism of
Prozac; they effectively get three times the dose I would expect. I start them on
10 mg, which to them is 30 mg, and they seem to be doing well. I increase to
20, which to them is 60, and they get a lot of side effects, so I back down to 10
mg. Now they’re on their equivalent of the optimal dose. How is this worse
than a genetic test which warns me against using Prozac because they have
mutant Prozac metabolism?

Or suppose I have a patient with a mutation that dectuples Prozac levels; now
there’s nosafe dose. I start them on 10 mg, and they immediately report
terrible side effects. I say “Yikes”, stop the Prozac, and put them on Zoloft,
which works fine. How is this worse than a genetic test which says Prozac is
bad for this patient but Zoloft is good?
Or suppose I have a patient with a mutation that makes them an ultrarapid
metabolizer; no matter how much Prozac I give them, zero percent ever
reaches their brain. I start them on Prozac 10 mg, nothing happens, go up to
20, then 40, then 60, then 80, nothing happens, finally I say “Screw this” and
switch them to Zoloft. Once again, how is this worse than the genetic test?

(again, all of this is pretending that dose correlates with plasma levels
correlates with efficacy in a way that’s hard to prove, but presumably
necessary for any of this to be meaningful at all)

I expect the last two situations to be very rare; few people have orders-of-
magnitude differences in metabolism compared to the general population.
Mostly it’s going to be people who I would expect to need 20 of Prozac actually
needing 40, or vice versa. But nobody has the slightest idea how to dose SSRIs
anyway and we usually just try every possible dose and stick with the one that
works. So I’m confused how genetic testing is supposed to make people do
better or worse, as opposed to just needing a little more or less of a medication
whose dosing is so mysterious that nobody ever knows how much anyone
needs anyway.

As far as I can tell, this is why they need those pharmacodynamic genes like
HTR2A and SLC6A4. Those represent real differences between
antidepressants and not just changes in dose which we would get to anyway. I
mean, you could still just switch antidepressants if your first one doesn’t work.
But this would admittedly be hard and some people might not do it. Everyone
titrates doses!

This is a fourth grain of salt and another reason why I’m wary about this idea.

VI.

Despite my skepticism, there are several studies showing impressive effects

from pharmacogenomic antidepressant tests. Now that we’ve established
some reasons to be doubtful, let’s look at them more closely.

GeneSight lists eight studies on its website here. Of note, all eight were
conducted by GeneSight; as far as I know no external group has ever
independently replicated any of their claims. The GeneSight rep I talked to
said they’re trying to get other scientists to look at it but haven’t been able to
so far. That’s fair, but it’s also fair for me to point out that studies by pharma
companies are far more likely to find their products effective than studies by
anyone else (OR = 4.05). I’m not going to start a whole other section for this,
but let’s call it a fifth grain of salt.

First is the LaCrosse Clinical Study. 114 depressed patients being treated at a
clinic in Wisconsin received the GeneSight test, and the results were given to
their psychiatrists, who presumably changed medications in accordance with
the tests. Another 113 depressed patients got normal treatment without any
genetic testing. The results were:

Taken from here, where you’ll find much more along the same lines.

All of the combinations of letters and numbers are different depression tests.
The blue bars are the people who got genotyped. The grey bars are the people
who didn’t. So we see that on every test, the people who got genotyped saw
much greater improvement than the people who didn’t. The difference in
remission was similarly impressive; by 8 weeks, 26% of the genotyped group
were depression-free as per QIDS-C16 compared to only 13% of the control
group (p = 0.03)
How can we nitpick these results? A couple of things come to mind.

Number one, the study wasn’t blinded. Everyone who was genotyped knew
they were genotyped. Everyone who wasn’t genotyped knew they weren’t
genotyped. I’m still not sure whether there’s a significant placebo effect in
depression (Hróbjartsson and Gøtzsche say no!), but it’s at least worth
worrying about.

Number two, the groups weren’t randomized. I have no idea why they didn’t
randomize the groups, but they didn’t. The first hundred-odd people to come
in got put in the control group. The second hundred-off people got put in the
genotype group. In accordance with the prophecy, there are various confusing
and inexplicable differences between the two groups. The control group had
more previous medication trials (4.7 vs. 3.6, p = 0.02). The intervention group
had higher QIDS scores at baseline (16 vs. 17.5, p = 0.003). They even had
different CYP2D6 phenotypes (p = 0.03). On their own these differences don’t
seem so bad, but they raise the question of why these groups were different at
all and what other differences might be lurking.

Number three, the groups had very different numbers of dropouts. 42 people
dropped out of the genotyped group, compared to 20 people from the control
group. Dropouts made up about a quarter of the entire study population. The
authors theorize that people were more likely to drop out of the genotype
group than the control group because they’d promised to give the control
group their genotypes at the end of the study, so they were sticking around to
get their reward. But this means that people who were failing treatment were
likely to drop out of the genotype group (making them look better) but stay in
the control group (making them look worse). The authors do an analysis and
say that this didn’t affect things, but it’s another crack in the study.

All of these are bad, but intuitively I don’t feel like any of them should have
been able to produce as dramatic an effect as they actually found. But I do
have one theory about how this might have happened. Remember, these are
all people who are on antidepressants already but aren’t getting better. The
intervention group’s doctors get genetic testing results saying what
antidepressant is best for them; the control group’s doctors get nothing. So the
intervention group’s doctors will probably switch their patients’ medication to
the one the test says will be best, and the control group’s doctors might just
leave them on the antidepressant that’s already not working. Indeed, we find
that 77% of intervention group patients switched medications, compared to
44% of control group patients. So imagine if the genetic test didn’t work at all.
77% of intervention group patients at least switch off their antidepressant that
definitely doesn’t work and onto one that might work; meanwhile, the control
group mostly stays on the same old failed drugs.

Someone (maybe Carlat again?) mentioned how they should have controlled
this study: give everyone a genetic test. Give the intervention group their own
test results, and give the control group someone else’s test results. If people do
better on their own results than on random results, then we’re getting
somewhere.

Second is the Hamm Study, which is so similar to the above I’m not going to
treat it separately.

Third is the Pine Rest Study. This one is, at least, randomized and single-
blind. Single-blind means that the patients don’t know which group they’re in,
but their doctors do; this is considered worse than double-blind (where
neither patients nor doctors know) because the doctors’ subtle expectations
could unconsciously influence the patients. But at least it’s something.

Unfortunately, the sample size was only 51 people, and the p-value for the
main outcome was 0.28. They tried to salvage this with some subgroup
analyses, but f**k that.

Fourth and fifth are two different meta-analyses of the above three studies,
which is the lowest study-to-meta-analysis ratio I’ve ever seen. They find big
effects, but “garbage in, garbage out”.

Sixth, there’s the Medco Study by Winner et al; I assume his name is a Big
Pharma plot to make us associate positive feelings with him. This study is an
attempt to prove cost-effectiveness. The GeneSight test costs $2000, but it
might be worth it to insurers/governments if it makes people so much
healthier that they spend less money on health care later. And indeed, it finds
that GeneSight users spend $1036 less per year on medication than matched
controls.
The details: they search health insurance databases for patients who were
taking an psychiatric medication and then got GeneSight tests. Then they
search the same databases for control patients for each; the control patients
take the same psych med, have the same gender, are similar in age, and have
the same primary psychiatric diagnosis. They end up with 2000 GeneSight
patients and 10000 matched controls, whom they prove are definitely similar
(even as a group) on the traits mentioned above. Then they follow all these
people for a year and see how their medication spending changes.

The year of the study, the GeneSight patients spent on average $689 more on
medications than they did the year before – unfortunate, but not entirely
unexpected since apparently they’re pretty sick. The control patients spent on
average $1725 more. So their medication costs increased much more than the
GeneSight patients. That presumably suggests GeneSight was doing a good job
treating their depression, thus keeping costs down.

The problem is, this study wasn’t randomized and so I see no reason to expect
these groups to be comparable in any way. The groups were matched for sex,
age, diagnosis, and one drug, but not on any other basis. And we have reason
to think that they’re not the same – after all, one group consists of people who
ordered a little-known $2000 genetic test. To me, that means they’re probably
1) rich, and 2) have psychiatrists who are really cutting-edge and into this kind
of stuff. To be fair, I would expect both of those to drive uptheir costs, whereas
in fact their costs were lower. But consider the possibility that rich people with
good psychiatrists probably have less severe disease and are more likely to
recover.

Here’s some more evidence for this: of the ~$1000 cost savings, $300 was in
psychiatric drugs and $700 was in non-psychiatric drugs. The article mentions
that there’s a mind-body connection and so maybe treating depression
effectively will make people’s non-psychiatric diseases get better too. This is
true, but I think seeing that the effect of a psychiatric intervention is stronger
on non-psychiatric than psychiatric conditions should at least raise our
suspicion that we’re actually seeing some confounder.

I cannot find anywhere in the study a comparison of how much money each
group spent the year before the study started. This is a very strange omission.
If these numbers were very different, that would clinch this argument.
Seventh is the Union Health Service study. They genotype people at a health
insurance company who have already been taking a psychotropic medication.
The genetic test either says that their existing medication is good for them
(“green bin”), okay for them (“yellow bin”) or bad for them (“red bin”). Then
they compare how the green vs. yellow vs. red patients have been doing over
the past year on their medications. They find green and yellow patients mostly
doing the same, but red patients doing very badly; for example, green patients
have about five sick days from work a year, but red patients have about
twenty.

I don’t really see any obvious flaws in this study, but there are only nine red
patients, which means their entire results depend on an n = 9 experimental
group.

Eighth is a study that just seems to be a simulation of how QALYs might

change if you enter some parameters; it doesn’t contain any new empirical
data.

Overall these studies show very impressive effects. While it’s possible to
nitpick all of them, we have to remind ourselves that we can nitpick anything,
even the best of studies, and do we really want to be that much of a jerk when
these people have tested their revolutionary new product in five different
ways, and every time it’s passed with flying colors aside from a few minor
quibbles?

And the answer is: yes, I want to be exactly that much of a jerk. The history of
modern medicine is one of pharmaceutical companies having amazing studies
supporting their product, and maybe if you squint you can just barely find one
or two little flaws but it hardly seems worth worrying about, and then a few
years later it comes out that the product had no benefits whatsoever and
caused everyone who took it to bleed to death. The reason for all those grains
of salt above was to suppress our natural instincts toward mercy and cultivate
the proper instincts to use when faced with pharmaceutical company studies,
ie Cartesian doubt mixed with smoldering hatred.
VII.

I am totally not above introducing arguments from authority, and I’ve seen
two people with much more credibility than myself look into this. The first is
Daniel Carlat, Tufts professor and editor of The Carlat Report, a well-
respected newsletter/magazine for psychiatrists. He writes a skeptical review
of their studies, and finishes:

If we were to hold the GeneSight test to the usual standards we require

for making medication decisions, we’d conclude that there’s very little
reliable evidence that it works.

The second is John Ioannidis, professor of health research at Stanford and

universally recognized expert on clinical evidence. He doesn’t look at
GeneSight in particular, but he writes of the whole pharmacogenomic project:

For at least 3 years now, the expectation has been that newer platforms
using exome or full-genome sequencing may improve the genome
coverage and identify far more variants that regulate phenotypes of
interest, including pharmacogenomic ones. Despite an intensive
research investment, these promises have not yet materialized as of
early 2013. A PubMed search on May 12, 2013, with
(pharmacogenomics* OR pharmacogenetc*) AND sequencing yielded an
impressive number of 604 items. I scrutinized the 80 most recently
indexed ones. The majority were either reviews/commentary articles
with highly promising (if not zealot) titles or irrelevant articles. There
was not a single paper that had shown robust statistical association
between a newly discovered gene and some pharmacogenomics
outcome, detected by sequencing. If anything, the few articles with real
data, rather than promises, show that the task of detecting and
validating statistically rigorous associations for rare variants is likely to
be formidable. One comprehensive study sequencing 202 genes
encoding drug targets in 14,002 individuals found an abundance of rare
variants, with 1 rare variant appearing every 17 bases, and there was also
geographic localization and heterogeneity. Although this is an
embarrassment of riches, eventually finding which of these thousands of
rare variants are most relevant to treatment response and treatment-
related harm will be a tough puzzle to solve even with large sample sizes.
 Despite these disappointing results, the prospect of applying
pharmacogenomics in clinical care has not abided. If anything, it is
pursued with continued enthusiasm among believers. But how much of
that information is valid and is making any impact? […]

Before investing into expensive clinical trials for testing the new crop of
mostly weak pharmacogenomic markers, a more radical decision is
whether we should find some means to improve the yield of
pharmacogenomics or just call it a day and largely abandon the field.
The latter option sounds like a painfully radical solution, but on the
other hand, we have already spent many thousands of papers and
enormous funding, and the yield is so minimal. The utility yield seems
to be even diminishing, if anything, as we develop more sophisticated
genetic measurement techniques. Perhaps we should acknowledge that
pharmacogenomics was a brilliant idea, we have learned some
interesting facts to date, and we also found a handful of potentially
useful markers, but industrial-level application of research funds may
need to shift elsewhere.

I think the warning from respected authorities like these should add a sixth
grain of salt to our rapidly-growing pile and make us feel a little bit better
about rejecting the evidence above and deciding to wait.

VIII.

There’s a thing I always used to hate about the skeptic community. Some
otherwise-responsible scientist would decide to study homeopathy for some
reason, and to everyone’s surprise they would get positive results. And we
would be uneasy, and turn to the skeptic community for advice. And they
would say “Yeah, but homeopathy is stupid, so forget about this.” And they
would be right, but – what’s the point of having evidence if you ignore it when
it goes the wrong way? And what’s the point in having experts if all they can do
is say “this evidence went the wrong way, so let’s ignore it”? Shouldn’t we
demand experts so confident in their understanding that they can explain to
us why the new “evidence” is wrong? And as a corollary, shouldn’t we demand
experts who – if the world really was topsy-turvy and some crazy alternative
medicine scheme did work – would be able to recognize that and tell us when
to suspend our usual skepticism?
But at this point I’m starting to feel a deep kinship with skeptic bloggers.
Sometimes we can figure out possible cracks in studies, and I think Part VI
above did okay with that. But there will be cracks in even the best studies, and
there will especially be cracks in studies done by small pharmaceutical
companies who don’t have the resources to do a major multicenter trial, and
it’s never clear when to use them as an excuse to reject the whole edifice versus
when to let them pass as an unavoidable part of life. And because of how tough
pharmacogenomics has proven so far, this is a case where I – after reading the
warnings from Carlat and Ioannidis and the Italian team and everyone else –
tentatively reject the edifice.

I hope later I kick myself over this. This might be the start of a revolutionary
exciting new era in psychiatry. But I don’t think I can believe it until
independent groups have evaluated the tests, until other independent groups
have replicated the work of the first independent groups, until everyone
involved has publicly released their data (GeneSight didn’t release any of the
raw data for any of these studies!), and until our priors have been raised by
equivalent success in other areas of pharmacogenomics.

Until then, I think it is a neat toy. I am glad some people are studying it. But I
would not recommend spending your money on it if you don’t have $2000 to
burn (though I understand most people find ways to make their insurance or
the government pay).

But if you just want to have fun with this, you can get a cheap approximation
from 23andMe. Use the procedure outlined here to get your raw data, then
look up rs6313 for the HTR2A polymorphism; (G,G) supposedly means more
Paxil side effects (and maybe SSRI side effects in general). 23andMe
completely dropped the ball on SLC6A4 and I would not recommend trying to
look that one up. The cytochromes are much more complicated, but you might
be able to piece some of it together from this page’s links links to lists of alleles
and related SNPs for each individual enzyme; also Promethease will do some
of it for you automatically. Right now I think this process would produce
pretty much 100% noise and be completely useless. But I’m not sure it would
be more useless than the $2000 test. And if any of this pharmacogenomic
stuff turns out to work, I hope some hobbyist automates the 23andMe-
checking process and sells it as shareware for $5.
Hypotheses and Hunches

The Atomic Bomb Considered As Hungarian High School Science

Fair Project

I.

A group of Manhattan Project physicists created a tongue-in-cheek mythology

where superintelligent Martian scouts landed in Budapest in the late 19th
century and stayed for about a generation, after which they decided the planet
was unsuitable for their needs and disappeared. The only clue to their
existence were the children they had with local women.

The joke was that this explained why the Manhattan Project was led by a
group of Hungarian supergeniuses, all born in Budapest between 1890 and
1920. These included Manhattan Project founder Leo Szilard, H-bomb creator
Edward Teller, Nobel-Prize-winning quantum physicist Eugene Wigner, and
legendary polymath John von Neumann, namesake of the List Of Things
Named After John Von Neumann.

The coincidences actually pile up beyond this. Von Neumann, Wigner, and
possibly Teller all went to the same central Budapest high school at about the
same time, leading a friend to joke about the atomic bomb being basically a
Hungarian high school science fair project.

But maybe we shouldn’t be joking about this so much. Suppose we learned

that Beethoven, Mozart, and Bach all had the same childhood piano tutor. It
sounds less like “ha ha, what a funny coincidence” and more like “wait, who
was this guy, and how quickly can we make everyone else start doing what he
did?”

In this case, the guy was Laszlo Ratz, legendary Budapest high school math
teacher. I didn’t even know people told legends about high school math
teachers, but apparently they do, and this guy features in a lot of them. There
is apparently a Laszlo Ratz Memorial Congress for high school math teachers
each year, and a Laszlo Ratz medal for services to the profession. There are
plaques and statues to this guy. It’s pretty impressive.

A while ago I looked into the literature on teachers and concluded that they
didn’t have much effect overall. Similarly, Freddie deBoer writes that most
claims that certain schools or programs have transformative effects on their
students are the result of selection bias.

On the other hand, we have a Hungarian academy producing like half the
brainpower behind 20th century physics, and Nobel laureates who literally
keep a picture of their high school math teacher on the wall of their office to
inspire them. Perhaps even if teachers don’t explain much of the existing
variability, there are heights of teacherdom so rare that they don’t show up in
the statistics, but still exist to be aspired to?

II.

I’ve heard this argument a few times, and I think it’s wrong.

Yes, two of Ratz’s students went on to become supergeniuses. But Edward

Teller, another supergenius, went to the same high school but (as far as I
know) was never taught by Ratz himself. That suggests that the school was
good at producing super-geniuses regardless of Ratz’s personal qualities. A
further point in support of this: John Harsanyi also went to the school, also
wasn’t directly taught by Ratz, and also went on to win a Nobel Prize and
invent various important fields of mathematics. So this school – the Fasori
Gymnasium – seems to have been about equally excellent for both its Ratz-
taught and its non-Ratz-taught pupils.
Yet the Fasori Gymnasium might not have even been the best high school in
its neighborhood. It competed with the Minta Gymnasium half a mile down
the street, whose alumni include Manhattan Project physicists Nicholas Kurti
and Theodore von Karman(von Karman went on to found the Jet Propulsion
Laboratory), brilliant chemist-philosopher Michael Polanyi, economists
Thomas Balogh and Nicholas Kaldor (of Kaldor-Hicks efficiency fame), and
Peter Lax, who once said “You don’t have to be Hungarian to be a
mathematician – but it helps”. There are also some contradictory sources
suggesting Teller attended this school and not Fasori; for all I know he might
have attended both. Once again, most of these people were born in the
1890-1910 period when the Martian scouts were supposedly in Budapest.

Worse, I’m not even sure that the best high school in early 20th-century
Hungary was either of the two mentioned above. The Berzsenyi Gymnasium, a
two mile walk down Gyorgy Street from the others, boasts alumni including
multizillionaire George Soros, Intel founder Andrew Grove, BASIC inventor
John Kemeny, leading cancer biologist George Klein, great mathematician
George Polya, and Nobel Prize winning physicist Dennis Gabor.

Given that the Fasori Gymnasium wasn’t obviously better than either of these
others, is it possible that the excellence was at a higher level – neither
excellent teachers nor excellent principals, but some kind of generally
excellent Hungarian culture of education?

This is definitely what the Hungarians want us to think. According to Cultures

of Creativity:

What’s so special about Budapest’s schools? A certain elitism and a

spirit of competition partly explains the successes of their students. For
example, annual competitions in mathematics and physics have been
held since 1894. The instruction the students receive as well as these
contests are an expression of a special pedagogy and a striving to
encourage creativity. Mor Karman, founder of the Minta school,
believed that everything should be taught by showing its relation to
everyday life. Instead of learning rules by heart from books, students
tried to formulate the rules themselves.
This paper on “The Hungarian Phenomenon” makes similar claims, but adds a
few more details:

The Eotvos Contests were a powerful mean for the stimulation of

mathematics on a large scale and were used to motivate mathematical
culture in the society. It also provided a channel to search for talented
youths. The contests, which have been open to Hungarian high school
students in their last year since 1894, played a remarkable role in the
development of mathematics.

Okay. But I want to challenge this. During this era, formal education in
Hungary began at age 10. By age ten, John von Neumann, greatest of the
Hungarian supergeniuses, already spoke English, French, German, Italian,
and Ancient Greek, knew integral and differential calculus, and could multiply
and divide 8-digit numbers in his head. Wikipedia notes that on his first
meeting with his math teacher, the math teacher “was so astounded with the
boy’s mathematical talent that he was brought to tears”. This doesn’t sound
like a guy whose potential was kindled by formal education. This sounds like a
guy who would have become one of history’s great mathematicians even if his
teachers had slept through his entire high school career.

Likewise, the book above notes that Dennis Gabor, the Hungarian inventor of
holography, “developed his passion for physics during his youth, but did so for
the most part on his own”. His biography notes that “During his childhood in
Budapest, Gabor and his brother would often duplicate the experiments they
read about in scientific journals in their home laboratory.”

Likewise, consider Paul Erdos, a brilliant mathematician born in Budapest

around this time. As per his Wikipedia page, “Left to his own devices, he
taught himself to read through mathematics texts that his parents left around
their home. By the age of four, given a person’s age, he could calculate, in his
head, how many seconds they had lived.”

I have no knock-down proof that Hungary’s clearly excellent education system

didn’t contribute to this phenomenon. A lot of child prodigies burn out, and
maybe Hungary was unusually good at making sure that didn’t happen. But it
sure seems like they had a lot of child prodigies to work with.
So what’s going on? Should we just accept the Manhattan Project consensus
that there was a superintelligent Martian scout force in early 20th-century
Budapest?

III.

Here’s something interesting: every single person I mentioned above is of

Jewish descent. Every single one. This isn’t some clever setup where I only
selected Jewish-Hungarians in order to spring this on you later. I selected all
the interesting Hungarians I could find, then went back and checked, and
every one of them was Jewish.

This puts the excellence of the Hungarian education system in a different light.
Hungarian schools totally failed to work their magic on Gentiles. You can talk
all you want about “elitism and a spirit of competition” and “striving to
encourage creativity”, yet for some reason this worked on exactly one of
Hungary’s many ethnic groups.

This reduces the difficult question of Hungarian intellectual achievement to

the easier question of Jewish intellectual achievement.

I say “easier question” because I find the solution by Cochran, Hardy, and
Harpending really compelling. Their paper is called A Natural History Of
Ashkenazi Intelligence(“Ashkenazi” means Eastern European Jew) and they
start by expressing the extent of the issue:

Ashkenazi Jews have the highest average IQ of any ethnic group for
which there are reliable data. They score 0.75 to 1.0 standard deviations
above the general European average, corresponding to an IQ 112 – 115.
This fact has social significance because IQ (as measured by IQ tests) is
the best predictor we have of success in academic subjects and most
jobs. Ashkenazi Jews are just as successful as their tested IQ would
predict, and they are hugely overrepresented in occupations and fields
with the highest cognitive demands. During the 20th century, they made
up about 3% of the US population but won 27% of the US Nobel science
prizes and 25% of the Turing Awards [in computer science]. They
account for more than half of world chess champions.
This doesn’t seem to be due to any advantage in material privilege; Ashkenazi
Jews frequently did well even in countries where they were persecuted. Nor is
it obviously linked to Jewish culture; Jews from other regions of the world
show no such advantage. So what’s going on?

Doctors have long noted that Ashkenazi Jews are uniquely susceptible to
various genetic diseases. For example, they’re about a hundred times more
likely to have Gaucher’s Disease, a hundred times more likely to get Tay-Sachs
Disease, ten times more likely to have torsion dystonia, et cetera. Genetic
diseases are so common in this population that the are official
recommendation is that all Ashkenazi Jewish couples get screened for genetic
disease before marriage. I’m Ashkenazi Jewish, I got screened, and I turn out
to be a carrier for Riley-Day syndrome – three hundred times as common in
Ashkenazi Jews as in anyone else.

Evolution usually gets rid of genetic diseases pretty quickly. If they stick
around, it’s because they’re doing something to earn their keep. One common
pattern is “heterozygote advantage” – two copies of the gene cause a disease,
but one copy does something good. For example, people with two copies of the
sickle cell gene get sickle cell anaemia, but people with one copy get some
protection against malaria. In Africa, where malaria is relatively common, the
tradeoff is worth it – so people of African descent have high rates of the sickle
cell gene and correspondingly high rates of sickle cell anaemia. In other
places, where malaria is relatively uncommon, the tradeoff isn’t worth it and
evolution eliminates the sickle cell gene. That’s why sickle cell is about a
hundred times more common in US blacks than US whites.

The moral of the story is: populations can have genetic diseases if they also
provide a useful advantage to carriers. And if those genetic diseases are
limited to a single group, we expect them to provide a useful advantage for
that group, but not others. Might the Jewish genetic diseases provide some
advantage? And why would that advantage be limited to Jews?

Most of the Jewish genetic diseases cluster into two biological systems – the
sphingolipid system and the DNA repair system. This is suspicious. It suggests
that they’re not just random. They’re doing something specific. Both of these
systems are related to neural growth and neural branching. Might they be
doing something to the brain?
Gaucher’s disease, one of the Ashkenazi genetic diseases, appears to increase
IQ. CHH obtained a list of all of the Gaucher’s patients in Israel. They were
about 15 times more likely than the Israeli average to be in high-IQ
occupations like scientist or engineer; CHH calculate the probability that this
is a coincidence to be 4×10^-19.

Torsion dystonia, another Ashkenazi genetic disease, shows a similar pattern.

CHH find ten reports in the literature where doctors comment on unusual
levels of intelligence in their torsion dystonia patients. Eldridge, Harlan,
Cooper, and Riklan tested 14 torsion dystonia patients and found an average
IQ of 121; another similar study found an average of 117. Torsion dystonia is
pretty horrendous, but sufferers will at least get the consolation prize of being
really, really smart.

Moving from medicine to history, we find that Ashkenazi Jews were

persecuted for the better part of a millennium, and the particular form of this
persecution was locking them out of various jobs until the main career
opportunities open to them were things like banker, merchant, and doctor.
CHH write:

For 800 to 900 years, from roughly 800 AD to 1650 or 1700 AD, the
great majority of the Ashkenazi Jews had managerial and financial jobs,
jobs of high complexity, and were neither farmers nor craftsmen. In this
they differed from all other settled peoples of which we have knowledge.

They continue:

Jews who were particularly good at these jobs enjoyed increased

reproductive success. Weinryb (1972, see also Hundert 1992) comments:
“More children survived to adulthood in affluent families than in less
affluent ones. A number of genealogies of business leaders, prominent
rabbis, community leaders, and the like – generally belonging to the
more affluent classes – show that such people often had four, six,
sometimes even eight or nine children who reached adulthood. On the
other hands, there are some indications that poorer families tended to
be small ones…as an example, in a census of the town of Brody in 1764
homeowner households had 1.2 children per adult member while tenant
households had 0.6.
Now we can start to sketch out the theory in full. Due to persecution, Jews
were pushed into cognitively-demanding occupations like banker or merchant
and forced to sink or swim. The ones who swam – people who were
intellectually up to the challenge – had more kids than the ones who sank,
producing an evolutionary pressure in favor of intelligence greater than that in
any other ethnic group. Just as Africans experiencing evolutionary pressure
for malaria resistance developed the sickle cell gene, so Ashkenazim
experiencing evolutionary pressure for intelligence developed a bunch of
genes which increased heterozygotes’ IQ but caused serious genetic disease in
homozygotes. As a result, Ashkenazi ended up somewhat more intelligent –
and somewhat more prone to genetic disease – than the rest of the European
population.

If true, this would explain the 27% of Nobel Prizes and 50% of world chess
champions thing. But one still has to ask – everywhere had Jews. Why
Hungary in particular? What was so special about Budapest in the early
1900s?

IV.

Okay, sure, everywhere had Jews. But it’s surprising exactly how many Jews
were in early 1900s Hungary.

The modern United States is about 2% Jewish. Hungary in 1900 was about
5%. The most Jewish city in America, New York, is about 15% Jewish.
Budapest in 1900 was 25%. It was one of the most Jewish large cities
anywhere in history, excepting only Israel itself. According to Wikipedia, the
city’s late 19th-century nickname was “Judapest”.

So is it possible that all the Jews were winning Nobel Prizes, and Hungary just
had more Jews and so more Nobelists?

No. This doesn’t seem right. The 1933 European Jewish Population By
Country site lists the following size for each country’s Jewish communities:

● Poland: 3 million
● Russia: 2.5 million
● Romania: 750,000
 ● Germany: 500,000
● Hungary: 500,000
● Britain: 300,000
● France: 250,000
● Austria: 200,000

It’s hard to find a good list of all famous Manhattan Project physicists, but I
tried this article and got the following number of famous Jewish Manhattan
Project physicists per country of origin:

● Hungary: 4
● Germany: 2
● Poland: 2
● Austria: 2
● Italy: 1
● Netherlands: 1
● Switzerland: 1

Here’s an alternative source with a different definition of “famous”, broken

down the same way:

● Germany: 5
● Hungary: 4
● Poland: 3
● Italy: 2
● Austria: 2

The main point seems to be disproportionately many people from Central

European countries like Hungary and Germany, compared to either Eastern
European countries like Poland and Russia or Western European countries
like France and Britain.

The Central European advantage over Western Europe is unsurprising; the

Western European Jews probably weren’t Ashkenazim, and so didn’t have the
advantage mentioned in the CHH paper above. But is there any reason to
think that Central European Jews were more intelligent than Polish and
Russian Jews?
I’m not really sure what to think about this. This paper finds that the
sphingolipidoses and other Jewish genetic diseases are about twice as
common in Central European Jews as in Eastern European Jews, but I have
very low confidence in these results. Intra-Jewish gossip points out the
Lithuanians as the geniuses among world Jewry, but doesn’t have any similar
suggestions about Hungarians. And torsion dystonia, maybe the most clearly
IQ-linked disease, is unique to Lithuanians and absent in Hungarians.

Probably much more promising is just to focus on the obvious facts of the
social situation. Early`1900s Hungary was a great nation and a prosperous
center of learning. Remember, we’re talking about the age of the Austro-
Hungarian Empire, one of the most industrialized and dynamic economies of
the time. It might have had advantages that Poland, Romania, and Russia
didn’t. My list of historical national GDPs per capita is very unimpressed by
the difference between Hungarian and Polish GDPs in 1900, but maybe it’s
wrong, or maybe Budapest was an especially modern part of Hungary, or
maybe there’s something else I’m missing.

Also, there could have been a difference in the position of Jews in these
countries. Russia was still experiencing frequent anti-Jewish pogroms in
1900; in Hungary, Jews were among the country’s most noble families.
Actually, the extent of Jewish wealth and influence in Hungary sort of defies
belief. According to Wikipedia, in 1920 Jews were 60% of Hungarian doctors,
50% of lawyers, 40% of engineers and chemists, and 90% of currency brokers
and stock exchange members. “In interwar Hungary, more than half and
perhaps as much as 90 percent of Hungarian industry was owned or operated
by a few closely related Jewish banking families.”

So Central European Jews – the Jews in Hungary and Germany – had a

unique combination of intellectual and financial advantages. This means
Hungary’s only real rival here is Germany. Since they were rich, industrialized,
and pretty liberal about Jewish rights at the beginning of the 20th century –
and since they had just as many Jews as Hungary – we should expect to see
the same phenomenon there too.

And we kind of do. Germany produced its share of Jewish geniuses. Hans
Bethe worked for the Manhattan Project and won a Nobel Prize. Max Born
helped develop quantum mechanics and also won a Nobel Prize. James
Franck, more quantum physics, another Nobel Prize. Otto Stern, even more
quantum physics, yet another Nobel Prize. John Polanyi, chemical kinetics,
Nobel Prize (although he was half-Hungarian). And of course we probably
shouldn’t forget about that Einstein guy. All of these people were born in the
same 1880 – 1920 window as the Martians in Hungary.

I think what’s going on is this: Germany and Hungary had about the same
Jewish population. And they produced about the same number of genius
physicists in the same window. But we think of Germany as a big rich country,
and Hungary as a small poor country. And the German Jews were spread over
a bunch of different cities, whereas the Hungarian Jews were all crammed into
Budapest. So when we hear “there were X Nobel Prize winning German
physicists in the early 1900s”, it sounds only mildly impressive. But when we
hear “there were X Nobel Prize winning physicists from Budapest in the early
1900s”, it sounds kind of shocking. But the denominator isn’t the number of
Germans vs. Hungarians, it’s the number of German Jews vs. Hungarian Jews,
which is about the same.

V.

This still leaves one question: why the period 1880 to 1920?

On further reflection, this isn’t much of a mystery. The emancipation of the

Jews in Eastern Europe was a difficult process that took place throughout the
19th century. Even when it happened, it took a while for the first generation of
Jews to get rich enough that their children could afford to go to fancy schools
and fritter away their lives on impractical subjects like physics and chemistry.
In much of Eastern Europe, the Jews born around 1880 were the first
generation that was free to pursue what they wanted and seek their own lot in
the world.

The end date around 1920 is more depressing: any Jew born after this time
probably wasn’t old enough to escape the Nazis. Almost all the famous
Hungarian Jews became physics professors in Europe, fled to America during
WWII using channels open to famous physicists, and then made most of their
achievements on this side of the Atlantic. There are a couple of stragglers born
after 1920 who survived – George Soros’ family lived because they bought
identity documents saying they were Christian; Andrew Grove lived because
he was hidden by righteous Gentiles. But in general Jews born in Europe after
1920 didn’t have a great life expectancy.

All of this suggests a pretty reasonable explanation of the Martian

phenomenon. For the reasons suggested by Cochran, Hardy, and Harpending,
Ashkenazi Jews had the potential for very high intelligence. They were mostly
too poor and discriminated against to take advantage of it. Around 1880, this
changed in a few advanced Central European economies like Germany,
Austria, and Hungary. Austria didn’t have many Jews. Germany had a lot of
Jews, but it was a big country, so nobody really noticed. Hungary had a lot of
Jews, all concentrated in Budapest, and so it was really surprising when all of
a sudden everyone from Budapest started winning Nobel Prizes around the
same time. This continued until World War II, and then all anyone
remembered was “Hey, wasn’t it funny that so many smart people were born
in Budapest between 1880 and 1920?”

And this story is really, really, gloomy.

For centuries, Europe was sitting on this vast untapped resource of potential
geniuses. Around 1880, in a few countries only, economic and political
conditions finally became ripe for the potential to be realized. The result was
one of the greatest spurts of progress in scientific history, bringing us
relativity, quantum mechanics, nuclear bombs, dazzling new mathematical
systems, the foundations of digital computing, and various other abstruse
ideas I don’t even pretend to understand. This lasted for approximately one
generation, after which a psychopath with a stupid mustache killed everyone
involved.

I certainly can’t claim that the Jews were the only people being crazy smart in
Central Europe around this time. This was the age of Bohr, Schrodinger,
Planck, Curie, etc. But part of me wonders even here. If you have one physicist
in a town, he sits in an armchair and thinks. If you have five physicists in a
town, they meet and talk and try to help each other with their theories. If you
have fifty physicists in a town, they can get funding and start a university
department. If you have a hundred, maybe some of them can go into teaching
or administration and help support the others. Having this extra
concentration of talent in central Europe during this period might have helped
Jews and Gentiles alike.
I wonder about this because of a sentiment I hear a lot, from people who know
more about physics than I do, that we just don’t get people like John von
Neumann or Leo Szilard anymore. That there was some weird magical
productivity to the early 20th century, especially in Central Europe and
Central European immigrants to the United States, that we’re no longer really
able to match. This can’t be a pure numbers game – the Ashkenazi population
has mostly recovered since the Holocaust, and people from all over the world
are coming to American and European universities and providing more of a
concentration of talent than ever. And even though it’s impossible to measure,
there’s still a feeling that it’s not enough.

I started down this particular research rabbit hole because a friend challenged
me to explain what was so magical about early 20th century Hungary. I think
the Jewish population calculations above explain a lot of the story. I’m not
sure whether there’s a missing ingredient, or, if so, what it might be. Maybe it
really was better education. Maybe it really was math competitions and talent
searches.

Or maybe it was superintelligent Martian scouts with an Earthling fetish.

It’s Bayes All The Way Up

[Epistemic status: Very speculative. I am not a neuroscientist and apologize
for any misinterpretation of the papers involved. Thanks to the people who
posted these papers in r/slatestarcodex. See also Mysticism and Pattern-
Matching and Bayes For Schizophrenics]

Bayes’ Theorem is an equation for calculating certain kinds of conditional

probabilities. For something so obscure, it’s attracted a surprisingly wide
fanbase, including doctors, environmental scientists, economists,
bodybuilders, fen-dwellers, and international smugglers. Eventually the hype
reached the point where there was both a Bayesian cabaretand a Bayesian
choir, popular books using Bayes’ Theorem to prove both the existenceand the
nonexistence of God, and even Bayesian dating advice. Eventually everyone
agreed to dial down their exuberance a little, and accept that Bayes’ Theorem
might not literally explain absolutely everything.
So – did you know that the neurotransmitters in the brain might represent
different terms in Bayes’ Theorem?

First things first: Bayes’ Theorem is a mathematical framework for integrating

new evidence with prior beliefs. For example, suppose you’re sitting in your
quiet suburban home and you hear something that sounds like a lion roaring.
You have some prior beliefs that lions are unlikely to be near your house, so
you figure that it’s probably not a lion. Probably it’s some weird machine of
your neighbor’s that just happens to sound like a lion, or some kids pranking
you by playing lion noises, or something. You end up believing that there’s
probably no lion nearby, but you do have a slightly higher probability of there
being a lion nearby than you had before you heard the roaring noise. Bayes’
Theorem is just this kind of reasoning converted to math. You can find the
long version here.

This is what the brain does too: integrate new evidence with prior beliefs. Here
are some examples I’ve used on this blog before:
All three of these are examples of top-down processing. Bottom-up processing
is when you build perceptions into a model of the the world. Top-down
processing is when you let your models of the world influence your
perceptions. In the first image, you view the center letter of the the first word
as an H and the second as an A, even though they’re the the same character;
your model of the world tells you that THE CAT is more likely than TAE CHT.
In the second image, you read “PARIS IN THE SPRINGTIME”, skimming over
the duplication of the word “the”; your model of the world tells you that the
phrase should probably only have one “the” in it (just as you’ve probably
skimmed over it the three times I’ve duplicated “the” in this paragraph alone!).
The third image might look meaningless until you realize it’s a cow’s head;
once you see the cow’s head your model of the world informs your perception
and it’s almost impossible to see it as anything else.
(Teh fcat taht you can siltl raed wrods wtih all the itroneir ltretrs rgraneanrd is
ahonter empxlae of top-dwon pssirocneg mkinag nsioy btotom-up dtaa sanp
itno pacle)

But top-down processing is much more omnipresent than even these

examples would suggest. Even something as simple as looking out the window
and seeing a tree requires top-down processing; it may be too dark or foggy to
see the tree one hundred percent clearly, the exact pattern of light and
darkness on the tree might be something you’ve never seen before – but
because you know what trees are and expect them to be around, the image
“snaps” into the schema “tree” and you see a tree there. As usual, this process
is most obvious when it goes wrong; for example, when random patterns on a
wall or ceiling “snap” into the image of a face, or when the whistling of the
wind “snaps” into a voice calling your name.

Most of the things you perceive when awake are generated from very
limited input – by the same machinery that generates dreams with no
input

— Void Of Space (@VoidOfSpace) September 2, 2016

Corlett, Frith & Fletcher (2009) (henceforth CFF) expand on this idea and
speculate on the biochemical substrates of each part of the process. They view
perception as a “handshake” between top-down and bottom-up processing.
Top-down models predict what we’re going to see, bottom-up models perceive
the real world, then they meet in the middle and compare notes to calculate a
prediction error. When the prediction error is low enough, it gets smoothed
over into a consensus view of reality. When the prediction error is too high, it
registers as salience/surprise, and we focus our attention on the stimulus
involved to try to reconcile the models. If it turns out that bottom-up was right
and top-down was wrong, then we adjust our priors (ie the models used by the
top-down systems) and so learning occurs.

In their model, bottom-up sensory processing involves glutamate via the

AMPA receptor, and top-down sensory processing involves glutamate via the
NMDA receptor. Dopamine codes for prediction error, and seem to represent
the level of certainty or the “confidence interval” of a given prediction or
perception. Serotonin, acetylcholine, and the others seem to modulate these
systems, where “modulate” is a generic neuroscientist weasel word. They
provide a lot of neurological and radiologic evidence for these
correspondences, for which I highly recommend reading the paper but which
I’m not going to get into here. What I found interesting was their attempts to
match this system to known pharmacological and psychological processes.

CFF discuss a couple of possible disruptions of their system. Consider

increased AMPA signaling combined with decreased NMDA signaling.
Bottom-up processing would become more powerful, unrestrained by top-
down models. The world would seem to become “noisier”, as sensory inputs
took on a life of their own and failed to snap into existing categories. In
extreme cases, the “handshake” between exuberant bottom-up processes and
overly timid top-down processes would fail completely, which would take the
form of the sudden assignment of salience to a random stimulus.

Schizophrenics are famous for “delusions of reference”, where they think a

random object or phrase is deeply important for reasons they have trouble
explaining. Wikipedia gives as examples:

● A feeling that people on television or radio are talking about or talking

directly to them
● Believing that headlines or stories in newspapers are written especially
for them
● Seeing objects or events as being set up deliberately to convey a special
or particular meaning to themselves
● Thinking ‘that the slightest careless movement on the part of another
person had great personal meaning…increased significance’

In CFF, these are perceptual handshake failures; even though “there’s a story
about the economy in today’s newspaper” should be perfectly predictable,
noisy AMPA signaling registers it as an extreme prediction failure, and it fails
its perceptual handshake with overly-weak priors. Then it gets flagged as
shocking and deeply important. If you’re unlucky enough to have your brain
flag a random newspaper article as shocking and deeply important, maybe
phenomenologically that feels like it’s a secret message for you.
And this pattern – increased AMPA signaling combined with decreased
NMDA signaling – is pretty much the effect profile of the drug ketamine, and
ketamine does cause a paranoid psychosis mixed with delusions of reference.

Organic psychosis like schizophrenia might involve a similar process. There’s a

test called the binocular depth inversion illusion, which looks like this:

(source)

The mask in the picture is concave, ie the nose is furthest away from the
camera. But most viewers interpret it as convex, with the nose closest to the
camera. This makes sense in terms of Bayesian perception; we see right-side-
in faces a whole lot more often than inside-out faces.

Schizophrenics (and people stoned on marijuana!) are more likely to properly

identify the face as concave than everyone else. In CFF’s system, something
about schizophrenia and marijuana messes with NMDA, impairs priors, and
reduces the power of top-down processing. This predicts that schizophrenics
and potheads would both have paranoia and delusions of reference, which
seems about right.
Consider a slightly different distortion: increased AMPA signaling combined
with increased NMDA signaling. You’ve still got a lot of sensory noise. But
you’ve also got stronger priors to try to make sense of them. CFF argue these
are the perfect conditions to create hallucinations. The increase in sensory
noise means there’s a lot of data to be explained; the increased top-down
pattern-matching means that the brain is very keen to fit all of it into some
grand narrative. The result is vivid, convincing hallucinations of things that
are totally not there at all.

LSD is mostly serotonergic, but most things that happen in the brain bottom
out in glutamate eventually, and LSD bottoms out in exactly the pattern of
increased AMPA and increased NMDA that we would expect to produce
hallucinations. CFF don’t mention this, but I would also like to add my theory
of pattern-matching based mysticism. Make the top-down prior-using NMDA
system strong enough, and the entire world collapses into a single narrative, a
divine grand plan in which everything makes sense and you understand all of
it. This is also something I associate with LSD.

If dopamine represents a confidence interval, then increased dopaminergic

signaling should mean narrowed confidence intervals and increased certainty.
Perceptually, this would correspond to increased sensory acuity. More
abstractly, it might increase “self-confidence” as usually described.
Amphetamines, which act as dopamine agonists, do both. Amphetamine users
report increased visual acuity (weirdly, they also report blurred vision
sometimes; I don’t understand exactly what’s going on here). They also create
an elevated mood and grandiose delusions, making users more sure of
themselves and making them feel like they can do anything.

(something I remain confused about: elevated mood and grandiose delusions

are also typical of bipolar mania. People on amphetamines and other
dopamine agonists act pretty much exactly like manic people.
Antidopaminergic drugs like olanzapine are very effective acute antimanics.
But people don’t generally think of mania as primarily dopaminergic. Why
not?)

CFF end their paper with a discussion of sensory deprivation. If perception is a

handshake between bottom-up sense-data and top-down priors, what happens
when we turn the sense-data off entirely? Psychologists note that most people
go a little crazy when placed in total sensory deprivation, but that
schizophrenics actually seem to do better under sense-deprivation conditions.
Why?

The brain filters sense-data to adjust for ambient conditions. For example,
when it’s very dark, your eyes gradually adjust until you can see by whatever
light is present. When it’s perfectly silent, you can hear the proverbial pin
drop. In a state of total sensory deprivation, any attempt to adjust to a
threshold where you can detect the nonexistent signal is actually just going to
bring you down below the point where you’re picking up noise. As with LSD,
when there’s too much noise the top-down systems do their best to impose
structure on it, leading to hallucinations; when they fail, you get delusions. If
schizophrenics have inherently noisy perceptual systems, such that all
perception comes with noise the same way a bad microphone gives off bursts
of static whenever anyone tries to speak into it, then their brains will actually
become less noisy as sense-data disappears.

(this might be a good time to remember that no congentally blind people ever
develop schizophrenia and no one knows why)

II.

Lawson, Rees, and Friston (2014) offer a Bayesian link to autism.

(there are probably a lot of links between Bayesians and autism, but this is the
only one that needs a journal article)

They argue that autism is a form of aberrant precision. That is, confidence
intervals are too low; bottom-up sense-data cannot handshake with top-down
models unless they’re almost-exactly the same. Since they rarely are, top-down
models lose their ability to “smooth over” bottom-up information. The world
is full of random noise that fails to cohere into any more general plan.

Right now I’m sitting in a room writing on a computer. A white noise machine
produces white noise. A fluorescent lamp flickers overhead. My body is doing
all sorts of body stuff like digesting food and pumping blood. There are a few
things I need to concentrate on: this essay I’m writing, my pager if it goes off,
any sorts of sudden dramatic pains in my body that might indicate a life-
threatening illness. But I don’t need to worry about the feeling of my back
against the back fo the chair, or the occasional flickers of the fluorescent light,
or the feeling of my shirt on my skin.

A well-functioning perceptual system gates out those things I don’t need to

worry about. Since my shirt always feels more or less similar on my skin, my
top-down model learns to predict that feeling. When the top-down model
predicts the shirt on my skin, and my bottom-up sensation reports the shirt on
my skin, they handshake and agree that all is well. Even if a slight change in
posture makes a different part of my shirt brush against my skin than usual,
the confidence intervals are wide: it is still an instance of the class “shirt on
skin”, it “snaps” into my shirt-on-skin schema, and the perceptual handshake
goes off successfully, and all remains well. If something dramatic happens –
for example my pager starts beeping really loudly – then my top-down model,
which has thus far predicted silence – is rudely surprised by the sudden burst
of noise. The perceptual handshake fails, and I am startled, upset, and
instantly stop writing my essay as I try to figure out what to do next (hopefully
answer my pager). The system works.

The autistic version works differently. The top-down model tries to predict the
feeling of the shirt on my skin, but tiny changes in the position of the shirt
change the feeling somewhat; bottom-up data does not quite match top-down
prediction. In a neurotypical with wide confidence intervals, the brain would
shrug off such a tiny difference, declare it good enough for government work,
and (correctly) ignore it. In an autistic person, the confidence intervals are
very narrow; the top-down systems expect the feeling of shirt-on-skin, but the
bottom-up systems report a slightly different feeling of shirt-on-skin. These
fail to snap together, the perceptual handshake fails, and the brain flags it as
important; the autistic person is startled, upset, and feels like stopping what
they’re doing in order to attend to it.

(in fact, I think the paper might be claiming that “attention” just means a
localized narrowing of confidence intervals in a certain direction; for example,
if I pay attention to the feeling of my shirt on my skin, then I can feel every
little fold and micromovement. This seems like an important point with a lot
of implications.)
Such handshake failures match some of the sensory symptoms of autism
pretty well. Autistic people dislike environments that are (literally or
metaphorically) noisy. Small sensory imperfections bother them. They literally
get annoyed by scratchy clothing. They tend to seek routine, make sure
everything is maximally predictable, and act as if even tiny deviations from
normal are worthy of alarm.

They also stim. LRF interpret stimming as an attempt to control sensory

predictive environment. If you’re moving your arms in a rhythmic motion, the
overwhelming majority of sensory input from your arm is from that rhythmic
motion; tiny deviations get lost in the larger signal, the same way a firefly
would disappear when seen against the blaze of a searchlight. The rhythmic
signal which you yourself are creating and keeping maximally rhythmic is the
most predictable thing possible. Even something like head-banging serves to
create extremely strong sensory data – sensory data whose production the
head-banger is themselves in complete control of. If the brain is in some sense
minimizing predictive error, and there’s no reasonable way to minimize
prediction error because your predictive system is messed up and registering
everything as a dangerous error – then sometimes you have to take things
into your own hands, bang your head against a metal wall, and say “I totally
predicted all that pain”.

(the paper doesn’t mention this, but it wouldn’t surprise me if weighted

blankets work the same way. A bunch of weights placed on top of you will
predictably stay there; if they’re heavy enough this is one of the strongest
sensory signals you’re receiving and it might “raise your average” in terms of
having low predictive error)

What about all the non-sensory-gating-related symptoms of autism? LRF

think that autistic people dislike social interaction because it’s “the greatest
uncertainty”; other people are the hardest-to-predict things we encounter.
Neurotypical people are able to smooth social interaction into general
categories: this person seems friendly, that person probably doesn’t like me.
Autistic people get the same bottom-up data: an eye-twitch here, a weird half-
smile there – but it never snaps into recognizable models; it just stays weird
uninterpretable clues. So:
 This provides a simple explanation for the pronounced social-
communication difficulties in autism; given that other agents are
arguably the most difficult things to predict. In the complex world of
social interactions, the many-to-one mappings between causes and
sensory input are dramatically increased and difficult to learn; especially
if one cannot contextualize the prediction errors that drive that learning.

They don’t really address differences between autists and neurotypicals in

terms of personality or skills. But a lot of people have come up with stories
about how autistic people are better at tasks that require a lot of precision and
less good at tasks that require central coherence, which seems like sort of what
this theory would predict.

LRF ends by discussing biochemical bases. They agree with CFF that top-
down processing is probably related to NMDA receptors, and so suspect this is
damaged in autism. Transgenic mice who lack an important NMDA receptor
component seem to behave kind of like autistic humans, which they take as
support for their model – although obviously a lot more research is needed.
They agree that acetylcholine “modulates” all of this and suggest it might be a
promising pathway for future research. They agree with CFF that dopamine
may represent precision/confidence, but despite their whole spiel being that
precision/confidence is messed up in autism, they don’t have much to say
about dopamine except that it probably modulates something, just like
everything else.

III.

All of this is fascinating and elegant. But is it elegant enough?

I notice that I am confused about the relative role of NMDA and AMPA in
producing hallucinations and delusions. CFF say that enhanced NMDA
signaling results in hallucinations as the brain tries to add excess order to
experience and “overfits” the visual data. Fine. So maybe you get a tiny bit of
visual noise and think you’re seeing the Devil. But shouldn’t NMDA and top-
down processing also be the system that tells you there is a high prior against
the Devil being in any particular visual region?
Also, once psychotics develop a delusion, that delusion usually sticks around.
It might be that a stray word in a newspaper makes someone think that the
FBI is after them, but once they think the FBI is after them, they fit everything
into this new paradigm – for example, they might think their psychiatrist is an
FBI agent sent to poison them. This sounds a lot like a new, very strong prior!
Their doctor presumably isn’t doing much that seems FBI-agent-ish, but
because they’re working off a narrative of the FBI coming to get them, they fit
everything, including their doctor, into that story. But if psychosis is a case of
attenuated priors, why should that be?

(maybe they would answer that because psychotic people also have increased
dopamine, they believe in the FBI with absolute certainty? But then how come
most psychotics don’t seem to be manic – that is, why aren’t they
overconfident in anything except their delusions?)

LRF discuss prediction error in terms of mild surprise and annoyance; you
didn’t expect a beeping noise, the beeping noise happened, so you become
startled. CFF discuss prediction error as sudden surprising salience, but then
say that the attribution of salience to an odd stimulus creates a delusion of
reference, a belief that it’s somehow pregnant with secret messages. These are
two very different views of prediction error; an autist wearing uncomfortable
clothes might be constantly focusing on their itchiness rather than on
whatever she’s trying to do at the time, but she’s not going to start thinking
they’re a sign from God. What’s the difference?

Finally, although they highlighted a selection of drugs that make sense within
their model, others seem not to. For example, there’s some discussion of
ampakines for schizophrenia. But this is the opposite of what you’d want if
psychosis involved overactive AMPA signaling! I’m not saying that the
ampakines for schizophrenia definitely work, but they don’t seem to make the
schizophrenia noticeably worse either.

Probably this will end the same way most things in psychiatry end –
hopelessly bogged down in complexity. Probably AMPA does one thing in one
part of the brain, the opposite in other parts of the brain, and it’s all nonlinear
and different amounts of AMPA will have totally different effects and maybe
downregulate itself somewhere else.
Still, it’s neat to have at least a vague high-level overview of what might be
going on.

Why Are Transgender People Immune To Optical Illusions?

I.

If you’ve ever wanted to see a glitch in the Matrix, watch this spinning mask:

Source: http://hearingthevoice.org/2013/11/14/predictive-coding-
masterclass/

Did you see it? As the face started to turn away from you, your brain did…
something, and then you were seeing a normal frontwards-facing mask again.
It turns out your visual system has really strong views about whether faces
should be inside-out or not, and it’s willing to execute a hard override on
perception if it doesn’t like what it sees.

But not always. Some people get glitchier glitches than others; a few seem
almost immune. Studies find schizophrenics and autistic people to be
consistently less glitchy than the rest of us. The correlation’s not perfect. But
it’s definitely there. Something about these people’s different cognitive
processing styles lets them see through the illusion.

I wanted to replicate this result myself. So a few months ago, when I surveyed
readers of my blog, I included some questions about perceptual illusions
(including a static versionof the hollow mask). I got five thousand responses,
including a few from schizophrenic and autistic readers. Sure enough, the
effect was there.

Schizophrenic readers were about twice as likely to report a weak reaction to

the mask illusion as non-schizophrenics (28% vs. 14%, p = 0.04). They were
also more likely to have a weak reaction to a similar illusion, the Spinning
Dancer (58% vs. 81%, p = 0.01). Readers with a family history of
schizophrenia landed in between schizophrenics and healthy controls (16% for
mask, 63% for dancer, ns).

Autistic readers were only slightly more likely to report a weak reaction to the
mask illusion than neurotypicals (17% vs. 14%), but thanks to our big sample
size we could be pretty confident that this was a meaningful difference (p =
0.004). There was no different between autists and neurotypicals on the
Spinning Dancer, not even a weak trend (58% vs. 60%, p = 0.4).

Looking deeper, I found a few other anomalies on illusion perception. Most

were small and inconsistent. But one stood out: transgender people had an
altered response pattern on both illusions, stronger than the alteration for
autism and almost as strong as the one for schizophrenia (mask: cis 14% vs.
trans 21%, p = 0.003; dancer: cis 58% vs. trans 71%, p = 0.001). These results
are very tentative, and need replication. My mass survey isn’t a very sensitive
instrument, and I place low confidence in any of this until other people can
confirm.

But for now, it sure looks like a signal. Something seems off about transgender
people’s perception, something deep enough to alter the lowest-level
components of visual processing. If it’s real, what could it be?

II.

A few days ago, trans blogger Zinnia Jones asked me if there might be any
neurochemical reason trans people dissociate so much.

Dissociation is a vague psychiatric symptom where you feel like you’re not
real, or the world isn’t real, or you’re detached from the world, or something
like that. It sounds weird, but if you explain it to someone who’s had it, they’ll
say “Oh yeah, that thing!” It’s usually unpleasant, and tends to occur in PTSD,
borderline personality, and extreme stress.

And in transgender people. The only formal study I can find on this describes
it as “greatly prevalent”, and suggests that up to 30% of trans people may have
dissociative conditions (compared to less than 1% of the general population).
This matches trans people’s self-reports (1, 2, 3, 4, 5). Anecdotally (according
to Zinnia’s impression of the trans community) and formally (see Costa &
Colizzi 2016) hormone replacement therapy is an effective treatment for
dissociative problems.

Intuitively this makes sense. Trans people feel like they’re “trapped in the
wrong body”, so of course they feel detached from their bodies / like their
bodies aren’t real / like their bodies aren’t theirs. Hormone therapy helps
solve the “wrong body” problem, so it also solves the dissociative symptoms.

We aim to bridge psychosocial and biological levels of explanation. We can say

that someone is stressed out because their boss overworks them, but also
because they’re secreting high levels of cortisol. We can say that someone is
depressed because they broke up with their boyfriend, but also because they
have decreased synaptogenesis in their hippocampus. Causation gets tricky,
and this is a philosophical minefield for sure, but overall these two levels
should be complementary rather than competitive. So what’s the biological
correlate to trans people having dissociation problems?

Practically all searches for the biological basis of dissociation end up at the
NMDA glutamate receptor, one of the many neurotransmitter systems in the
brain. Even though its cousins dopamine and serotonin usually get top billing,
glutamate is probably the brain’s most important neurotransmitter, and
NMDA glutamate receptors in particular are involved in all sorts of interesting
things.

Drugs that block NMDA receptors cause dissociation. The most famous
dissociative anaesthetic, ketamine, is an NMDA antagonist. So is DXM, a
recreational drug that causes dissociation in abusers. Wikipedia’s list of
dissociative drugs is basically just fifty-five NMDA antagonists in a row. The
only other category they list are kappa opioid agonists, and kappa opioid
agonism probably – you guessed it – antagonize NMDA. If we take this result
seriously, every substance we know of that causes dissociation is an NMDA
antagonist in some way.

Does anything improve NMDA function – an effect we might expect to

alleviate dissociation? Yes, and among a list of intimidating research
chemicals called things like “aminocyclopropanecarboxylic acid” is one
familiar name: estrogen. See eg El-Bakri et al, which finds that “estrogen
modulates NMDA receptors function in the brain…enhancing NMDA
function”. McEwen et al: “One of the long-term effects of estradiol [estrogen]
is to induce NMDA receptor binding sites in the CA1 region of the
hippocampus.” Bi et al: “17-B-estradiol [estrogen] enhances NMDA receptor
phosphorylation and function.” I don’t fully understand this research, but it
seems to point to estrogen promoting NMDA activity in some way.

So transgender people dissociate a lot, a state usually associated with

hypofunctioning NMDA receptors. And trans women get better when they
take estrogen, a hormone that improves NMDA function. That’s interesting.
But what does this have to do with those optical illusions?

III.

The Hollow Mask illusion and its cousins may depend on NMDA function.

To oversimplify: the brain interprets the world through Bayesian calculations.

In Corlett et al’s model, it communicates top-down priors (ie assumptions
based on previous knowledge about the world) through NMDA receptors and
bottom-up new evidence through AMPA receptors. They write:

In a hierarchical cortical system in which representations become more

abstract with increasing distance from the primary input, higher levels
of the hierarchy specify top-down predictions through NMDA receptor
signaling and any mismatches between expectancy and experience are
conveyed upward through the hierarchy via rapid AMPA and GABA
signaling

When you see a hollow mask, the brute facts of how the mask looks are your
bottom-up sensory evidence. Your top-down prior is that every other face
you’ve seen for your entire life has been normal, not inside-out. Given the
strength of the prior, the prior wins, and your brain interprets the mask as a
normal face.

Unless your brain is bad at applying priors, ie its NMDA receptors aren’t
working that well. Then it just sticks with the bottom-up sensory evidence
showing that the mask is hollow.

Schizophrenia and autism both probably involve decreased NMDA function in

different ways. For schizophrenia, see eg Olney, NMDA receptor hypofunction
model of schizophrenia, and Coyle, NMDA receptor and schizophrenia: a brief
history. Ketamine seems to replicate the symptoms of schizophrenia pretty
well and is commonly used as a model for the disorder. For autism, see eg Lee,
NMDA receptor dysfunction in autism spectrum disorders and this study
where screwing with NMDA receptors in mice seems to turn them autistic.

From this we would predict that estrogen would help treat schizophrenia and
autism. It does. Schizophrenia is more common and more severe in men than
women, with researchers noting that “gonadal steroids may play a role in
buffering females against the development of schizophrenia”. Women are
known to sometimes get schizophrenia triggered by menopause when their
estrogen levels decrease. Estrogen supplementation is an effective
schizophrenia treatment, and there’s some interest in developing estrogen
receptor modulators that can help schizophrenic men without making them
grow breasts. Meanwhile, autism continues to be about four times more
common in men than women, autistic women tend to have more “male-typical
brains”, and although it’s considered unethical to treat autistic boys with
estrogen, it works in mice and fish. Once again, doctors are looking into
estrogen analogues that don’t turn people female as possible autism
treatments.

We might also predict that estrogen would increase glitching on the hollow
mask. I can’t study this directly, but on the survey, 15% of biological males had
weak reactions to the illusion, compared with only 11% of biological females, p
= 0.01. Since women have more estrogen, that looks good for the theory.

Transgender people have higher rates of autism and schizophrenia. The

Atlantic actually had a good article about this recently : The Link Between
Autism And Trans Identity. They cite one study showing 8% autism rate in
trans people (compared to 1-2% in the general population), and another
showing that autistic people were 7.5x more likely to express “gender
variance”. Apparently a lot of trans people have problems getting hormone
therapy because their doctors think the gender issues are “just” because of
their autism. Some might say that denying people estrogen because they have
a condition which studies suggest estrogen can successfully treat is a bit, I
don’t know, crazy and evil, but I guess people get really weird around this
stuff.

My survey broadly confirms these numbers. Autism rates were sky-high in

every category – it’s almost as if the sorts of people who like reading blogs
about how gender is all just NMDA receptors skew more autistic than average
– but there was a remarkable difference across gender identities. 15% of
cisgender people were autistic, but a full 52% of trans people were.

The survey also finds that about 4% of non-schizophrenic people were

transgender, compared to 21% of schizophrenics and self-suspected
schizophrenics. Other people have noticed the same connection, and I’ve met
more schizophrenic transgender people than I would expect by chance given
the very low rates of both conditions.

If this is right, we end up with this rich set of connections between

schizophrenics, autistics, ketamine, dissociative experiences, estrogen, gender
identity, and the hollow mask. Anything that decreases NMDA function –
schizophrenia, autism, ketamine – will potentially cause dissociative
experiences and decreased glitching on the mask illusion. Estrogen will
improve NMDA function, treat dissociative experiences, and bring back
hollow-mask glitching.

So I wonder: is NMDA hypofunction related to transgender? That would

explain the autism and schizophrenia connections. It would explain the hollow
mask numbers. It would explain the dissociation. It would explain why
estrogen helps the dissociation. And it would explain a lot of internal
connections between all of these different conditions and factors.
IV.

I’m going to stop here, even though there’s a lot more worth saying on this,
because I’ve already gotten so far into Speculation Land that trying to chain
any more conclusions on would probably be premature. So let’s switch to some
reasons for skepticism.

First, the research into NMDA receptors is too interesting. People argue that
NMDA is key to depression, key to anxiety, OCD, chronic pain, and borderline
personality (my guess is the depression claims are mostly overblown, the
borderline claims are 100% absolutely right and revelatory, and I’m agnostic
on the others). On the one hand, explaining everything sounds sort of good.
On the other hand, it also sounds like what would happen if a field was getting
kind of overhyped and slipping into methodology loose enough to prove
anything it wanted. Maybe a vague link between a receptor which is literally
everywhere in the brain and some psychiatric disease isn’t that interesting. A
theory that can explain absolutely everything should always cause suspicion.

Second, I’m still not sure what to make of the Hollow Mask results on my
survey. Although the transgender results were unusually strong, I did get
mildly statistically significant results on about half of the thirty-or-so things I
looked at, including seemingly-unrelated items like political affiliation. Some
might argue that this means something is wrong with my survey. Others might
argue that hey, we know political attitudes are about 50% genetic, and the last
time people tried trace the genes involved all the strongest results were genes
for NMDA receptors. Have I mentioned that NMDA receptors are really
interesting?

Third, I included a second illusion I asked about on the survey, the Spinning
Dancer. It also had an odd response pattern among transgender people. But it
didn’t correlate at all with the Hollow Mask Illusion, and it doesn’t seem to be
elevated among autists. I don’t know what’s going on here, and the whole
thing makes me more suspicious that all of this is some weird artifact.

Fourth, all this predicts that ketamine will cause reduced glitching on the
Hollow Mask. It doesn’t. Corlett argues that this is because chronic, but not
acute, NMDA dysfunction is required to stop the hollow mask glitches
“because [keatmine] has a predominant impact on bottom-up AMPA
signaling”. I don’t really understand this and it seems like a prediction failure
to me. On the other hand, chronic marijuana use does prevent mask glitching,
which might be because of marijuana causing NMDA hypofunction over time,
which I guess is a point in favor of the chronicity theory.

Fifth, although trans women dissociate less when they take estrogen, trans
men dissociate less when they take testosterone. I can’t find whether
testosterone has similar NMDA-promoting properties in the brain, although it
sometimes gets aromatized to estrogen so that might be relevant. Also, I’ve
never heard of any trans woman taking testosterone or trans man taking
estrogen. If that makes dissociation worse – and from the psychosocial
perspective it probably should – then that would be a strike against this
theory.

Sixth, although I played up the transgender/autism and transgender/

schizophrenia links, the truth is that transgender people have higher rates of
every mental illness, to the point where it may just be some general factor. I
think I’m justified in focusing on these two results because transgender
people’s higher rates of depression and anxiety are probably just related to
being transgender being depressing and anxiety-provoking in this society. But
schizophrenia and autism are 80+% genetic, and so harder to explain away
like that. Still, somebody could question the relevance of worrying about these
two conditions in particular.

I hope some of this can be sorted out in the near future. A first step would be
for someone official to replicate the transgender Hollow Mask pattern and
prove that it’s not just confounded by autism and schizophrenia rates in that
population. A very tentative second step would be to investigate whether
chronic use of the supplements that improve NMDA function in schizophrenia
– like glycine, d-serine, and especially sarcosine – can augment estrogen in
improving gender dysphoria. Remember to consult your doctor before trying
any weird supplements since they may cause unintended side effects, like
becoming a Republican.

It could also be worth trying to understand more explicitly why gender

identity and NMDA should be linked. This post is long enough already, but I
might write more on this in the future. If you want a preview, check out The
Role Of Neonatal NMDA Receptor Activation In Defeminization And
Masculinization Of Sex Behavior In The Rat and draw the obvious
conclusions.

The Case Of The Suffocating Woman

I.

I recently presented this case at a conference and I figured you guys might
want to hear it too. Various details have been obfuscated or changed around to
protect confidentiality of the people involved.

A 20-something year old woman comes into the emergency room complaining
that she can’t breathe. The emergency doctors note that she’s breathing
perfectly normally. She says okay, fine, she’s breathing normally now, but
she’s certain she’s about to suffocate. She’s having constant panic attacks,
gasping for breath, feels like she can’t get any air into her lungs, been awake
96 hours straight because she’s afraid she’ll stop breathing in her sleep. She
accepts voluntary admission to the psychiatric unit with a diagnosis of panic
disorder.

We take a full history in the psych ward and there’s not much of interest. She’s
never had any psychiatric conditions in the past. She’s never used any
psychiatric medication. She’s never had any serious diseases. One month ago,
she gave birth to a healthy baby girl, and she’s been very busy with all the new
baby-related issues, but she doesn’t think it’s stressed her out unreasonably
much.

We start her on an SSRI with (as usual) little immediate effect. On the ward,
she continues to have panic attacks, which look like her gasping for breath and
being utterly convinced that she is about to die; these last from a few minutes
to a few hours. In between these she’s reasonable and cooperative but still very
worried about her breathing. There are no other psychiatric symptoms. She
isn’t delusional – when we tell her that our tests show her breathing is fine,
she’s willing to admit we’re probably right – she just feels on a gut level like
she can’t breathe. I’m still not really sure what’s going on.

So at this point, I do what any good psychiatrist would: I Google “how do you
treat a patient who thinks she’s suffocating?” And I stumble onto one of the
first convincing explanations I’ve ever seen of the pathophysiology of a
psychiatric disorder.

II.

Panic disorder is a DSM-approved psychiatric condition affecting about 3% of

the population. It’s marked by “panic attacks”, short (minutes to hours)
episodes where patients experience extreme terror, increased heart rate,
gasping for breath, feeling of impending doom, choking, chest pain, faintness,
et cetera. These episodes can happen either after a particular stressor (for
example, a claustrophobic patient getting stuck in a small room) or randomly
for no reason at all when everything is fine. In a few cases, they even happen
when patients are asleep and they wake up halfway through. The attacks rise
to the level of a full disorder when they interfere with daily life – for example,
a patient can’t do her job because she’s afraid of having panic attacks while
engaged in sensitive activities like driving.

The standard model of panic disorder involves somatosensory feedback loops.

Your body is always monitoring itself to make sure that nothing’s wrong. Any
major organ dysfunction is going to produce a variety of abnormalities – pain,
blockage of normal activities like digestion and circulation, change in chemical
composition of the blood, etc. If your body notices enough of these things, it’ll
go into alarm mode and activate the stress response – increased heart rate,
sweating, etc – to make sure you’re sufficiently concerned.

In the feedback model of panic disorder, this response begins too early and
recurses too heavily. So maybe you have an itch on your back. Your body
notices this unusual sensation and falsely interprets it as the sort of
abnormality that might indicate major dysfunction. It increases heart rate,
starts sweating, et cetera. Then, because it’s stupid, it notices the increased
heart rate and the sweating that it just caused, and decides this is definitely
the sort of abnormality that indicates major dysfunction, and there’s nothing
to do except activate even more stress response, which of course it interprets
as even more organ dysfunction, and so on. At some point your body just
maxes out on its stress response, your heart is beating as fast as it can possibly
go and your brain is full of as many terror-related chemicals as you can
produce on short notice, and then after a while of that it plateaus and returns
to normal. So panic disorder sufferers are people who are overly prone to have
the stress response, and overly prone to interpret their own stress response as
further evidence of dysfunction.

This is probably part genetic and part learned – I have a panic disorder patient
who has a bunch of really bad allergies, whose body would shut down in
horrifying ways every time he accidentally ate a crumb of the wrong thing, and
this seems to have “sensitized” him into having panic attacks; that is, his body
has learned that worrying sensations oftenforetell a health crisis, and lowered
its threshold accordingly to the point where random noise can easily set it off.
I’ve done a lot of work with this guy, but none of it has been “just ignore your
panic attacks, you’ll be fine”. His body knows what it’s doing, and we’ve got to
work from a position of respecting it while also teaching it not to be quite so
overzealous.

So this is where my understanding of panic disorder stood until I Googled

“how do you treat a patient who thinks she’s suffocating?” and came across
Donald Klein’s theory of panic as false suffocation alarm. You might want to
read the full paper, as it’s got far too many fascinating things to list here,
including a theory of sighing. But I’ll try to go over the basics.

Klein is a professor of psychiatry who studies the delightful field of

“experimental panicogens”, ie chemicals that cause panic attacks if you inject
them in someone. These include lactate, bicarbonate, and carbon dioxide, all
of which naturally occur in the body under conditions of decreased
respiration.

But this is actually confusing. All of these chemicals naturally occur in the
body under conditions of decreased respiration. But they don’t cause panic
attacks then. During exercise, for example, your body has much higher oxygen
demand but (no matter how much you pant while running) only a little bit
higher oxygen supply, so at the muscle level you don’t have enough oxygen
and start forming lactate. But exercise doesn’t make people panic. Even
deliberately holding your breath doesn’t make you panic, although it’s about
the fastest way possible to increase levels of those chemicals. So it looks like
your body is actively predicting how much lactate/bicarbonate/CO2 you
should have, and only getting concerned if there’s more than it expects.
So Klein theorized that the brain has a “suffocation alarm”, which does some
pretty complicated calculations to determine whether you’re suffocating or
not. Its inputs are anything from blood CO2 level to very high-level cognitions
like noticing that you’re in space and your spacesuit just ruptured. If, after
considering all of this, and taking into account confounding factors like
whether you’re exercising or voluntarily holding your breath, it decides that
you’re suffocating, it activates your body’s natural suffocation response.

And the body’s natural suffocation response seems a lot like panic attacks.
Increased heart rate? Check. Gasping for breath? Check. Feeling of impending
doom? Check. Choking? Check. Chest pain? Check. Faintness? Check. Some of
this makes more sense if you remember that the brain works on Bayesian
process combining top-down and bottom-up information, so that your brain
can predict that “suffocation implies choking” just as easily as “choking
implies suffocation”.

A quick digression into medieval French mythology. Once upon a time there
was a nymph named Ondine whose lover was unfaithful to her, as so often
happens in mythology and in France. She placed a very creative curse on him:
she cursed him not to be able to breathe automatically. He freaked out and
kept trying to remember to breathe in, now breathe out, now breathe in, now
breathe out, but at some point he had to fall asleep, at which point he stopped
breathing and died.

So when people discovered a condition that limits the ability to breathe

automatically, some very imaginative doctor named the condition Ondine’s
Curse (some much less imaginative doctors provided its alternate name,
central hypoventilation syndrome). People with Ondine’s curse don’t exactly
not breathe automatically. But if for some reason they stop breathing, they
don’t notice. Needless to say, this condition is very, very fatal. The usual
method of death is that somebody stops breathing at night (ie sleep apnea,
very common among the ordinary population, but not immediately dangerous
since your body notices the problem and makes you start breathing again) and
just never starts again.

Klein says that this proves the existence of the suffocation alarm: Ondine’s
Curse is an underactive suffocation alarm – and thus the opposite of panic
disorder, which is an overactive suffocation alarm. In Ondine’s Curse, patients
don’t feel like they’re suffocating even when they are; in panic disorder,
patients feel like they’re suffocating even when they’re not.

This picture has since gotten some pretty powerful confirmation, like the
discovery that panic disorder is associated with ACCN2, a gene involved in
carbon dioxide detection in the amygdala. If you’re looking for something that
causes you to panic when you’re suffocating, a carbon dioxide detector in the
amygdala is a pretty impressive fit.

I don’t think this is necessarily a replacement for the somatosensory feedback

loop theory. I think it ties into it pretty nicely. The suffocation alarm is one of
the many monitors watching the body and seeing whether something is
dysfunctional, maybe the most important such monitor. It goes through some
kind of Bayesian learning process to constantly have a prior probability of
suffocation and update with incoming evidence. Let me give two examples.

First, my patient with the bad allergies. Every time he eats the wrong thing, he
goes into anaphylactic shock, which prevents respiration and brings him to the
edge of suffocating. His suffocation alarm becomes sensitized to this
condition, increases its prior probability of suffocation, and so drops its
threshold so low that it can be set off by random noise.

Second, claustrophobics. There’s a clear analogy between being crammed into

a tiny space, and suffocating – think of people who are buried alive. For
claustrophobics, for some reason that link is especially strong, and just being
in an elevator is enough to set off their suffocation alarm and start a panic
attack. Now, why agoraphobics get panic attacks I’m not sure. Maybe fear
makes them feel woozy and hyperventilate, and the suffocation alarm treats
wooziness and hyperventilation as signs of suffocation and then gets stuck in a
feedback loop? I don’t know.

III.

Bandelow et al find that you’re about a hundred times more likely to develop a
new case of panic disorder during the postpartum period than usual.

This can be contrasted with two equally marked trends. Panic attacks decrease
markedly during pregnancy, and disappear entirely during childbirth. This last
is really remarkable. People get panic attacks at any conceivable time. When
they’re driving, when they’re walking, when they’re tired, when they’re asleep.
Just not, apparently, when they’re giving birth. Childbirth is one of the scariest
things you can imagine, your body’s getting all sorts of painful sensations it’s
never felt before, and it’s a very dangerous period in terms of increased
mortality risk. But in terms of panic attack, it’s one of the rare times when you
are truly and completely protected.

Maternal And Fetal Acid-Base Chemistry: A Major Determinant Of Perinatal

Outcomes notes that:

There is a substantial reduction in the partial pressure of carbon dioxide

in pregnancy…this fall is found to reach a mean level of 30-32 mmHg
and is associated with a 21% increase in oxygen uptake. The
physiological hyperventilation of pregnancy is due to the hormonal
effect of progesterone on the respiratory center.

In other words, you’re breathing more, you have more blood oxygen, you have
less blood CO2, and you’re further away from suffocation. This nicely matches
the observation that there’s fewer panic attacks.

According to Klein, “There is a period of extreme hyperventilation during

delivery, which drops the blood carbon dioxide to the minimum recorded
under nonpathological conditions”. This explains the extreme protective effect
of labor against panic disorder, despite labor’s seeming panic-inducing
properties. When your CO2 is that low, even an oversensitive suffocation
alarm is very far from a position where it might be set off.

(source)
Then you give birth, and progesterone – the hormone that was increasing
respiratory drive – falls off a cliff. Your body, which for nine months has been
doing very nicely with far more oxygen than it could ever need, suddenly finds
itself breathing much less than usual and having a normal CO2/oxygen
balance. This explains the hundredfold increased risk of developing panic
disorder! Somebody who’s previously never had any reason to think they’re
suffocating finds themselves with much less air than they expect (though still
the physiologically correct amount of air they need), and if they’ve got any
sensitivity at all, their suffocation alarm interprets this as possible suffocation
and freaks out.

This can go one of two directions: either it eventually fully readjusts to your
new position and becomes comfortable with a merely normal level of oxygen.
Or the constant panic and suffocation feelings sensitize it – the same way that
my allergy patient’s constant anaphylaxis sensitized him – the alarm develops
a higher prior on suffocation and a lower threshold, and the patient gets a
chronic panic disorder.

The reason my patient was so interesting was that she was kind of in the
middle of this process and had what must have been unusually good
introspective ability. Instead of saying “I feel panic”, she said “I feel like I’m
suffocating”. This is pretty interesting. It’s like a heart attack patient coming
in, and instead of saying “I feel chest pain”, they say “I feel like I have a
thrombus in my left coronary artery”. You’re like “Huh, good job”.

So I explained all of this to her, and since she didn’t know I used Google I
probably looked very smart. I told her that she wasn’t suffocating, that this
was a natural albeit unusual side effect of childbirth, and that with luck it
would go away soon. I told her if it didn’t go away soon then she might develop
panic disorder, which was unfortunate, but that there were lots of good
therapies for panic disorder which she would be able to try. This calmed her
down a lot and we were able to send her home with some benzodiazepines for
acute exacerbation and some SSRIs which she would stay on for a while to see
if they helped. She’s scheduled to see an outpatient psychiatrist for followup
and hopefully he will monitor her panic attacks to see if they eventually get
better.
IV.

I realize that case reports are usually supposed to include a part where the
doctor does something interesting and heroic and tries an experimental new
medication that saves the day. And I realize there wasn’t much of that here.
But I think that in psychiatry, a good explanation can sometimes be half the
battle.

Consider Schachter and Singer (1962). They injected patients with adrenaline
(a drug which among other things makes people physiologically agitated) or a
placebo. Half the patients were told that the drug would make them agitated.
The other half were told it was just some test drug to improve their eyesight.
Then a confederate came and did some annoying stuff, and they monitored
how angry the patients got. The patients who knew that the drug was
supposed to make them angry got less angry than the ones who didn’t. The
researchers theorized that both groups experienced physiological changes
related to anger, but the patients who knew it was because of the drug sort of
mentally adjusted for them, and the ones who didn’t took them seriously and
interpreted them as their own emotion.

We can think of this as the brain making a statistical calculation to try to

figure out its own level of anger. It has a certain prior. It gets certain evidence,
like the body’s physiological state and how annoying the confederate is being.
And it controls for certain confounders, like being injected with an arousal-
inducing drug. Eventually it makes its best guess, and that’s how angry you
feel.

In the same way, the suffocation monitor is taking all of its evidence about
suffocation – from very low-level stuff like how much CO2 is in the blood to
very high-level stuff like what situation you seem to be in – and then adjusting
for confounders like whether you’re exercising. And I wonder whether telling a
patient “You’re not actually suffocating, your panic comes from a known
physiologic process and here are the hormones that control it” is the
equivalent of telling them “You’re not really angry, your agitation comes from
us giving you a drug that’s known to produce agitation”. It tells the suffocation
alarm computer that this is a confounder to be controlled for rather than
evidence on which to update.
I can’t claim to really understand this at a level where it makes sense to me.
There are a lot of things that very directly increase CO2 but don’t increase
panic, or vice versa. Hyperventilation can either cause or prevent panic
depending on the situation. There seems to be something going on where the
suffocation monitor controls for some things but not others, but this is an
obvious cop-out that allows me to avoid making real predictions or narrowing
hypothesis-space.

For example, this theory would seem to predict that waterboarding shouldn’t
work. After all, its whole deal is artificially inducing the feeling of suffocation
in a situation where the victim presumably knows that the interrogators aren’t
going to let him suffocate. You would think that eventually the alarm realizes
that “is being waterboarded” is a confounder to control for, but this doesn’t
seem to be true.

(on the other hand, the inability to condition yourself seems relevant here. It
seems like the brain might be not be controlling for whether something is
reasonable, but only for whether something is produced by yourself. So maybe
exercise counts because it’s under your control, but waterboarding doesn’t
count because it isn’t. I wonder if anyone has ever tried letting someone
waterboard themselves and giving them the on-off switch for the
waterboarding device. Was Hitchens’ experience close enough to this to
count? Why would this be different from letting someone hold their breath,
which doesn’t produce the same level of panic?)

But overall I find Klein’s evidence pretty convincing and feel like this must be
at least part of the story. And I think that giving this kind of explanation to
somebody can comfort them, reassure them, and (maybe) even improve their
condition.

Politics and Pragmatics

I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup

I.

In Chesterton’s The Secret of Father Brown, a beloved nobleman who

murdered his good-for-nothing brother in a duel thirty years ago returns to his
hometown wracked by guilt. All the townspeople want to forgive him
immediately, and they mock the titular priest for only being willing to give a
measured forgiveness conditional on penance and self-reflection. They lecture
the priest on the virtues of charity and compassion.

Later, it comes out that the beloved nobleman did not in fact kill his good-for-
nothing brother. The good-for-nothing brother killed the beloved nobleman
(and stole his identity). Now the townspeople want to see him lynched or
burned alive, and it is only the priest who – consistently – offers a measured
forgiveness conditional on penance and self-reflection.

The priest tells them:

It seems to me that you only pardon the sins that you don’t really think
sinful. You only forgive criminals when they commit what you don’t
regard as crimes, but rather as conventions. You forgive a conventional
duel just as you forgive a conventional divorce. You forgive because
there isn’t anything to be forgiven.

He further notes that this is why the townspeople can self-righteously consider
themselves more compassionate and forgiving than he is. Actual forgiveness,
the kind the priest needs to cultivate to forgive evildoers, is really really hard.
The fake forgiveness the townspeople use to forgive the people they like is
really easy, so they get to boast not only of their forgiving nature, but of how
much nicer they are than those mean old priests who find forgiveness difficult
and want penance along with it.

After some thought I agree with Chesterton’s point. There are a lot of people
who say “I forgive you” when they mean “No harm done”, and a lot of people
who say “That was unforgiveable” when they mean “That was genuinely really
bad”. Whether or not forgiveness is right is a complicated topic I do not want
to get in here. But since forgiveness is generally considered a virtue, and one
that many want credit for having, I think it’s fair to say you only earn the right
to call yourself ‘forgiving’ if you forgive things that genuinely hurt you.

To borrow Chesterton’s example, if you think divorce is a-ok, then you don’t
get to “forgive” people their divorces, you merely ignore them. Someone who
thinks divorce is abhorrent can “forgive” divorce. You can forgive theft, or
murder, or tax evasion, or something you find abhorrent.

I mean, from a utilitarian point of view, you are still doing the correct action of
not giving people grief because they’re a divorcee. You can have all the Utility
Points you want. All I’m saying is that if you “forgive” something you don’t
care about, you don’t earn any Virtue Points.

(by way of illustration: a billionaire who gives $100 to charity gets as many
Utility Points as an impoverished pensioner who donates the same amount,
but the latter gets a lot more Virtue Points)

Tolerance is also considered a virtue, but it suffers the same sort of dimished
expectations forgiveness does.

The Emperor summons before him Bodhidharma and asks: “Master, I have
been tolerant of innumerable gays, lesbians, bisexuals, asexuals, blacks,
Hispanics, Asians, transgender people, and Jews. How many Virtue Points
have I earned for my meritorious deeds?”

Bodhidharma answers: “None at all”.

The Emperor, somewhat put out, demands to know why.

Bodhidharma asks: “Well, what do you think of gay people?”

The Emperor answers: “What do you think I am, some kind of homophobic
bigot? Of course I have nothing against gay people!”

And Bodhidharma answers: “Thus do you gain no merit by tolerating them!”

II.

If I had to define “tolerance” it would be something like “respect and kindness

toward members of an outgroup”.

And today we have an almost unprecedented situation.

We have a lot of people – like the Emperor – boasting of being able to tolerate
everyone from every outgroup they can imagine, loving the outgroup, writing
long paeans to how great the outgroup is, staying up at night fretting that
somebody else might not like the outgroup enough.

This is really surprising. It’s a total reversal of everything we know about

human psychology up to this point. No one did any genetic engineering. No
one passed out weird glowing pills in the public schools. And yet suddenly we
get an entire group of people who conspicuously promote and defend their
outgroups, the outer the better.

What is going on here?

Let’s start by asking what exactly an outgroup is.

There’s a very boring sense in which, assuming the Emperor’s straight, gays
are part of his “outgroup” ie a group that he is not a member of. But if the
Emperor has curly hair, are straight-haired people part of his outgroup? If the
Emperor’s name starts with the letter ‘A’, are people whose names start with
the letter ‘B’ part of his outgroup?

Nah. I would differentiate between multiple different meanings of outgroup,

where one is “a group you are not a part of” and the other is…something
stronger.
I want to avoid a very easy trap, which is saying that outgroups are about how
different you are, or how hostile you are. I don’t think that’s quite right.

Compare the Nazis to the German Jews and to the Japanese. The Nazis were
very similar to the German Jews: they looked the same, spoke the same
language, came from a similar culture. The Nazis were totally different from
the Japanese: different race, different language, vast cultural gap. But the
Nazis and Japanese mostly got along pretty well. Heck, the Nazis were actually
moderately positively disposed to the Chinese, even when they were
technically at war. Meanwhile, the conflict between the Nazis and the German
Jews – some of whom didn’t even realize they were anything other than
German until they checked their grandparents’ birth certificate – is the stuff of
history and nightmares. Any theory of outgroupishness that naively assumes
the Nazis’ natural outgroup is Japanese or Chinese people will be totally
inadequate.

And this isn’t a weird exception. Freud spoke of the narcissism of small
differences, saying that “it is precisely communities with adjoining territories,
and related to each other in other ways as well, who are engaged in constant
feuds and ridiculing each other”. Nazis and German Jews. Northern Irish
Protestants and Northern Irish Catholics. Hutus and Tutsis. South African
whites and South African blacks. Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs. Anyone in the
former Yugoslavia and anyone else in the former Yugoslavia.

So what makes an outgroup? Proximity plus small differences. If you want to

know who someone in former Yugoslavia hates, don’t look at the Indonesians
or the Zulus or the Tibetans or anyone else distant and exotic. Find the
Yugoslavian ethnicity that lives closely intermingled with them and is most
conspicuously similar to them, and chances are you’ll find the one who they
have eight hundred years of seething hatred toward.

What makes an unexpected in-group? The answer with Germans and

Japanese is obvious – a strategic alliance. In fact, the World Wars forged a lot
of unexpected temporary pseudo-friendships. A recent article from War Nerd
points out that the British, after spending centuries subjugating and despising
the Irish and Sikhs, suddenly needed Irish and Sikh soldiers for World Wars I
and II respectively. “Crush them beneath our boots” quickly changed to
fawning songs about how “there never was a coward where the shamrock
grows” and endless paeans to Sikh military prowess.

Sure, scratch the paeans even a little bit and you find condescension as strong
as ever. But eight hundred years of the British committing genocide against
the Irish and considering them literally subhuman turned into smiles and
songs about shamrocks once the Irish started looking like useful cannon
fodder for a larger fight. And the Sikhs, dark-skinned people with turbans and
beards who pretty much exemplify the European stereotype of “scary
foreigner”, were lauded by everyone from the news media all the way up to
Winston Churchill.

In other words, outgroups may be the people who look exactly like you, and
scary foreigner types can become the in-group on a moment’s notice when it
seems convenient.

III.

There are certain theories of dark matter where it barely interacts with the
regular world at all, such that we could have a dark matter planet exactly co-
incident with Earth and never know. Maybe dark matter people are walking all
around us and through us, maybe my house is in the Times Square of a great
dark matter city, maybe a few meters away from me a dark matter blogger is
writing on his dark matter computer about how weird it would be if there was
a light matter person he couldn’t see right next to him.

This is sort of how I feel about conservatives.

I don’t mean the sort of light-matter conservatives who go around

complaining about Big Government and occasionally voting for Romney. I see
those guys all the time. What I mean is – well, take creationists. According to
Gallup polls, about 46% of Americans are creationists. Not just in the sense of
believing God helped guide evolution. I mean they think evolution is a vile
atheist lie and God created humans exactly as they exist right now. That’s half
the country.

And I don’t have a single one of those people in my social circle. It’s not
because I’m deliberately avoiding them; I’m pretty live-and-let-live politically,
I wouldn’t ostracize someone just for some weird beliefs. And yet, even though
I probably know about a hundred fifty people, I am pretty confident that not
one of them is creationist. Odds of this happening by chance? 1/2^150 =
1/10^45 = approximately the chance of picking a particular atom if you are
randomly selecting among all the atoms on Earth.

About forty percent of Americans want to ban gay marriage. I think if I really
stretch it, maybe ten of my top hundred fifty friends might fall into this group.
This is less astronomically unlikely; the odds are a mere one to one hundred
quintillion against.

People like to talk about social bubbles, but that doesn’t even begin to cover
one hundred quintillion. The only metaphor that seems really appropriate is
the bizarre dark matter world.

I live in a Republican congressional district in a state with a Republican

governor. The conservatives are definitely out there. They drive on the same
roads as I do, live in the same neighborhoods. But they might as well be made
of dark matter. I never meet them.

To be fair, I spend a lot of my time inside on my computer. I’m browsing sites

like Reddit.

Recently, there was a thread on Reddit asking – Redditors Against Gay

Marriage, What Is Your Best Supporting Argument? A Reddit user who didn’t
understand how anybody could be against gay marriage honestly wanted to
know how other people who wereagainst it justified their position. He figured
he might as well ask one of the largest sites on the Internet, with an estimated
user base in the tens of millions.

It soon became clear that nobody there was actually against gay marriage.

There were a bunch of posts saying “I of course support gay marriage but here
are some reasons some other people might be against it,” a bunch of others
saying “my argument against gay marriage is the government shouldn’t be
involved in the marriage business at all”, and several more saying “why would
you even ask this question, there’s no possible good argument and you’re
wasting your time”. About halfway through the thread someone started saying
homosexuality was unnatural and I thought they were going to be the first one
to actually answer the question, but at the end they added “But it’s not my
place to decide what is or isn’t natural, I’m still pro-gay marriage.”

In a thread with 10,401 comments, a thread specifically asking for people

against gay marriage, I was eventually able to find two people who came out
and opposed it, way near the bottom. Their posts started with “I know I’m
going to be downvoted to hell for this…”

But I’m not only on Reddit. I also hang out on LW.

On last year’s survey, I found that of American LWers who identify with one of
the two major political parties, 80% are Democrat and 20% Republican, which
actually sounds pretty balanced compared to some of these other examples.

But it doesn’t last. Pretty much all of those “Republicans” are libertarians who
consider the GOP the lesser of two evils. When allowed to choose “libertarian”
as an alternative, only 4% of visitors continued to identify as conservative. But
that’s still…some. Right?

When I broke the numbers down further, 3 percentage points of those are
neoreactionaries, a bizarre sect that wants to be ruled by a king. Only one
percent of LWers were normal everyday God-‘n-guns-but-not-George-III
conservatives of the type that seem to make up about half of the United States.

It gets worse. My formative years were spent at a university which, if it was

similar to other elite universities, had a faculty and a student body that skewed
about 90-10 liberal to conservative – and we can bet that, like LW, even those
few token conservatives are Mitt Romney types rather than God-n’-guns types.
I get my news from vox.com, an Official Liberal Approved Site. Even when I go
out to eat, it turns out my favorite restaurant, California Pizza Kitchen, is the
most liberal restaurant in the United States.

I inhabit the same geographical area as scores and scores of conservatives. But
without meaning to, I have created an outrageously strong bubble, a 10^45
bubble. Conservatives are all around me, yet I am about as likely to have a
serious encounter with one as I am a Tibetan lama.
(Less likely, actually. One time a Tibetan lama came to my college and gave a
really nice presentation, but if a conservative tried that, people would protest
and it would be canceled.)

IV.

One day I realized that entirely by accident I was fulfilling all the Jewish
stereotypes.

I’m nerdy, over-educated, good with words, good with money, weird sense of
humor, don’t get outside much, I like deli sandwiches. And I’m a psychiatrist,
which is about the most stereotypically Jewish profession short of maybe
stand-up comedian or rabbi.

I’m not very religious. And I don’t go to synagogue. But that’s stereotypically
Jewish too!

I bring this up because it would be a mistake to think “Well, a Jewish person is

by definition someone who is born of a Jewish mother. Or I guess it sort of
also means someone who follows the Mosaic Law and goes to synagogue. But I
don’t care about Scott’s mother, and I know he doesn’t go to synagogue, so I
can’t gain any useful information from knowing Scott is Jewish.”

The defining factors of Judaism – Torah-reading, synagogue-following,

mother-having – are the tip of a giant iceberg. Jews sometimes identify as a
“tribe”, and even if you don’t attend synagogue, you’re still a member of that
tribe and people can still (in a statistical way) infer things about you by
knowing your Jewish identity – like how likely they are to be psychiatrists.

The last section raised a question – if people rarely select their friends and
associates and customers explicitly for politics, how do we end up with such
intense political segregation?

Well, in the same way “going to synagogue” is merely the iceberg-tip of a

Jewish tribe with many distinguishing characteristics, so “voting Republican”
or “identifying as conservative” or “believing in creationism” is the iceberg-tip
of a conservative tribe with many distinguishing characteristics.
A disproportionate number of my friends are Jewish, because I meet them at
psychiatry conferences or something – we self-segregate not based on explicit
religion but on implicit tribal characteristics. So in the same way, political
tribes self-segregate to an impressive extent – a 1/10^45 extent, I will never
tire of hammering in – based on their implicit tribal characteristics.

The people who are actually into this sort of thing sketch out a bunch of
speculative tribes and subtribes, but to make it easier, let me stick with two
and a half.

The Red Tribe is most classically typified by conservative political beliefs,

strong evangelical religious beliefs, creationism, opposing gay marriage,
owning guns, eating steak, drinking Coca-Cola, driving SUVs, watching lots of
TV, enjoying American football, getting conspicuously upset about terrorists
and commies, marrying early, divorcing early, shouting “USA IS NUMBER
ONE!!!”, and listening to country music.

The Blue Tribe is most classically typified by liberal political beliefs, vague
agnosticism, supporting gay rights, thinking guns are barbaric, eating arugula,
drinking fancy bottled water, driving Priuses, reading lots of books, being
highly educated, mocking American football, feeling vaguely like they should
like soccer but never really being able to get into it, getting conspicuously
upset about sexists and bigots, marrying later, constantly pointing out how
much more civilized European countries are than America, and listening to
“everything except country”.

(There is a partly-formed attempt to spin off a Grey Tribe typified by

libertarian political beliefs, Dawkins-style atheism, vague annoyance that the
question of gay rights even comes up, eating paleo, drinking Soylent, calling in
rides on Uber, reading lots of blogs, calling American football “sportsball”,
getting conspicuously upset about the War on Drugs and the NSA, and
listening to filk – but for our current purposes this is a distraction and they
can safely be considered part of the Blue Tribe most of the time)

I think these “tribes” will turn out to be even stronger categories than politics.
Harvard might skew 80-20 in terms of Democrats vs. Republicans, 90-10 in
terms of liberals vs. conservatives, but maybe 99-1 in terms of Blues vs. Reds.
It’s the many, many differences between these tribes that explain the strength
of the filter bubble – which have I mentioned segregates people at a strength
of 1/10^45? Even in something as seemingly politically uncharged as going to
California Pizza Kitchen or Sushi House for dinner, I’m restricting myself to
the set of people who like cute artisanal pizzas or sophsticated foreign foods,
which are classically Blue Tribe characteristics.

Are these tribes based on geography? Are they based on race, ethnic origin,
religion, IQ, what TV channels you watched as a kid? I don’t know.

Some of it is certainly genetic – estimates of the genetic contribution to

political association range from 0.4 to 0.6. Heritability of one’s attitudes
toward gay rights range from 0.3 to 0.5, which hilariously is a little more
heritable than homosexuality itself.

(for an interesting attempt to break these down into more rigorous concepts
like “traditionalism”, “authoritarianism”, and “in-group favoritism” and find
the genetic loading for each see here. For an attempt to trace the specific genes
involved, which mostly turn out to be NMDA receptors, see here)

But I don’t think it’s just genetics. There’s something else going on too. The
word “class” seems like the closest analogue, but only if you use it in the
sophisticated Paul Fussell Guide Through the American Status System way
instead of the boring “another word for how much money you make” way.

For now we can just accept them as a brute fact – as multiple coexisting
societies that might as well be made of dark matter for all of the interaction
they have with one another – and move on.

V.

The worst reaction I’ve ever gotten to a blog post was when I wrote about the
death of Osama bin Laden. I’ve written all sorts of stuff about race and gender
and politics and whatever, but that was the worst.

I didn’t come out and say I was happy he was dead. But some people
interpreted it that way, and there followed a bunch of comments and emails
and Facebook messages about how could I possibly be happy about the death
of another human being, even if he was a bad person? Everyone, even Osama,
is a human being, and we should never rejoice in the death of a fellow man.
One commenter came out and said:

I’m surprised at your reaction. As far as people I casually stalk on the

internet (ie, LJ and Facebook), you are the first out of the “intelligent,
reasoned and thoughtful” group to be uncomplicatedly happy about this
development and not to be, say, disgusted at the reactions of the other
90% or so.

This commenter was right. Of the “intelligent, reasoned, and thoughtful”

people I knew, the overwhelming emotion was conspicuous disgust that other
people could be happy about his death. I hastily backtracked and said I wasn’t
happy per se, just surprised and relieved that all of this was finally behind us.

And I genuinely believed that day that I had found some unexpected good in
people – that everyone I knew was so humane and compassionate that they
were unable to rejoice even in the death of someone who hated them and
everything they stood for.

Then a few years later, Margaret Thatcher died. And on my Facebook wall –
made of these same “intelligent, reasoned, and thoughtful” people – the most
common response was to quote some portion of the song “Ding Dong, The
Witch Is Dead”. Another popular response was to link the videos of British
people spontaneously throwing parties in the street, with comments like “I
wish I was there so I could join in”. From this exact same group of people, not
a single expression of disgust or a “c’mon, guys, we’re all human beings here.”

I gently pointed this out at the time, and mostly got a bunch of “yeah, so
what?”, combined with links to an article claiming that “the demand for
respectful silence in the wake of a public figure’s death is not just misguided
but dangerous”.

And that was when something clicked for me.

You can talk all you want about Islamophobia, but my friend’s “intelligent,
reasoned, and thoughtful people” – her name for the Blue Tribe – can’t get
together enough energy to really hate Osama, let alone Muslims in general. We
understand that what he did was bad, but it didn’t anger us personally. When
he died, we were able to very rationally apply our better nature and our Far
Mode beliefs about how it’s never right to be happy about anyone else’s death.

On the other hand, that same group absolutely loathed Thatcher. Most of us
(though not all) can agree, if the question is posed explicitly, that Osama was a
worse person than Thatcher. But in terms of actual gut feeling? Osama
provokes a snap judgment of “flawed human being”, Thatcher a snap
judgment of “scum”.

I started this essay by pointing out that, despite what geographical and
cultural distance would suggest, the Nazis’ outgroup was not the vastly
different Japanese, but the almost-identical German Jews.

And my hypothesis, stated plainly, is that if you’re part of the Blue Tribe, then
your outgroup isn’t al-Qaeda, or Muslims, or blacks, or gays, or transpeople,
or Jews, or atheists – it’s the Red Tribe.

VI.

“But racism and sexism and cissexism and anti-Semitism are these giant all-
encompassing social factors that verge upon being human universals! Surely
you’re not arguing that mere political differences could ever come close to
them!”

One of the ways we know that racism is a giant all-encompassing social factor
is the Implicit Association Test. Psychologists ask subjects to quickly identify
whether words or photos are members of certain gerrymandered categories,
like “either a white person’s face or a positive emotion” or “either a black
person’s face and a negative emotion”. Then they compare to a different set of
gerrymandered categories, like “either a black person’s face or a positive
emotion” or “either a white person’s face or a negative emotion.” If subjects
have more trouble (as measured in latency time) connecting white people to
negative things than they do white people to positive things, then they
probably have subconscious positive associations with white people. You can
try it yourself here.

Of course, what the test famously found was that even white people who
claimed to have no racist attitudes at all usually had positive associations with
white people and negative associations with black people on the test. There are
very many claims and counterclaims about the precise meaning of this, but it
ended up being a big part of the evidence in favor of the current consensus
that all white people are at least a little racist.

Anyway, three months ago, someone finally had the bright idea of doing an
Implicit Association Test with political parties, and they found that people’s
unconscious partisan biases were half again as strong as their unconscious
racial biases (h/t Bloomberg. For example, if you are a white Democrat, your
unconscious bias against blacks (as measured by something called a d-score)
is 0.16, but your unconscious bias against Republicans will be 0.23. The
Cohen’s d for racial bias was 0.61, by the book a “moderate” effect size; for
party it was 0.95, a “large” effect size.

Okay, fine, but we know race has real world consequences. Like, there have
been several studies where people sent out a bunch of identical resumes
except sometimes with a black person’s photo and other times with a white
person’s photo, and it was noticed that employers were much more likely to
invite the fictional white candidates for interviews. So just some stupid
Implicit Association Test results can’t compare to that, right?

Iyengar and Westwood also decided to do the resume test for parties. They
asked subjects to decide which of several candidates should get a scholarship
(subjects were told this was a genuine decision for the university the
researchers were affiliated with). Some resumes had photos of black people,
others of white people. And some students listed their experience in Young
Democrats of America, others in Young Republicans of America.

Once again, discrimination on the basis of party was much stronger than
discrimination on the basis of race. The size of the race effect for white people
was only 56-44 (and in the reverse of the expected direction); the size of the
party effect was about 80-20 for Democrats and 69-31 for Republicans.

If you want to see their third experiment, which applied yet another classic
methodology used to detect racism and once again found partyism to be much
stronger, you can read the paper.
I & W did an unusually thorough job, but this sort of thing isn’t new or
ground-breaking. People have been studying “belief congruence theory” – the
idea that differences in beliefs are more important than demographic factors
in forming in-groups and outgroups – for decades. As early as 1967, Smith et
al were doing surveys all over the country and finding that people were more
likely to accept friendships across racial lines than across beliefs; in the forty
years since then, the observation has been replicated scores of times. Insko,
Moe, and Nacoste’s 2006 review Belief Congruence And Racial Discrimination
concludes that:

. The literature was judged supportive of a weak version of belief

congruence theory which states that in those contexts in which social
pressure is nonexistent or ineffective, belief is more important than race
as a determinant of racial or ethnic discrimination. Evidence for a
strong version of belief congruence theory (which states that in those
contexts in which social pressure is nonexistent, or ineffective, belief is
the only determinant of racial or ethnic discrimination) and was judged
much more problematic.

One of the best-known examples of racism is the “Guess Who’s Coming To

Dinner” scenario where parents are scandalized about their child marrying
someone of a different race. Pew has done some good work on this and found
that only 23% of conservatives and 1% (!) of liberals admit they would be upset
in this situation. But Pew also asked how parents would feel about their child
marrying someone of a different political party. Now 30% of conservatives
and 23% of liberals would get upset. Average them out, and you go from 12%
upsetness rate for race to 27% upsetness rate for party – more than double.
Yeah, people do lie to pollsters, but a picture is starting to come together here.

(Harvard, by the way, is a tossup. There are more black students – 11.5% –
than conservative students – 10% – but there are more conservative faculty
than black faculty.)

Since people will delight in misinterpreting me here, let me overemphasize

what I am notsaying. I’m not saying people of either party have it “worse” than
black people, or that partyism is more of a problem than racism, or any of a
number of stupid things along those lines which I am sure I will nevertheless
be accused of believing. Racism is worse than partyism because the two parties
are at least kind of balanced in numbers and in resources, whereas the brunt
of an entire country’s racism falls on a few underprivileged people. I am saying
that the underlying attitudes that produce partyism are stronger than the
underlying attitudes that produce racism, with no necessary implications on
their social effects.

But if we want to look at people’s psychology and motivations, partyism and

the particular variant of tribalism that it represents are going to be fertile
ground.

VII.

Every election cycle like clockwork, conservatives accuse liberals of not being
sufficiently pro-America. And every election cycle like clockwork, liberals give
extremely unconvincing denials of this.

“It’s not that we’re, like, against America per se. It’s just that…well, did you
know Europe has much better health care than we do? And much lower crime
rates? I mean, come on, how did they get so awesome? And we’re just sitting
here, can’t even get the gay marriage thing sorted out, seriously, what’s wrong
with a country that can’t…sorry, what were we talking about? Oh yeah,
America. They’re okay. Cesar Chavez was really neat. So were some other
people outside the mainstream who became famous precisely by criticizing
majority society. That’s sort of like America being great, in that I think the
parts of it that point out how bad the rest of it are often make excellent points.
Vote for me!”

(sorry, I make fun of you because I love you)

There was a big brouhaha a couple of years ago when, as it first became
apparent Obama had a good shot at the Presidency, Michelle Obama said that
“for the first time in my adult life, I am proud of my country.”

Republicans pounced on the comment, asking why she hadn’t felt proud
before, and she backtracked saying of course she was proud all the time and
she loves America with the burning fury of a million suns and she was just
saying that the Obama campaign was particularly inspiring.
As unconvincing denials go, this one was pretty far up there. But no one really
held it against her. Probably most Obama voters felt vaguely the same way. I
was an Obama voter, and I have proud memories of spending my Fourth of
Julys as a kid debunking people’s heartfelt emotions of patriotism. Aaron
Sorkin:

[What makes America the greatest country in the world?] It’s not the
greatest country in the world! We’re seventh in literacy, 27th in math,
22nd in science, 49th in life expectancy, 178th in infant mortality, third
in median household income, No. 4 in labor force, and No. 4 in exports.
So when you ask what makes us the greatest country in the world, I
don’t know what the f*** you’re talking about.

(Another good retort is “We’re number one? Sure – number one in

incarceration rates, drone strikes, and making new parents go back to work!”)

All of this is true, of course. But it’s weird that it’s such a classic interest of
members of the Blue Tribe, and members of the Red Tribe never seem to bring
it up.

(“We’re number one? Sure – number one in levels of sexual degeneracy! Well,
I guess probably number two, after the Netherlands, but they’re really small
and shouldn’t count.”)

My hunch – both the Red Tribe and the Blue Tribe, for whatever reason,
identify “America” with the Red Tribe. Ask people for typically “American”
things, and you end up with a very Red list of characteristics – guns, religion,
barbecues, American football, NASCAR, cowboys, SUVs, unrestrained
capitalism.

That means the Red Tribe feels intensely patriotic about “their” country, and
the Blue Tribe feels like they’re living in fortified enclaves deep in hostile
territory.

Here is a popular piece published on a major media site called America: A Big,
Fat, Stupid Nation. Another: America: A Bunch Of Spoiled, Whiny Brats.
Americans are ignorant, scientifically illiterate religious fanatics whose
“patriotism” is actually just narcissism. You Will Be Shocked At How Ignorant
Americans Are, and we should Blame The Childish, Ignorant American
People.

Needless to say, every single one of these articles was written by an American
and read almost entirely by Americans. Those Americans very likely enjoyed
the articles very much and did not feel the least bit insulted.

And look at the sources. HuffPo, Salon, Slate. Might those have anything in
common?

On both sides, “American” can be either a normal demonym, or a code word

for a member of the Red Tribe.

VIII.

The other day, I logged into OKCupid and found someone who looked cool. I
was reading over her profile and found the following sentence:

Don’t message me if you’re a sexist white guy

And my first thought was “Wait, so a sexist black person would be okay?
Why?”

(The girl in question was white as snow)

Around the time the Ferguson riots were first starting, there were a host of
articles with titles like Why White People Don’t Seem To Understand
Ferguson, Why It’s So Hard For Whites To Understand Ferguson, and White
Folks Listen Up And Let Me Tell You What Ferguson Is All About, this last of
which says:

Social media is full of people on both sides making presumptions, and

believing what they want to believe. But it’s the white folks that don’t
understand what this is all about. Let me put it as simply as I can for you
[…]

No matter how wrong you think Trayvon Martin or Michael Brown

were, I think we can all agree they didn’t deserve to die over it. I want
 you white folks to understand that this is where the anger is coming
from. You focused on the looting….”

And on a hunch I checked the author photos, and every single one of these
articles was written by a white person.

White People Are Ruining America? White. White People Are Still A Disgrace?
White. White Guys: We Suck And We’re Sorry? White. Bye Bye, Whiny White
Dudes? White. Dear Entitled Straight White Dudes, I’m Evicting You From My
Life? White. White Dudes Need To Stop Whitesplaining? White. Reasons Why
Americans Suck #1: White People? White.

We’ve all seen articles and comments and articles like this. Some unsavory
people try to use them to prove that white people are the real victims or the
media is biased against white people or something. Other people who are very
nice and optimistic use them to show that some white people have developed
some self-awareness and are willing to engage in self-criticism.

But I think the situation with “white” is much the same as the situation with
“American” – it can either mean what it says, or be a code word for the Red
Tribe.

(except on the blog Stuff White People Like, where it obviously serves as a
code word for the Blue tribe. I don’t know, guys. I didn’t do it.)

I realize that’s making a strong claim, but it would hardly be without

precedent. When people say things like “gamers are misogynist”, do they mean
the 52% of gamers who are women? Do they mean every one of the 59% of
Americans from every walk of life who are known to play video or computer
games occasionally? No. “Gamer” is a coded reference to the Gray Tribe, the
half-branched-off collection of libertarianish tech-savvy nerds, and everyone
knows it. As well expect that when people talk about “fedoras”, they mean
Indiana Jones. Or when they talk about “urban youth”, they mean freshmen at
NYU. Everyone knows exactly who we mean when we say “urban youth”, and
them being young people who live in a city has only the most tenuous of
relations to the actual concept.

And I’m saying words like “American” and “white” work the same way. Bill
Clinton was the “first black President”, but if Herman Cain had won in 2012
he’d have been the 43rd white president. And when an angry white person
talks at great length about how much he hates “white dudes”, he is not being
humble and self-critical.

IX.

Imagine hearing that a liberal talk show host and comedian was so enraged by
the actions of ISIS that he’d recorded and posted a video in which he shouts at
them for ten minutes, cursing the “fanatical terrorists” and calling them “utter
savages” with “savage values”.

If I heard that, I’d be kind of surprised. It doesn’t fit my model of what liberal
talk show hosts do.

But the story I’m actually referring to is liberal talk show host / comedian
Russell Brand making that same rant against Fox News for supporting war
against the Islamic State, adding at the end that “Fox is worse than ISIS”.

That fits my model perfectly. You wouldn’t celebrate Osama’s death, only
Thatcher’s. And you wouldn’t call ISIS savages, only Fox News. Fox is the
outgroup, ISIS is just some random people off in a desert. You hate the
outgroup, you don’t hate random desert people.

I would go further. Not only does Brand not feel much like hating ISIS, he has
a strong incentive not to. That incentive is: the Red Tribe is known to hate
ISIS loudly and conspicuously. Hating ISIS would signal Red Tribe
membership, would be the equivalent of going into Crips territory with a big
Bloods gang sign tattooed on your shoulder.

But this might be unfair. What would Russell Brand answer, if we asked him
to justify his decision to be much angrier at Fox than ISIS?

He might say something like “Obviously Fox News is not literally worse than
ISIS. But here I am, talking to my audience, who are mostly white British
people and Americans. These people already know that ISIS is bad; they don’t
need to be told that any further. In fact, at this point being angry about how
bad ISIS is, is less likely to genuinely change someone’s mind about ISIS, and
more likely to promote Islamophobia. The sort of people in my audience are at
zero risk of becoming ISIS supporters, but at a very real risk of Islamophobia.
So ranting against ISIS would be counterproductive and dangerous.

On the other hand, my audience of white British people and Americans is very
likely to contain many Fox News viewers and supporters. And Fox, while not
quite as evil as ISIS, is still pretty bad. So here’s somewhere I have a genuine
chance to reach people at risk and change minds. Therefore, I think my
decision to rant against Fox News, and maybe hyperbolically say they were
‘worse than ISIS’ is justified under the circumstances.”

I have a lot of sympathy to hypothetical-Brand, especially to the part about

Islamophobia. It does seem really possible to denounce ISIS’ atrocities to a
population that already hates them in order to weak-man a couple of already-
marginalized Muslims. We need to fight terrorism and atrocities – therefore
it’s okay to shout at a poor girl ten thousand miles from home for wearing a
headscarf in public. Christians are being executed for their faith in Sudan,
therefore let’s picket the people trying to build a mosque next door.

But my sympathy with Brand ends when he acts like his audience is likely to
be fans of Fox News.

In a world where a negligible number of Redditors oppose gay marriage and

1% of Less Wrongers identify conservative and I know 0/150 creationists, how
many of the people who visit the YouTube channel of a well-known liberal
activist with a Che-inspired banner, a channel whose episode names are things
like “War: What Is It Good For?” and “Sarah Silverman Talks Feminism” –
how many of them do you think are big Fox News fans?

In a way, Russell Brand would have been braver taking a stand against ISIS
than against Fox. If he attacked ISIS, his viewers would just be a little
confused and uncomfortable. Whereas every moment he’s attacking Fox his
viewers are like “HA HA! YEAH! GET ‘EM! SHOW THOSE IGNORANT
BIGOTS IN THE OUTGROUP WHO’S BOSS!”

Brand acts as if there are just these countries called “Britain” and “America”
who are receiving his material. Wrong. There are two parallel universes, and
he’s only broadcasting to one of them.
The result is exactly what we predicted would happen in the case of Islam.
Bombard people with images of a far-off land they already hate and tell them
to hate it more, and the result is ramping up the intolerance on the couple of
dazed and marginalized representatives of that culture who have ended up
stuck on your half of the divide. Sure enough, if industry or culture or
community gets Blue enough, Red Tribe members start getting harassed, fired
from their jobs (Brendan Eich being the obvious example) or otherwise shown
the door.

Think of Brendan Eich as a member of a tiny religious minority surrounded by

people who hate that minority. Suddenly firing him doesn’t seem very noble.

If you mix together Podunk, Texas and Mosul, Iraq, you can prove that
Muslims are scary and very powerful people who are executing Christians all
the time – and so we have a great excuse for kicking the one remaining
Muslim family, random people who never hurt anyone, out of town.

And if you mix together the open-source tech industry and the parallel
universe whereyou can’t wear a FreeBSD t-shirt without risking someone
trying to exorcise you, you can prove that Christians are scary and very
powerful people who are persecuting everyone else all the time, and you have
a great excuse for kicking one of the few people willing to affiliate with the Red
Tribe, a guy who never hurt anyone, out of town.

When a friend of mine heard Eich got fired, she didn’t see anything wrong
with it. “I can tolerate anything except intolerance,” she said.

“Intolerance” is starting to look like another one of those words like “white”
and “American”.

“I can tolerate anything except the outgroup.” Doesn’t sound quite so noble
now, does it?

X.

We started by asking: millions of people are conspicuously praising every

outgroup they can think of, while conspicuously condemning their own in-
group. This seems contrary to what we know about social psychology. What’s
up?
We noted that outgroups are rarely literally “the group most different from
you”, and in fact far more likely to be groups very similar to you sharing
almost all your characteristics and living in the same area.

We then noted that although liberals and conservatives live in the same area,
they might as well be two totally different countries or universe as far as level
of interaction were concerned.

Contra the usual idea of them being marked only by voting behavior, we
described them as very different tribes with totally different cultures. You can
speak of “American culture” only in the same way you can speak of “Asian
culture” – that is, with a lot of interior boundaries being pushed under the rug.

The outgroup of the Red Tribe is occasionally blacks and gays and Muslims,
more often the Blue Tribe.

The Blue Tribe has performed some kind of very impressive act of alchemy,
and transmuted all of its outgroup hatred to the Red Tribe.

This is not surprising. Ethnic differences have proven quite tractable in the
face of shared strategic aims. Even the Nazis, not known for their ethnic
tolerance, were able to get all buddy-buddy with the Japanese when they had a
common cause.

Research suggests Blue Tribe / Red Tribe prejudice to be much stronger than
better-known types of prejudice like racism. Once the Blue Tribe was able to
enlist the blacks and gays and Muslims in their ranks, they became allies of
convenience who deserve to be rehabilitated with mildly condescending
paeans to their virtue. “There never was a coward where the shamrock grows.”

Spending your entire life insulting the other tribe and talking about how
terrible they are makes you look, well, tribalistic. It is definitely not high class.
So when members of the Blue Tribe decide to dedicate their entire life to
yelling about how terrible the Red Tribe is, they make sure that instead of
saying “the Red Tribe”, they say “America”, or “white people”, or “straight
white men”. That way it’s humble self-criticism. They are so interested in
justice that they are willing to critique their own beloved side, much as it pains
them to do so. We know they are not exaggerating, because one might
exaggerate the flaws of an enemy, but that anyone would exaggerate their own
flaws fails the criterion of embarrassment.

The Blue Tribe always has an excuse at hand to persecute and crush any Red
Tribers unfortunate enough to fall into its light-matter-universe by defining
them as all-powerful domineering oppressors. They appeal to the fact that this
is definitely the way it works in the Red Tribe’s dark-matter-universe, and
that’s in the same country so it has to be the same community for all intents
and purposes. As a result, every Blue Tribe institution is permanently licensed
to take whatever emergency measures are necessary against the Red Tribe,
however disturbing they might otherwise seem.

And so how virtuous, how noble the Blue Tribe! Perfectly tolerant of all of the
different groups that just so happen to be allied with them, never intolerant
unless it happen to be against intolerance itself. Never stooping to engage in
petty tribal conflict like that awful Red Tribe, but always nobly criticizing their
own culture and striving to make it better!

Sorry. But I hope this is at least a little convincing. The weird dynamic of
outgroup-philia and ingroup-phobia isn’t anything of the sort. It’s just good
old-fashioned in-group-favoritism and outgroup bashing, a little more
sophisticated and a little more sneaky.

XI.

This essay is bad and I should feel bad.

I should feel bad because I made exactly the mistake I am trying to warn
everyone else about, and it wasn’t until I was almost done that I noticed.

How virtuous, how noble I must be! Never stooping to engage in petty tribal
conflict like that silly Red Tribe, but always nobly criticizing my own tribe and
striving to make it better.

Yeah. Once I’ve written a ten thousand word essay savagely attacking the Blue
Tribe, either I’m a very special person or they’re my outgroup. And I’m not
that special.
Just as you can pull a fast one and look humbly self-critical if you make your
audience assume there’s just one American culture, so maybe you can trick
people by assuming there’s only one Blue Tribe.

I’m pretty sure I’m not Red, but I did talk about the Grey Tribe above, and I
show all the risk factors for being one of them. That means that, although my
critique of the Blue Tribe may be right or wrong, in terms of motivation it
comes from the same place as a Red Tribe member talking about how much
they hate al-Qaeda or a Blue Tribe member talking about how much they hate
ignorant bigots. And when I boast of being able to tolerate Christians and
Southerners whom the Blue Tribe is mean to, I’m not being tolerant at all, just
noticing people so far away from me they wouldn’t make a good outgroup
anyway.

I had fun writing this article. People do not have fun writing articles savagely
criticizing their in-group. People can criticize their in-group, it’s not humanly
impossible, but it takes nerves of steel, it makes your blood boil, you should
sweat blood. It shouldn’t be fun.

You can bet some white guy on Gawker who week after week churns out “Why
White People Are So Terrible” and “Here’s What Dumb White People Don’t
Understand” is having fun and not sweating any blood at all. He’s not
criticizing his in-group, he’s never even considered criticizing his in-group. I
can’t blame him. Criticizing the in-group is a really difficult project I’ve barely
begun to build the mental skills necessary to even consider.

I can think of criticisms of my own tribe. Important criticisms, true ones. But
the thought of writing them makes my blood boil.

I imagine might I feel like some liberal US Muslim leader, when he goes on the
O’Reilly Show, and O’Reilly ambushes him and demands to know why he and
other American Muslims haven’t condemned beheadings by ISIS more,
demands that he criticize them right there on live TV. And you can see the
wheels in the Muslim leader’s head turning, thinking something like “Okay,
obviously beheadings are terrible and I hate them as much as anyone. But you
don’t care even the slightest bit about the victims of beheadings. You’re just
looking for a way to score points against me so you can embarass all Muslims.
And I would rather personally behead every single person in the world than
give a smug bigot like you a single microgram more stupid self-satisfaction
than you’ve already got.”

That is how I feel when asked to criticize my own tribe, even for correct
reasons. If you think you’re criticizing your own tribe, and your blood is not at
that temperature, consider the possibility that you aren’t.

But if I want Self-Criticism Virtue Points, criticizing the Grey Tribe is the only
honest way to get them. And if I want Tolerance Points, my own personal cross
to bear right now is tolerating the Blue Tribe. I need to remind myself that
when they are bad people, they are merely Osama-level bad people instead of
Thatcher-level bad people. And when they are good people, they are powerful
and necessary crusaders against the evils of the world.

The worst thing that could happen to this post is to have it be used as
convenient feces to fling at the Blue Tribe whenever feces are necessary.
Which, given what has happened to my last couple of posts along these lines
and the obvious biases of my own subconscious, I already expect it will be.

But the best thing that could happen to this post is that it makes a lot of
people, especially myself, figure out how to be more tolerant. Not in the “of
course I’m tolerant, why shouldn’t I be?” sense of the Emperor in Part I. But in
the sense of “being tolerant makes me see red, makes me sweat blood, but
darn it I am going to be tolerant anyway.”

Book Review: Albion’s Seed

I.

Albion’s Seed by David Fischer is a history professor’s nine-hundred-page

treatise on patterns of early immigration to the Eastern United States. It’s not
light reading and not the sort of thing I would normally pick up. I read it
anyway on the advice of people who kept telling me it explains everything
about America. And it sort of does.

In school, we tend to think of the original American colonists as “Englishmen”,

a maximally non-diverse group who form the background for all of the
diversity and ethnic conflict to come later. Fischer’s thesis is the opposite.
Different parts of the country were settled by very different groups of
Englishmen with different regional backgrounds, religions, social classes, and
philosophies. The colonization process essentially extracted a single stratum of
English society, isolated it from all the others, and then plunked it down on its
own somewhere in the Eastern US.

I used to play Alpha Centauri, a computer game about the colonization of its
namesake star system. One of the dynamics that made it so interesting was its
backstory, where a Puerto Rican survivalist, an African plutocrat, and other
colorful characters organized their own colonial expeditions and competed to
seize territory and resources. You got to explore not only the settlement of a
new world, but the settlement of a new world by societies dominated by
extreme founder effects. What kind of weird pathologies and wonderful
innovations do you get when a group of overly romantic Scottish
environmentalists is allowed to develop on its own trajectory free of all non-
overly-romantic-Scottish-environmentalist influences? Albion’s Seed argues
that this is basically the process that formed several early US states.

Fischer describes four of these migrations: the Puritans to New England in the
1620s, the Cavaliers to Virginia in the 1640s, the Quakers to Pennsylvania in
the 1670s, and the Borderers to Appalachia in the 1700s.

A: The Puritans

I hear about these people every Thanksgiving, then never think about them
again for the next 364 days. They were a Calvinist sect that dissented against
the Church of England and followed their own brand of dour, industrious, fun-
hating Christianity. Most of them were from East Anglia, the part of England
just northeast of London. They came to America partly because they felt
persecuted, but mostly because they thought England was full of sin and they
were at risk of absorbing the sin by osmosis if they didn’t get away quick and
build something better. They really liked “city on a hill” metaphors.

I knew about the Mayflower, I knew about the black hats and silly shoes, I
even knew about the time Squanto threatened to release a bioweapon buried
under Plymouth Rock that would bring about the apocalypse. But I didn’t
know that the Puritan migration to America was basically a eugenicist’s wet
dream.
Much like eg Unitarians today, the Puritans were a religious group that drew
disproportionately from the most educated and education-obsessed parts of
the English populace. Literacy among immigrants to Massachusetts was twice
as high as the English average, and in an age when the vast majority of
Europeans were farmers most immigrants to Massachusetts were skilled
craftsmen or scholars. And the Puritan “homeland” of East Anglia was a an
unusually intellectual place, with strong influences from Dutch and
Continental trade; historian Havelock Ellis finds that it “accounts for a much
larger proportion of literary, scientific, and intellectual achievement than any
other part of England.”

Furthermore, only the best Puritans were allowed to go to Massachusetts;

Fischer writes that “it may have been the only English colony that required
some of its immigrants to submit letters of recommendation” and that “those
who did not fit in were banished to other colonies and sent back to England”.
Puritan “headhunters” went back to England to recruit “godly men” and
“honest men” who “must not be of the poorer sort”.

Interesting Puritan Facts:

1. Sir Harry Vane, who was “briefly governor of Massachusetts at the age
of 24”, “was so rigorous in his Puritanism that he believed only the
thrice-born to be truly saved”.
2. The great seal of the Massachusetts Bay Company “featured an Indian
with arms beckoning, and five English words flowing from his mouth:
‘Come over and help us'”
3. Northern New Jersey was settled by Puritans who named their town
after the “New Ark Of The Covenant” – modern Newark.
4. Massachusetts clergy were very powerful; Fischer records the story of a
traveller asking a man “Are you the parson who serves here?” only to be
corrected “I am, sir, the parson who rules here.”
5. The Puritans tried to import African slaves, but they all died of the cold.
6. In 1639, Massachusetts declared a “Day Of Humiliation” to condemn
“novelties, oppression, atheism, excesse, superfluity, idleness, contempt
of authority, and trouble in other parts to be remembered”
7. The average family size in Waltham, Massachusetts in the 1730s was 9.7
children.
 8. Everyone was compelled by law to live in families. Town officials would
search the town for single people and, if found, order them to join a
family; if they refused, they were sent to jail.
9. 98% of adult Puritan men were married, compared to only 73% of adult
Englishmen in general. Women were under special pressure to marry,
and a Puritan proverb said that “women dying maids lead apes in Hell”.
10.90% of Puritan names were taken from the Bible. Some Puritans took
pride in their learning by giving their children obscure Biblical names
they would expect nobody else to have heard of, like Mahershalalhasbaz.
Others chose random Biblical terms that might not have technically
been intended as names; “the son of Bostonian Samuel Pond was named
Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin Pond”. Still others chose Biblical words
completely at random and named their children things like Maybe or
Notwithstanding.
11. Puritan parents traditionally would send children away to be raised with
other families, and raise those families’ children in turn, in the hopes
that the lack of familiarity would make the child behave better.
12.In 1692, 25% of women over age 45 in Essex County were accused of
witchcraft.
13.Massachusetts passed the first law mandating universal public
education, which was called The Old Deluder Law in honor of its
preamble, which began “It being one chief project of that old deluder,
Satan, to keep men from the knowledge of the scriptures…”
14.Massachusetts cuisine was based around “meat and vegetables
submerged in plain water and boiled relentlessly without seasonings of
any kind”.
15. Along with the famous scarlet A for adultery, Puritans could be forced to
wear a B for blasphemy, C for counterfeiting, D for drunkenness, and so
on.
16.Wasting time in Massachusetts was literally a criminal offense, listed in
the law code, and several people were in fact prosecuted for it.
17. This wasn’t even the nadir of weird hard-to-enforce Massachusetts laws.
Another law just said “If any man shall exceed the bounds of
moderation, we shall punish him severely”.

Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote of Massachusetts Puritanism: “The underlying

foundation of life in New England was one of profound, unutterable, and
therefore unuttered mehalncholy, which regarded human existence itself as a
ghastly risk, and, in the case of the vast majority of human beings, an
inconceivable misfortune.” And indeed, everything was dour, strict,
oppressive, and very religious. A typical Massachusetts week would begin in
the church, which doubled as the town meeting hall. There were no
decorations except a giant staring eye on the pulpit to remind churchgoers
that God was watching them. Townspeople would stand up before their and
declare their shame and misdeeds, sometimes being forced to literally crawl
before the other worshippers begging for forgiveness. THen the minister
would give two two-hour sermons back to back. The entire affair would take
up to six hours, and the church was unheated (for some reason they stored all
their gunpowder there, so no one was allowed to light a fire), and this was
Massachusetts, and it was colder in those days than it is now, so that during
winter some people would literally lose fingers to frostbite (Fischer: “It was a
point of honor for the minister never to shorten a sermon merely because his
audience was frozen”). Everyone would stand there with their guns (they were
legally required to bring guns, in case Indians attacked during the sermon)
and hear about how they were going to Hell, all while the giant staring eye
looked at them.

So life as a Puritan was pretty terrible. On the other hand, their society was
impressively well-ordered. Teenage pregnancy rates were the lowest in the
Western world and in some areas literally zero. Murder rates were half those
in other American colonies. There was remarkably low income inequality –
“the top 10% of wealthholders held only 20%-30% of taxable property”,
compared to 75% today and similar numbers in other 17th-century
civilizations. The poor (at least the poor native to a given town) were treated
with charity and respect – “in Salem, one man was ordered to be set by the
heels in the stocks for being uncharitable to a poor man in distress”.
Government was conducted through town meetings in which everyone had a
say. Women had more equality than in most parts of the world, and domestic
abuse was punished brutally. The educational system was top-notch – “by
most empirical tests of intellectual eminence, New England led all other parts
of British America from the 17th to the early 20th century”.

In some ways the Puritans seem to have taken the classic dystopian bargain –
give up all freedom and individuality and art, and you can have a perfect
society without crime or violence or inequality. Fischer ends each of his
chapters with a discussion of how the society thought of liberty, and the
Puritans unsurprisingly thought of liberty as “ordered liberty” – the freedom
of everything to tend to its correct place and stay there. They thought of it as a
freedom from disruption – apparently FDR stole some of his “freedom from
fear” stuff from early Puritan documents. They were extremely not in favor of
the sort of liberty that meant that, for example, there wouldn’t be laws against
wasting time. That was going too far.

B: The Cavaliers

The Massachusetts Puritans fled England in the 1620s partly because the king
and nobles were oppressing them. In the 1640s, English Puritans under Oliver
Cromwell rebelled, took over the government, and killed the king. The nobles
not unreasonably started looking to get the heck out.

Virginia had been kind of a wreck ever since most of the original Jamestown
settlers had mostly died of disease. Governor William Berkeley, a noble
himself, decided the colony could reinvent itself as a destination for refugee
nobles, and told them it would do everything possible to help them maintain
the position of oppressive supremacy to which they were accustomed. The
British nobility was sold. The Cavaliers – the nobles who had fought and lost
the English Civil War – fled to Virginia. Historians who cross-checking
Virginian immigrant lists against English records find that of Virginians whose
opinions on the War were known, 98% were royalists. They were
overwhelming Anglican, mostly from agrarian southern England, and all
related to each other in the incestuous way of nobility everywhere: “it is
difficult to think of any ruling elite that has been more closely interrelated
since the Ptolemies”. There were twelve members of Virginia’s royal council;
in 1724 “all without exception were related to one another by blood or
marriage…as late as 1775, every member of that august body was descended
from a councilor who had served in 1660”.

These aristocrats didn’t want to do their own work, so they brought with them
tens of thousands of indentured servants; more than 75% of all Virginian
immigrants arrived in this position. Some of these people came willingly on a
system where their master paid their passage over and they would be free after
a certain number of years; others were sent by the courts as punishments; still
others were just plain kidnapped. The gender ratio was 4:1 in favor of men,
and there were entire English gangs dedicated to kidnapping women and
sending them to Virginia, where they fetched a high price. Needless to say,
these people came from a very different stratum than their masters or the
Puritans.

People who came to Virginia mostly died. They died of malaria, typhoid fever,
amoebiasis, and dysentery. Unlike in New England, where Europeans were
better adapted to the cold climate than Africans, in Virginia it was Europeans
who had the higher disease-related mortality rate. The whites who survived
tended to become “sluggish and indolent”, according to the universal report of
travellers and chroniclers, although I might be sluggish and indolent too if I
had been kidnapped to go work on some rich person’s farm and sluggishness/
indolence was an option.

The Virginians tried their best to oppress white people. Really, they did. The
depths to which they sank in trying to oppress white people almost boggle the
imagination. There was a rule that if a female indentured servant became
pregnant, a few extra years were added on to their indenture, supposedly
because they would be working less hard during their pregnancy and child-
rearing so it wasn’t fair to the master. Virginian aristocrats would rape their
own female servants, then add a penalty term on to their indenture for
becoming pregnant. That is an impressive level of chutzpah. But despite these
efforts, eventually all the white people either died, or became too sluggish to
be useful, or worst of all just finished up their indentures and became legally
free. The aristocrats started importing black slaves as per the model that had
sprung up in the Caribbean, and so the stage was set for the antebellum South
we read about in history classes.

Interesting Cavalier Facts:

1. Virginian cavalier speech patterns sound a lot like modern African-

American dialects. It doesn’t take much imagination to figure out why,
but it’s strange to think of a 17th century British lord speaking what a
modern ear would clearly recognize as Ebonics.
2. Three-quarters of 17th-century Virginian children lost at least one
parent before turning 18.
3. Cousin marriage was an important custom that helped cement bonds
among the Virginian elite, “and many an Anglican lady changed her
condition but not her name”.
4. In Virginia, women were sometimes unironically called “breeders”;
English women were sometimes referred to as “She-Britons”.
5. Virginia didn’t really have towns; the Chesapeake Bay was such a giant
maze of rivers and estuaries and waterways that there wasn’t much need
for land transport hubs. Instead, the unit of settlement was the
plantation, which consisted of an aristocratic planter, his wife and
family, his servants, his slaves, and a bunch of guests who hung around
and mooched off him in accordance with the ancient custom of
hospitality.
6. Virginian society considered everyone who lived in a plantation home to
be a kind of “family”, with the aristocrat both as the literal father and as
a sort of abstracted patriarch with complete control over his domain.
7. Virginia governor William Berkeley probably would not be described by
moderns as ‘strong on education’. He said in a speech that “I thank God
there are no free schools nor printing [in Virginia], and I hope we shall
not have these for a hundred years, for learning has brought
disobedience, and heresy, and sects into the world, and printing has
divulged them, and libels against the best government. God keep us
from both!”
8. Virginian recreation mostly revolved around hunting and bloodsports.
Great lords hunted deer, lesser gentry hunted foxes, indentured servants
had a weird game in which they essentially draw-and-quartered geese,
young children “killed and tortured songbirds”, and “at the bottom of
this hierarchy of bloody games were male infants who prepared
themselves for the larger pleasures of maturity by torturing snakes,
maiming frogs, and pulling the wings off butterflies. Thus, every red-
blooded male in Virginia was permitted to slaughter some animal or
other, and the size of his victim was proportioned to his social rank.”
9. “In 1747, an Anglican minister named William Kay infuriated the great
planter Landon Carter by preaching a sermon against pride. The planter
took it personally and sent his [relations] and ordered them to nail up
the doors and windows of all the churches in which Kay preached.”
10.Our word “condescension” comes from a ritual attitude that leading
Virginians were supposed to display to their inferiors. Originally
 condescension was supposed to be a polite way of showing respect those
who were socially inferior to you; our modern use of the term probably
says a lot about what Virginians actually did with it.

In a lot of ways, Virginia was the opposite of Massachusetts. Their homicide

rate was sky-high, and people were actively encouraged to respond to slights
against their honor with duels (for the rich) and violence (for the poor). They
were obsessed with gambling, and “made bets not merely on horses, cards,
cockfights, and backgammon, but also on crops, prices, women, and the
weather”. Their cuisine focused on gigantic sumptuous feasts of animals killed
in horrible ways. There were no witchcraft trials, but there were people who
were fined for disrupting the peace by accusing their neighbors of witchcraft.
Their church sermons were twenty minutes long on the dot.

The Puritans naturally thought of the Virginians as completely lawless

reprobate sinners, but this is not entirely true. Virginian church sermons
might have been twenty minutes long, but Virginian ballroom dance lessons
could last nine hours. It wasn’t that the Virginians weren’t bound by codes,
just that those codes were social rather than moral.

And Virginian nobles weren’t just random jerks, they were carefully cultivated
jerks. Planters spared no expense to train their sons to be strong, forceful, and
not take nothin’ from nobody. They would encourage and reward children for
being loud and temperamental, on the grounds that this indicated a strong
personality and having a strong personality was fitting of a noble. When this
worked, it worked really well – witness natural leaders and self-driven
polymaths like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. More often it failed
catastrophically – the rate of sex predation and rape in Virginia was at least as
high as anywhere else in North America.

The Virginian Cavaliers had an obsession with liberty, but needless to say it
was not exactly a sort of liberty of which the ACLU would approve. I once
heard someone argue against libertarians like so: even if the government did
not infringe on liberties, we would still be unfree for other reasons. If we had
to work, we would be subject to the whim of bosses. If we were poor, we would
not be “free” to purchase most of the things we want. In any case, we are
“oppressed” by disease, famine, and many other things besides government
that prevent us from implementing our ideal existence.
The Virginians took this idea and ran with it – in the wrong direction. No, they
said, we wouldn’t be free if we had to work, therefore we insist upon not
working. No, we wouldn’t be free if we were limited by poverty, therefore we
insist upon being extremely rich. Needless to say, this conception of freedom
required first indentured servitude and later slavery to make it work, but the
Virginians never claimed that the servants or slaves were free. That wasn’t the
point. Freedom, like wealth, was properly distributed according to rank;
nobles had as much as they wanted, the middle-class enough to get by on, and
everyone else none at all. And a Virginian noble would have gone to his grave
insisting that a civilization without slavery could never have citizens who were
truly free.

C: The Quakers

Fischer warns against the temptation to think of the Quakers as normal

modern people, but he has to warn us precisely because it’s so tempting.
Where the Puritans seem like a dystopian caricature of virtue and the
Cavaliers like a dystopian caricature of vice, the Quakers just seem ordinary.
Yes, they’re kind of a religious cult, but they’re the kind of religious cult any of
us might found if we were thrown back to the seventeenth century.

Instead they were founded by a weaver’s son named George Fox. He believed
people were basically good and had an Inner Light that connected them
directly to God without a need for priesthood, ritual, Bible study, or self-
denial; mostly people just needed to listen to their consciences and be nice.
Since everyone was equal before God, there was no point in holding up
distinctions between lords and commoners: Quakers would just address
everybody as “Friend”. And since the Quakers were among the most
persecuted sects at the time, they developed an insistence on tolerance and
freedom of religion which (unlike the Puritans) they stuck to even when
shifting fortunes put them on top. They believed in pacificism, equality of the
sexes, racial harmony, and a bunch of other things which seem pretty hippy-
ish even today let alone in 1650.

England’s top Quaker in the late 1600s was William Penn. Penn is universally
known to Americans as “that guy Pennsylvania is named after” but actually
was a larger-than-life 17th century superman. Born to the nobility, Penn
distinguished himself early on as a military officer; he was known for beating
legendary duelists in single combat and then sparing their lives with sermons
about how murder was wrong. He gradually started having mystical visions,
quit the military, and converted to Quakerism. Like many Quakers he was
arrested for blasphemy; unlike many Quakers, they couldn’t make the
conviction stick; in his trial he “conducted his defense so brilliantly that the
jurors refused to convict him even when threatened with prison themselves,
[and] the case became a landmark in the history of trial by jury.” When the
state finally found a pretext on which to throw him in prison, he spent his
incarceration composing “one of the noblest defenses of religious liberty ever
written”, conducting a successful mail-based courtship with England’s most
eligible noblewoman, and somehow gaining the personal friendship and
admiration of King Charles II. Upon his release the King liked him so much
that he gave him a large chunk of the Eastern United States on a flimsy pretext
of repaying a family debt. Penn didn’t want to name his new territory
Pennsylvania – he recommended just “Sylvania” – but everybody else
overruled him and Pennyslvania it was. The grant wasn’t quite the same as the
modern state, but a chunk of land around the Delaware River Valley – what
today we would call eastern Pennsylvania, northern Delaware, southern New
Jersey, and bits of Maryland – centered on the obviously-named-by-Quakers
city of Philadelphia.

Penn decided his new territory would be a Quaker refuge – his exact wording
was “a colony of Heaven [for] the children of the Light”. He mandated
universal religious toleration, a total ban on military activity, and a
government based on checks and balances that would “leave myself and
successors no power of doing mischief, that the will of one man may not
hinder the good of a whole country”.

His recruits – about 20,000 people in total – were Quakers from the north of
England, many of them minor merchants and traders. They disproportionately
included the Britons of Norse descent common in that region, who formed a
separate stratum and had never really gotten along with the rest of the British
population. They were joined by several German sects close enough to
Quakers that they felt at home there; these became the ancestors of (among
other groups) the Pennsylvania Dutch, Amish, and Mennonites.

Interesting Quaker Facts:

1. In 1690 a gang of pirates stole a ship in Philadelphia and went up and
down the Delaware River stealing and plundering. The Quakers got in a
heated (but brotherly) debate about whether it was morally permissible
to use violence to stop them. When the government finally decided to
take action, contrarian minister George Keith dissented and caused a
major schism in the faith.
2. Fischer argues that the Quaker ban on military activity within their
territory would have doomed them in most other American regions, but
by extreme good luck the Indians in the Delaware Valley were almost as
peaceful as the Quakers. As usual, at least some credit goes to William
Penn, who taught himself Algonquin so he could negotiate with the
Indians in their own language.
3. The Quakers’ marriage customs combined a surprisingly modern ideas
of romance, with extreme bureaucracy. The wedding process itself had
sixteen stages, including “ask parents”, “ask community women”, “ask
community men”, “community women ask parents”, and “obtain a
certificate of cleanliness”. William Penn’s marriage apparently had
forty-six witnesses to testify to the good conduct and non-relatedness of
both parties.
4. Possibly related: 16% of Quaker women were unmarried by age 50,
compared to only about 2% of Puritans.
5. Quakers promoted gender equality, including the (at the time
scandalous) custom of allowing women to preach (condemned by the
Puritans as the crime of “she-preaching”).
6. But they were such prudes about sex that even the Puritans thought they
went too far. Pennsylvania doctors had problems treating Quakers
because they would “delicately describe everything from neck to waist as
their ‘stomachs’, and anything from waist to feet as their ‘ankles'”.
7. Quaker parents Richard and Abigail Lippincott named their eight
children, in order, “Remember”, “John”, “Restore”, “Freedom”,
“Increase”, “Jacob”, “Preserve”, and “Israel”, so that their names
combined formed a simple prayer.
8. Quakers had surprisingly modern ideas about parenting, basically
sheltering and spoiling their children at a time when everyone else was
trying whip the Devil out of them.
9. “A Quaker preacher, traveling in the more complaisant colony of
Maryland, came upon a party of young people who were dancing merrily
 together. He broke in upon them like an avenging angel, stopped the
dance, anddemanded to know if they considered Martin Luther to be a
good man. The astonished youngsters answered in the affirmative. The
Quaker evangelist then quoted Luther on the subject of dancing: ‘as
many paces as the man takes in his dance, so many steps he takes
toward Hell. This, the Quaker missionary gloated with a gleam of
sadistic satisfaction, ‘spoiled their sport’.”
10.William Penn wrote about thirty books defending liberty of conscience
throughout his life. The Quaker obsession with the individual conscience
as the work of God helped invent the modern idea of conscientious
objection.
11. Quakers were heavily (and uniquely for their period) opposed to animal
cruelty. When foreigners introduced bullbaiting into Philadelphia
during the 1700s, the mayor bought a ticket supposedly as a spectator.
When the event was about to begin, he leapt into the ring, personally set
the bull free, and threatened to arrest anybody who stopped him.
12.On the other hand, they were also opposed to other sports for what seem
like kind of random reasons. The town of Morley declared an anathema
against foot races, saying that they were “unfruitful works of darkness”.
13.The Pennsylvania Quakers became very prosperous merchants and
traders. They also had a policy of loaning money at low- or zero- interest
to other Quakers, which let them outcompete other, less religious
businesspeople.
14.They were among the first to replace the set of bows, grovels, nods,
meaningful looks, and other British customs of acknowledging rank
upon greeting with a single rank-neutral equivalent – the handshake.
15. Pennsylvania was one of the first polities in the western world to abolish
the death penalty.
16.The Quakers were lukewarm on education, believing that too much
schooling obscured the natural Inner Light. Fischer declares it “typical
of William Penn” that he wrote a book arguing against reading too
much.
17. The Quakers not only instituted religious freedom, but made laws
against mocking another person’s religion.
18.In the late 1600s as many as 70% of upper-class Quakers owned slaves,
but Pennsylvania essentially invented modern abolitionism. Although
their colonial masters in England forbade them from banning slavery
 outright, they applied immense social pressure and by the mid 1700s
less than 10% of the wealthy had African slaves. As soon as the
American Revolution started, forbidding slavery was one of independent
Pennsylvania’s first actions.

Pennsylvania was very successful for a while; it had some of the richest
farmland in the colonies, and the Quakers were exceptional merchants and
traders; so much so that they were forgiven their military non-intervention
during the Revolution because of their role keeping the American economy
afloat in the face of British sanctions.

But by 1750, the Quakers were kind of on their way out; by 1750, they were a
demographic minority in Pennsylvania, and by 1773 they were a minority in its
legislature as well. In 1750 Quakerism was the third-largest religion in the US;
by 1820 it was the ninth-largest, and by 1981 it was the sixty-sixth largest.
What happened? The Quakers basically tolerated themselves out of existence.
They were so welcoming to religious minorities and immigrants that all these
groups took up shop in Pennsylvania and ended its status as a uniquely
Quaker society. At the same time, the Quakers themselves became more
“fanatical” and many dropped out of politics believing it to be too worldly a
concern for them; this was obviously fatal to their political domination. The
most famous Pennsylvanian statesman of the Revolutionary era, Benjamin
Franklin, was not a Quaker at all but a first-generation immigrant from New
England. Finally, Quakerism was naturally extra-susceptible to that thing
where Christian denominations become indistinguishable from liberal
modernity and fade into the secular background.

But Fischer argues that Quakerism continued to shape Pennsylvania long after
it had stopped being officially in charge, in much the same way that
Englishmen themselves have contributed disproportionately to American
institutions even though they are now a numerical minority. The
Pennsylvanian leadership on abolitionism, penal reform, the death penalty,
and so on all happened after the colony was officially no longer Quaker-
dominated.

And it’s hard not to see Quaker influence on the ideas of the modern US –
which was after all founded in Philadelphia. In the middle of the Puritans
demanding strict obedience to their dystopian hive society and the Cavaliers
demanding everybody bow down to a transplanted nobility, the
Pennsylvanians – who became the thought leaders of the Mid-Atlantic region
including to a limited degree New York City – were pretty normal and had a
good opportunity to serve as power-brokers and middlemen between the
North and South. Although there are seeds of traditionally American ideas in
every region, the Quakers really stand out in terms of freedom of religion,
freedom of thought, checks and balances, and the idea of universal equality.

It occurs to me that William Penn might be literally the single most successful
person in history. He started out as a minor noble following a religious sect
that everybody despised and managed to export its principles to Pennsylvania
where they flourished and multiplied. Pennsylvania then managed to export
its principles to the United States, and the United States exported them to the
world. I’m not sure how much of the suspiciously Quaker character of modern
society is a direct result of William Penn, but he was in one heck of a right
place at one heck of a right time

D: The Borderers

The Borderers are usually called “the Scots-Irish”, but Fischer dislikes the
term because they are neither Scots (as we usually think of Scots) nor Irish (as
we usually think of Irish). Instead, they’re a bunch of people who lived on
(both sides of) the Scottish-English border in the late 1600s.

None of this makes sense without realizing that the Scottish-English border
was terrible. Every couple of years the King of England would invade Scotland
or vice versa; “from the year 1040 to 1745, every English monarch but three
suffered a Scottish invasion, or became an invader in his turn”. These
“invasions” generally involved burning down all the border towns and killing a
bunch of people there. Eventually the two sides started getting pissed with
each other and would also torture-murder all of the enemy’s citizens they
could get their hands on, ie any who were close enough to the border to reach
before the enemy could send in their armies. As if this weren’t bad enough,
outlaws quickly learned they could plunder one side of the border, then escape
to the other before anyone brought them to justice, so the whole area basically
became one giant cesspool of robbery and murder.
In response to these pressures, the border people militarized and stayed feudal
long past the point where the rest of the island had started modernizing. Life
consisted of farming the lands of whichever brutal warlord had the top hand
today, followed by being called to fight for him on short notice, followed by a
grisly death. The border people dealt with it as best they could, and developed
a culture marked by extreme levels of clannishness, xenophobia, drunkenness,
stubbornness, and violence.

By the end of the 1600s, the Scottish and English royal bloodlines had
intermingled and the two countries were drifting closer and closer to Union.
The English kings finally got some breathing room and noticed – holy frick,
everything about the border is terrible. They decided to make the region
economically productive, which meant “squeeze every cent out of the poor
Borderers, in the hopes of either getting lots of money from them or else
forcing them to go elsewhere and become somebody else’s problem”.
Sometimes absentee landlords would just evict everyone who lived in an entire
region, en masse, replacing them with people they expected to be easier to
control.

Many of the Borderers fled to Ulster in Ireland, which England was working
on colonizing as a Protestant bulwark against the Irish Catholics, and where
the Crown welcomed violent warlike people as a useful addition to their Irish-
Catholic-fighting project. But Ulster had some of the same problems as the
Border, and also the Ulsterites started worrying that the Borderer cure was
worse than the Irish Catholic disease. So the Borderers started getting kicked
out of Ulster too, one thing led to another, and eventually 250,000 of these
people ended up in America.

250,000 people is a lot of Borderers. By contrast, the great Puritan emigration

wave was only 20,000 or so people; even the mighty colony of Virginia only
had about 50,000 original settlers. So these people showed up on the door of
the American colonies, and the American colonies collectively took one look at
them and said “nope”.

Except, of course, the Quakers. The Quakers talked among themselves and
decided that these people were also Children Of God, and so they should
demonstrate Brotherly Love by taking them in. They tried that for a couple of
years, and then they questioned their life choices and also said “nope”, and
they told the Borderers that Philadelphia and the Delaware Valley were
actually kind of full right now but there was lots of unoccupied land in
Western Pennsylvania, and the Appalachian Mountains were very pretty at
this time of year, so why didn’t they head out that way as fast as it was
physically possible to go?

At the time, the Appalachians were kind of the booby prize of American
colonization: hard to farm, hard to travel through, and exposed to hostile
Indians. The Borderers fell in love with them. They came from a pretty
marginal and unproductive territory themselves, and the Appalachians were
far away from everybody and full of fun Indians to fight. Soon the Appalachian
strategy became the accepted response to Borderer immigration and was
taken up from Pennsylvania in the north to the Carolinas in the South (a few
New Englanders hit on a similar idea and sent their own Borderers to colonize
the mountains of New Hampshire).

So the Borderers all went to Appalachia and established their own little rural
clans there and nothing at all went wrong except for the entire rest of
American history.

Interesting Borderer Facts:

1. Colonial opinion on the Borderers differed within a very narrow range:

one Pennsylvanian writer called them “the scum of two nations”,
another Anglican clergyman called them “the scum of the universe”.
2. Some Borderers tried to come to America as indentured servants, but
after Virginian planters got some experience with Borderers they
refused to accept any more.
3. The Borderers were mostly Presbyterians, and their arrival en masse
started a race among the established American denominations to
convert them. This was mostly unsuccessful; Anglican preacher Charles
Woodmason, an important source for information about the early
Borderers, said that during his missionary activity the Borderers
“disrupted his service, rioted while he preached, started a pack of dogs
fighting outside the church, loosed his horse, stole his church key,
refused him food and shelter, and gave two barrels of whiskey to his
congregation before a service of communion”.
4. Borderer town-naming policy was very different from the Biblical names
of the Puritans or the Ye Olde English names of the Virginians. Early
Borderer settlements include – just to stick to the creek-related ones –
Lousy Creek, Naked Creek, Shitbritches Creek, Cuckold’s Creek,
Bloodrun Creek, Pinchgut Creek, Whipping Creek, and Hangover Creek.
There were also Whiskey Springs, Hell’s Half Acre, Scream Ridge,
Scuffletown, and Grabtown. The overall aesthetic honestly sounds a bit
Orcish.
5. One of the first Borderer leaders was John Houston. On the ship over to
America, the crew tried to steal some of his possessions; Houston
retaliated by leading a mutiny of the passengers, stealing the ship, and
sailing it to America himself. He settled in West Virginia; one of his
descendants was famous Texan Sam Houston.
6. Traditional Borderer prayer: “Lord, grant that I may always be right, for
thou knowest I am hard to turn.”
7. “The backcountry folk bragged that one interior county of North
Carolina had so little ‘larnin’ that the only literate inhabitant was elected
‘county reader'”
8. The Borderer accent contained English, Scottish, and Irish elements,
and is (uncoincidentally) very similar to the typical “country western
singer” accent of today.
9. The Borderers were famous for family feuds in England, including the
Johnson clan’s habit of “adorning their houses with the flayed skins of
their enemies the Maxwells in a blood feud that continued for many
generations”. The great family feuds of the United States, like the
Hatfield-McCoy feud, are a direct descendent of this tradition.
10.Within-clan marriage was a popular Borderer tradition both in England
and Appalachia; “in the Cumbrian parish of Hawkshead, for example,
both the bride and the groom bore the same last names in 25 percent of
all marriages from 1568 to 1704”. This led to the modern stereotype of
Appalachians as inbred and incestuous.
11. The Borderers were extremely patriarchal and anti-women’s-rights to a
degree that appalled even the people of the 1700s.
12.“In the year 1767, [Anglican priest] Charles Woodmason calculated that
94 percent of backcountry brides whom he had married in the past year
were pregnant on their wedding day”
13.Although the Borderers started off Presbyterian, they were in constant
religious churn and their territories were full of revivals, camp meetings,
born-again evangelicalism, and itinerant preachers. Eventually most of
them ended up as what we now call Southern Baptist.
14.Borderer folk beliefs: “If an old woman has only one tooth, she is a
witch”, “If you are awake at eleven, you will see witches”, “The howling
of dogs shows the presence of witches”, “If your shoestring comes
untied, witches are after you”, “If a warm current of air is felt, witches
are passing”. Also, “wet a rag in your enemy’s blood, put it behind a rock
in the chimney, and when it rots your enemy will die”; apparently it was
not a coincidence they were thinking about witches so much.
15. Borderer medical beliefs: “A cure for homesickness is to sew a good
charge of gunpowder on the inside of ths shirt near the neck”. That’ll
cure homesickness, all right.
16.More Borderer medical beliefs: “For fever, cut a black chicken open
while alive and bind it to the bottom of your foot”, “Eating the brain of a
screech owl is the only dependable remedy for headache”, “For
rheumatism, apply split frogs to the feet”, “To reduce a swollen leg, split
a live cat and apply while still warm”, “Bite the head off the first
butterfly you see and you will get a new dress”, “Open the cow’s mouth
and throw a live toad-frog down her throat. This will cure her of hollow-
horn”. Also, blacksmiths protected themselves from witches by
occasionally throwing live puppies into their furnaces.
17. Rates of public schooling in the backcountry settled by the Borderers
were “the lowest in British North America” and sometimes involved
rituals like “barring out”, where the children would physically keep the
teacher out of the school until he gave in and granted the students the
day off.
18.“Appalachia’s idea of a moderate drinker was the mountain man who
limited himself to a single quart [of whiskey] at a sitting, explaining that
more ‘might fly to my head’. Other beverages were regarded with
contempt.”
19.A traditional backcountry sport was “rough and tumble”, a no-holds-
barred form of wrestling where gouging out your opponent’s eyes was
considered perfectly acceptable and in fact sound strategy. In 1772
Virginia had to pass a law against “gouging, plucking, or putting out an
eye”, but this was the Cavalier-dominated legislature all the way on the
 east coast and nobody in the backcountry paid them any attention.
Other traditional backcountry sports were sharpshooting and hunting.
20.The American custom of shooting guns into the air to celebrate holidays
is 100% Borderer in origin.
21.The justice system of the backcountry was heavy on lynching, originally
a race-neutral practice and named after western Virginian settler
William Lynch.
22.Scottish Presbyterians used to wear red cloth around their neck to
symbolize their religion; other Englishmen nicknamed them “rednecks”.
This may be the origin of the popular slur against Americans of
Borderer descent, although many other etiologies have been proposed.
“Cracker” as a slur is attested as early as 1766 by a colonist who says the
term describes backcountry men who are great boasters; other proposed
etymologies like slaves talking about “whip-crackers” seem to be
spurious.

This is not to paint the Borderers as universally poor and dumb – like every
group, they had an elite, and some of their elite went on to become some of
America’s most important historical figures. Andrew Jackson became the first
Borderer president, behaving exactlyas you would expect the first Borderer
president to behave, and he was followed by almost a dozen others. Borderers
have also been overrepresented in America’s great military leaders, from
Ulysses Grant through Teddy Roosevelt (3/4 Borderer despite his Dutch
surname) to George Patton to John McCain.

The Borderers really liked America – unsurprising given where they came
from – and started identifying as American earlier and more fiercely than any
of the other settlers who had come before. Unsurprisingly, they strongly
supported the Revolution – Patrick Henry (“Give me liberty or give me
death!”) was a Borderer. They also also played a disproportionate role in
westward expansion. After the Revolution, America made an almost literal 180
degree turn and the “backcountry” became the “frontier”. It was the Borderers
who were happiest going off into the wilderness and fighting Indians, and
most of the famous frontiersmen like Davy Crockett were of their number.
This was a big part of the reason the Wild West was so wild compared to, say,
Minnesota (also a frontier inhabited by lots of Indians, but settled by
Northerners and Germans) and why it inherited seemingly Gaelic traditions
like cattle rustling.
Their conception of liberty has also survived and shaped modern American
politics: it seems essentially to be the modern libertarian/Republican version
of freedom from government interference, especially if phrased as “get the hell
off my land”, and especially especially if phrased that way through clenched
teeth while pointing a shotgun at the offending party.

III.

This is all interesting as history and doubly interesting as anthropology, but

what relevance does it have for later American history and the present day?

One of my reasons reading this book was to see whether the link between
Americans’ political opinions and a bunch of their other cultural/religious/
social traits (a “Blue Tribe” and “Red Tribe”) was related to the immigration
patterns it describes. I’m leaning towards “probably”, but there’s a lot of work
to be done in explaining how the split among these four cultures led to a split
among two cultures in the modern day, and with little help from the book
itself I am going to have to resort to total unfounded speculation. But the
simplest explanation – that the Puritans and Quakers merged into one group
(“progressives”, “Blue Tribe”, “educated coastal elites”) and the Virginians and
Borderers into another (“conservatives”, “Red Tribe”, “rednecks”) – has a lot
going for it.

Many conservatives I read like to push the theory that modern progressivism
is descended from the utopian Protestant experiments of early America –
Puritanism and Quakerism – and that the civil war represents “Massachusetts’
conquest of America”. I always found this lacking in rigor: Puritanism and
Quakerism are sufficiently different that positing a combination of them
probably needs more intellectual work than just gesturing at “you know, that
Puritan/Quaker thing”. But the idea of a Puritan New England and a Quaker-
(ish) Pennsylvania gradually blending together into a generic “North” seems
plausible, especially given the high levels of interbreeding between the two
(some of our more progressive Presidents, including Abraham Lincoln, were
literally half-Puritan and half-Quaker). Such a merge would combine the
Puritan emphasis on moral reform, education, and a well-ordered society with
the Quaker doctrine of niceness, tolerance, religious pluralism, individual
conscience, and the Inner Light. It seems kind of unfair to just mix-and-match
the most modern elements of each and declare that this proves they caused
modernity, but there’s no reason that couldn’t have happened.

The idea of Cavaliers and Borderers combining to form modern

conservativism is buoyed by modern conservativism’s obvious Border
influences, but complicated by its lack of much that is recognizably Cavalier –
the Republican Party is hardly marked by its support for a hereditary
aristocracy of gentlemen. Here I have to admit that I don’t know as much
about Southern history as I’d like. In particular, how were places like
Alabama, Mississippi, et cetera settled? Most sources I can find suggest they
were set up along the Virginia model of plantation-owning aristocrats, but if
that’s true how did the modern populations come to so embody Fischer’s
description of Borderers? In particular, why are they so Southern Baptist and
not very Anglican? And what happened to all of those indentured servants the
Cavaliers brought over after slavery put them out of business? What happened
to that whole culture after the Civil War destroyed the plantation system? My
guess is going to be that the indentured servants and the Borderer population
mixed pretty thoroughly, and that this stratum was hanging around providing
a majority of the white bodies in the South while the plantation owners were
hogging the limelight – but I just don’t know.

A quick argument that I’m not totally making all of this up:
This is a map of voting patterns by county in the 2012 Presidential election.
The blue areas in the South carefully track the so-called “black belt” of
majority African-American areas. The ones in the Midwest are mostly big
cities. Aside from those, the only people who vote Democrat are New England
(very solidly!) and the Delaware Valley region of Pennsylvania. In fact, you can
easily see the distinction between the Delaware Valley settled by Quakers in
the east, and the backcountry area settled by Borderers in the west. Even the
book’s footnote about how a few Borderers settled in the mountains of New
Hampshire is associated with a few spots of red in the mountains of New
Hampshire ruining an otherwise near-perfect Democratic sweep of the north.

One anomaly in this story is a kind of linear distribution of blue across

southern Michigan, too big to be explained solely by the blacks of Detroit. But
a quick look at Wikipedia’s History of Michigan finds:
 In the 1820s and 1830s migrants from New England began moving to
what is now Michigan in large numbers (though there was a trickle of
New England settlers who arrived before this date). These were
“Yankee” settlers, that is to say they were descended from the English
Puritans who settled New England during the colonial era….Due to the
prevalence of New Englanders and New England transplants from
upstate New York, Michigan was very culturally contiguous with early
New England culture for much of its early history…The amount with
which the New England Yankee population predominated made
Michigan unique among frontier states in the antebellum period. Due to
this heritage Michigan was on the forefront of the antislavery crusade
and reforms during the 1840s and 1850s.

Although I can’t find proof of this specifically, I know that Michigan was
settled from the south up, and I suspect that these New England settlers
concentrated in the southern regions and that the north was settled by a more
diverse group of whites who lacked the New England connection.

Here’s something else cool. We can’t track Borderers directly because there’s
no “Borderer” or “Scots-Irish” option on the US census. But Albion’s Seed
points out that the Borderers were uniquely likely to identify as just
“American” and deliberately forgot their past ancestry as fast as they could.
Meanwhile, when the census asks an ethnicity question about where your
ancestors came from, every year some people will stubbornly ignore the point
of the question and put down “America” (no, this does not track the
distribution of Native American population). Here’s a map of so-called
“unhyphenated Americans”, taken from this site:
We see a strong focus on the Appalachian Mountains, especially West Virginia,
Tennessee, and Kentucky, bleeding into the rest of the South. Aside from west
Pennsylvania, this is very close to where we would expect to find the
Borderers. Could these be the same groups?

Meanwhile, here is a map of where Obama underperformed the usual

Democratic vote worst in 2008:
These maps are small and lossy, and surely unhyphenatedness is not an exact
proxy for Border ancestry – but they are nevertheless intriguing. You may also
be interested in the Washington Post’s correlation between distribution of
unhyphenated Americans and Trump voters, or the Atlantic’s article on
Trump and Borderers.

If I’m going to map these cultural affiliations to ancestry, do I have to walk

back on my previous theory that they are related to class? Maybe I should. But
I also think we can posit complicated interactions between these ideas.
Consider for example the interaction between race and class; a black person
with a white-sounding name, who speaks with a white-sounding accent, and
who adopts white culture (eg listens to classical music, wears business suits) is
far more likely to seem upper-class than a black person with a black-sounding
name, a black accent, and black cultural preferences; a white person who
seems black in some way (listens to hip-hop, wears baggy clothes) is more
likely to seem lower-class. This doesn’t mean race and class are exactly the
same thing, but it does mean that some races get stereotyped as upper-class
and others as lower-class, and that people’s racial identifiers may change
based on where they are in the class structure.

I think something similar is probably going on with these forms of ancestry.

The education system is probably dominated by descendents of New
Englanders and Pennsylvanians; they had an opportunity to influence the
culture of academia and the educated classes more generally, they took it, and
now anybody of any background who makes it into that world is going to be
socialized according to their rules. Likewise, people in poorer and more rural
environments will be surrounded by people of Borderer ancestry and
acculturated by Borderer cultural products and end up a little more like that
group. As a result, ethnic markers have turned into and merged with class
markers in complicated ways.

Indeed, some kind of acculturation process has to have been going on, since
most of the people in these areas today are not the descendents of the original
settlers. But such a process seems very likely. Just to take an example, most of
the Jews I know (including my own family) came into the country via New
York, live somewhere on the coast, and have very Blue Tribe values. But
Southern Jews believed in the Confederacy as strongly as any Virginian – see
for example Judah Benjamin. And Barry Goldwater, a half-Jew raised in
Arizona, invented the modern version of conservativism that seems closest to
some Borderer beliefs.

All of this is very speculative, with some obvious flaws. What do we make of
other countries like Britain or Germany with superficially similar splits but
very different histories? Why should Puritans lose their religion and sexual
prudery, but keep their interest in moralistic reform? There are whole heaps of
questions like these. But look. Before I had any idea about any of this, I wrote
that American society seems divided into two strata, one of which is marked
by emphasis on education, interest in moral reforms, racial tolerance, low
teenage pregnancy, academic/financial jobs, and Democratic party affiliation,
and furthermore that this group was centered in the North. Meanwhile, now I
learn that the North was settled by two groups that when combined have
emphasis on education, interest in moral reforms, racial tolerance, low
teenage pregnancy, an academic and mercantile history, and were the
heartland of the historical Whigs and Republicans who preceded the modern
Democratic Party.

And I wrote about another stratum centered in the South marked by poor
education, gun culture, culture of violence, xenophobia, high teenage
pregnancy, militarism, patriotism, country western music, and support for the
Republican Party. And now I learn that the South was settled by a group noted
even in the 1700s for its poor education, gun culture, culture of violence,
xenophobia, high premarital pregnancy, militarism, patriotism, accent exactly
like the modern country western accent, and support for the Democratic-
Republicans who preceded the modern Republican Party.

If this is true, I think it paints a very pessimistic world-view. The “iceberg

model” of culture argues that apart from the surface cultural features we all
recognize like language, clothing, and food, there are deeper levels of culture
that determine the features and institutions of a people: whether they are
progressive or traditional, peaceful or warlike, mercantile or self-contained.
We grudgingly acknowledge these features when we admit that maybe making
the Middle East exactly like America in every way is more of a long-term
project than something that will happen as soon as we kick out the latest
dictator and get treated as liberators. Part of us may still want to believe that
pure reason is the universal solvent, that those Afghans will come around once
they realize that being a secular liberal democracy is obviously great. But we
keep having deep culture shoved in our face again and again, and we don’t
know how to get rid of it. This has led to reasonable speculation that some
aspects of it might even be genetic – something which would explain a lot,
though not its ability to acculturate recent arrivals.

This is a hard pill to swallow even when we’re talking about Afghanistan. But it
becomes doubly unpleasant when we think about it in the sense of our
neighbors and fellow citizens in a modern democracy. What, after all, is the
point? A democracy made up of 49% extremely liberal Americans and 51%
fundamentalist Taliban Afghans would be something very different from the
democratic ideal; even if occasionally a super-charismatic American candidate
could win over enough marginal Afghans to take power, there’s none of the
give-and-take, none of the competition within the marketplace of ideas, that
makes democracy so attractive. Just two groups competing to dominate one
another, with the fact that the competition is peaceful being at best a
consolation prize.

If America is best explained as a Puritan-Quaker culture locked in a death-

match with a Cavalier-Borderer culture, with all of the appeals to freedom and
equality and order and justice being just so many epiphenomena – well, I’m
not sure what to do with that information. Push it under the rug? Say “Well,
my culture is better, so I intend to do as good a job dominating yours as
possible?” Agree that We Are Very Different Yet In The End All The Same And
So Must Seek Common Ground? Start researching genetic engineering?
Maybe secede? I’m not a Trump fan much more than I’m an Osama bin Laden
fan; if somehow Osama ended up being elected President, should I start
thinking “Maybe that time we made a country that was 49% people like me
and 51% members of the Taliban – maybe that was a bad idea“.

I don’t know. But I highly recommend Albion’s Seed as an entertaining and

enlightening work of historical scholarship which will be absolutely delightful
if you don’t fret too much over all of the existential questions it raises.

Albion’s Seed, Genotyped

Last year I reviewed Albion’s Seed, historian David Fischer’s work on the four
great English migrations to America (and JayMan continues the story in his
series on American Nations). These early migrations help explain modern
regional patterns like why Massachusetts is so liberal or why Appalachia
seems so backwards. As always, there’s the lingering question of how much of
these patterns are cultural versus genetic versus gene-cultural interaction.

Now Han et al take this field high-tech with the publication of Clustering Of
770,000 Genomes Reveals Post-Colonial Population Structure Of North
America (h/t gwern, werttrew)

The team looked at 770,000 genomes analyzed by the AncestryDNA company

and used a technique called identity-by-descent to find recent common
ancestors. Then they used some other techniques to divide them into natural
clusters. This is what they got:

This is the European-settler-focused map – there’s another one focusing on

immigrant groups lower down here

This is kind of beautiful. While not exactly matching Albion’s Seed, it at least
clearly shows its New Englander and Pennsylvania Quaker migrations (more
realistically the Germans who came along with the Quakers), with less distinct
signals for Borderers and Virginians. It shows how they spread directly west
from their place of origin in almost exactly the way American Nations
predicted. It even confirms my own conjecture that the belt of Democrat
voters along southern Michigan corresponds to an area of New Englander
settlement there (see part III here, or search “linear distribution of blue”). And
it confirms Razib Khan’s observation that the Mormons are just displaced New
Englanders and that their various unusual demographic features make sense
in that context.

My biggest confusion is in the Southern/Appalachian region. I think Fischer

would have predicted two distinct strains: a Tidewater/Virginian population
along the coasts, and a Borderer/Appalachian population centered in West
Virginia and Kentucky. Instead there are three populations, all of which start
along the Atlantic Coast and continue inland in about the same way. Assuming
red/”Appalachian” is the Borderers, I don’t know if Fischer has a good
explanation for the purple/”upland south” vs. gold/”lower south” distinction.
Nor I do understand why, if one of those two represent the Tidewater
Virginians, they don’t seem to be in the Tidewater Virginia region (which here
is inhabited mostly by Borderers). Maybe this has something to do with the
Civil War, or with the growth of the DC suburbs?

(And I guess we still haven’t ruled out the maximally boring explanation that
interbreeding is entirely geographic and north-south is a bigger distinction
than east-west so we’re just seeing the country divided into five equal-sized
latitudinal bands.)

Not exactly a confusion, but more a disappointment: this map doesn’t provide
the confirmation I’d hoped for that Californians, Seattleites, and other “Left
Coasters” are displaced New Englanders – which would complete the circle of
“Liberal Democrats = Puritan/Quaker population subgroup”. It’s also
disappointing how little data they have for the Mountain West in general; I
don’t know if that’s because there weren’t enough people there to show up, or
because they’re a mix of every genetic lineage and don’t fit into any of the
clusters nicely.

Still, I find this a really elegant example of hard science confirming historical
speculation. Thanks to everyone who brought it to my attention.
Society Is Fixed, Biology Is Mutable
Today during an otherwise terrible lecture on ADHD I realized something
important we get sort of backwards.

There’s this stereotype that the Left believes that human characteristics are
socially determined, and therefore mutable. And social problems are easy to
fix, through things like education and social services and public awareness
campaigns and “calling people out”, and so we have a responsibility to fix
them, thus radically improving society and making life better for everyone.

But the Right (by now I guess the far right) believes human characteristics are
biologically determined, and biology is fixed. Therefore we shouldn’t bother
trying to improve things, and any attempt is just utopianism or
“immanentizing the eschaton” or a shady justification for tyranny and
busybodyness.

And I think I reject this whole premise.

See, my terrible lecture on ADHD suggested several reasons for the increasing
prevalence of the disease. Of these I remember two: the spiritual desert of
modern adolescence, and insufficient iron in the diet. And I remember
thinking “Man, I hope it’s the iron one, because that seems a lot easier to fix.”

Society is really hard to change. We figured drug use was “just” a social
problem, and it’s obvious how to solve social problems, so we gave kids nice
little lessons in school about how you should Just Say No. There were
advertisements in sports and video games about how Winners Don’t Do
Drugs. And just in case that didn’t work, the cherry on the social engineering
sundae was putting all the drug users in jail, where they would have a lot of
time to think about what they’d done and be so moved by the prospect of
further punishment that they would come clean.

And that is why, even to this day, nobody uses drugs.

On the other hand, biology is gratifyingly easy to change. Sometimes it’s just
giving people more iron supplements. But the best example is lead. Banning
lead was probably kind of controversial at the time, but in the end some
refineries probably had to change their refining process and some gas stations
had to put up “UNLEADED” signs and then we were done. And crime dropped
like fifty percent in a couple of decades – including many forms of drug abuse.

Saying “Tendency toward drug abuse is primarily determined by fixed brain

structure” sounds callous, like you’re abandoning drug abusers to die. But
maybe it means you can fight the problem head-on instead of forcing kids to
attend more and more useless classes where cartoon animals sing about how
happy they are not using cocaine.

What about obesity? We put a lot of social effort into fighting obesity: labeling
foods, banning soda machines from school, banning large sodas from New
York, programs in schools to promote healthy eating, doctors chewing people
out when they gain weight, the profusion of gyms and Weight Watchers
programs, and let’s not forget a level of stigma against obese people so strong
that I am constantly having to deal with their weight-related suicide attempts.
As a result, everyone…keeps gaining weight at exactly the same rate they have
been for the past couple decades. Wouldn’t it be nice if increasing obesity was
driven at least in part by changes in the intestinal microbiota that we could
reverse through careful antibiotic use? Or by trans-fats?

What about poor school performance? From the social angle, we try No Child
Left Behind, Common Core Curriculum, stronger teachers’ unions, weaker
teachers’ unions, more pay for teachers, less pay for teachers, more prayer in
school, banning prayer in school, condemning racism, condemning racism
even more, et cetera. But the poorest fifth or so of kids show spectacular
cognitive gains from multivitamin supplementation, and doctors continue to
tell everyone schools should start later so children can get enough sleep and
continue to be totally ignored despite strong evidence in favor.

Even the most politically radioactive biological explanation – genetics –

doesn’t seem that scary to me. The more things turn out to be genetic, the
more I support universal funding for implantable contraception that allow
people to choose when they do or don’t want children – thus breaking the
cycle where people too impulsive or confused to use contraception have more
children and increase frequency of those undesirable genes. I think I’d have a
heck of a lot easier a time changing gene frequency in the population than you
would changing people’s locus of control or self-efficacy or whatever, even if I
wasn’t allowed to do anything immoral (except by very silly religious
standards of “immoral”).

I’m not saying that all problems are purely biological and none are social. But
I do worry there’s a consensus that biological things are unfixable but social
things are easy – or that social solutions are morally unambiguous but
biological solutions necessarily monstrous – and so for any given biological/
social breakdown of a problem, we figure we might as well put all our
resources into attacking the more tractable social side and dismiss the
biological side. I think there’s a sense in which that’s backwards, and in which
it’s possible to marry scientific rigor with human compassion for the evils of
the world.

A Philosopher Walks Into A Coffee Shop

I have been really enjoying literarystarbucks.tumblr.com, which publishes
complicated jokes about what famous authors and fictional characters order
at Starbucks. I like it so much I wish I knew more great literature, so I could
get more of the jokes.

Since the creators seem to be restricting themselves to the literary world, I

hope they won’t mind if I fail to resist the temptation to steal their technique
for my own field of interest. Disclaimer: two of these are widely-known
philosophy jokes and not original to me.

***

Parmenides goes up to the counter. “Same as always?” asks the barista.

Parmenides nods.

***

Pythagoras goes up to the counter and orders a caffe Americano. “Mmmmm,”

he says, tasting it. “How do you guys make such good coffee?” “It’s made from
the freshest beans,” the barista answers. Pythagoras screams and runs out of
the store.

***
Thales goes up to the counter, says he’s trying to break his caffeine habit, and
orders a decaf. The barista hands it to him. He takes a sip and spits it out.
“Yuck!” he says. “What is this, water?”

***

Gottfried Leibniz goes up to the counter and orders a muffin. The barista says
he’s lucky since there is only one muffin left. Isaac Newton shoves his way up
to the counter, saying Leibniz cut in line and he was first. Leibniz insists that
he was first. The two of them come to blows.

***

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel goes up to the counter and gives a

tremendously long custom order in German, specifying exactly how much of
each sort of syrup he wants, various espresso shots, cream in exactly the right
pattern, and a bunch of toppings, all added in a specific order at a specific
temperature. The barista can’t follow him, so just gives up and hands him a
small plain coffee. He walks away. The people behind him in line are very
impressed with his apparent expertise, and they all order the same thing Hegel
got. The barista gives each of them a small plain coffee, and they all remark on
how delicious it tastes and what a remarkable coffee connoisseur that Hegel is.
“The Hegel” becomes a new Starbucks special and is wildly popular for the
next seventy years.

***

Socrates goes up to the counter. “What would you like?” asks the barista.
“What would you recommend?” asks Socrates. “I would go with the pumpkin
spice latte,” says the barista. “Why?” asks Socrates. “It’s seasonal,” she
answers. “But why exactly is a seasonal drink better than a non-seasonal
drink?” “Well,” said the barista, “I guess it helps to connect you to the rhythm
of the changing seasons.” “But do you do other things to connect yourself to
that rhythm?” asked Socrates. “Like wear seasonal clothing? Or read seasonal
books? If not, how come it’s only drinks that are seasonal?” “I’m not sure,”
says the barista. “Think about it,” says Socrates, and leaves without getting
anything.

***
Rene Descartes goes up to the counter. “I’ll have a scone,” he says. “Would you
like juice with that?” asks the barista. “I think not,” says Descartes, and he
ceases to exist.

***

Jean-Paul Sartre goes up to the counter. “What do you want?” asks the barista.
Sartre thinks for a long while. “What do? I want?” he asks, and wanders off
with a dazed look on his face.

***

William of Occam goes up to the counter. He orders a coffee.

***

Adam Smith goes up to the counter. “I’ll have a muffin,” he says. “Sorry,” says
the barista, “but those two are fighting over the last muffin.” She points to
Leibniz and Newton, who are still beating each other up. “I’ll pay $2 more
than the sticker price, and you can keep the extra,” says Smith. The barista
hands him the muffin.

***

John Buridan goes up to the counter and stares at the menu indecisively.

***

Ludwig Wittgenstein goes up to the counter. “I’ll have a small toffee mocha,”
he says. “We don’t have small,” says the barista. “Then what sizes do you
have?” “Just tall, grande, and venti.” “Then doesn’t that make ‘tall’ a ‘small’?”
“We call it tall,” says the barista. Wittgenstein pounds his fist on the counter.
“Tall has no meaning separate from the way it is used! You are just playing
meaningless language games!” He storms out in a huff.

***
St. Anselm goes up to the counter and considers the greatest coffee of which it
is possible to conceive. Since existence is more perfect than nonexistence, the
coffee must exist. He brings it back to his table and drinks it.

***

Ayn Rand goes up to the counter. “What do you want?” asks the barista.
“Exactly the relevant question. As a rational human being, it is my desires that
are paramount. Since as a reasoning animal I have the power to choose, and
since I am not bound by any demand to subordinate my desires to that of an
outside party who wishes to use force or guilt to make me sacrifice my values
to their values or to the values of some purely hypothetical collective, it is what
I want that is imperative in this transaction. However, since I am dealing with
you, and you are also a rational human being, under capitalism we have an
opportunity to mutually satisfy our values in a way that leaves both of us
richer and more fully human. You participate in the project of affirming my
values by providing me with the coffee I want, and by paying you I am not only
incentivizing you for the transaction, but giving you a chance to excel as a
human being in the field of producing coffee. You do not produce the coffee
because I am demanding it, or because I will use force against you if you do
not, but because it most thoroughly represents your own values, particularly
the value of creation. You would not make this coffee for me if it did not serve
you in some way, and therefore by satisfying my desires you also reaffirm
yourself. Insofar as you make inferior coffee, I will reject it and you will go
bankrupt, but insofar as your coffee is truly excellent, a reflection of the
excellence in your own soul and your achievement as a rationalist being, it will
attract more people to your store, you will gain wealth, and you will be able to
use that wealth further in pursuit of excellence as you, rather than some
bureaucracy or collective, understand it. That is what it truly means to be a
superior human.” “Okay, but what do you want?” asks the barista. “Really I
just wanted to give that speech,” Rand says, and leaves.

***

Voltaire goes up to the counter and orders an espresso. He takes it and goes to
his seat. The barista politely reminds him he has not yet paid. Voltaire stays
seated, saying “I believe in freedom of espresso.”
***

Thomas Malthus goes up to the counter and orders a muffin. The barista tells
him somebody just took the last one. Malthus grumbles that the Starbucks is
getting too crowded and there’s never enough food for everybody.

***

Immanuel Kant goes up to the counter at exactly 8:14 AM. The barista has just
finished making his iced cinnamon dolce latte, and hands it to him. He sips it
for eight minutes and thirty seconds, then walks out the door.

***

Bertrand Russell goes up to the counter and orders the Hegel. He takes one
sip, then exclaims “This just tastes like plain coffee! Why is everyone making
such a big deal over it?”

***

Pierre Proudhon goes up to the counter and orders a Tazo Green Tea with
toffee nut syrup, two espresso shots, and pumpkin spice mixed in. The barista
warns him that this will taste terrible. “Pfah!” scoffs Proudhon. “Proper tea is
theft!”

***

Sigmund Freud goes up to the counter. “I’ll have ass sex, presto,” he says.
“What?!” asks the barista. “I said I’ll have iced espresso.” “Oh,” said the
barista. “For a moment I misheard you.” “Yeah,” Freud tells her. “I fucked my
mother. People say that.” “WHAT?!” asks the barista. “I said, all of the time
other people say that.”

***

Jeremy Bentham goes up to the counter, holding a $50 bill. “What’s the
cheapest drink you have?” he asks. “That would be our decaf roast, for only
$1.99,” says the barista. “Good,” says Bentham and hands her the $50. “I’ll
buy those for the next twenty-five people who show up.”
***

Patricia Churchland walks up to the counter and orders a latte. She sits down
at a table and sips it. “Are you enjoying your beverage?” the barista asks. “No,”
says Churchland.

***

Friedrich Nietzsche goes up to the counter. “I’ll have a scone,” he says. “Would
you like juice with that?” asks the barista. “No, I hate juice,” says Nietzsche.
The barista misinterprets him as saying “I hate Jews”, so she kills all the Jews
in Europe.

The Witching Hour

On an ordinary evening, Tal Aivon was lively and pleasant. The collection of
longhouses and yurts within its tall brick walls shone bright with kerosene –
not just torches, real kerosene – and its communal meeting area was noisy
with conversation and song. The children would be playing their games, and
on the eves of holy days the Lorekeepers would chant their stories of the Lost
World, accompanied by lyres and the town’s one decaying gyitar.

Tonight, though, a pall lay on Tal Aivon. The six gates of its tall brick walls
were barred and shut, and foreboding warriors dressed in odd combinations of
Kevlar and steel armor stood just within them, brandishing their swords.
Families locked themselves in their yurts and longhouses, huddled around
little kerosene lanterns. In the temple, the priests knelt before the stone idols
of St. Christ and St. Mahomet, chanting plaintive prayers for protection.

“I still don’t understand,” Meical Dorn complained, from inside the longest
longhouse “what this is all about. “None of the wildlings are anywhere nearby
– I should know, I’ve came through two hundred miles of forest to get here –
and the only three towns in this area are at peace with you. In Great Rabda,
even an impending attack couldn’t make us cower inside like this. I have half a
mind to think there’s something you’re not telling me, Fin. Something that
might…threaten our deal.”
Fin Lerisas, Chief Lorekeeper for Tal Aivon, sighed. “Nothing that would
threaten our deal, Meical. Great Rabda has gold. We have sunblessings. Just
stay here long enough for our bankers to figure out the price, and you’ll have
timers and mathers and lighters of your very own.”

Meical glanced longingly at the Chief Lorekeeper’s own sunblessing, a timer

that stood on the shelf of his private room. 1:52 AM gleamed on its face, with
an maddeningly smooth red glow unlike sunlight or moonlight or firelight. Yet
Meical knew it was sunlight, or something like. He was the Lorekeeper of
Great Rabda. The Lorekeepers of Tal Aivon were far wiser than he – how could
they not be with the town’s close proximity to ruined Diteroi and its trove of
artifacts from the Lost World – but even he knew how sunblessings worked.
You took them outside and the blue tiles on their surface fed on sunlight. Then
they worked various miracles. Timers would tell you the time far more
precisely than any sundial – invaluable in keeping the schedule of sacred
prayer decreed by St. Mahomet. Mathers would add and subtract quantities
more quickly than the fastest savant. Lighters would shine at night without
wood or kerosene.

Meical had no doubt that the Lorekeepers of Tal Aivon – the wisest on the
Great Peninsula – knew of still other sunblessings, ones that mighty but lore-
deficient Great Rabda had never heard of. He himself would be happy with
anything – even the meanest timer. Of all the millions of wonders built by the
Lost World, only the sunblessings still worked, and they were in fiendishly
short supply. While lore-rich Tal Aivon had a timer upon each of its six gates,
Great Rabda, for all its bountiful gold and grain, had not a single sunblessing
to call its own. As its Lorekeeper, it would aid his status immensely if this
trade mission was successful and he could bring something back to
demonstrate the power of the Lost World and, incidentally, his own
importance as keeper of its Lore.

But even his greed for power did not override his concern for his own safety.
“I’m serious, Fin. I want to know what’s going on. I can’t deal with a city that
won’t even tell me why it’s on high alert.”

Fin Lerisas, Chief Lorekeeper of Tal Aivon and wisest in ancient matters on
the whole Great Peninsula, gave another sigh. “If you were not a Lorekeeper
yourself, I would not sure such secrets with a foreigner. But if it threatens the
deal, very well. Only know that you will be no happier with this knowledge,
and that you may not sleep quite as soundly on autumn nights from now on.”

Meical gave a nod, indicating he wanted the old man to continue.

“In Great Rabda you have no sunblessings, and so you must keep the time like
wildlings, by watching the course of the sun. Here in Tal Aivon we have six
timers, one on each of the city gates, and so everyone down to the meanest
peasant knows the time, down to the second. To most, they check the time
when they enter the city, and the time when they leave the city, and they never
think any more of it. We Lorekeepers are more astute, but not infinitely so.
And so it was only forty years ago, in the time when my uncle Derech was
Chief Lorekeeper, that we noticed” (and here his voice changed to a whisper)
“that there is something wrong with Time.”

“The stars,” he continued “sometimes match the time as told by the timers,
and sometimes they do not. At first we thought the flaw was in the heavens
themselves, so perfect are the devices of the Lost World. But this so
discomfited my uncle that for three months he sat in front of this very timer,
handing it off to an acolyte only when he slept. And one night, his watch bore
fruit.”

“What happened?” asked Meical, breathlessly.

“Time moved backwards,” said Fin.

“Impossible,” said Meical.

“It was on this very night,” said Fin. “Time, which three hundred sixty four
days of the year moves only in one direction, suddenly jumped backwards.
And you yourself will witness it.”

He pointed to the timer on his shelf, which now read 1:59 AM. Its red glow
suddenly looked unfriendly, even eerie. Even though Meical knew it had to be
sunlight at its root, it held none of the wholesomeness of the sun.

And then it changed. 1:59 turned to 1:00.

Meical gasped, and his fingers instantly formed the cross of St. Jesus and then
the crescent of St. Mahomet. “Madness!” he whispered.

“Something,” said Fin, “is wrong with this night. It is not always this night – it
can come as early as three days before, or as late as three days after. My uncle
worked out the formula after several years. But every year, it happens. Time
jumps backwards.”

“But why?” asked Meical. “Why would the gods do such a thing? Why would
they break the symmetry of the True Time and the heavens?”

“That’s the worst part,” said Fin. “When I was younger, I looked over my
uncle’s formula – the one for calculating the day when the time skip would
happen – and found what he had missed. The day of the time skip is fixed to
the seven day calendar of the Lost World. To the ancients, it would always
occur on the same day of the week. Sunday. Their holy day.”

Meical felt his blood run cold. “That’s…some coincidence.”

“Perhaps,” said Fin. “But I don’t think it is a coincidence. The gods are just.
They would not play with Time as children play with blocks, picking one up
here, then putting it down far away. I think the ancients of the Lost World, the
ones who could build the great glass towers, the ones who manufactured
sunblessings, the ones who made Diteroi-That-Was – I think they took their
magic and threw it against time, and broke it. I think they wanted to become
lords of time itself.”

“But they failed,” guessed Meical.

“They created a single hour,” said Fin. “Of the nine thousand hours in a year,
all but one were made by the gods, but one was made by Man. What stopped
them from creating more, from creating an infinite number of hours, from
becoming immortal by arresting the progression of Time? We will never know.
But it is my belief that when they saw what men had done, the gods stopped
them before they could do worse. Meical, I believe that is how the Lost World
ended. A last ditch effort by the gods to save Time itself from the hubris of
Man.”
Meical was silent. For all their wisdom, none of the Lorekeepers claimed to
know how the Lost World ended. Surely the gods had pulverized it for some
offense, but what sin could have been so dire as to doom those magnificent
glass towers, those great black roads as smooth as water? Meical looked at the
clock, gleaming 1:03 AM, and knew. Knew in his heart that Fin was right.

“There is a day in the very early springtime,” said Fin, “when an hour
disappears. The gods are stingy. They would not grant the ancients their
victory. What they did with that hour in springtime, I do not know. But their
message is clear.”

Meical shuddered again. Like all the inhabitants of Great Rabda, he had told
the time with the sun and the stars. But it had always been an approximation,
not the to-the-second True Time displayed on the six gates of Tal Aivon. And
so in their ignorance they had missed no fewer than two violations of Time,
and it had fallen to the people of Tal Aivon alone to guard these terrible
secrets.

“You ask why we extinguish our fires and pray this night. Nine thousand hours
in the year were made by the gods, but one was made by Man. I cannot help
but wonder what walks abroad, during the hour no god made. I cannot help
but wonder what spirits awake on the anniversary of the old world’s death.
When time itself stands stagnant, what sorts of things breed within it? I prefer
not to think about such things. That is why for the past forty years, ever since
my discovery, I have knelt with the priests in the temple, and joined in their
prayers. With an honored guest such as yourself here, I thought to entertain
you instead, to avoid worrying you. Now I see that thought was vain. Will you
come to the temple and pray with me?”

And so on the longest night of the year, Fin Lerisas, Chief Lorekeeper of Tal
Aivon, and Meical Dorn, Lorekeeper of Great Rabda, knelt in the temple and
prayed to St. Jesus and St. Mahomet that time continue, that 1:59 AM be
followed by 2:00 AM just as it always had in the past, and that the people be
forgiven the sins of the Lost World, which had dared to change Time itself.
And lo, at the appointed hour the six clocks on the six gates of Tal Aivon
showed 2 AM, and the people rejoiced, and the kerosene lights were lit and the
city of Tal Aivon was lively and pleasant once again.
Three days later, Meical Dorn left Tal Aivon minus the gold he had brought
but with a sunblessing of his own, a beautiful slate-gray mather that would
have the engineers of Great Rabda dancing with glee. They had offered him a
timer instead, a beautiful digital timer that even played short tunes at different
hours, but Meical had refused. He bore a secret that need not trouble the
people of Great Rabda. They would have a mather, and calculate things
lightning-quick, and never know that there was a flaw in Time that even the
gods themselves could not resolve.

But until the day he died, every so often on chill autumn nights Meical Dorn
would look up at the stars and shudder.

Economics and Efficiency

Against Tulip Subsidies

I.

Imagine a little kingdom with a quaint custom: when a man likes a woman, he
offers her a tulip; if she accepts, they are married shortly thereafter. A couple
who marries sans tulip is considered to be living in sin; no other form of
proposal is appropriate or accepted.

One day, a Dutch trader comes to the little kingdom. He explains that his
homeland also has a quaint custom involving tulips: they speculate on them,
bidding the price up to stratospheric levels. Why, in the Netherlands, a tulip
can go for ten times more than the average worker earns in a year! The trader
is pleased to find a new source of bulbs, and offers the people of the kingdom a
few guilders per tulip, which they happily accept.

Soon other Dutch traders show up and start a bidding war. The price of tulips
goes up, and up, and up; first dozens of guilders, then hundreds. Tulip-
growers make a fortune, but everyone else is less pleased. Suitors wishing to
give a token of their love find themselves having to invest their entire life
savings – with no guarantee that the woman will even say yes! Soon, some of
the poorest people are locked out of marriage and family-raising entirely.

Some of the members of Parliament are outraged. Marriage is, they say, a
human right, and to see it forcibly denied the poor by foreign speculators is
nothing less than an abomination. They demand that the King provide every
man enough money to guarantee he can buy a tulip. Some objections are
raised: won’t it deplete the Treasury? Are we obligated to buy everyone a
beautiful flawless bulb, or just the sickliest, grungiest plant that will
technically satisfy the requirements of the ritual? If some man continuously
proposes to women who reject him, are we obligated to pay for a new bulb
each time, subsidizing his stupidity?

The pro-subsidy faction declares that the people asking these question are
well-off, and can probably afford tulips of their own, and so from their place of
privilege they are trying to raise pointless objections to other people being able
to obtain the connubial happiness they themselves enjoy. After the doubters
are tarred and feathered and thrown in the river, Parliament votes that the
public purse pay for as many tulips as the poor need, whatever the price.

A few years later, another Dutch trader comes to the little kingdom. Everyone
asks if he is there to buy tulips, and he says no, the Netherlands’ tulip bubble
has long since collapsed, and the price is down to a guilder or two. The people
of the kingdom are very surprised to hear that, since the price of their own
tulips has never stopped going up, and is now in the range of tens of
thousands of guilders. Nevertheless, they are glad that, however high tulip
prices may be for them, they know the government is always there to help.
Sure, the roads are falling apart and the army is going hungry for lack of
rations, but at least everyone who wants to marry is able to do so.
Meanwhile, across the river is another little kingdom that had the same tulip-
related marriage custom. They also had a crisis when the Dutch merchants
started making the prices go up. But they didn’t have enough money to afford
universal tulip subsidies. It was pretty touch-and-go for a while, and a lot of
poor people were very unhappy.

But nowadays they use daffodils to mark engagements, and their economy has
never been better.

II.

In America, aspiring doctors do four years of undergrad in whatever area they

want (I did Philosophy), then four more years of medical school, for a total of
eight years post-high school education. In Ireland, aspiring doctors go straight
from high school to medical school and finish after five years.

I’ve done medicine in both America and Ireland. The doctors in both countries
are about equally good. When Irish doctors take the American standardized
tests, they usually do pretty well. Ireland is one of the approximately 100% of
First World countries that gets better health outcomes than the United States.
There’s no evidence whatsoever that American doctors gain anything from
those three extra years of undergrad. And why would they? Why is having a
philosophy degree under my belt supposed to make me any better at
medicine?

(I guess I might have acquired a talent for colorectal surgery through long
practice pulling things out of my ass, but it hardly seems worth it.)

I’ll make another confession. Ireland’s medical school is five years as opposed
to America’s four because the Irish spend their first year teaching the basic
sciences – biology, organic chemistry, physics, calculus. When I applied to
medical school in Ireland, they offered me an accelerated four year program
on the grounds that I had surely gotten all of those in my American
undergraduate work. I hadn’t. I read some books about them over the summer
and did just fine.

Americans take eight years to become doctors. Irishmen can do it in four, and
achieve the same result. Each year of higher education at a good school – let’s
say an Ivy, doctors don’t study at Podunk Community College – costs about
$50,000. So American medical students are paying an extra $200,000 for…
what?

Remember, a modest amount of the current health care crisis is caused by

doctors’ crippling level of debt. Socially responsible doctors often consider less
lucrative careers helping the needy, right up until the bill comes due from
their education and they realize they have to make a lot of money right now.
We took one look at that problem and said “You know, let’s make doctors pay
an extra $200,000 for no reason.”

And to paraphrase Dirkson, $200,000 here, $200,000 there, and pretty soon
it adds up to real money. 20,000 doctors graduate in the United States each
year; that means the total yearly cost of requiring doctors to have
undergraduate degrees is $4 billion. That’s most of the amount of money
you’d need to house every homeless person in the country ($10,000to house
one homeless x 600,000 homeless).

I want to be able to say people have noticed the Irish/American discrepancy

and are thinking hard about it. I can say that. Just not in the way I would like.
Many of the elder doctors I talked to in Ireland wanted to switch to the
American system. Not because they thought it would give them better doctors.
Just because they said it was more fun working with medical students like
myself who were older and a little wiser. The Irish medical students were just
out of high school and hard to relate to – us foreigners were four years older
than that and had one or another undergraduate subject under our belts. One
of my attendings said that it was nice having me around because I’d studied
Philosophy in college and that gave our team a touch of class. A touch of class!

This is why, despite my reservations about libertarianism, it’s not-

libertarianism that really scares me. Whenever some people without skin in
the game are allowed to make decisions for other people, you end up with a
bunch of elderly doctors getting together, think “Yeah, things do seem a little
classier around here if we make people who are not us pay $200,000, make it
so,” and then there goes the money that should have housed all the homeless
people in the country.
But more important, it also destroyed my last shred of hope that the current
mania for requiring college degrees for everything had a good reason behind
it.

III.

The only reason I’m picking on medicine is that it’s so clear. You have your
experimental group in the United States, your control group in Ireland, you
can see the lack of difference. You can take an American doctor and an Irish
doctor, watch them prescribe the same medication in the same situation, and
have a visceral feel for “Wait, we just spent $200,000 for no reason.”

But it’s not just medicine. Let me tell you about my family.

There’s my cousin. He wants to be a firefighter. He’s wanted to be a firefighter

ever since he was young, and he’s done volunteer work for his local fire
department, who have promised him a job. But in order to get it, he has to go
do four years of college. You can’t be a firefighter without a college degree.
That would be ridiculous. Back in the old days, when people were allowed to
become firefighters after getting only thirteen measly years of book learning, I
have it on good authority that several major states burnt to the ground.

My mother is a Spanish teacher. After twenty years teaching, with excellent

reviews by her students, she pursued a Masters’ in Education because her
school was going to pay her more money if she had it. She told me that her
professors were incompetent, had never actually taught real students, and
spent the entire course pushing whatever was the latest educational fad;
however, after paying them thousands of dollars, she got the degree and her
school dutifully increased her salary. She is lucky. In several states, teachers
are required by law to pursue a Masters’ degree to be allowed to continue
teaching. Oddly enough, these states have no better student outcomes than
states without this requirement, but this does not seem to affect their zeal for
this requirement. Even though many rigorous well-controlled studies have
found that presence of absence of a Masters’ degree explains approximately
zero percent of variance in teacher quality, many states continue to require it if
you want to keep your license, and almost every state will pay you more for
having it.
Before taking my current job, I taught English in Japan. I had no Japanese
language experience and no teaching experience, but the company I
interviewed with asked if I had an undergraduate degree in some subject or
other, and that was good enough for them. Meanwhile, I knew people who
were fluent in Japanese and who had high-level TOEFL certification. They did
not have a college degree so they were not considered.

My ex-girlfriend majored in Gender Studies, but it turned out all of the high-
paying gender factories had relocated to China. They solved this problem by
going to App Academy, a three month long, $15,000 course that taught
programming. App Academy graduates compete for the same jobs as people
who have taken computer science in college, a four year long, $200,000
undertaking.

I see no reason to think my family and friends are unique. The overall picture
seems to be one of people paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to get a
degree in Art History to pursue a job in Sales, or a degree in Spanish
Literature to get a job as a middle manager. Or not paying hundreds of
thousands of dollars, if they happen to be poor, and so being permanently
locked out of jobs as a firefighter or salesman.

IV.

So presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has proposed universal free college

tuition.

On the one hand, I sympathize with his goals. If you can’t get any job better
than ‘fast food worker’ without a college degree, and poor people can’t afford
college degrees, that’s a pretty grim situation, and obviously unfair to the poor.

On the other hand, if can’t you get married without a tulip, and poor people
can’t afford tulips, that’s also a pretty grim situation, and obviously unfair to
the poor.

But the solution isn’t universal tulip subsidies.

Higher education is in a bubble much like the old tulip bubble. In the past
forty years, the price of college has dectupled (quadrupled when adjusting for
inflation). It used to be easy to pay for college with a summer job; now it is
impossible. At the same time, the unemployment rate of people without
college degrees is twice that of people who have them. Things are clearly very
bad and Senator Sanders is right to be concerned.

But, well, when we require doctors to get a college degree before they can go to
medical school, we’re throwing out a mere $5 billion, barely enough to house
all the homeless people in the country. But Senator Sanders admits that his
plan would cost $70 billion per year. That’s about the size of the entire
economy of Hawaii. It’s enough to give $2000 every year to every American in
poverty.

At what point do we say “Actually, no, let’s not do that, and just let people hold
basic jobs even if they don’t cough up a a hundred thousand dollars from
somewhere to get a degree in Medieval History”?

I’m afraid that Sanders’ plan is a lot like the tulip subsidy idea that started off
this post. It would subsidize the continuation of a useless tradition that has
turned into a speculation bubble, prevent the bubble from ever popping, and
disincentivize people from figuring out a way to route around the problem, eg
replacing the tulips with daffodils.

(yes, it is nice to have college for non-economic reasons too, but let’s be honest
– if there were no such institution as college, would you, totally for non-
economic reasons, suggest the government pay poor people $100,000 to get a
degree in Medieval History? Also, anything not related to job-getting can be
done three times as quickly by just reading a book.)

If I were Sanders, I’d propose a different strategy. Make “college degree” a

protected characteristic, like race and religion and sexuality. If you’re not
allowed to ask a job candidate whether they’re gay, you’re not allowed to ask
them whether they’re a college graduate or not. You can give them all sorts of
examinations, you can ask them their high school grades and SAT scores, you
can ask their work history, but if you ask them if they have a degree then that’s
illegal class-based discrimination and you’re going to jail. I realize this is a
blatant violation of my usual semi-libertarian principles, but at this point I
don’t care.

Considerations On Cost Disease

I.

Tyler Cowen writes about cost disease. I’d previously heard the term used to
refer only to a specific theory of why costs are increasing, involving labor
becoming more efficient in some areas than others. Cowen seems to use it
indiscriminately to refer to increasing costs in general – which I guess is fine,
goodness knows we need a word for that.

Cowen assumes his readers already understand that cost disease exists. I don’t
know if this is true. My impression is that most people still don’t know about
cost disease, or don’t realize the extent of it. So I thought I would make the
case for the cost disease in the sectors Tyler mentions – health care and
education – plus a couple more.

First let’s look at primary education:

There was some argument about the style of this graph, but as per Politifact
the basic claim is true. Per student spending has increased about 2.5x in the
past forty years even after adjusting for inflation.

At the same time, test scores have stayed relatively stagnant. You can see the
full numbers here, but in short, high school students’ reading scores went
from 285 in 1971 to 287 today – a difference of 0.7%.

There is some heterogenity across races – white students’ test scores increased
1.4% and minority students’ scores by about 20%. But it is hard to credit
school spending for the minority students’ improvement, which occurred
almost entirely during the period from 1975-1985. School spending has been
on exactly the same trajectory before and after that time, and in white and
minority areas, suggesting that there was something specific about that decade
which improved minority (but not white) scores. Most likely this was the
general improvement in minorities’ conditions around that time, giving them
better nutrition and a more stable family life. It’s hard to construct a narrative
where it was school spending that did it – and even if it did, note that the
majority of the increase in school spending happened from 1985 on, and
demonstrably helped neither whites nor minorities.

I discuss this phenomenon more here and here, but the summary is: no, it’s
not just because of special ed; no, it’s not just a factor of how you measure test
scores; no, there’s not a “ceiling effect”. Costs really did more-or-less double
without any concomitant increase in measurable quality.

So, imagine you’re a poor person. White, minority, whatever. Which would
you prefer? Sending your child to a 2016 school? Or sending your child to a
1975 school, and getting a check for $5,000 every year?

I’m proposing that choice because as far as I can tell that is the stakes here.
2016 schools have whatever tiny test score advantage they have over 1975
schools, and cost $5000/year more, inflation adjusted. That $5000 comes out
of the pocket of somebody – either taxpayers, or other people who could be
helped by government programs.

Second, college is even worse:

Note this is not adjusted for inflation; see link below for adjusted figures

Inflation-adjusted cost of a university education was something like $2000/

year in 1980. Now it’s closer to $20,000/year. No, it’s not because of
decreased government funding, and there are similar trajectories for public
and private schools.

I don’t know if there’s an equivalent of “test scores” measuring how well

colleges perform, so just use your best judgment. Do you think that modern
colleges provide $18,000/year greater value than colleges did in your parents’
day? Would you rather graduate from a modern college, or graduate from a
college more like the one your parents went to, plus get a check for $72,000?

(or, more realistically, have $72,000 less in student loans to pay off)

Was your parents’ college even noticeably worse than yours? My parents
sometimes talk about their college experience, and it seems to have had all the
relevant features of a college experience. Clubs. Classes. Professors.
Roommates. I might have gotten something extra for my $72,000, but it’s
hard to see what it was.
Third, health care. The graph is starting to look disappointingly familiar:

The cost of health care has about quintupled since 1970. It’s actually been
rising since earlier than that, but I can’t find a good graph; it looks like it
would have been about $1200 in today’s dollars in 1960, for an increase of
about 800% in those fifty years.

This has had the expected effects. The average 1960 worker spent ten days’
worth of their yearly paycheck on health insurance; the average modern
worker spends sixty days’ worth of it, a sixth of their entire earnings.
Or not.

This time I can’t say with 100% certainty that all this extra spending has been
for nothing. Life expectancy has gone way up since 1960:

Extra bonus conclusion: the Spanish flu was really bad

But a lot of people think that life expectancy depends on other things a lot
more than healthcare spending. Sanitation, nutrition, quitting smoking, plus
advances in health technology that don’t involve spending more money. ACE
inhibitors (invented in 1975) are great and probably increased lifespan a lot,
but they cost $20 for a year’s supply and replaced older drugs that cost about
the same amount.

In terms of calculating how much lifespan gain healthcare spending has

produced, we have a couple of options. Start with by country:
Countries like South Korea and Israel have about the same life expectancy as
the US but pay about 25% of what we do. Some people use this to prove the
superiority of centralized government health systems, although Random
Critical Analysis has an alternative perspective. In any case, it seems very
possible to get the same improving life expectancies as the US without
octupling health care spending.
The Netherlands increased their health budget by a lot around 2000, sparking
a bunch of studies on whether that increased life expectancy or not. There’s a
good meta-analysis here, which lists six studies trying to calculate how much
of the change in life expectancy was due to the large increases in health
spending during this period. There’s a broad range of estimates: 0.3%, 1.8%,
8.0%, 17.2%, 22.1%, 27.5% (I’m taking their numbers for men; the numbers
for women are pretty similar). They also mention two studies that they did not
officially include; one finding 0% effect and one finding 50% effect (I’m not
sure why these studies weren’t included). They add:

In none of these studies is the issue of reverse causality addressed;

sometimes it is not even mentioned. This implies that the effect of
health care spending on mortality may be overestimated.

They say:

Based on our review of empirical studies, we conclude that it is likely

that increased health care spending has contributed to the recent
increase in life expectancy in the Netherlands. Applying the estimates
form published studies to the observed increase in health care spending
in the Netherlands between 2000 and 2010 [of 40%] would imply that
0.3% to almost 50% of the increase in life expectancy may have been
caused by increasing health care spending. An important reason for the
wide range in such estimates is that they all include methodological
problems highlighted in this paper. However, this wide range inicates
that the counterfactual study by Meerding et al, which argued that 50%
of the increase in life expectancy in the Netherlands since the 1950s can
be attributed to medical care, can probably be interpreted as an upper
bound.

It’s going to be completely irresponsible to try to apply this to the increase in

health spending in the US over the past 50 years, since this is probably
different at every margin and the US is not the Netherlands and the 1950s are
not the 2010s. But if we irresponsibly take their median estimate and apply it
to the current question, we get that increasing health spending in the US has
been worth about one extra year of life expectancy.
This study attempts to directly estimate a %GDP health spending to life
expectancy conversion, and says that an increase of 1% GDP corresponds to an
increase of 0.05 years life expectancy. That would suggest a slightly different
number of 0.65 years life expectancy gained by healthcare spending since
1960)

If these numbers seem absurdly low, remember all of those controlled

experiments where giving people insurance doesn’t seem to make them much
healthier in any meaningful way.

Or instead of slogging through the statistics, we can just ask the same question
as before. Do you think the average poor or middle-class person would rather:

1. Get modern healthcare

2. Get the same amount of health care as their parents’ generation, but
with modern technology like ACE inhibitors, and also earn $8000 extra
a year

Fourth, we see similar effects in infrastructure. The first New York City
subway opened around 1900. Various sources list lengths from 10 to 20 miles
and costs from $30 million to $60 million dollars – I think my sources are
capturing it at different stages of construction with different numbers of
extensions. In any case, it suggests costs of between $1.5 million to $6 million
dollars/mile = $1-4 million per kilometer. That looks like it’s about the
inflation-adjusted equivalent of $100 million/kilometer today, though I’m
very uncertain about that estimate. In contrast, Vox notes that a new New
York subway line being opened this year costs about $2.2 billion per
kilometer, suggesting a cost increase of twenty times – although I’m very
uncertain about this estimate.

Things become clearer when you compare them country-by-country. The same
Vox article notes that Paris, Berlin, and Copenhagen subways cost about $250
million per kilometer, almost 90% less. Yet even those European subways are
overpriced compared to Korea, where a kilometer of subway in Seoul costs
$40 million/km (another Korean subway project cost $80 million/km). This is
a difference of 50x between Seoul and New York for apparently comparable
services. It suggests that the 1900s New York estimate above may have been
roughly accurate if their efficiency was roughly in line with that of modern
Europe and Korea.

Fifth, housing (source:

Most of the important commentary on this graph has already been said, but I
would add that optimistic takes like this one by the American Enterprise
Institute are missing some of the dynamic. Yes, homes are bigger than they
used to be, but part of that is zoning laws which make it easier to get big
houses than small houses. There are a lot of people who would prefer to have a
smaller house but don’t. When I first moved to Michigan, I lived alone in a
three bedroom house because there were no good one-bedroom houses
available near my workplace and all of the apartments were loud and crime-y.

Or, once again, just ask yourself: do you think most poor and middle class
people would rather:

1. Rent a modern house/apartment

 2. Rent the sort of house/apartment their parents had, for half the cost

II.

So, to summarize: in the past fifty years, education costs have doubled, college
costs have dectupled, health insurance costs have dectupled, subway costs
have at least dectupled, and housing costs have increased by about fifty
percent. US health care costs about four times as much as equivalent health
care in other First World countries; US subways cost about eight times as
much as equivalent subways in other First World countries.

I worry that people don’t appreciate how weird this is. I didn’t appreciate it for
a long time. I guess I just figured that Grandpa used to talk about how back in
his day movie tickets only cost a nickel; that was just the way of the world. But
all of the numbers above are inflation-adjusted. These things have dectupled
in cost even after you adjust for movies costing a nickel in Grandpa’s day.
They have really, genuinely dectupled in cost, no economic trickery involved.

And this is especially strange because we expect that improving technology

and globalization ought to cut costs. In 1983, the first mobile phone cost
$4,000 – about $10,000 in today’s dollars. It was also a gigantic piece of crap.
Today you can get a much better phone for $100. This is the right and proper
way of the universe. It’s why we fund scientists, and pay businesspeople the
big bucks.

But things like college and health care have still had their prices dectuple.
Patients can now schedule their appointments online; doctors can send
prescriptions through the fax, pharmacies can keep track of medication
histories on centralized computer systems that interface with the cloud, nurses
get automatic reminders when they’re giving two drugs with a potential
interaction, insurance companies accept payment through credit cards – and
all of this costs ten times as much as it did in the days of punch cards and
secretaries who did calculations by hand.

It’s actually even worse than this, because we take so many opportunities to
save money that were unavailable in past generations. Underpaid foreign
nurses immigrate to America and work for a song. Doctors’ notes are sent to
India overnight where they’re transcribed by sweatshop-style labor for pennies
an hour. Medical equipment gets manufactured in goodness-only-knows
which obscure Third World country. And it stillcosts ten times as much as
when this was all made in the USA – and that back when minimum wages
were proportionally higher than today.

And it’s actually even worse than this. A lot of these services have decreased in
quality, presumably as an attempt to cut costs even further. Doctors used to
make house calls; even when I was young in the ’80s my father would still go
to the houses of difficult patients who were too sick to come to his office. This
study notes that for women who give birth in the hospital, “the standard
length of stay was 8 to 14 days in the 1950s but declined to less than 2 days in
the mid-1990s”. The doctors I talk to say this isn’t because modern women are
healthier, it’s because they kick them out as soon as it’s safe to free up beds for
the next person. Historic records of hospital care generally describe leisurely
convalescence periods and making sure somebody felt absolutely well before
letting them go; this seems bizarre to anyone who has participated in a
modern hospital, where the mantra is to kick people out as soon as they’re
“stable” ie not in acute crisis.

If we had to provide the same quality of service as we did in 1960, and without
the gains from modern technology and globalization, who even knows how
many times more health care would cost? Fifty times more? A hundred times
more?

And the same is true for colleges and houses and subways and so on.

III.

The existing literature on cost disease focuses on the Baumol effect. Suppose
in some underdeveloped economy, people can choose either to work in a
factory or join an orchestra, and the salaries of factory workers and orchestra
musicians reflect relative supply and demand and profit in those industries.
Then the economy undergoes a technological revolution, and factories can
produce ten times as many goods. Some of the increased productivity trickles
down to factory workers, and they earn more money. Would-be musicians
leave the orchestras behind to go work in the higher-paying factories, and the
orchestras have to raise their prices if they want to be assured enough
musicians. So tech improvements in the factory sectory raise prices in the
orchestra sector.

We could tell a story like this to explain rising costs in education, health care,
etc. If technology increases productivity for skilled laborers in other
industries, then less susceptible industries might end up footing the bill since
they have to pay their workers more.

There’s only one problem: health care and education aren’t paying their
workers more; in fact, quite the opposite.

Here are teacher salaries over time (source):

Teacher salaries are relatively flat adjusting for inflation. But salaries for other
jobs are increasing modestly relative to inflation. So teacher salaries relative to
other occupations’ salaries are actually declining.

Here’s a similar graph for professors (source):

Professor salaries are going up a little, but again, they’re probably losing
position relative to the average occupation. Also, note that although the
average salary of each type of faculty is stable or increasing, the average salary
of all faculty is going down. No mystery here – colleges are doing everything
they can to switch from tenured professors to adjuncts, who complain of being
overworked and abused while making about the same amount as a Starbucks
barista.

This seems to me a lot like the case of the hospitals cutting care for new
mothers. The price of the service dectuples, yet at the same time the service
has to sacrifice quality in order to control costs.

And speaking of hospitals, here’s the graph for nurses (source):

Female nurses’ salaries went from about $55,000 in 1988 to $63,000 in 2013.
This is probably around the average wage increase during that time. Also,
some of this reflects changes in education: in the 1980s only 40% of nurses
had a degree; by 2010, about 80% did.

And for doctors (source)

Stable again! Except that a lot of doctors’ salaries now go to paying off their
medical school debt, which has been ballooning like everything eles.

I don’t have a similar graph for subway workers, but come on. The overall
pictures is that health care and education costs have managed to increase by
ten times without a single cent of the gains going to teachers, doctors, or
nurses. Indeed these professions seem to have lost ground salary-wise relative
to others.

I also want to add some anecdote to these hard facts. My father is a doctor and
my mother is a teacher, so I got to hear a lot about how these professions have
changed over the past generation. It seems at least a little like the adjunct
story, although without the clearly defined “professor vs. adjunct” dichotomy
that makes it so easy to talk about. Doctors are really, really, really unhappy.
When I went to medical school, some of my professors would tell me outright
that they couldn’t believe anyone would still go into medicine with all of the
new stresses and demands placed on doctors. This doesn’t seem to be limited
to one medical school. Wall Street Journal: Why Doctors Are Sick Of Their
Profession – “American physicians are increasingly unhappy with their once-
vaunted profession, and that malaise is bad for their patients”. The Daily
Beast: How Being A Doctor Became The Most Miserable Profession – “Being a
doctor has become a miserable and humiliating undertaking. Indeed, many
doctors feel that America has declared war on physicians”. Forbes: Why Are
Doctors So Unhappy? – “Doctors have become like everyone else: insecure,
discontent and scared about the future.” Vox: Only Six Percent Of Doctors Are
Happy With Their Jobs. Al Jazeera America: Here’s Why Nine Out Of Ten
Doctors Wouldn’t Recommend Medicine As A Profession. Read these articles
and they all say the same thing that all the doctors I know say – medicine used
to be a well-respected, enjoyable profession where you could give patients
good care and feel self-actualized. Now it kind of sucks.

Meanwhile, I also see articles like this piece from NPR saying teachers are
experiencing historic stress levels and up to 50% say their job “isn’t worth it”.
Teacher job satisfaction is at historic lows. And the veteran teachers I know
say the same thing as the veteran doctors I know – their jobs used to be
enjoyable and make them feel like they were making a difference; now they
feel overworked, unappreciated, and trapped in mountains of paperwork.

It might make sense for these fields to become more expensive if their
employees’ salaries were increasing. And it might make sense for salaries to
stay the same if employees instead benefitted from lower workloads and better
working conditions. But neither of these are happening.

IV.

So what’s going on? Why are costs increasing so dramatically? Some possible
answers:

First, can we dismiss all of this as an illusion? Maybe adjusting for inflation is
harder than I think. Inflation is an average, so some things have to have
higher-than-average inflation; maybe it’s education, health care, etc. Or maybe
my sources have the wrong statistics.

But I don’t think this is true. The last time I talked about this problem,
someone mentioned they’re running a private school which does just as well as
public schools but costs only $3000/student/year, a fourth of the usual rate.
Marginal Revolution notes thatIndia has a private health system that delivers
the same quality of care as its public system for a quarter of the cost.
Whenever the same drug is provided by the official US health system and
some kind of grey market supplement sort of thing, the grey market
supplement costs between a fifth and a tenth as much; for example, Google’s
first hit for Deplin®, official prescription L-methylfolate, costs $175 for a
month’s supply; unregulated L-methylfolate supplement delivers the same
dose for about $30. And this isn’t even mentioning things like the $1 bag of
saline that costs $700 at hospitals. Since it seems like it’s not too hard to do
things for a fraction of what we currently do things for, probably we should be
less reluctant to believe that the cost of everything is really inflated.

Second, might markets just not work? I know this is kind of an extreme
question to ask in a post on economics, but maybe nobody knows what they’re
doing in a lot of these fields and people can just increase costs and not suffer
any decreased demand because of it. Suppose that people proved beyond a
shadow of a doubt that Khan Academy could teach you just as much as a
normal college education, but for free. People would still ask questions like –
will employers accept my Khan Academy degree? Will it look good on a
resume? Will people make fun of me for it? The same is true of community
colleges, second-tier colleges, for-profit colleges, et cetera. I got offered a free
scholarship to a mediocre state college, and I turned it down on the grounds
that I knew nothing about anything and maybe years from now I would be
locked out of some sort of Exciting Opportunity because my college wasn’t
prestigious enough. Assuming everyone thinks like this, can colleges just
charge whatever they want?

Likewise, my workplace offered me three different health insurance plans, and

I chose the middle-expensiveness one, on the grounds that I had no idea how
health insurance worked but maybe if I bought the cheap one I’d get sick and
regret my choice, and maybe if I bought the expensive one I wouldn’t be sick
and regret my choice. I am a doctor, my employer is a hospital, and the health
insurance was for treatment in my own health system. The moral of the story
is that I am an idiot. The second moral of the story is that people probably are
not super-informed health care consumers.

This can’t be pure price-gouging, since corporate profits haven’t increased

nearly enough to be where all the money is going. But a while ago a
commenter linked me to the Delta Cost Project, which scrutinizes the exact
causes of increasing college tuition. Some of it is the administrative bloat that
you would expect. But a lot of it is fun “student life” types of activities like
clubs, festivals, and paying Milo Yiannopoulos to speak and then cleaning up
after the ensuing riots. These sorts of things improve the student experience,
but I’m not sure that the average student would rather go to an expensive
college with clubs/festivals/Milo than a cheap college without them. More
important, it doesn’t really seem like the average student is offered this choice.

This kind of suggests a picture where colleges expect people will pay whatever
price they set, so they set a very high price and then use the money for cool
things and increasing their own prestige. Or maybe clubs/festivals/Milo
become such a signal of prestige that students avoid colleges that don’t comply
since they worry their degrees won’t be respected? Some people have pointed
out that hospitals have switched from many-people-all-in-a-big-ward to
private rooms. Once again, nobody seems to have been offered the choice
between expensive hospitals with private rooms versus cheap hospitals with
roommates. It’s almost as if industries have their own reasons for switching to
more-bells-and-whistles services that people don’t necessarily want, and
consumers just go along with it because for some reason they’re not exercising
choice the same as they would in other markets.

(this article on the Oklahoma City Surgery Center might be about a partial
corrective for this kind of thing)

Third, can we attribute this to the inefficiency of government relative to

private industry? I don’t think so. The government handles most primary
education and subways, and has its hand in health care. But we know that for-
profit hospitals aren’t much cheaper than government hospitals, and that
private schools usually aren’t much cheaper (and are sometimes more
expensive) than government schools. And private colleges cost more than
government-funded ones.

Fourth, can we attribute it to indirect government intervention through

regulation, which public and private companies alike must deal with? This
seems to be at least part of the story in health care, given how much money
you can save by grey-market practices that avoid the FDA. It’s harder to apply
it to colleges, though some people have pointed out regulations like Title IX
that affect the educational sector.

One factor that seems to speak out against this is that starting with Reagan in
1980, and picking up steam with Gingrich in 1994, we got an increasing
presence of Republicans in government who declared war on overregulation –
but the cost disease proceeded unabated. This is suspicious, but in fairness to
the Republicans, they did sort of fail miserably at deregulating things. “The
literal number of pages in the regulatory code” is kind of a blunt instrument,
but it doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in the Republicans’ deregulation
efforts:

Here’s a more interesting (and more fun) argument against regulations being
to blame: what about pet health care? Veterinary care is much less regulated
than human health care, yet its cost is rising as fast (or faster) than that of the
human medical system (popular article, study). I’m not sure what to make of
this.

Fifth, might the increased regulatory complexity happen not through literal
regulations, but through fear of lawsuits? That is, might institutions add extra
layers of administration and expense not because they’re forced to, but
because they fear being sued if they don’t and then something goes wrong?

I see this all the time in medicine. A patient goes to the hospital with a heart
attack. While he’s recovering, he tells his doctor that he’s really upset about all
of this. Any normal person would say “You had a heart attack, of course you’re
upset, get over it.” But if his doctor says this, and then a year later he commits
suicide for some unrelated reason, his family can sue the doctor for “not
picking up the warning signs” and win several million dollars. So now the
doctor consults a psychiatrist, who does an hour-long evaluation, charges the
insurance company $500, and determines using her immense clinical
expertise that the patient is upset because he just had a heart attack.

Those outside the field have no idea how much of medicine is built on this
principle. People often say that the importance of lawsuits to medical cost
increases is overrated because malpractice insurance doesn’t cost that much,
but the situation above would never look lawsuit-related; the whole thing only
works because everyone involved documents it as well-justified psychiatric
consult to investigate depression. Apparently some studies suggest this isn’t
happening, but all they do is survey doctors, and with all due respect all the
doctors I know say the opposite.

This has nothing to do with government regulations (except insofar as these

make lawsuits easier or harder), but it sure can drive cost increases, and it
might apply to fields outside medicine as well.

Sixth, might we have changed our level of risk tolerance? That is, might
increased caution be due not purely to lawsuitphobia, but to really caring more
about whether or not people are protected? I read stuff every so often about
how playgrounds are becoming obsolete because nobody wants to let kids run
around unsupervised on something with sharp edges. Suppose that one in
10,000 kids get a horrible playground-related injury. Is it worth making
playgrounds cost twice as much and be half as fun in order to decrease that
number to one in 100,000? This isn’t a rhetorical question; I think different
people can have legitimately different opinions here (though there are
probably some utilitarian things we can do to improve them).

To bring back the lawsuit point, some of this probably relates to a difference
between personal versus institutional risk tolerance. Every so often, an elderly
person getting up to walk to the bathroom will fall and break their hip. This is
a fact of life, and elderly people deal with it every day. Most elderly people I
know don’t spend thousands of dollars fall-proofing the route from their bed
to their bathroom, or hiring people to watch them at every moment to make
sure they don’t fall, or buy a bedside commode to make bathroom-related falls
impossible. This suggests a revealed preference that elderly people are willing
to tolerate a certain fall probability in order to save money and convenience.
Hospitals, which face huge lawsuits if any elderly person falls on the premises,
are not willing to tolerate that probability. They put rails on elderly people’s
beds, place alarms on them that will go off if the elderly person tries to leave
the bed without permission, and hire patient care assistants who among other
things go around carefully holding elderly people upright as they walk to the
bathroom (I assume this job will soon require at least a master’s degree). As
more things become institutionalized and the level of acceptable institutional
risk tolerance becomes lower, this could shift the cost-risk tradeoff even if
there isn’t a population-level trend towards more risk-aversion.

Seventh, might things cost more for the people who pay because so many
people don’t pay? This is somewhat true of colleges, where an increasing
number of people are getting in on scholarships funded by the tuition of non-
scholarship students. I haven’t been able to find great statistics on this, but
one argument against: couldn’t a college just not fund scholarships, and offer
much lower prices to its paying students? I get that scholarships are good and
altruistic, but it would be surprising if every single college thought of its role as
an altruistic institution, and cared about it more than they cared about
providing the same service at a better price. I guess this is related to my
confusion about why more people don’t open up colleges. Maybe this is the
“smart people are rightly too scared and confused to go to for-profit colleges,
and there’s not enough ability to discriminate between the good and the bad
ones to make it worthwhile to found a good one” thing again.

This also applies in health care. Our hospital (and every other hospital in the
country) has some “frequent flier” patients who overdose on meth at least
once a week. They comes in, get treated for their meth overdose (we can’t
legally turn away emergency cases), get advised to get help for their meth
addiction (without the slightest expectation that they will take our advice) and
then get discharged. Most of them are poor and have no insurance, but each
admission costs a couple of thousand dollars. The cost gets paid by a
combination of taxpayers and other hospital patients with good insurance who
get big markups on their own bills.

Eighth, might total compensation be increasing even though wages aren’t?

There definitely seems to be a pensions crisis, especially in a lot of government
work, and it’s possible that some of this is going to pay the pensions of
teachers, etc. My understanding is that in general pensions aren’t really
increasing much faster than wages, but this might not be true in those specific
industries. Also, this might pass the buck to the question of why we need to
spend more on pensions now than in the past. I don’t think increasing life
expectancy explains all of this, but I might be wrong.

V.

I mentioned politics briefly above, but they probably deserve more space here.
Libertarian-minded people keep talking about how there’s too much red tape
and the economy is being throttled. And less libertarian-minded people keep
interpreting it as not caring about the poor, or not understanding that
government has an important role in a civilized society, or as a “dog whistle”
for racism, or whatever. I don’t know why more people don’t just come out
and say “LOOK, REALLY OUR MAIN PROBLEM IS THAT ALL THE MOST
IMPORTANT THINGS COST TEN TIMES AS MUCH AS THEY USED TO
FOR NO REASON, PLUS THEY SEEM TO BE GOING DOWN IN QUALITY,
AND NOBODY KNOWS WHY, AND WE’RE MOSTLY JUST DESPERATELY
FLAILING AROUND LOOKING FOR SOLUTIONS HERE.” State that clearly,
and a lot of political debates take on a different light.

For example: some people promote free universal college education,

remembering a time when it was easy for middle class people to afford college
if they wanted it. Other people oppose the policy, remembering a time when
people didn’t depend on government handouts. Both are true! My uncle paid
for his tuition at a really good college just by working a pretty easy summer job
– not so hard when college cost a tenth of what it did now. The modern
conflict between opponents and proponents of free college education is over
how to distribute our losses. In the old days, we could combine low taxes with
widely available education. Now we can’t, and we have to argue about which
value to sacrifice.

Or: some people get upset about teachers’ unions, saying they must be sucking
the “dynamism” out of education because of increasing costs. Others people
fiercely defend them, saying teachers are underpaid and overworked. Once
again, in the context of cost disease, both are obviously true. The taxpayers are
just trying to protect their right to get education as cheaply as they used to.
The teachers are trying to protect their right to make as much money as they
used to. The conflict between the taxpayers and the teachers’ unions is about
how to distribute losses; somebody is going to have to be worse off than they
were a generation ago, so who should it be?

And the same is true to greater or lesser degrees in the various debates over
health care, public housing, et cetera.

Imagine if tomorrow, the price of water dectupled. Suddenly people have to

choose between drinking and washing dishes. Activists argue that taking a
shower is a basic human right, and grumpy talk show hosts point out that in
their day, parents taught their children not to waste water. A coalition
promotes laws ensuring government-subsidized free water for poor families; a
Fox News investigative report shows that some people receiving water on the
government dime are taking long luxurious showers. Everyone gets really
angry and there’s lots of talk about basic compassion and personal
responsibility and whatever but all of this is secondary to why does water
costs ten times what it used to?

I think this is the basic intuition behind so many people, even those who
genuinely want to help the poor, are afraid of “tax and spend” policies. In the
context of cost disease, these look like industries constantly doubling, tripling,
or dectupling their price, and the government saying “Okay, fine,” and
increasing taxes however much it costs to pay for whatever they’re demanding
now.

If we give everyone free college education, that solves a big social problem. It
also locks in a price which is ten times too high for no reason. This isn’t fair to
the government, which has to pay ten times more than it should. It’s not fair to
the poor people, who have to face the stigma of accepting handouts for
something they could easily have afforded themselves if it was at its proper
price. And it’s not fair to future generations if colleges take this opportunity to
increase the cost by twenty times, and then our children have to subsidize
that.

I’m not sure how many people currently opposed to paying for free health
care, or free college, or whatever, would be happy to pay for health care that
cost less, that was less wasteful and more efficient, and whose price we
expected to go down rather than up with every passing year. I expect it would
be a lot.
And if it isn’t, who cares? The people who want to help the poor have enough
political capital to spend eg $500 billion on Medicaid; if that were to go ten
times further, then everyone could get the health care they need without any
more political action needed. If some government program found a way to
give poor people good health insurance for a few hundred dollars a year,
college tuition for about a thousand, and housing for only two-thirds what it
costs now, that would be the greatest anti-poverty advance in history. That
program is called “having things be as efficient as they were a few decades
ago”.

VI.

In 1930, economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that his grandchildrens’

generation would have a 15 hour work week. At the time, it made sense. GDP
was rising so quickly that anyone who could draw a line on a graph could tell
that our generation would be four or five times richer than his. And the
average middle-class person in his generation felt like they were doing pretty
well and had most of what they needed. Why wouldn’t they decide to take
some time off and settle for a lifestyle merely twice as luxurious as Keynes’
own?

Keynes was sort of right. GDP per capita is 4-5x greater today than in his time.
Yet we still work forty hour weeks, and some large-but-inconsistently-reported
percent of Americans (76? 55? 47?) still live paycheck to paycheck.

And yes, part of this is because inequality is increasing and most of the gains
are going to the rich. But this alone wouldn’t be a disaster; we’d get to Keynes’
utopia a little slower than we might otherwise, but eventually we’d get there.
Most gains going to the rich means at least some gains are going to the poor.
And at least there’s a lot of mainstream awareness of the problem.

I’m more worried about the part where the cost of basic human needs goes up
faster than wages do. Even if you’re making twice as much money, if your
health care and education and so on cost ten times as much, you’re going to
start falling behind. Right now the standard of living isn’t just stagnant, it’s at
risk of declining, and a lot of that is student loans and health insurance costs
and so on.
What’s happening? I don’t know and I find it really scary.

Highlights From The Comments On Cost Disease

I got many good responses to my Considerations On Cost Disease post, both in
the comments and elsewhere. A lot of people thought the explanation was
obvious; unfortunately, they all disagreed on what the obvious explanation
was. Below are some of the responses I found most interesting.

John Cochrane:

So, what is really happening? I think Scott nearly gets there. Things cost 10
times as much, 10 times more than they used to and 10 times more than in
other countries. It’s not going to wages. It’s not going to profits. So where is it
going?

The unavoidable answer: The number of people it takes to produce these

goods is skyrocketing. Labor productivity — number of people per quality
adjusted output — declined by a factor of 10 in these areas. It pretty much has
to be that: if the money is not going to profits, to to each employee, it must be
going to the number of employees.

How can that happen? Our machines are better than ever, as Scott points out.
Well, we (and especially we economists) pay too much attention to snazzy
gadgets. Productivity depends on organizations not just on gadgets. Southwest
figured out how to turn an airplane around in 20 minutes, and it still takes
United an hour.

Contrariwise, I think we know where the extra people are. The ratio of
teachers to students hasn’t gone down a lot — but the ratio of administrators
to students has shot up. Most large public school systems spend more than
half their budget on administrators. Similarly, class sizes at most colleges and
universities haven’t changed that much — but administrative staff have
exploded. There are 2.5 people handling insurance claims for every doctor.
Construction sites have always had a lot of people standing around for every
one actually working the machine. But now for every person operating the
machine there is an army of planners, regulators, lawyers, administrative staff,
consultants and so on. (I welcome pointers to good graphs and numbers on
this sort of thing.)

So, my bottom line: administrative bloat.

Well, how does bloat come about? Regulations and law are, as Scott mentions,
part of the problem. These are all areas either run by the government or with
large government involvement. But the real key is, I think lack of competition.
These are above all areas with not much competition. In turn, however, they
are not by a long shot “natural monopolies” or failure of some free market. The
main effect of our regulatory and legal system is not so much to directly raise
costs, as it is to lessen competition (that is often its purpose). The lack of
competition leads to the cost disease.

Though textbooks teach that monopoly leads to profits, it doesn’t “The best of
all monopoly profits is a quiet life” said Hicks. Everywhere we see businesses
protected from competition, especially highly regulated businesses, we see the
cost disease spreading. And it spreads largely by forcing companies to hire
loads of useless people.

Yes, technical regress can happen. Productivity depends as much on the

functioning of large organizations, and the overall legal and regulatory system
in which they operate, as it does on gadgets. We can indeed “forget” how those
work. Like our ancestors peer at the buildings, aqueducts, dams, roads, and
bridges put up by our ancestors, whether Roman or American, and wonder
just how they did it.

David Manheim:

I think there is another dynamic that’s being ignored — and I would be

surprised if an economist ignored it, but I’ll blame Scott’s eclectic ad-hoc
education for why he doesn’t discuss the elephant in the room — Superior
goods.

For those who don’t remember their Economics classes, imagine a guy who
makes $40,000/year and eats chicken for dinner 3 nights a week. He gets a
huge 50% raise, to $60,000/year, and suddenly has extra money to spend — 
his disposable income probably tripled or quadrupled. Before the hedonic
treadmill kicks in, and he decides to waste all the money on higher rent and
nicer cars, he changes his diet. But he won’t start eating chicken 10 times a
week — he’ll start eating steak. When people get more money, they replace
cheap “inferior” goods with expensive “superior” goods. And steak is a
superior good.

But how many times a week will people eat steak? Two? Five? Americans as a
whole got really rich in the 1940s and 1950s, and needed someplace to start
spending their newfound wealth. What do people spend extra money on?
Entertainment is now pretty cheap, and there are only so many nights a week
you see a movie, and only so many $20/month MMORPGs you’re going to pay
for. You aren’t going to pay 5 times as much for a slightly better video game or
movie — and although you might pay double for 3D-Imax, there’s not much
room for growth in that 5%.

The Atlantic had a piece on this several years ago, with the following chart:

Food, including rising steak consumption, decreased to a negligible part of

people’s budgets, as housing started rising.In this chart, the reason healthcare
hasn’t really shot up to the extent Scott discussed, as the article notes, is
because most of the cost is via pre-tax employer spending. The other big
change the article discusses is that after 1950 or so, everyone got cars, and
commuted from their more expensive suburban houses — which is effectively
an implicit increase in housing cost.

And at some point, bigger houses and nicer cars begin to saturate; a Tesla is
nicer than my Hyundai, and I’d love one, but not enough to upgrade for 3x the
cost. I know how much better a Tesla is — I’ve seen them.

Limitless Demand, Invisible Supply

There are only a few things that we have a limitless demand for, but very
limited ability to judge the impact of our spending. What are they?

I think this is one big missing piece of the puzzle; in both healthcare and
education, we want improvements, and they are worth a ton, but we can’t
figure out how much the marginal spending improves things. So we pour
money into these sectors.

Scott thinks this means that teachers’ and doctors’ wages should rise, but they
don’t. I think it’s obvious why; they supply isn’t very limited. And the marginal
impact of two teachers versus one, or a team of doctors versus one, isn’t huge.
(Class size matters, but we have tons of teachers — with no shortage in sight,
there is no price pressure.)

What sucks up the increased money? Dollars, both public and private, chasing
hard to find benefits.

I’d spend money to improve my health, both mental and physical, but how?
Extra medical diagnostics to catch problems, pricier but marginally more
effective drugs, chiropractors, probably useless supplements — all are
exploding in popularity. How much do they improve health? I don’t really
know — not much, but I’d probably try something if it might be useful.

I’m spending a ton of money on preschool for my kids. Why? Because it helps,
according to the studies. How much better is the $15,000/year daycare versus
the $8,000 a year program a friend of mine runs in her house? Unclear, but
I’m certainly not the only one spending big bucks. Why spend less, if
education is the most superior good around?
How much better is Harvard than a subsidized in-state school, or four years of
that school versus 2 years of cheap community college before transferring in?
The studies seem to suggest that most of the benefit is really because the kids
who get into the better schools. And Scott knows that this is happening.

We pour money into schools and medicine in order to improve things, but
where does the money go? Into efforts to improve things, of course. But I’ve
argued at length before that bureaucracy is bad at incentivizing things,
especially when goals are unclear. So the money goes to sinkholes like more
bureaucrats and clever manipulation of the metrics that are used to allocate
the money.

As long as we’re incentivized to improve things that we’re unsure how to

improve, the incentives to pour money into them unwisely will continue, and
costs will rise. That’s not the entire answer, but it’s a central dynamic that
leads to many of the things Scott is talking about — so hopefully that reduces
Scott’s fears a bit.

A reader who wishes to remain anonymous emails me, saying:

In the business I know – hedge funds – I am aware of tiny operators running

perfectly functional one-person shops on a shoestring, who take advantage of
workarounds for legal and regulatory costs (like http://www.riainabox.com/).
Then there are folks like me who are trying to “be legit” and hope to attract the
big money from pensions and big banks. Those folks’ decisions are all made
across major principal/agent divides where agents are incentivized not to take
risks. So, they force hedge funds into an arms race of insanely paranoid “best
practices” to compete for their money. So… my set up costs (which so far seem
to have been too little rather than too much) were more than 10x what they
could have been.

I guess this supports the “institutional risk tolerance” angle. There must be
similar massive unseen frictions probably in many industries that go into
“checking boxes”.

Relatedly, a pet theory of mine is that “organizational complexity” imposes

enormous and not fully appreciated costs, which probably grow quadratically
with organization size. I’d predict, without Googling, that the the US military,
just as a function of being so large, has >75% of its personal doing effectively
administrative/logistical things, and that you could probably find funny
examples of organizational-overhead-proliferation like an HR department so
big it needed its own (meta-)HR department.

Noah Smith:

That could be one force behind rising costs; it definitely seems important for
K-12 education. But it doesn’t explain why the U.S. is so much worse than
countries such as France, Germany or Japan. Those countries are about as
productive as the U.S., so their cost disease should be comparable. Something
else must be afoot.

Another usual suspect is government intervention. The government subsidizes

college through cheap loans, purchases infrastructure, restricts housing
supply, and intervenes heavily in the health-care market. It’s probably part of
the problem in these areas, especially in urban housing markets.

But again, government intervention struggles to explain the difference

between the U.S. and other rich nations. In most countries, health care is
mainly paid for by the government — many countries have nationalized the
industry outright. Yet their health outcomes are broadly similar to those in the
U.S., or even a little bit better. Other countries have strong unions and high
land acquisition costs — often stronger and higher than the U.S. — but their
infrastructure is much cheaper. And there is no law or regulation propping up
high wealth-management fees or real-estate commissions. In general, lower-
cost places like Japan and Europe have more regulation and more
interventionism than the U.S.

So if cost disease and government can at most be only part of the story, what’s
going on? One possibility Alexander raises is that “markets might just not
work.” In other words, there might be large market failures going on.

The health-care market naturally has a lot of adverse selection — people with
poor health are more inclined to buy insurance. That means insurance
companies, knowing its customers tend to be those with poorer health, charge
higher prices. Also, hospitals could be local monopolies. And college education
could be costly in part because of asymmetric information — if Americans tend
to vary more than people in other countries with respect to work ethnic and
natural ability, they might have to spend more on college to prove themselves.
This is known as signaling.

When high costs are due to market failures, interventionist government can be
the solution instead of the problem — provided the intervention is done right.
So the more active governments of countries like Europe and Japan might be
successfully holding down costs that would otherwise balloon to inefficient
levels.

But there’s one more possibility — one that gets taught in few economics
classes. There is almost certainly some level of pure trickery in the economy —
people paying more than they should, because they don’t have the time or
knowledge to look for better prices, or because they trust people they
shouldn’t trust.

This is the thesis of the book “Phishing for Phools,” by Nobel-winning

economists George Akerlof and Robert Shiller. The authors advance the
disturbing thesis that sellers will continually look for ways to dupe customers
into paying more than they should, and that these efforts will always be
partially successful. In Akerlof and Shiller’s reckoning, markets don’t just
sometimes fail — they are inherently subject to both deceit and mistakes.

That could explain a number of unsettling empirical results in the economics

literature. For example, transparency reduces prices substantially in health-
care equipment markets. More complex and opaque mortgage-backed
securities failed at higher rates in the financial crisis. In these and other cases,
buyers paid too much because they didn’t know what they were buying.
Whether that’s due to trickery, or to the difficulty of gathering accurate
information, it’s not good — in an efficient economy, everyone will know what
they’re buying.

So it’s possible that many of those anomalously high U.S. costs are due to the
natural informational problems of markets.

Megan McArdle:

It’s pretty easy to tell a libertarian story where markets work fine, but
government intrusions into these markets have rendered them so unfree that
they no longer function the way they’re supposed to. And I think that is at least
part of the story here. Yes, these things are often procured from private
parties. But everywhere you look you see the government: blocking new entry
(through accreditation standards, “certificate of need” laws, and zoning and
building codes), while simultaneously subsidizing the purchases through
artificially cheap loans and often, direct price subsidies. It would be sort of
shocking if restricted supply combined with stimulated demand didn’t
produce rapidly rising prices. Meanwhile, in areas that the government largely
leaves alone (such as Lasik), we pretty much see what you’d expect: falling
prices and improving consumer service.

But that’s perhaps a little simplistic. Agriculture is also the focus of a great
deal of government intervention, as are sundry things such as air travel, and
we don’t see the same phenomenon there. So we need to dig a little deeper and
describe what’s special about these three sectors (we’ll leave public
transportation out of it, because there, the answer is pretty much “union
featherbedding combined with increasingly dysfunctional procurement and
regulatory processes”).

First, and most obviously, they involve vital purchases made on long time
horizons, and with considerable uncertainty. Food is more vital than health
care to our well-being, but its price and quality are really easy to assess: if you
buy a piece of fruit, you know pretty quickly whether you liked it or not. This is
a robust market, and it’s going to take communist-level intervention to
fundamentally mess it up so that food is both scarce and not very good.

Homes, schooling and health care, on the other hand, are more complicated
products. You don’t know when you buy them how much value they will be to
you, and it is often difficult for a lay person to assess the quality of the
product. You can read hospital rankings and pay a home inspector, but these
things only go so far.

The fact that these are expensive purchases that can go terribly wrong creates
a great deal of pressure for the government to intervene. As ours has, over and
over, in all sorts of ways.

And at the risk of giving up a little bit of my libertarian cred, I’ll say that
government intervention in these markets did not have to be as expensive-
making as it has turned out to be in America. Other countries have these sorts
of problems too, but they’re nowhere near as large as ours.

Part of that is just that we’re richer than most of those other countries. We
were going to spend the portion of our budgets no longer needed for food
somewhere, and health care, education and housing are pretty good
candidates. But that’s only part of the story. A big part of the story is that
America just isn’t very good at regulation. When you talk to people who live
elsewhere about what their government does, one thing that really strikes you
about those conversations is how much more competent other rich industrial
governments seem to be at regulating things and delivering services. Their
bureaucracies are not perfect, but they are better than ours.

That’s not to say that America could have an awesome big government. Our
regulatory state has been incompetent compared to others for decades, since
long before the Reagan Revolution that Democrats like to blame. There are
many, many factors in this, from our immigration history (vital to
understanding how modern urban bureaucracies work in this country), to the
fact that we have many competing centers of power instead of a single unified
government providing over a single bureaucratic hierarchy. There is no way to
fix this on a national level, and even at the level of local bureaucratic reform,
it’s darned near impossible.

In other words, this is probably what we’re stuck with. It may not be Baumol’s
cost disease — but it’s potentially even more serious, and it’s going to be a
lingering condition.

Scott Sumner:

I certainly don’t claim to have all the answers, but I do feel that much of the
problem reflects the fact that governments often cover the cost of services in
those three areas. This leads producers to spend more than the socially
optimal amount on these products. I’m going to provide some examples, but
before doing so recall that economic theory predicts that costs in those areas
should be wildly excessive. If the government paid 90% of the cost of any car
you bought, and that didn’t lead to lots more people buying Porsches and
Ferraris, then we’d have a major puzzle on our hands.
Scott mentions that private for-profit hospitals are also quite expensive. But
even there, costs are largely paid for by the government. Close to half of all
health care spending is directly paid for by the government (Medicare,
Medicaid, Veterans, government employees, etc.) and a large share of the rest
is indirectly paid for by taxpayers because health insurance is not just income
tax free, but also payroll tax free. I’d be stunned if health care spending had
not soared in recent decades.

A sizable share of my health care spending has been unneeded, and I’m fairly
healthy. I met one person in their 80s who had a normal cold and went to see
the doctor. They said it was probably just a normal cold, but let’s put you in
the hospital overnight and do some tests, just in case. There was nothing
wrong, and the bill the next day was something in the $5000 to $10,000
range, I forget the exact amount. This must happen all the time. No way would
they have opted for those services if Medicare weren’t picking up the tab.

Just to be clear, I don’t think any monocausal explanation is enough.

Governments also pay for health care in other countries, and the costs are far
lower. It’s likely the interaction of the US government picking up much of the
tab, plus insurance regulations, plus American-style litigation, plus powerful
provider lobbies that prevent European-style cost controls, etc., etc., lead to
our unusually high cost structure. So don’t take this as a screed against
“socialized medicine.” I’m making a narrower point, that a country where the
government picks up most of the costs, and doesn’t have effective regulations
to hold down spending, is likely to end up with very expensive medicine.

To be fair, there is evidence from veterinary medicine that demand for pet care
has also soared, and that suggests people are becoming more risk averse, even
for their pets. But there is also evidence cutting the other way. Plastic surgery
has not seen costs skyrocket. (Both are medical fields where people tend to pay
out of pocket.)

I started working at Bentley in 1982, teaching 4 courses a semester. When I

retired in 2015, I was making 7 times as much in nominal terms (nearly 3
times as much in real terms), and I was teaching 2 courses per semester. Thus
I was being paid 14 times more per class (nearly 6 times as much in real
terms). No wonder higher education costs have soared! (Even salaries for new
hires have risen sharply in real terms.) Interestingly, the size of the student
body at Bentley didn’t change noticeably over that period (about 4000
undergrads.) But the physical size of the school rose dramatically, with many
new buildings full of much fancier equipment. Right now they are building a
new hockey arena. There are more non-teaching employees. You can debate
whether living standards for Americans have risen over time, but there’s no
doubt that living standards for Americans age 18-22 have risen over time—by
a lot.

As far as elementary school, my daughter had 2, 3, and once even 4 teachers in

her classroom, with about 18 students. We had one teacher for 30 students
when I was young. (I’m told classes are even bigger in Japan, and they don’t
have janitors in their schools. The students must mop the floors. I love Japan!)

There are also lots more rules and regulations. By the end of my career, I felt
almost like I was spending as much time teaching 2 classes as I used to spend
teaching 4. Many of these rules were well intentioned, but in the end I really
don’t think they led to students learning any more than back in 1982. I wonder
if Dodd/Frank is now making small town banking a frustrating profession in
the way that earlier regs made medicine and teaching increasingly frustrating
professions.

People say this is a disease of the service sector. But I don’t see skyrocketing
prices in restaurants, dry cleaners, barbers and lots of other service industries
where people pay out of pocket.

The same is true of construction. Scott estimates that NYC subways cost 20
times as much as in 1900, even adjusting for inflation. The real cost of other
types of construction (such as new homes), has risen far less. Again, people
pay for homes out of pocket, but government pays for subways. Do I even need
to mention the cost of weapons system like the F-35?

To summarize, the case of pet medicine shows that costs can rise rapidly even
when people pay out of pocket. But the biggest and most important examples
of cost inflation are in precisely those industries where government picks up a
major part of the tab–health, education, and government procurement of
complex products. And excessive cost inflation is exactly what economic
theory predicts will happen when governments heavily subsidize an activity,
without adequate cost regulations. Just as excessive risk taking is exactly what
economic theory predicts will happen if government insures bank deposits,
without adequate risk regulations. Let’s not be surprised if the things that
happen, are exactly what the textbooks predict would happen. Even FDR
predicted that deposit insurance would lead to reckless behavior by banks, and
he (reluctantly) signed the bill into law.

Sohois:

I’ve seen some evidence that corporations can be equally vulnerable to cost
disease as public institutions.

For example, since the 1980s CEO pay has quintupled despite the lack of any
growth in profits or otherwise to justify this. Now this is probably going to
result in far smaller effects on overall cost, but it still stands as a
demonstration of how market failure can occur and result in large cost
increases in these firms.

I would venture that many firms have seen huge increases in both revenues
and costs so that when you adjust profit for inflation it hasn’t really changed at
all, on average.

Andrew Swift

What you observe is fifty years of optimization of wealth extraction. Price

outcomes depend on the contributions of hundreds of participants. Every
participant optimizes his/her earnings, exerting a constant upward pressure
on price. Participants become ever more expert at getting rich. Wealth-
extraction schemes (scams) are refined and optimized (in all markets), and
price increases are pushed downstream (in markets where buyers can’t push
back). Radical price increases reflect markets where consumers have reduced
ability to push back:

– complex markets (can’t understand)

– opaque markets (can’t see)

– entrenched/highly-regulated markets (can’t modify)

– necessary-to-keep-living markets (can’t avoid)

– limited-quantity markets (really want)

– intermediated markets where the end buyer doesn’t decide how things are
purchased (don’t choose)

Some systems are resistant to contributors’ efforts to extract wealth and some
systems are not. There’s an equilibrium between cost and readiness to pay. To
reduce the costs in expensive domains, willingness to pay the high costs has to
be reduced. As long as the buyer won’t or can’t say no, costs will increase
through the entire production process. There won’t necessarily be one big
obvious rip-off, but every participant will optimize the heck out of his
contribution and the overall pressure will push costs up.

Could one provide a cheaper alternative in these domains? Sure for a little
while, but if the bottom line is that people are willing to pay more for the
service the prices will creep back up.

The only exception would be where the new, lower-priced, alternative sets a
new standard and buyers refuse to continue paying the old prices. See https://
stratechery.com/2016/dollar-shave-club-and-the-disruption-of-everything/
for a great article about this.

Habu71:

My favorite example of ridiculous order-of-magnitude type cost increases is

nuclear power plant construction costs. The plots from this paper illustrate it
nicely.

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/292964046_fig6_Overnight-
Construction-Cost-and-Construction-Duration-of-US-Nuclear-Reactors-Color

Except, in the case of power plant costs, the causes – at least, for the
increasing US costs – are quite a bit more apparent. Pre TMI, US costs were in
line with the rest of the world’s cost. Post TMI, not so much. New regulatory
burdens all by themselves increased the cost of new plants by a factor of ten.
Now, this is of course not proof that any of the other problems that Scott
mentioned are entirely – or even mostly – caused by increasing regulatory
burdens. It does however, show that government institutions as awful as the
NRC do exist, and that their effects can raise costs by the amounts seen health
care, education, etc…”

John Schilling:

[Fear of lawsuits] is well understood as the cause of the substantial rise in light
airplane prices since 1970. A single-engine, four-seat Cessna 172 cost an
inflation-adjusted $77,000 in 1970. A substantially identical airplane cost
$163,000 in 1986. And went out of production the next year, because people
weren’t willing to pay that price. When congress passed laws relaxing the
manufacturer’s liability for older airplanes, Cessna was able to reinstate
production in 1996 at an inflation-adjusted $190,000. Today, the price seems
to literally be “if you have to ask, you can’t afford it”; the manufacturer only
advertises fleet sales, but I’d estimate about $400,000 (of which ~$100K is
fancy electronics that didn’t exist in 1986 and weren’t standard in 1996).

In this case it is particularly easy to pull out the lawsuit/liability effect because
there aren’t many cofounders. The 1986 Cessna is so little changed from the
1970 model that they sell at about the same price on the used market when
controlled for condition and total flight time. And fear of lawsuits didn’t
manifest as safety enhancements of inscrutable cost and value, because light
airplane crashes are almost always due to Stupid Pilot Tricks and almost
everything that a manufacturer could do to mitigate that (e.g. tricycle landing
gear) was standard in 1970. But the manufacturers still get sued, and have to
pay millions, so there’s nothing to be done but pay for liability insurance. And,
second-order effect, cut production when your customers start balking at the
increased prices, so you have to amortize the fixed costs of actually building
airplanes over a smaller sales volume.

So, a doubling in price over fifteen or so years, a quadrupling over fifty years
in spite of Congress noticing the problem and trying to mitigate it, attributable
to safety/liability concerns but not resulting in actual safety improvements. I
have no trouble believing something similar is happening in other industries
but is harder to discern because too many other things are happening at the
same time.

Alex Zavoluk
Wikipedia suggests that almost all of those other countries have litigation
rules that make weak civil cases more costly, which seems like evidence in
favor of the litigation hypothesis. It also means that there’s a relatively
straightforward solution.

Doug on Marginal Revolution, in response to a lot of people asking whether

maybe we were just calculating the CPI wrong:

That’s a plausible hypothesis, but viewed through that frame of reference,

median wages have also gone down tremendously. It’s still the case that the
median person spends at least six times more of their paycheck on healthcare.
If healthcare is a closer metric to “true prices” then manufactured good, then
that means median wages have fallen by around 80%. It also means that
overall GDP has crashed since 1970, since the price deflator now averages
6-7%, and nominal GDP has only averaged around 4%. It would mean that the
economy has literally been in recession 90% of the past 40 years.

The only reason we’re not all starving in the street is from the miraculous
gains in manufacturing productivity and automation. But again, in this
framework, that process is largely exogenous to the terrible macroeconomic
situation. If those gains slow down even a little, and the macro trends
continue, we’re probably facing imminent economic collapse. So maybe this is
a plausible hypothesis, but it certainly comes with a whole lot of extreme
implications. I think medicine/education specific cost disease is a much more
likely explanation.

bkearns123:

One commonality in the examples cited is disintermediation/subsidies.

College is paid for by a third party, and financed by generous government
loans. Generous in the sense that they are easy to get, not easy to get out of.
Health care has massive tax subsidies, and for a good period of time felt “free”
to employees. Public schooling is paid for indirectly.

Regarding the section on risk aversion, I happen to be in the playground

business. The most common injury is broken bones from a fall. Consequently,
our industry has ended up with poured in place surfacing, which costs 10x as
much as mulch or pea gravel. It is wonderful stuff, but really increases the cost
of the playground. Again, no one pays directly for their playground, and the
paying party cannot risk not being in tune with the regulations.

Markets cannot function if the risk reward relationship is not direct.

fc123::

In all of these problem sectors it seems the resources consumed in each

industry has shifted to servicing and extending the definition of the marginal
‘customer’. This can explain I think some of the above

E.g.. 40 years ago hospitals received 100 customers. Ranked, patients 1-20
died. And no one really tried to save them (some comfort but that was it).
Today they are trying (are obliged) to try to save patients no 5-15 (the 85 year
old with triple bypass, 20 week premie). The total no of staff needed for this
task swamps increases in individual productivity. You just need more people,
even if they each are more productive or trained than in the pasts. So salaries
for each does not go up that much, there are just more of them, total cost go
up, and outcomes over the patients treated are somewhat but not much better
(some now make it but some fraction still die). Hence medical curve shows
some improvement but not 1:1 with cost.

In education, in the 1950-1970s we could afford to socially promote non-

academically inclined students, not really expend effort on them as long as
they kept quiet in class, then have them leave at age 16 to go work at Ford.
Universities could count on getting the higher performing students. Today, we
have to deliver much weaker students all the way to the end of high school,
also force many into college. And ALL the extra resources go to get this new
lower end close to what used to be the minimal university student
performance. The top cohort gets little extra resources and has not really
improved. Hence, the scores across the new ‘extended’ student population
stays flat.

I base this partly on what I have seen from my wife (engineering professor at
top university), resources are heavily consumed by the lower performing
students, top students have better opportunities than 20 years ago but in
general the resources are much less focused on them than on the marginal
students.
So if you assume these industries for whatever reason shifted focus to
servicing deeper into the tail of the population aptitude/effort over the years (I
am not saying this is good/bad, was for social reasons, for humanistic reasons
or making any comment), this would very much explain the overall cost rise,
coupled with the lack of desired improvement in statistics measured across the
population that now gets services as a whole.

In short, in the US we define policies that drive costs based on the tail of the
population, but we experience performance on the average. As an immigrant
from a third world country I think this is a big difference often invisible to the
US-born citizens I talk to. Maybe why this is a great country and I am here. All
I can say is that it is a world view that is not common world wide. Where I
grew up, No Child Left Behind law would have been designed as 1 Child Left
Behind. There just were not the resources, but more important, it was just
more socially acceptable to just halve the no of slots halfway through an
academic program, for example.

So I guess the question is why are we so focused on pushing services into the
tails and will we continue to do so? Does society really benefit from having a
larger fraction of the population capable of doing crappy algebra? Clearly
there will be some point where the cost becomes prohibitive and it will stop:
maybe that is what we are seeing now. But it is stunning that this was a 50
year process — if the dynamics in social policy “markets” are that slow it is
going to be really difficult to manage.

CatCube::

I can’t help but wonder if part of the ever-expanding expenses isn’t that we
mediate our interactions through the legal system more than we used to.

What got me thinking about it was what I’m working on this week. To answer
Incurian’s question above about why I was posting during the workday, I was
avoiding working on a report for selecting a contractor for a project I’m
working on. (I owe the taxpayer about three hours this weekend, since I spent
time on Friday here and reading about the Oroville Dam spillway.)

We had contractors submit proposals, and we had two structural engineers

and a construction quality assurance rep sit in a room for three days, writing
our individual reports about each proposal, then coming to agreement about
how we rate them. Then I have to write a report summarizing all of our
individual reports, which gets fed into the arcane machine that will eventually
spit out an award. This process costs about $10,000, and had zero value for
evaluating the proposals. However, it has to be done this way or we’ll get
dragged around in court by an offeror’s lawyer if they choose to make a case of
their rejection. I think that in years past they’d use a simple low-bid process,
which has its own problems, or the rejected contractors would bitch to their
Congressmen or something but wouldn’t literally make a federal case of it.

LukHamilton:

I think you gave short shrift to libertarian explanations of this phenomena. In

particular, the Kling Theory of Public Choice may explain a significant fraction
of cost disease: public policy will always choose to subsidize demand and
restrict supply. If you restrict supply holding everything else equal, prices will
go up. If you subsidize demand holding everything else equal, prices will go
up. If you do both, prices will really go up.

(1) Healthcare: The government restricts the supply of all healthcare

professionals (for example, doctors, nurses, CNAs, pharmacists, dentists,
LPNs, etc.) via occupational licensing. (I should note that maybe everyone can
get behind the simple idea that the number of doctors per 10,000 people in
the US should at least remain constant over time and not go down, as it has.)
It restricts the supply of healthcare organizations (for example, hospitals,
surgery centers, etc.) via onerous regulations, like the very ridiculous
“certificate-of-need“. You have already explained in previous posts how things
like the FDA restrict the supply of generic drugs. In terms of demand, the
government subsidizes health insurance via the corporate income tax code,
CHIP, the Obamacare marketplace, Medicaid, Medicare, etc.

(2) Education: I have done less investigation into this sector’s regulations. You
mentioned Title IX. David Friedman has some nice blog posts on how the
American Bar Association’s regulations on law schools make cheap law
schools impossible. (This same concept also applies to healthcare-related
professional schools, by the way.) If Bryan Caplan is right about signaling, a
lot of education involves negative externalities, so it should be taxed or limited
by the government. Instead, it subsidizes demand via loans. K-12 education,
meanwhile, receives massive subsidies from the government; everyone can
enjoy a totally free K-12 education.

(3) Real estate: Land-use regulations restrict the supply of housing.

(Explanations of this can be found by googling “Matt Yglesias housing”.) It
also subsidizes housing via Section 8, various other HUD programs, Freddie
Mac, the mortgage-interest tax deduction, etc.

In short, any industry that the United States government has a heavy hand in
has/will experience cost disease.

BenWave:

Scott, help me out here because I’ve read a long article about the mysterious
nature of rising costs in certain sectors as well as hundreds of bemused
comments, and the article had no more than a throwaway paragraph saying
that maybe rising inequality is a sign that the ‘missing’ money is ending up in
the pockets of the super-wealthy elite.

I come from a left-wing perspective, so I hope you can see that to me ex nihilo,
“the super wealthy are becoming much richer than was historically the case,
also all of these important services are becoming way more expensive than
they used to be, but the one does not explain the other” looks like an
extraordinary claim. I would like to see more evidence presented that this is
not the case before updating in this direction!

In particular, I can see that a large majority of the odd features you have
picked out about these services are acting exactly as predicted in Das Kapital
volume 2, where Marx studies the process of realisation of invested capital (ie,
money spent on labour, materials, tools etc) as the principal plus surplus value
in money form. In particular, some of his predictions were:

1. Gains made by workers through collective action in sites of production can

be taken away again by the landlord, the grocer, the financier etc.

2. The difficulty in the realisation of capital will incentivise businesses to strive

for monopoly positions (whether by government mandate, mutual
cooperations, quasi-monopolies such as real estate, branding and advertising).
3. The tensions between the production of surplus value and the realisation of
surplus value will tend to set certain sectors of capital against one another –
for example landlords would prefer if workers were well paid, but had to
spend larger amounts of money on rent whereas factory owners would prefer
to pay workers as little as possible, and that includes low housing costs.

Later analysis in the tradition of Marx have noticed that financial capital these
days is doing very very well compared to workers, but also compared to
traditional industrialists. And four out of the five of your examples are fields in
which debt and financing plays a very large role. It’s pretty easy to see that
financial capital would be incentivised to make these things more expensive so
that they can extract more money through larger loans and financing. (I’m not
certain about subways. Are they typically debt-financed?).

Financial capital certainly has the economic and political power to push for
this, and they don’t particularly care if they squeeze other holders of capital
along they way. They are debt-financed fields in which large monopoly powers
exist for one reason or another. And while I acknowledge that bureacratic
bloat is certainly playing its role, I’m baffled by the relative lack of
consideration of normal capitalist tendencies on this thread. As far as I can see
it is the single most important factor driving up the costs of these services.
Please present me with evidence that I am wrong about this!

Some additional links less-directly related or less easy to excerpt:

National Center for Policy Analysis: Should All Medicine Work Like Cosmetic
Surgery?Because plastic surgery isn’t a life-or-death need, it’s not covered by
insurance. Costs in the sector have risen 30% since 1992, compared to 118%
for other types of health care. Does this mean that being sheltered from the
insurance system has sheltered it from cost disease?

The American Interest: Why Can’t We Have Nice Things? A breakdown of

exactly why infrastructure and transportation projects cost so much more in
the US than elsewhere, with an eye for Trump’s promise of $1 trillion extra
infrastructure spending.

Arnold Kling: What I Believe About Education. I have to include one “it’s all
the teachers’ unions fault” post for completeness here.
Neerav Kingsland on education spending and the role of charter schools

The comment thread on Marginal Revolution contains some insight

The Incidental Economist: What Makes The US Health Care System So

Expensive FAQ. From July 2011. Includes links to a lot of other things.

And some additional comments of my own:

I think any explanation that starts with “well, we have so much money now
that we have to spend it on something…” ignores that many people do not
have so much money, and in fact are really poor, but they get the same
education and health care as the rest of us. If the problem were just “rich
people looking for places to throw their money away”, there would be other
options for poor people who don’t want to do that, the same way rich people
have fancy restaurants where they can throw their money away and poor
people have McDonalds.

Any explanation of the form “evil capitalists are scamming the rest of us for
profit” has to explain why the cost increases are in the industries least exposed
to evil capitalists. K-12 education is entirely nonprofit. Colleges are a mix but
generally not owned by a single rich guy who gets all the money. My hospital is
owned by an order of nuns; studies show that government hospitals have
higher costs than for-profit ones. Meanwhile, the industries with the actual
evil capitalists – tech, retail, restaurants, natural resources – seem mostly
immune to the cost disease. This is not promising. Also, this wouldn’t explain
why so much of the money seems to be going to administrators/bells-and-
whistles. If prices increase by $100,000, and the money goes to hiring two
extra $50,000/year administrators, how does this help the capitalist profiting
off it all?

Any explanation of the form “administrative bloat” or “inefficiency” has to

explain why non-bloated alternatives don’t pop up or become popular. I’m
sure the CEO of Ford would love to just stop doing his job and approve every
single funding request that passes his desk and pay for it by jacking up the
price of cars, but at some point if he did that too much we’d all just buy
Toyotas instead. Although there are some barriers to competition in the
hospital market, there are fewer such barriers in the college, private school,
and ambulatory clinic market. Why hasn’t competition discouraged
administrative bloat here the same way it does in other industries?

Maybe a good time to reread the post How Likely Are Multifactorial Trends?

The Price Of Glee In China

I.

Noah Smith reviews recent economic research suggesting that globalization

was a net harm to working class people in rich countries like the US; he
tentatively suggests this could justify a weak form of protectionism. But Scott
Sumner argues that’s the wrong way to look at things. Globalization fueled
China’s transition from a poor agrarian economy to an industrialized modern
nation. A billion people were lifted out of poverty, an accomplishment Sumner
calls “the best thing that ever happened”. This is far more important than the
less dramatic costs imposed on the US. Therefore, even if we agree
globalization hurts the working class of rich nations, it’s still a morally
defensible policy since it benefits the needier working classes of much poorer
nations.

On the one hand, this makes sense. On the other, here’s happiness in China
over the past fifteen years:
Measuring happiness is really hard, but the Chinese result seems as robust as
any. You get the same thing if you ask about satisfaction versus dissatisfaction.
Brookings analyzes five different series of happiness data and concludes that
“the Chinese became less happy during their growth boom”. The New York
Times agrees and says that “Chinese people’s feelings of well-being have
declined in [this] period of momentous improvement in their economic lives”.
And this seems to be worst among the poorest Chinese:
Nor does this seem to be an effect from our happiness research just not being
good enough to capture changes in happiness even if they occur. There’s good
evidence that increased income within a country increases happiness, and
various other things have been found to be effective too. I would even argue
we can find happiness changes in nations – recent surveys have found Iraq
and Syria to be the least happy nations in the world, and I doubt this was true
before those countries’ respective wars. It seems to just be national GDP per
capita that doesn’t do anything.

This is Easterlin’s Paradox, the observation that a country in general does not
get happier as it becomes richer. This is very controversial, with statisticians
analyzing and reanalyzing data and crunching it a bunch of different ways. In
the latest volley in this eternal war, Easterlin’s side came out with data from 37
countries over 30 years, including many countries that underwent spectacular
growth during that time, and confirmed their original conclusion.

There are certainly graphs like this one that propose a nice clear log
relationship between income and happiness:

But I find the exact breakdown much more interesting:

Here we see a lot of cultural variation in this apparent happiness-income
relationship. For example, Latin American countries are consistently poor but
happy; Eastern European countries are usually richer but sadder than African
countries, et cetera. Looking at the original graph above, you’d expect Chinese
growth to make them much happier; looking at this graph, you notice that
China’s three rich neighbors – Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea – are all about
as happy as China. South Korea, despite making five times more money, is less
happy than China is. If China’s income quintuples, why would you expect it to
look like France or Ireland rather than South Korea?

Just to rub this in a little:

A UN report theorizes that although richer countries tend to be happier, this is
more likely due to factors other than income, like freedom, social trust, and
stable families. These may be stable on scales much longer than income is, and
may be related to culture.

II.

Let’s assume for a second that all this is true. National income does not matter
for national happiness, and if China’s growth continues to skyrocket then in
twenty years it will be as rich as Japan but not an iota happier than it is today.
What do we do with this kind of knowledge?

Or let me ask a more specific question. Suppose that some free trade pact will
increase US unemployment by 1%, but also accelerate the development of
some undeveloped foreign country like India into hyper-speed. In twenty
years, India’s GDP per capita will go from $1,500/year to $10,000/year. The
only cost will be a million or so extra unemployed Americans, plus all that coal
that the newly vibrant India is burning probably won’t be very good for the
fight against global warming.
Part of me wants to argue that obviously we should sign the trade pact; as
utilitarians we should agree with Sumner that lifting 1.4 billion Chinese out of
poverty was “the best thing that ever happened” and so lifting 1.2 billion
Indians out of poverty would be the second-best thing that ever happened, far
more important than any possible risks. But if Easterlin is right, those Indians
won’t be any happier, the utility gain will be nil, and all we will have done is
worsened global warming and kicked a million Americans out of work for no
reason (and they will definitely be unhappy).

Or since most of us don’t get the option to sign trade pacts, here’s a more
relevant question. Suppose we are effective altruists. We have the opportunity
to cure disease (at relatively high costs) or boost national development (at
relatively low costs). Assume the numbers work out such that if we took a
simple ‘development = good’ perspective, then donating to the development
charity would be a no-brainer. Should we donate to the disease-cure charity
anyway?

A couple of years ago, I learned that people who were paralyzed in car
accidents took a few months to adjust to their new situation, but after that
were no less happy than people who were still healthy and abled. Then last
December I learned that this was an urban legend, that people who were
paralyzed in car accidents were mostly as miserable as you would expect. But
for those few years while I still believed that particular factoid, I was a little
creeped out. Was a doctor who helps car accident victims recover their
function wasting her life? If people got genuine enjoyment from driving drunk
at 95 mph while shouting “WOOOOOOOOOOOOO!”, was there any reason to
make them stop, since they weren’t really hurting anybody?

(I admit I’m skipping over factors like how paralyzed people can’t earn any
income to pay into the tax system and stuff, but I’m just saying I would be
pretty creeped out if that were the only reason we should avoid car accidents.)

Again assuming I haven’t made some simple calculation mistake, I can think
of three ways to go from here. First, abandon consequentialism entirely (I
understand that having children will likely decrease my happiness, but I still
want to have children because I value them for non-utilitarian reasons).
Second, switch to a consequentialism based on non-subjective things like
maximizing development and industrialization as a terminal goal (Really?
Even if everyone hates it? Does it matter what the factories are building? How
about paper clips?). Third, switch to preference utilitarianism.

Preference utilitarianism is tempting and I was kind of in favor of it already,

but I don’t find it completely satisfying. Suppose I myself am an Indian
peasant. Should I have a preference for my society industrializing? If I’m not
going to be any happier after it does, and supposing there’s no inherent moral
value in industrialization, why bother? And if Indian peasants want their
country to industrialize anyway, aren’t we as Americans allowed to say we
don’t take their preference that seriously? If some hippie said they wanted to
go on some Spiritual Yoga Nature Retreat that would turn their life around
and bring them constant bliss, but we knew it was a complete fraud that
wouldn’t help them at all, would we still feel a moral obligation to help fund
that hippie’s retreat? How are the two situations different?

There’s a risk of being patronizing here – telling the Indians “Oh, you don’t
need to industrialize, it’s not so great anyway,” even while we ourselves enjoy
our nice food and flat-screen TVs. If we were to actively try to keep the Indians
from industrializing, that would be pretty awful. But that’s not the argument
at hand here. The argument at hand is “are we morally required to sacrifice
our own economy in order to help the Indians industrialize?”, and I feel like
that’s a hard sell if industrialization doesn’t really help the Indians.

And there’s also a risk that I might be misdefining happiness. Maybe every
way economists have hitherto measured happiness is hopelessly deficient, and
there’s some ineffable essence of happiness which, if we could get at it, would
increase during national development. I admit that all of these subjective well-
being indices are kind of sketchy and change a lot with the wording that you
use or don’t use.

A final option for rescuing common sense might be acknowledging that

economic progress doesn’t change happiness yet. That is, there are ways to
convert economic (and closely linked technological) progress into happiness,
but most countries are not making use of them – either for political reasons,
or because they don’t know about them, or because we haven’t gotten enough
technological and economic progress to reach them yet. This seems probably
true to me – if nothing else, a technological singularity ought to help – but this
situation looks a lot different from the situation where incremental progress
increases happiness. In particular, it would make us want to concentrate our
resources on increasing technological progress, perhaps in the richest
economies, rather than trying to help poor countries in particular.

None of these possibilities really appeal to me, and I am forced to

acknowledge that happiness research remains a very strange field whose
conclusions make no sense to me and which tempt me to crazy beliefs and
actions if I take them seriously.

I guess we’re done fighting racism. Good job, guys.

Things Probably Matter

A while back when I wrote about how China’s economic development might
not have increased happiness there much, Scott Sumner wrote a really
interesting response, Does Anything Matter?

He points out that it’s too easy to make this about exotic far-off Chinese. Much
the same phenomenon occurs closer to home:

If nothing really matters in China, if even overcoming horrible problems

doesn’t make the Chinese better off, then what’s the use of favoring or
opposing any public policy? After all, America also shows no rise in
average happiness since the 1950s, despite:
 1. A big rise in real wages.
2. Environmental clean-up (including lead–does Flint matter?)
3. Civil rights for African Americans
4. Feminism, gay rights.
5. Dentists now use Novocain (My childhood cavities were filled
without it)
6. 1000 channels in glorious widescreen HDTV
7. Blogs

I could go on and on. And yet, if the surveys are to be believed, we are no
happier than before. And I think it’s very possible that we are in fact no
happier than before, that there’s a sort of law of the conservation of
happiness. As I walk down the street, grown-ups don’t seem any happier
than the grown-ups I recall as a kid. Does that mean that all of those
wonderful societal achievements since 1950 were absolutely worthless?

But there are exceptions. I recall reading that surveys showed a rise in
European happiness in the decades after WWII, and Scott reports that
happiness is currently very low in Iraq and Syria. So that suggests that
current conditions do matter.

The following hypothesis will sound really ad hoc, but matches the way a
lot of people I know talk about their lives. Suppose people’s happiness is
normally calibrated around the sort of lifestyle that they view as
“normal.” As America got richer after 1950, it all seemed very normal, so
people didn’t report more happiness. Ditto for China during the boom
years. Everyone around you was also doing better, so you started
thinking about how you were doing relative to your neighbors. But
Germans walking through the rubble of Berlin in 1948, or Syrians doing
so today in Aleppo, do see their plight as abnormal. They remember a
time before the war. So they report less happiness than during normal
times.

The obvious retort is – modern Chinese grew up when China was very poor.
Why didn’t they calibrate themselves to poverty, such that sudden wealth
seems good? What’s the difference between a Chinese person going from
poverty to wealth, versus a Syrian going from stability to chaos? Might it be a
shorter time course? A sudden shock is noticeable, a gradual thirty-year
improvement in living standards isn’t?

Probably not. There seem to be a lot of cases where happiness of large groups
does change gradually in response to social trends less dramatic than a world
war.

First, consider African-Americans. The New York Times calls the increase in
black happiness over the past forty years “one of the most dramatic gains in
the happiness data that you’ll see”. This is not just about poverty; in 1970,
blacks who earned more than 75% of whites were only in the tenth percentile
of white happiness. Today, those blacks would be in the fiftieth percentile;
they’re still doing worse than would be expected based on income, but not
nearly as much worse. This is a very sensible and predictable thing to find.
Black people face a lot less racism and discrimination today than in 1970
[citation needed], so assuming that was really unpleasant we shouldn’t be
surprised that they’re happier. But notice that this is a time course very similar
to the rise of China! It doesn’t look like black people picked a happiness level
to calibrate on and then never bothered to adjust. It looks like they adjusted
exactly like we would expect them to, even over the course of a multi-decade
change.

Second, consider women. In 1970, US women were generally happier than US

men. Today, the reverse is true. There seems to be a general pattern around
the world of women being happier than men in traditional societies and less
happy than men in modern societies (though see Language Log for a contrary
perspective). I don’t think of this as a weird paradox. It seems perfectly
reasonable to me that having to work outside the home makes people less
happy, getting to spend time with their family makes them more happy, and
having to work outside the home but also being expected to take care of your
family at the same time makes them least happy of all. In any case, the point is
that the numbers are changing. Men and women aren’t just fixating on some
level of happiness and staying there, they’re altering their happiness level
based on real trends, just like African-Americans did (but apparently unlike
Chinese).
Third, I was finally able to find a paper that had really good data on change in
happiness in different countries, and it supports the idea that happiness can
change significantly on a countrywide level.

This is a change in happiness in a bunch of countries between about 1990 and

2010 (the years were slightly different in each country). There are other
graphs for related concepts like life satisfaction and subjective well-being that
look about the same.

The most striking finding is that most countries got happier between those
two years – sometimes a lot happier. In Mexico, the percent of people saying
they were very happy increased by 25 percentage points!
Just eyeballing the graph, there’s not an obvious relationship between
happiness and economic growth – China is still near the bottom like we talked
about before, and France – a country that’s been First World since forever – is
near the top. Even Japan, which is famous for its decades of stagnation, has
done pretty well. But the authors tell us that after doing their statistical
analyses, there is a strong relationship with economic growth. Okay, I guess.

They also say there’s a dramatic relationship with freedom and democracy.
Mexico, the top country on the graph, went from a relatively closed to a
relatively democratic government during this time. South Africa, number five,
went from apartheid to no apartheid. Some of the ex-Communist countries
like Poland and Ukraine also look pretty good here. On the other hand, other
ex-Communist countries like Lithuania and Estonia are near the bottom. I
wonder if this has to do with cutoff points – since every country started at a
slightly different time, maybe they began sampling Poland during the worst
parts of Soviet dictatorship and got Lithuania right in the first euphoria of
independence? I don’t know. It all seems very noisy.

They also mention that the United States’ supposedly level happiness is kind
of a misunderstanding. People say things like “Happiness in the US has been
flat from 1950 to today”, but in fact it declined from 1950 to 1979 and
increased from 1980 to today. They attribute this to the 1950s being unusually
happy; then the 60s and 70s being unusually conflict-prone, and the Reagan
Revolution and Clinton years were back to being optimistic. They don’t have
data that stretches too long after that.

(This is pretty neat for Reagan and Clinton. When I die, I’ll consider my life a
success if people attribute a spike on national happiness graphs to my
influence.)

So apparently population happiness levels do change in response to relevant

social changes, even on multi-decade timescales. Which brings us back to
asking – what’s up with China?

The graph above shows India as doing okay – not great, but okay. But a
similar graph on subjective well-being – which should be another way of
looking at the same thing – shows India as doing pretty poorly, right down
there with China – even though its GDP per capita quadrupled during the
period of study.

I see a lot of conflicting perspectives about whether economic growth

increases national happiness. It may, but the effect isn’t as big as you’d expect,
and is usually overpowered by other factors. Maybe it isn’t even direct, but has
something to do with development increasing democracy, liberalism, rule of
law, and stability. China got the development, but its happiness genuinely
didn’t increase because of country-specific factors that have something to do
with how it developed (inequality? pollution? authoritarianism?).

This matches the race and gender data. Blacks saw a big happiness boost
during a time when their feeling of freedom (but not their income) increased
relative to whites. Women saw a small happiness drop during a time when
their income (but not their feeling of freedom) increased relative to men.

So it looks like happiness can change. It just didn’t change in China over the
past thirty years. The apparent paradox of improving economic situation and
stable/decreasing happiness is genuinely paradoxical. Intangibles are
probably just way more important than money, even amounts of money big
enough to raise whole countries out of poverty.

How The West Was Won

I.

Someone recently linked me to Bryan Caplan’s post A Hardy Weed: How

Traditionalists Underestimate Western Civ. He argues that “western
civilization”‘s supposed defenders don’t give it enough credit. They’re always
worrying about it being threatened by Islam or China or Degeneracy or
whatever, but in fact western civilization can not only hold its own against
these threats but actively outcompetes them:

The fragility thesis is flat wrong. There is absolutely no reason to think

that Western civilization is more fragile than Asian civilization, Islamic
civilization, or any other prominent rivals. At minimum, Western
 civilization can and does perpetuate itself the standard way: sheer
conformity and status quo bias.

But saying that Western civilization is no more fragile than other

cultures is a gross understatement. The truth is that Western civilization
is taking over the globe. In virtually any fair fight, it steadily triumphs.
Why? Because, as fans of Western civ ought to know, Western civ is
better. Given a choice, young people choose Western consumerism,
gender norms, and entertainment. Anti-Western governments from
Beijing to Tehran know this this to be true: Without draconian
censorship and social regulation, “Westoxification” will win.

A big part of the West’s strength, I hasten to add, is its openness to

awesomeness. When it encounters competing cultures, it gleefully
identifies competitors’ best traits – then adopts them as its own. By the
time Western culture commands the globe, it will have appropriated the
best features of Asian and Islamic culture. Even its nominal detractors
will be Westernized in all but name. Picture how contemporary
Christian fundamentalists’ consumerism and gender roles would have
horrified Luther or Calvin. Western civ is a good winner. It doesn’t
demand total surrender. It doesn’t make fans of competing cultures
formally recant their errors. It just tempts them in a hundred different
ways until they tacitly convert.

Traditionalists’ laments for Western civilization deeply puzzle me. Yes,

it’s easy to dwell on setbacks. In a world of seven billion people, you
can’t expect Western culture to win everywhere everyday. But do
traditionalists seriously believe that freshman Western civ classes are
the wall standing between us and barbarism? Have they really failed to
notice the fact that Western civilization flourishes all over the globe,
even when hostile governments fight it tooth and nail? It is time for the
friends of Western civilization to learn a lesson from its enemies:
Western civ is a hardy weed. Given half a chance, it survives, spreads,
and conquers. Peacefully.

I worry that Caplan is eliding the important summoner/demon distinction.

This is an easy distinction to miss, since demons often kill their summoners
and wear their skin. But in this case, he’s become hopelessly confused without
it.

I am pretty sure there was, at one point, such a thing as western civilization. I
think it involved things like dancing around maypoles and copying Latin
manuscripts. At some point Thor might have been involved. That civilization
is dead. It summoned an alien entity from beyond the void which devoured its
summoner and is proceeding to eat the rest of the world.

An analogy: naturopaths like to use the term “western medicine” to refer to

the evidence-based medicine of drugs and surgeries you would get at your
local hospital. They contrast this with traditional Chinese medicine and
Ayurvedic medicine, which it has somewhat replaced, apparently a symptom
of the “westernization” of Chinese and Indian societies.

But “western medicine” is just medicine that works. It happens to be western

because the West had a technological head start, and so discovered most of the
medicine that works first. But there’s nothing culturally western about it;
there’s nothing Christian or Greco-Roman about using penicillin to deal with a
bacterial infection. Indeed, “western medicine” replaced the traditional
medicine of Europe – Hippocrates’ four humors – before it started
threatening the traditional medicines of China or India. So-called “western
medicine” is an inhuman perfect construct from beyond the void, summoned
by Westerners, which ate traditional Western medicine first and is now
proceeding to eat the rest of the world.

“Western culture” is no more related to the geographical west than western

medicine. People who complain about western culture taking over their
country always manage to bring up Coca-Cola. But in what sense is Coca-Cola
culturally western? It’s an Ethiopian bean mixed with a Colombian leaf mixed
with carbonated water and lots and lots of sugar. An American was the first
person to discover that this combination tasted really good – our
technological/economic head start ensured that. But in a world where America
never existed, eventually some Japanese or Arabian chemist would have found
that sugar-filled fizzy drinks were really tasty. It was a discovery waiting to be
plucked out of the void, like penicillin. America summoned it but did not
create it. If western medicine is just medicine that works, soda pop is just
refreshment that works.
The same is true of more intellectual “products”. Caplan notes that foreigners
consume western gender norms, but these certainly aren’t gender norms that
would have been recognizable to Cicero, St. Augustine, Henry VIII, or even
Voltaire. They’re gender norms that sprung up in the aftermath of the
Industrial Revolution and its turbulent intermixing of the domestic and public
economies. They arose because they worked. The West was the first region to
industrialize and realize those were the gender norms that worked for
industrial societies, and as China and Arabia industrialize they’re going to find
the same thing.

Caplan writes:

A big part of the West’s strength, I hasten to add, is its openness to

awesomeness. When it encounters competing cultures, it gleefully
identifies competitors’ best traits – then adopts them as its own. By the
time Western culture commands the globe, it will have appropriated the
best features of Asian and Islamic culture.

Certainly he’s pointing at a real phenomenon – sushi has spread almost as

rapidly as Coke. But in what sense has sushi been “westernized”? Yes, Europe
has adopted sushi. But so have China, India, and Africa. Sushi is another
refreshment that works, a crack in the narrative that what’s going on is
“westernization” in any meaningful sense.

Here’s what I think is going on. Maybe every culture is the gradual
accumulation of useful environmental adaptations combined with random
memetic drift. But this is usually a gradual process with plenty of room for
everybody to adjust and local peculiarities to seep in. The Industrial
Revolution caused such rapid change that the process become qualitatively
different, a frantic search for better adaptations to an environment that was
itself changing almost as fast as people could understand it.

The Industrial Revolution also changed the way culture was spatially
distributed. When the fastest mode of transportation is the horse, and the
postal system is frequently ambushed by Huns, almost all culture is local
culture. England develops a culture, France develops a culture, Spain develops
a culture. Geographic, language, and political barriers keep these from
intermixing too much. Add rapid communication – even at the level of a good
postal service – and the equation begins to change. In the 17th century,
philosophers were remarking (in Latin, the universal language!) about how
Descartes from France had more in common with Leibniz from Germany than
either of them did with the average Frenchman or German. Nowadays I
certainly have more in common with SSC readers in Finland than I do with my
next-door neighbor whom I’ve never met.

Improved trade and communication networks created a rapid flow of ideas

from one big commercial center to another. Things that worked – western
medicine, Coca-Cola, egalitarian gender norms, sushi – spread along the trade
networks and started outcompeting things that didn’t. It happened in the west
first, but not in any kind of a black-and-white way. Places were inducted into
the universal culture in proportion to their participation in global trade;
Shanghai was infected before West Kerry; Dubai is further gone than
Alabama. The great financial capitals became a single cultural region in the
same way that “England” or “France” had been a cultural region in the olden
times, gradually converging on more and more ideas that worked in their new
economic situation.

Let me say again that this universal culture, though it started in the West, was
western only in the most cosmetic ways. If China or the Caliphate had
industrialized first, they would have been the ones who developed it, and it
would have been much the same. The new sodas and medicines and gender
norms invented in Beijing or Baghdad would have spread throughout the
world, and they would have looked very familiar. The best way to industrialize
is the best way to industrialize.

II.

Something Caplan was pointing towards but never really said outright:
universal culture is by definition the only culture that can survive without
censorship.

He writes in his post:

The truth is that Western civilization is taking over the globe. In

virtually any fair fight, it steadily triumphs. Why? Because, as fans of
Western civ ought to know, Western civ is better. Given a choice, young
 people choose Western consumerism, gender norms, and
entertainment. Anti-Western governments from Beijing to Tehran know
this this to be true: Without draconian censorship and social regulation,
“Westoxification” will win.

Universal culture is the collection of the most competitive ideas and products.
Coca-Cola spreads because it tastes better than whatever people were drinking
before. Egalitarian gender norms spread because they’re more popular and
likeable than their predecessors. If there was something that outcompeted
Coca-Cola, then that would be the official soda of universal culture and Coca-
Cola would be consigned to the scrapheap of history.

The only reason universal culture doesn’t outcompete everything else instantly
and achieve fixation around the globe is barriers to communication. Some of
those barriers are natural – Tibet survived universalization for a long time
because nobody could get to it. Sometimes the barrier is time – universal
culture can’t assimilate every little hill and valley instantly. Other times there
are no natural barriers, and then your choice is to either accept assimilation
into universal culture, or put up some form of censorship.

Imagine that Tibet wants to protect its traditional drink of yak’s milk. The
Dalai Lama requests that everyone continue to drink yak’s milk. But Coca-Cola
tastes much better than yak’s milk, and everyone knows this. So it becomes a
coordination problem: even if individual Tibetans would prefer that their
neighbors all drink yak’s milk to preserve the culture, they want to drink Coca-
Cola. The only way yak’s milk stays popular is if the Dalai Lama bans Coca-
Cola from the country.

But westerners aren’t banning yak’s milk to “protect” their cultures. They
don’t have to. Universal culture is high-entropy; it’s already in its ground state
and will survive and spread without help. All other cultures are low-entropy;
they survive only if someone keeps pushing energy into the system to protect
them. It could be the Dalai Lama banning Coca-Cola. It could be the Académie
Française removing English words from the language. It could be the secret
police killing anyone who speaks out against Comrade Stalin. But if you want
anything other than universal culture, you better either be surrounded by
some very high mountains, or be willing to get your hands dirty.
There’s one more sense in which universal culture is high-entropy; I think it
might be the only culture that can really survive high levels of immigration.

I’ve been wondering for a long time – how come groups that want to protect
their traditional cultures worry about immigration? After all, San Francisco is
frequently said to have a thriving gay culture. There’s a strong Hasidic Jewish
culture in New York City. Everyone agrees that the US has something called
“black culture”, although there’s debate over exactly what it entails. But only
6% of San Francisco is gay. Only 1% of New Yorkers are Hasidim. Only about
11% of Americans are black. So these groups have all managed to maintain
strong cultures while being vastly outnumbered by people who are different
from them.

So why is anyone concerned about immigration threatening their culture?

Suppose that Tibet was utterly overwhelmed by immigrants, tens of millions
of them. No matter how many people you import, Tibetan people couldn’t
possibly get more outnumbered in their own country than gays, Hasidim, and
blacks already are. But those groups hold on to their cultures just fine.
Wouldn’t we expect Tibetans (or Americans, or English people) to do the
same?

I’m still not totally sure about the answer to this one, but once again I think it
makes more sense when we realize that Tibet is competing not against
Western culture, but against universal culture.

And here, universal culture is going to win, simply because it’s designed to
deal with diverse multicultural environments. Remember, different strategies
can succeed in different equilibria. In a world full of auto-cooperators, defect-
bot hits the jackpot. In a world full of tit-for-tat-players, defect-bot crashes
and burns. Likewise, in a world where everybody else follows Tibetan culture,
Tibetan culture may do very well. In a world where there are lots of different
cultures all mixed together, Tibetan culture might not have any idea what to
do.

(one more hypothetical, to clarify what I’m talking about – imagine a culture
where the color of someone’s clothes tells you a lot of things about them – for
example, anyone wearing red is a prostitute. This may work well as long as
everyone follows the culture. If you mix it 50-50 with another culture that
doesn’t have this norm, then things go downhill quickly; you proposition a
lady wearing red, only to get pepper sprayed in the eye. Eventually the first
culture gives up and stops trying to communicate messages through clothing
color.)

I think universal culture has done a really good job adapting to this through a
strategy of social atomization; everybody does their own thing in their own
home, and the community exists to protect them and perform some lowest
common denominator functions that everyone can agree on. This is a really
good way to run a multicultural society without causing any conflict, but it
requires a very specific set of cultural norms and social technologies to work
properly, and only universal culture has developed these enough to pull it off.

Because universal culture is better at dealing with multicultural societies, the

more immigrants there are, the more likely everyone will just default to
universal culture in public spaces. And eventually the public space will creep
further and further until universal culture becomes the norm.

If you don’t understand the difference between western culture and universal
culture, this looks like the immigrants assimilating – “Oh, before these people
were Chinese people behaving in their foreign Chinese way, but now they’re
Westerners just like us.” Once you make the distinction, it looks like both
Chinese people and traditional Americans assimilating into universal culture
in order to share a common ground – with this being invisible to people who
are already assimilated into universal culture, to whom it just looks “normal”.

III.

I stress these points because the incorrect model of “foreign cultures being
Westernized” casts Western culture as the aggressor, whereas the model of
“every culture is being universalized” finds Western culture to be as much a
victim as anywhere else. Coca-Cola might have replaced traditional yak’s milk
in Mongolia, but it also replaced traditional apple cider in America. A Hopi
Indian saddened that her children no longer know the old ritual dances differs
little from a Southern Baptist incensed that her kids no longer go to church.
Universal values have triumphed over both.
Our society is generally in favor of small, far-away, or exotic groups trying to
maintain their culture. We think it’s great that the Hopi are trying to get the
next generation to participate in the traditional dances. We support the
Tibetans’ attempt to maintain their culture in the face of pressure from China.
We promote black culture, gay culture, et cetera. We think of it as a tragedy
when the dominant culture manages to take over and destroy one of these
smaller cultures. For example, when white American educators taught Native
American children to identify with white American culture and ignore the old
ways, that was inappropriate and in some senses “genocidal” if the aim was to
destroy Native Americans as a separate people. We get excited by the story of
Bhutan, the tiny Himalayan kingdom trying to preserve its natural and human
environment and prevent its own McDonaldization. We tend to be especially
upset when the destruction of cultures happens in the context of colonialism,
ie a large and powerful country trying to take over and eliminate the culture of
a smaller country. Some examples include the English in Ireland, the English
in India, the English in Africa, and basically the English anywhere.

One of the most common justifications for colonialism is that a more advanced
and enlightened society is taking over an evil and oppressive society. For
example, when China invaded Tibet, they said that this was because Tibet was
a feudal hellhole where most of the people were living in abject slavery and
where people who protested the rule of the lamas were punished by having
their eyes gouged out (true!). They declared the anniversary of their conquest
“Serfs Emancipation Day” and force the Tibetans to celebrate it every year.
They say that anyone who opposes the Chinese, supports the Dalai Lama, or
flies the old Tibetan flag is allied with the old feudal lords and wants to
celebrate a culture based around serfdom and oppression.

But opponents of colonialism tend to believe that cultures are valuable and
need to be protected in and of themselves. This is true even if the culture is
very poor, if the culture consists of people who aren’t very well-educated by
Western standards, even if they believe in religions that we think are stupid,
even if those cultures have unsavory histories, et cetera. We tend to allow such
cultures to resist outside influences, and we even celebrate such resistance. If
anybody were to say that, for example, Native Americans are poor and
ignorant, have a dumb religion with all sorts of unprovable “spirits”, used to
be involved in a lot of killing and raiding and slave-taking – and so we need to
burn down their culture and raise their children in our own superior culture –
that person would be incredibly racist and they would not be worth listening
to. We celebrate when cultures choose preservation of their traditional
lifestyles over mere economic growth, like Bhutan’s gross national happiness
program.

This is true in every case except with the cultures we consider our outgroups –
in the US, white Southern fundamentalist Christian Republicans; in the UK,
white rural working-class leave voters. In both cases, their ignorance is treated
as worthy of mockery, their religion is treated as stupidity and failure to
understand science, their poverty makes them “trailer trash”, their rejection of
economic-growth-at-all-costs means they are too stupid to understand the
stakes, and their desire to protect their obviously inferior culture makes them
xenophobic and racist. Although we laugh at the Chinese claim that the only
reason a Tibetan could identify with their own culture and want to fly its flag is
because they support serfdom and eye-gouging, we solemnly nod along with
our own culture’s claim that the only reason a Southerner could identify with
their own culture and want to fly its flag is because they support racism and
slavery.

(one question I got on the post linked above was why its description of
American tribes seemed to fit other countries so well. I think the answer is
because most countries’ politics are centered around the conflict between
more-universalized and less-universalized segments of the population.)

We could even look at this as a form of colonialism – if Brexit supporters and

opponents lived on two different islands and had different colored skin, then
people in London saying things like “These people are so butthurt that we’re
destroying their so-called ‘culture’, but they’re really just a bunch of ignorant
rubes, and they don’t realize they need us elites to keep their country running,
so screw them,” would sound a lot more sinister. The insistence that they
tolerate unwanted immigration into their lands would look a lot like how
China is trying to destroy Tibet by exporting millions of people to it in the
hopes they will eventually outnumber the recalcitrant native Tibetans (if you
don’t believe me, believe the Dalai Lama, who apparently has the same
perspective). The claim that they’re confused bout their own economic self-
interest would give way to discussions of Bhutan style “gross national
happiness”.
(I get accused of being crypto-conservative around here every so often, but I
think I’m just taking my anti-colonialism position to its logical conclusion. A
liberal getting upset about how other liberals are treating conservatives,
doesn’t become conservative himself, any more than an American getting
upset about how other Americans treat Iraqis becomes an Iraqi.)

And I worry that confusing “universal culture” with “Western culture”

legitimizes this weird double standard. If universal culture and Western
culture are the same thing, then Western culture doesn’t need protection – as
Caplan points out, it’s the giant unstoppable wave of progress sweeping over
everything else. Or maybe it doesn’t deserve protection – after all, it’s the
colonialist ideology that tried to destroy local cultures and set itself up as
supreme. If Western culture is already super-strong and has a history of trying
to take over everywhere else, then surely advocating “protecting Western
culture” must be a code phrase for something more sinister. We can
sympathize with foreign cultures like the Tibetans who are actually under
threat, but sympathizing with any Western culture in any way would just be
legitimizing aggression.

But I would argue that it’s universal culture which is the giant unstoppable
wave of progress, and that it was universal culture that was responsible for
colonizing other cultures and replacing them with itself. And universal
culture’s continuing attempts to subjugate the last unassimilated remnants of
traditional western culture are just part of this trend.

IV.

I am mostly just on the side of consistency. After that I have no idea what to
do.

One argument is that we should consistently support traditional cultures’

attempts to defend themselves against universal culture. Support the Native
Americans’ ability to practice their old ways, support traditional Siberians
trying to return to their shamanistic roots, support Australian Aborigines’
rights to continue the old rituals, support Tibetans’ rights to practice
Vajrayana Buddhism, and support rural British people trying to protect Ye
Olde England from the changes associated with increased immigration. For
most people, this would mean extending the compassion that they feel to the
Aborigines, peasants, and Tibetans to apply to the British as well.

But another argument is that we should consistently support universal

culture’s attempt to impose progress on traditional cultures. Maybe we should
tell the Native Americans that if they embraced global capitalism, they could
have a tacqueria, sushi restaurant, and kebab place all on the same street in
their reservation. Maybe we should tell the Aborigines that modern science
says the Dreamtime is a myth they need to stop clinging to dumb disproven
ideas. Maybe we should tell the Tibetans that Vajrayana Buddhism is too
intolerant of homosexuality. Take our conviction that rural Englanders are
just racist and xenophobic and ill-informed, and extend that to everyone else
who’s trying to resist a way of life that’s objectively better.

I am sort of torn on this.

On the one hand, universal culture is objectively better. Its science is more
correct, its economy will grow faster, its soft drinks are more refreshing, its
political systems are (necessarily) freer, and it is (in a certain specific sense)
what everybody would select if given a free choice. It also seems morally
better. The Tibetans did gouge out the eyes of would-be-runaway serfs. I
realize the circularity of saying that universal culture is objectively morally
better based on it seeming so to me, a universal culture member – but I am
prepared to suspend that paradox in favor of not wanting people’s eyes gouged
out for resisting slavery.

On the other hand, I think that “universal culture is what every society would
select if given the opportunity” is less of a knock-down point than it would
seem. Heroin use is something every society would select if given the
opportunity. That is, if nobody placed “censorship” on the spread of heroin, it
would rapidly spread from country to country, becoming a major part of that
country’s society. Instead, we implement an almost authoritarian level of
control on it, because we know that even though it would be very widely
adopted, it’s not something that is good for anybody in the long term. An
opponent of universal culture could say it has the same property.

Things get even worse when you remember that cultures are multi-agent
games and each agent pursuing its own self-interest might be a disaster for the
whole. Pollution is a good example of this; if the best car is very polluting, and
one car worth of pollution is minimal but many cars’ worth of pollution is
toxic, then absent good coordination mechanisms everyone will choose the
best car even though everyone would prefer a world where nobody (including
them) had the best car. I may have written about this before.

I’m constantly intrigued (though always a little skeptical) by claims that

“primitive” cultures live happier and more satisfying lives than our own. I
know of several of this type. First, happiness surveys that tend to find Latin
American countries doing as well or better than much richer and more
advanced European countries. Second, the evidence from the Amish, whose
children are allowed to experience the modern culture around them but who
usually prefer to stay in Amish society. Third, Axtell’s paper on prisoner
exchanges between early US colonists and Native Americans; colonists
captured by the natives almost always wanted to stay and live with the natives;
natives captured by the colonists never wanted to stay and live with the
colonists. Many people have remarked on how more culturally homogenous
countries seem happier. Bhutan itself might be evidence here, although I’ve
seen wildly different claims on where it falls on happiness surveys. I’ve also
talked before about how China’s happiness level stayed stable or even dropped
during its period of rapid development.

(on the other hand, there’s also a lot of counterevidence. More democratic
countries seem to be happier, and democracies will generally be the low-
censorship countries that get more assimilated into universal culture. Free
market economies are happier. Some studies say that more liberal countries
are happier. And there’s a complicated but positiverelationship between
national happiness and wealth.)

I also think that it might be reasonable to have continuation of your own

culture as a terminal goal, even if you know your culture is “worse” in some
way than what would replace it. There’s a transhumanist joke – “Instead of
protecting human values, why not reprogram humans to like hydrogen? After
all, there’s a lot of hydrogen.” There’s way more hydrogen than beautiful art,
or star-crossed romances, or exciting adventures. A human who likes beautiful
art, star-crossed romances, and exciting adventures is in some sense “worse”
than a human who likes hydrogen, since it would be much harder for her to
achieve her goals and she would probably be much less happy. But knowing
this does not make me any happier about the idea of being reprogrammed in
favor of hydrogen-related goals. My own value system might not be objectively
the best, or even very good, but it’s my value system and I want to keep it and
you can’t take it away from me. I am an individualist and I think of this on an
individual level, but I could also see having this self-preservation-against-
optimality urge for my community and its values.

(I’ve sometimes heard this called Lovecraftian parochialism, based on H.P.

Lovecraft’s philosophy that the universe is vast and incomprehensible and
anti-human, and you’ve got to draw the line between Self and Other
somewhere, so you might as well draw the line at 1920s Providence, Rhode
Island, and call everywhere else from Boston all the way to the unspeakable
abyss-city of Y’ha-nthlei just different degrees of horribleness.)

Overall I am not 100% convinced either way. Maybe some traditional cultures
are worse than universal culture and others are better? Mostly the confusion
makes me want to err on the side of allowing people to go either direction as
they see fit, barring atrocities. Which are of course hard to define.

I like the Jewish idea of the Noahide Laws, where the Jews say “We are not
going to impose our values on anyone else…except these seven values which
we think are incredibly important and breaking them is totally beyond the
pale.” Sometimes I wish universal culture would just establish a couple of clear
Noahide Laws – two of them could be “no slavery” and “no eye-gouging” – and
then agree to bomb/sanction/drone any culture that breaks them while
leaving other cultures alone. On the other hand, I also understand universal
culture well enough to know that two minutes after the first set of Noahide
Laws were established, somebody would propose amending them to include
something about how every culture must protect transgender bathroom rights
or else be cleansed from the face of the Earth by fire and sword. I’m not sure
how to prevent this, or if preventing it is even desirable. This seems like the
same question as the original question, only one meta-level up and without
any clear intuition to help me solve it. I guess this is another reason I continue
to be attracted to the idea of Archipelago.

But I think that none of this makes sense unless we abandon the idea that
“universal culture” and “western culture” are one and the same. I think when
Caplan’s debate opponent talked about “protecting Western culture”, he was
referring to something genuinely fragile and threatened.

I also think he probably cheated by saying we needed to protect it because it

was responsible for so many great advances, like Coca-Cola and egalitarian
gender norms. I don’t think that’s fair. I think it’s a culture much like Tibetan
or Indian culture, pretty neat in its own way, possibly extra interesting as the
first culture to learn the art of summoning entities from beyond the void.
Mostly I’m just happy that it exists in the same way I’m happy that pandas and
gorillas exist, a basic delight in the diversity of the world. I think it can be
defended in those terms without having to resolve the debate on how many of
its achievements are truly its own.

The Lizard People Of Alpha Draconis 1 Decided To Build An

Ansible

I.

The lizard people of Alpha Draconis 1 decided to build an ansible.

The transmitter was a colossal tower of silksteel, doorless and windowless.

Inside were millions of modular silksteel cubes, each filled with beetles, a
different species in every cube. Big beetles, small beetles, red beetles, blue
beetles, friendly beetles, venomous beetles. There hadn’t been a million beetle
species on Alpha Draconis I before the ansible. The lizard people had
genetically engineered them, carefully, lovingly, making each one just different
enough from all the others. Atop each beetle colony was a heat lamp. When
the heat lamp was on, the beetles crawled up to the top of the cage, sunning
themselves, basking in the glorious glow. When it turned off, they huddled
together to warmth, chittering out their anger in little infrasonic groans only
they could hear.

The receiver stood on 11845 Nochtli, eighty-five light years from Alpha
Draconis, toward the galactic rim. It was also made of beetles, a million beetle
colonies of the same million species that made up the transmitter. In each
beetle colony was a pheromone dispenser. When it was on, the beetles would
multiply until the whole cage was covered in them. When it was off, they
would gradually die out until only a few were left.

Atop each beetle cage was a mouse cage, filled with a mix of white and grey
mice. The white mice had been genetically engineered to want all levers in the
“up” position, a desire beyond even food or sex in its intensity. The grey mice
had been engineered to want levers in the “down” position, with equal ferocity.
The lizard people had uplifted both strains to full sapience. In each of a million
cages, the grey and white mice would argue whether levers should be up or
down – sometimes through philosophical debate, sometimes through outright
wars of extermination.

There was one lever in each mouse cage. It controlled the pheromone
dispenser in the beetle cage just below.

This was all the lizard people of Alpha Draconis 1 needed to construct their
ansible.

They had mastered every field of science. Physics, mathematics, astronomy,

cosmology. It had been for nothing. There was no way to communicate faster-
than-light. Tachyons didn’t exist. Hyperspace didn’t exist. Wormholes didn’t
exist. The light speed barrier was absolute – if you limited yourself to physics,
mathematics, astronomy, and cosmology.

The lizard people of Alpha Draconis I weren’t going to use any of those things.
They were going to build their ansible out of negative average preference
utilitarianism.

II.

Utilitarianism is a moral theory claiming that an action is moral if it makes the

world a better place. But what do we mean by “a better place”?

Suppose you decide (as Jeremy Bentham did) that it means increasing the
total amount of happiness in the universe as much as possible – the greatest
good for the greatest number. Then you run into a so-called “repugnant
conclusion”. The philosophers quantify happiness into “utils”, some arbitrary
small unit of happiness. Suppose your current happiness level is 100 utils. And
suppose you could sacrifice one util of happiness to create another person
whose total happiness is two utils: they are only 1/50th as happy as you are.
This person seems quite unhappy by our standards. But crucially, their total
happiness is positive; they would (weakly) prefer living to dying. Maybe we
can imagine this as a very poor person in a war-torn Third World country who
is (for now) not actively suicidal.

It would seem morally correct to make this sacrifice. After all, you are losing
one unit of happiness to create two units, increasing the total happiness in the
universe. In fact, it would seem morally correct to keep making the sacrifice as
many times as you get the opportunity. The end result is that you end up with
a happiness of 1 util – barely above suicidality – and also there are 99 extra
barely-not-suicidal people in war-torn Third World countries.

And the same moral principles that lead you to make the sacrifice bind
everyone else alike. So the end result is everyone in the world ends up with the
lowest possible positive amount of happiness, plus there are billions of extra
near-suicidal people in war-torn Third World countries.

This seems abstract, but in some sense it might be the choice on offer if we
have to decide whether to control population growth (thus preserving enough
resources to give everyone a good standard of living), or continue explosive
growth so that there are many more people but not enough resources for any
of them to live comfortably.

The so-called “repugnant conclusion” led many philosophers away from “total
utilitarianism” to “average utilitarianism”. Here the goal is still to make the
world a better place, but it gets operationalized as “increase the average
happiness level per person”. The repugnant conclusion clearly fails at this, so
we avoid that particular trap.

But here we fall into another ambush: wouldn’t it be morally correct to kill
unhappy people? This raises average happiness very effectively!

So we make another amendment. We’re not in the business of raising

happiness, per se. We’re in the business of satisfying preferences. People
strongly prefer not to die, so you can’t just kill them. Killing them actively
lowers the average number of satisfied preferences.
Philosopher Roger Chao combines these and other refinements of the
utilitarian method into a moral theory he calls negative average preference
utilitarianism, which he considers the first system of ethics to avoid all the
various traps and pitfalls. It says: an act is good if it decreases the average
number of frustrated preferences per person.

This doesn’t imply we should create miserable people ad nauseum until the
whole world is a Third World slum. It doesn’t imply that we should kill
everyone who cracks a frown. It doesn’t imply we should murder people for
their organs, or never have children again, or replace everybody with identical
copies of themselves, or anything like that.

It just implies faster-than-light transmission of moral information.

III.

The ansible worked like this:

Each colony of beetles represented a bit of information. In the transmitter on

Alpha Draconis I, the sender would turn the various colonies’ heat lamps on or
off, increasing or decreasing the average utility of the beetles.

In the receiver on 11845 Nochtli, the beetles would be in a constant state of

half-light: warmer than the Draconis beetles if their heat lamp was turned off,
but colder than them if their heat lamp was turned on. So increasing the
population of a certain beetle species on 11845 Nochtli would be morally good
if the heat lamp for that species on Alpha Draconis were off, but morally evil
otherwise.

The philosophers among the lizard people of Alpha Draconis 1 had realized
that this was true regardless of intervening distance; morality was the only
force that transcended the speed of light. The question was how to detect it.
Yes, a change in the heat lamps on their homeworld would instantly change
the moral valence of pulling a lever on a colony 85 light-years away, but how
to detect the morality of an action?

The answer was: the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward
justice. Over time, as the great debates of history ebb and sway, evil may not
be conquered completely, but it will lessen. Our own generation isn’t perfect,
but we have left behind much of the slavery, bigotry, war and torture, of the
past; perhaps our descendants will be wiser still. And how could this be, if not
for some benevolent general rule, some principle that tomorrow must be
brighter than today, and the march of moral progress slow but inevitable?

Thus the white and grey rats. They would debate, they would argue, they
would even fight – but in the end, moral progress would have its way. If
raising the lever and causing an increase in the beetle population was the right
thing to do, then the white rats would eventually triumph; if lowering the lever
and causing the beetle population to fall was right, then the victory would
eventually go to the grey. All of this would be recorded by a camera watching
the mouse colony, and – lo – a bit of information would have been
transmitted.

The ansible of the lizard people of Alpha Draconis 1 was a flop.

They spent a century working on it: ninety years on near-light-speed starships

just transporting the materials, and a decade constructing the receiver
according to meticulous plans. With great fanfare, the Lizard Emperor himself
sent the first message from Alpha Draconis I. And it was a total flop.

The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends to justice. But nobody had
ever thought to ask how long, and why. When everyone alike ought to love the
good, why does it take so many years of debate and strife for virtue to triumph
over wickedness? Why do war and slavery and torture persist for century after
century, so that only endless grinding of the wheels of progress can do them
any damage at all?

After eighty-five years of civilizational debate, the grey and white mice in each
cage finally overcame their differences and agreed on the right position to put
the lever, just as the mundane lightspeed version of the message from Alpha
Draconis reached 11845 Nochtli’s radio telescopes. And the lizard people of
Alpha Draconis 1 realized that one can be more precise than simply defining
the arc of moral progress as “long”. It’s exactly as long as it needs to be to
prevent faster-than-light transmission of moral information.

Fundamental physical limits are a harsh master.

A Modern Myth

1. Eris

A middle-aged man, James, had come on stage believing it was an audition for
American Idol. It wasn’t. Out ran his ex-lover, Terri. “You said you loved me!”
she said. “And then when I got pregnant, you disappeared! Twenty years, and
you never even sent me a letter!”

The crowd booed.

As James tried to sputter a response, his wife ran onto the stage. “You
cheating jerk!” she shouted at James. “You lying, cheating jerk! Twenty-five
years we’ve been married, and I never…” She picked up a folding chair, tried to
swing it at James.

“Stop!” cried James’ teenage daughter Katie, joining in the fray. “Mom, Dad,
stop it!”

“You stay out of this!” shouted James’ wife. “Maybe if you’d had a good male
role model, you wouldn’t have become a lesbian.”

The crowd gasped.

Katie’s girlfriend Lisa came out of a side door. “You take that back!” she yelled.
Then she saw Terri. “Wait? Mom? What are you doing here?”

“That’s right,” said Alice DiScorria, sidling onto the stage, effortlessly drawing
the audience’s attention from the brawl taking shape in front of them. “Katie’s
girlfriend is the daughter of the woman her father cheated with, so many years
ago. And we’ve got the paternity test right here.” She theatrically opened a
manilla envelope. “And…James! James is the father!”

“I’VE BEEN LESBIAN LOVERS WITH MY HALF-SISTER!” shrieked Katie.

“This is all your fault!” everyone shouted at everyone else in unison. Then the
punching started.

In short, it had been another successful episode of The Alice Show.

Now Ms. DiScorria was in her dressing room, wiping off the night’s makeup,
trying to decide where to go to dinner. Knock, knock. She opened the door
wide.

There stood Katie and Lisa. Katie was holding a shotgun.

“Why would you do this to us?” screamed Katie. “We were a happy family!”

“I loved her!” added Lisa.

“Why?” Katie screamed at her, waving the gun. “WHY?”

“Oh, put it away,” said Alice. “We both know you’re not going to shoot me. And
it wouldn’t hurt me if you did. I do this because I’m Eris, the Greek Goddess of
Discord. I destroy peace. I set people against each other. Then, when their
petty fights destroy everything they’ve worked for, I stand over the ruins and
laugh. It’s my thing. Here. Have a golden apple.”

It appeared in Alice’s hand, shining with beauty that defied description. “FOR
THE FAIREST” was writ on the front in letters of liquid light. Katie dropped
her gun and stared. Lisa rubbed her eyes to see if she was dreaming. For a
brief moment, no one moved.

Finally, Katie asked, “You’re…giving it to me?”

“Absolutely. To you and your girlfriend. Traditionally, I think it would go to

whichever of you is prettier.”

Gently, she placed the golden apple on her dressing table, winked at the girls,
and left the room. She closed the door behind her, so nobody would hear the
screams.

2. Ares

“Look,” Tom told Ari, “you always seem to come out of this kind of thing okay.
So if I don’t make it tomorrow, I want you to give this to my wife.” It was an
envelope. There was no address, just ‘TO BE OPENED IN THE EVENT OF MY
DEATH’.
“Stop talking like that, Tom,” said Ari, taking the envelope and putting it into
his backpack. “You’ll make it. The Taliban’s gonna fold like a wet rag
tomorrow, I promise.”

“Easy for you to say. In Helmand, half your squad dies, you just walk out with
a big grin on your face. Kandahar, outnumbered eight to one, and not only do
you win, you end up with two Medals of Honor. I didn’t even know you could
get more than one Medal of Honor for a single battle. Yeah, sure, you’ll be fine
tomorrow. The rest of us, we’re only mortal.”

“Yeah,” said Ari. “I can see how that would suck.”

“Look, you’re doing me a big favor, taking that envelope,” said Tom. “Anything
I can do for you? You know, in case the worst happens?”

“Nah, don’t worry about it.”

“There’s nobody back home you care about? Wife? Girlfriend? Family?”

“Fuck all. No wife, no girlfriend, and a family dysfunctional like you wouldn’t
believe.”

“Where are you even from, Ari? You never talk about it.”

“Who cares?”

“I care. Heck, half the squad thinks you’re some kind of government
supersoldier, the other half thinks you should be in a loony bin. You’re
interesting, Ari.”

“Well, fine. I’m Ares, Greek god of war. I’m the son of Zeus and his sister Hera,
and let me tell you, marrying your sister works about as well as you’d expect. I
used to be a big deal, shape the destiny of whole nations, rise of Rome and all
that. Then my power crashed along with everyone else’s. Man, I don’t even
remember the Dark Ages. The whole medieval era is a blur. By the time I start
feeling like myself again, it’s the Renaissance and everybody’s fighting with
muskets. Nowadays…man. I can fight better than you mortals, you gotta give
me that. But in terms of god stuff…I remember when I could make all of
fucking Persia flee in abject surrender. Now I’m stuck taking pot shots at
Taliban assholes. Meanwhile, they’re all shouting about Allah, and you guys
are all shouting about Jesus, and nobody even fucking believes in me
anymore.”

“I believe you,” said Tom.

“Really?”

“Yeah,” said Tom. “In Kandahar, I saw a bullet pass right through you. How
would a government super-soldier manage that? Sure. You’re Ares, god of war.
I’ll worship you, if you want.”

“What fucking good would that be?”

“Think about it! You said that you and all the other gods lost your power back
in Roman days. What happened in Roman days? Constantine! The start of
Christianity! That must have been what did it! Gods’ power comes from people
believing in them!”

“Why does every mortal always figure that gods’ power comes from people
believing in them? Like you’re all some kind of god power experts? Do they
teach that to baby mortals in their little mortal schools? Stupidest thing I ever
heard. You think we ruled the world for a thousand years and didn’t check
where our power came from? We figured that out a long time ago. Divine
power comes from meat.”

“Meat?”

“Yeah. Like, you know, sacrifice a ram to Ares, pray for victory, then eat it in a
big communal feast in the barracks. The more meat sacrificed in a god’s name,
the stronger he got.”

“But then it’s still about belief. People stopped believing in you, so they
stopped sacrificing rams to you.”

“You’ve got it ass-backwards. We were at the height of our power. People were
sacrificing rams to us right and left. Then it stopped working. One year the
meat started having a little less effect. The next year it was a little less than
that. Eventually it was gone. And then when the gods became powerless, the
cults collapsed, and then the Christians and Muslims and all the rest stepped
in to fill the gap.”

“So what can I do? There’s some meat in the mess hall, I can sacrifice that for
you if you want.”

“I’m telling you, it won’t work. The power’s gone. It’s been gone for two
thousand years. Me – and all the rest – we’re stuck like this. Some kind of
natural floor to our power, still more than mortal but forever less than divine.
It’s fucking awful and I hate it. I hate not being able to smite whole nations
when I’m angry. I hate having to take commands from ‘superior officers’
because I’m ‘just a grunt’. And most of all, I hate that people have forgotten
about us. We used to be big, Tom!”

“People haven’t forgotten. They love you guys. There’s still, you know, Hermes
handbags, and Athena mineral water, and, you know, Mars bars….”

“I am the lord over war, the manslaughtering one, the bloodstained one, he of
many devices, bringer of much weeping, destroyer of men. I AM NOT A
FUCKING CHOCOLATE BAR.”

“Sorry, man. I was just saying…”

“I know. You wanted to make me feel better. That’s what I’ve come to. Having
to be consoled by mortals. You know what’s going to make me feel better,
Tom? Killing some fucking Taliban tomorrow.”

“Yeah. Okay.”

“Look, I’m sorry, I didn’t meant to…”

“It’s not that. But, uh, Ari. We’ve got a big battle coming up tomorrow. And I
know this probably sounds really crazy to you, but humans – praying makes
us feel better. That’s why we do it all the time. To Jesus or Allah or whoever.
And we don’t really expect it to work, so…um…”

“Out with it, Tom.”

“…is it okay if I pray to you tomorrow?”

“Knock yourself out, Tom.”

3. Apollo

Ianthe had always liked magic squares. They were one of the oldest forms of
magic. A Sator square had been found scrawled on one of the walls of Pompeii.
Since then the art had advanced, and she was its master. She would fill the
word square with words relating to the sun, and Apollo would appear before
her. Working with gold ink, she traced the letters carefully:

C I R C L E

I C A R U S

R A R E S T

C R E A T E

L U S T R E

E S T E E M

Apollo appeared before her, devilishly handsome, impeccably well-dressed,

unfailingly polite. He’d told her once that in his other identity, he was a
professor at some college somewhere. She could believe it.

“Ianthe, my daughter,” he said, his voice smooth and golden. He always called
her that, even when he was doing very un-fatherly things to her. Though come
to think of it, in hisfamily that might not be such a jarring contradiction. She
wondered if he’d known Oedipus.

“Lord Apollo,” she said. “I have called you here to request a boon.”

His face fell. He had explained the first time he met her that his powers were
weak. That he couldn’t help her the way she might have wished. Couldn’t grant
her wealth or wisdom or prophecy the way he might have in days of old. Since
then she had never asked him for anything but himself.

“It’s…nothing too difficult,” she assured him. “Just…actually, I wanted to say

good-bye.”
“Good-bye?” asked Apollo.

“There’s…someone’s hunting us. The neopagan community. I told you about

Megan, right? The girl who used to run a traditionalist group up in Santa
Cruz? They found her dead two weeks ago. There’s a Wiccan circle over in
Oakland that deals with Greek themes sometimes; two of their leaders have
been missing since January. And then Aristopsychus the Wise…that’s what he
calls himself, seriously, one of the crazy sorts who attacks people drinking
Athena Mineral Water and says they’re profaning the name of a goddess…I
just got a call. His head was bashed in last night. I’m really afraid, Lord
Apollo.”

He looked at her, his face infinitely wise and sorrowful, and she knew he could
do nothing.

“That’s why I’m leaving here,” she said. “I haven’t told anybody, nobody else in
the neopagan community, not even that weird girl Emily who thinks she’s my
‘acolyte’. I’m shutting down the temple and going somewhere really far away
where nobody can find me, and I don’t know when I’ll be able to summon you
again.”

“I understand,” said Apollo. “May good fortune go with you.”

“But I was asking you for a boon. I need you to take something from me.” She
took out a paper bag and produced an apple, brilliant gold, shining with an
unearthly radiance. Apollo stepped back as if someone had struck him, his
calm manner broken for the first time Ianthe had seen.

“Where did you get that…that thing?” asked Apollo.

“A detective gave it to me! He was investigating a crime scene. These two girls
murdered each other in a Hollywood studio dressing room…it was all over the
news. And this guy was called in to investigate the crime scene, and all he
could find was this golden apple that said “for the fairest”. And after all the
legal things were closed he didn’t want to throw it out, because it looked so
pretty, and he heard about our temple here, and he figured it looked like
something a Greek pagan revivalist movement should own, so he gave it to me.
And as soon as I saw it…this sounds so bad, but I didn’t tell any of the others,
not even Emily. I brought it home and never told anyone about it. But I’m
scared, Apollo. I’m scared it has something to do with the reason all this is
happening. I don’t want to leave it here and I don’t want to take it with me,
so…please, just take the apple. Before it makes me change my mind!” She
wasn’t looking at it; she was carefully avoiding looking at it.

“I can’t,” said Apollo.

“You have to!” said Ianthe.

“No, I mean, literally, I can’t,” said Apollo. “The apple has to belong to a
woman. Any woman who sees the apple, she wants it more than she’s ever
wanted anything else. Any man who sees it, no effect. Even if a man gets it, he
feels compelled to give it to a woman. That must have been what happened to
your detective. I really, really do not want that apple. You have no idea how
bad things get around one of these.”

With a grunt and an effort of will, Ianthe threw the golden apple at Apollo’s
face. He caught it in his hand reflexively, involuntarily. “Take it!” she said, as
he stared at his unwanted prize. “You’re a god! I’m sure you can think of a
woman who can keep it safe for you!”

“Ohhhhh….this is not good,” Apollo said, through clenched teeth. “I hate these
things, I hate these things, I hate these things, I hate these things…”

Ianthe erased a letter from the middle of the magic square, and Apollo
disappeared. Then she picked up her suitcase, got in her car, and started
driving, intent on putting as much distance as possible between herself and
anywhere people would be looking for her.

4. Aphrodite

She stays by the sea shore. Shining shells and soft surf sounds surround her
shelter. Cythera simmers with summer, and seals swim in the sun. Songbirds
circle in the sapphire sky, and sea stars sit semi-submerged in the sand.

Ares wades out to the cliff where he knows he’ll find her, a cliff of soft pink
rock that looks like any other on this side of the island. On a little depression
in the rock which only he can see, he traces letters with his fingers:
M O A N

O N C E

A C M E

N E E D

The cliff opens around him, and he is in the bower of Aphrodite.

She is naked. Her body glistens with sea-foam. She is behind a glass shelf filled
with seashells, and from where Ares is standing, two of them perfectly cover
her breasts. On the near wall are pictures of her family: her husband,
Hephaestus; her son, Eros; her parents, the sea and the blood of Uranus; her
nth-great-grandson, Julius Caesar. On the far wall is a banner reading
“UNDEFEATED GOLDEN APPLE WINNER, 1200 BC – PRESENT”, and
several oak barrels overflowing with golden apples that cast an unearthly glow
all over the room.

“Hello, sexy,” she says.

He tries to play it cool, act natural. “Hey Aph,” he says. “Just dropping by.”

There is no sign of her husband.

“Come on, Ares. You never ‘drop by’. What is it really?”

“Um,” says Ares. He is acutely aware of the god-sized erection he probably has
right now. He keeps his eyes fixed on the barrels of golden apples, so as not to
stare. “Um,” he says again.

“I heard about what happened in Kandahar,” she said. “That was very heroic
of you.” She gently brushed her arm against his.

“Um,” said Ares. “That’s…kind of…look. This soldier guy I knew. He asked me
if…if there was anyone back home I cared for. And I said no. Fuck everyone.
You know. Mom, Dad, fuck them all. But then I started thinking. We had
something good. A long time ago. And I was thinking, maybe…”

“But Ares,” she said, biting her lip, “you know I’m married.”
“You were married the last five times too,” Ares said, forcefully now. “It’s kind
of a big part of having an affair.”

“But,” she said, running a hand through her golden hair, “what if people found
out?”

“People found out the last five times too,” he said. “Nobody thought anything
of it. You’re the goddess of love. Of lust. Love and lust. Of course you have
affairs.”

“What if my parents knew? It would break their heart.”

“Your parents are the sea, and the blood that came out of a guy’s scrotum
when my grandfather castrated him. I think they’ll be fine.”

“Oh, Ares. You know so much about me.”

She pulled him closer. She closed her eyes. His lips touched hers. Then –

“We can’t do this, Ares. We’re just too different, you and I. Love. War. It
wouldn’t work.”

“We are not different. All’s fair in both of us, for one thing. We’re both, uh,
relationships between two parties. Often involving fighting. More fun when
you’re high testosterone. And when you’ve got a big spear.”

“I love it when you talk dirty to me, Ares,” said Aphrodite, and put her hand
around his waist. He tried to kiss her a second time.

“No,” she said suddenly. “I can’t. What about the children?”

“Your child is Eros!” protested Ares. “How is that a problem?!”

“Show me you care,” said Aphrodite.

“I care!” said Ares. “I promise you, I care. Tom – this soldier I know – he was
telling me all about his wife, and how much he loved her, and I was thinking, I
need something like that, and then I remembered – I’ve got that. You’re the
one for me. You’re the only one I want. I promise.”
“Show me,” said Aphrodite.

“How?” asked Ares. “What can I do to show you that I care?”

Aphrodite let her hand linger on his shoulder, then walked to the other side of
the room. She picked up a golden apple.

“There’s another golden apple in the world now,” she said. “I can feel it, Ares.
That apple is mine by right.” For a second, all the softness disappeared from
her face, and he knew why one of her epithets was ‘the warlike one’. “I want
that apple, Ares. Bring it to me.”

“But baby, you already have like a million golden apples. Look, you’ve got
barrels full of them. You’re not even using – ” He picked up a golden apple
that had fallen behind one the barrels.

“It’s the principle of the thing, Ares. It says ‘for the fairest’. Am I not the
fairest? Have I not been the most beautiful of goddess and women since before
Paris was a glimpse in his mother’s eye? Somebody else has my magic apple,
Ares, and I am literally shaking here. You are my protector, the hero of
Kandahar, the man who got two Medals of Honor in the same battle. Can you
rescue me?” She knelt before him. There were tears coming out of her eyes.
She hugged his leg.

“I’ll…I’ll get you your apple, Aph. I’ll find whoever’s got your golden apple, and
if they don’t give it back, I’ll…” He took out his sword and swung it above him,
so fast that it whistled in the air like the note of a lute.

“I’ll be waiting for you…” whispered Aphrodite.

Ares turned to go. The cliff face opened in front of him. The birds were still
singing, and dolphins leapt for joy in the melodious waves. He was kind of a
chump, but he knew this was the way of things, and it would never change.

“…I won’t be wearing any clothes.” Aphrodite called after him.

5. Hermes

He is called Herman. He runs a hedge fund. He lives in Manhattan. He wears

nice suits.

Today he is in a nice suit, but he is not in Manhattan. He is in Memphis,

Tennessee. Not even the nice part of Memphis, Tennessee. He’s in a poor,
crime-ridden ghetto in Memphis Tennessee, and it has a bridge, and he is
underneath it.

He spots a big man sleeping underneath the bridge, wrapped in a ratty

blanket. His beard is unkempt, and even from far away, he smells like alcohol.

“Hi Dad”, said Hermes.

“Whaddyawant?” mumbled Zeus.

“It’s me, Dad,” said Hermes. “Hermes.”

With some effort, Zeus brought himself into a sitting position, brushed some
of the more egregious twigs out of his beard. He rubbed his eyes.

“Yeah, so? Whaddyawant?”

Hermes inspected the King of Gods and Men. He was streaked with dirt. He
was dressed in a fading white wife-beater, with reddish stains that Hermes
hoped were wine.

“I’ve been looking all over for you, Dad. You look terrible. What happened to
you?”

“Whaddyoucare?”

“You used to be King, Dad!”

“I’m still king. Iduncarewhatchy’all think.”

“But what happened to you? I talked to Ares the other day. He won two
Medals of Honor, did you hear? Apollo’s got tenure at Oxford. I’m the god of
commerce and crime, so of course I’ve got a hedge fund. But you? What
happened to you?”

“Fucking child support payments!” said Zeus. “I was doin’ just fine for myself
until cops from forty-seven different states came my front door calling me a
deadbeat dad!”

“Oh dear,” said Hermes. “Forty-seven women?”

“Forty-seven states,” said Zeus. “Hundred ninety women. Two hundred five
kids. Fucking mess.”

“A hundred ninety women,” mused Hermes. “Please tell me you didn’t turn all
of them into animals.”

“Are you fucking kink-shaming me?” said Zeus. “If I get off on having kids
with women and then turning ’em into animals, that’s my private business.
Ain’t no weirder than Ganymede being gay or your kid who’s a futa or…
BLAAAAAARGH”. He turned and vomited the morning’s meal into the river.
“Besides, I don’t got power anymore. Can’t even turn a pretty girl into an ape
these days, forgeddabout a cow or a bear.”

“Look, sorry for bringing up your fetish,” said Hermes. “I didn’t know it was a
sore point. I wanted to talk about something important. Dad, I’ve figured it all
out.”

“You figgered what out?”

“All of it. What happened to us. Why we lost our power. And how we’re going
to get it back.”

“Yeah?” said Zeus. He sounded skeptical. “I’m listenin'”

“Look,” said Hermes. “How did we used to get power? Animal sacrifice. And
which animal? Rams. What astrological age was it? The Age of Aries, the sign
of The ram. 2000 BC to 1 AD, or thereabouts. Then the age changes. The sun is
in Pisces. Sign of the fish. Boom. Sacrificing rams no longer works. Who
comes out on top? Some Israeli whose followers are all fishermen. Talk about
being in the right place at the right time.”
“So yer saying, we need to get the mortals to sacrifice fish to us now, and then
we’re back in business?”

“No. Because the Age of Pisces ended last century. Now it’s the Age of
Aquarius. The Water Bearer.”

“So sacrifice water?”

“Well, this is where we start to have a problem. I know you have trouble
remembering all your children, but perhaps you recall that a few thousand
years ago, you had a daughter who happened to become the Goddess Of
Wisdom, Intelligence, and Cleverness?”

“Never gonna forget that one,” said Zeus, rubbing his head.

“It would seem that my lovely and not-at-all-incredibly-annoying sister

Athena figured all of this out about ten years before I did,” said Hermes. He
reached into his pocket and took out a bottle of Athena Mineral Water.
“Behold! 91% market share. Aquafina? Bankrupt. Dasani? Out of business.
And here’s the best part.” He held the label up very close, so Zeus could read
it. “Athena Mineral Water Customer Reward Program,” it said in small font.
“Every time you drink a refreshing bottle of Athena Mineral Water, say
‘Thanks, Athena!’ in front of a registered associate, and they’ll punch your
card. Collect ten punches and get a liter bottle of Athena Mineral Water
absolutely free.”

“Whaddya sayin’?” asked Zeus.

“I’m saying that every day, about a million mortals are going into
supermarkets, drinking water, and saying ‘Thanks, Athena!’, and each one of
them is giving my beloved-and-not-at-all-aneurysm-inducing sister an
amount of divine power equal to an entire animal sacrifice. I had some of my
quants crunch the numbers, and right now I’m guessing she’s about twenty
times more powerful than you were at your prime. At your prime, Dad. She
pretty much has a monopoly on divinity right now. We’re really really really
screwed.”

“So you gonna take all that cash you got and open up your own water
business?”
“I tried. They wouldn’t even let me register it. Said it was a trademark conflict
with Hermes Handbags. I got my lawyers to look up who owns Hermes
Handbags, and it’s a shell corporation belonging to a consortium belonging to
a Chinese group belonging to a company registered in the Cayman Islands
which was set up using money from…Athena Mineral Water. Mars Bars, same
thing. Zeus Cameras, likewise. And it’s worse than that. I try to find some
neopagan groups, see if maybe I can get them to sacrifice a few bottles of water
to me just until I can think of a solution that scales. She murdered all of them.
In cold blood. Every priest or priestess who ever worshipped another
Olympian. She’s boxed us in, Dad.”

“And that’s why yer comin’ to me. You want….the power of lighning!”

Zeus tried to stand in an imposing pose, but only succeeded in tripping on his
blanket and crumpling back onto the ground.

“Dad, you can’t summon lightning anymore. You haven’t had that kind of
strength for two millennia. And with the power Athena’s collected, it wouldn’t
help. But there is something you can give me.”

“What?”

“I need to talk to Prometheus.”

Zeus managed to bring himself into an approximation of standing. “Now listen

here, sonny. Maybe I ain’t much of a king of the gods anymore. I ain’t got the
lightning and the thunder and all that. But lockin’ that bastard up was the best
thing I ever did, and you know it, and yer not gonna take that away from me.
You think yer so smart with your hedge fund, and yer money, and yer fancy
East Coast suit, but I’m tellin’ you, Prometheus would eat you for breakfast
and he wouldn’t even break out a sweat.”

“Right, Dad. That’s the thing. He’s the only one who’s smart enough to
outmanuever Athena. I’m proud of my brains, but she’s the Goddess Of
Wisdom, Intelligence, and Cleverness, plus now she’s stronger than us, and
I’m not sure how to get one up on the Goddess of Wisdom, Intelligence, and
Cleverness without help from someone who’s…uh…very very smart.”
“Prometheus ain’t just smart,” spat Zeus. “It’s not just that he has book-
larning. He’s the God of Foresight. He sees every possible future laid out in
fronna him as easily as you or I see that there blanket.” He pointed to the
blanket, which was actually so dirt-covered that it was getting hard to see
against the dirt below. “It took all of us together, and all the Giants, and all the
Cyclopses to bring him down, and we wouldn’ta succeeded if the Fates
themselves hadn’t gotten pissed with him for ruining their weaving and given
us a hand. And it was Athena herself who told us that we had to bind him
somewhere far away, couldn’t talk to him, couldn’t even go near him, or else
he’d figure out some way to screw up all our futures just by sayin’ a couple a’
sentences to us. And all a’ you, and all the Giants, and all the Cyclopses, you all
agreed, and you all gave me the key that lets you reach him, and I ain’t given
that key to anyone in the past two thousand years and I ain’t givin’ it to you
now and that’s final, you hear me, boy?”

“Then,” said Hermes, “I fear we are all doomed.”

“We’re fucking gods,” said Zeus. “We can’t die. We can’t even be contained, for
long. Only gods we ever managed to lock up were the Titans in Tartarus and
Prometheus in Elbrus, and that was only by all of us workin’ together, and by
my power as King of Gods, and if you think I’m signin’ off to any of this, yer
crazy.”

“Then we will wane,” said Hermes, “and become little better than bugs
skittering beneath Athena’s feet.”

“I ain’t got much,” said Zeus, “but I beat Prometheus and no one ain’t ever
going to take that away from me. Now get going, sonny boy.”

“If I do not beat Athena,” said Hermes, “you’ll never be able to turn any
women into animals, ever again.”

Zeus paused, just a second, then spat. “I made my choice,” he told Hermes.
“Now git!”
6. Pandora

He remembered the first time he had come here to see her. It had taken him
months just to find the place. An Orthodox convent. Our Lady Of Sorrows, just
outside Kiev.

He had knocked on her door. “Come in,” she’d said. She hadn’t opened the
door. At the time, he hadn’t realized that was significant.

She was wearing a veil. “Dory?” he asked. She nodded slightly. “Dory, it’s
Apollo.”

“You didn’t forget about me.” He couldn’t see her eyes, but she was smiling.

“Forget about you? Dory, I’ve been sending you care packages every month!”

“Oh.” A frown. “I’m sorry. I didn’t…I don’t open things.”

“Oh.”

“You understand, don’t you?”

“I can see how it would be traumatic. But…you didn’t get any of my letters?”

“They were in envelopes, Apollo. I told you, I don’t open things.”

“Oh,” he said. He lifted her veil, saw her face for the first time in years. “What,
not even your eyes?”

Pandora nodded.

“The church is beautiful. It looks like a wedding cake. You haven’t even been a
littlecurious what the convent you’re living in looks like?”

“I don’t do curiosity anymore, Apollo. Curiosity leads me to bad, bad places.”

“Dory.” It was worse than he’d thought. He was the god of healing, or had
been. His powers were weak, but maybe he could at least do some therapy?
“Dory, you did one bad thing.”
“I did all the bad things, Apollo. Literally. Every single one of them.”

“Okay. Be that as it may. You were tricked. Zeus played a horrible joke on you.
Or he used you as a pawn to play a horrible joke on everybody. It doesn’t mean
opening things is always bad, or that curiosity always gets punished. It means
one stupid god played one stupid joke. Look, he could have put all the world’s
evils in, I don’t know, his basement, and released them if and only if you didn’t
open a box. Then the lesson would have been to always open things. Do you
see how that makes just as much sense as what actually happened.”

“I’m sorry, Apollo,” said Pandora. “I appreciate what you’re trying to do. But it
won’t help.”

“It might!” said Apollo. “Keep an open mind!”

“I don’t do open.”

“Ah. Right.”

He sat down on the little cot. She sat down beside him.

“So now you’re a nun.”

“I just live here. I wandered by one day, and the sisters took me in. Said I
looked like I needed help, which I guess I did. I’ve stayed here ever since. They
say that I’m good luck to have around. Can you believe that? Me? Good luck?”

“They like you,” said Apollo. “Anyone would.”

“It’s because I don’t age,” said Pandora. “And because I never leave my room.
They assume I’m a saint or something. Praying all the time. I’m even starting
to get pilgrims, if you can believe it.” She waved her hand towards a table full
of little knickknacks. “Gifts. The pilgrims give me gifts.” She sighed.

Apollo went over to the table. A rosary. An icon, covered in gold leaf. Jesus, he
assumed. A vial of holy water. “This is lovely,” he said, looking more closely at
the icon. “Who gave it to you?”

“I didn’t ask,” said Pandora. “I don’t do curiosity.”

“Ah,” said Apollo. He took her hand again. “Come outside with me. I won’t
make you open your eyes. I’ll lead the way. Just for a minute?”

They walked through the courtyard. A few nuns looked askance at them, but
Apollo looked too poised to be anywhere other than where he was supposed to
be, and they assumed he was a visiting priest or somebody and let him pass.
They came to a meadow. Apollo gingerly guided Pandora to sit down on a
rock, and sat beside her.

“We used to have a good thing going,” he told her.

“And now I’m like this,” she said.

“You might get better. With time.”

“I might not.”

“There’s always hope.”

“Yes, they say I closed the box just in time for that one. Strange how little I’ve
gotten from it myself.”

“Kiss me,” said Apollo, on impulse.

“We had a good thing going once,” Pandora said. “That’s not me anymore.”

“It could be,” said Apollo. “Hope, and all that.”

“I don’t open things,” said Pandora. “Not even my heart.”

How many centuries ago had that been? Three? Four? They all blended
together. The convent was no help either. Most places had the decency to
change a little since the Renaissance. The convent looked exactly the same.
Same meadow. Same courtyard. Same door. Apollo knocked. “It’s me, Dory.”

“Come in,” she said, without opening the door.

He came in, sat down on the cot. She looked the same, too. She was in a
strange middle state; a human created before mortality, given all the divine
gifts, to be the wife of a god. She wasn’t divine, not quite. But she wasn’t fully
mortal either. A demigod, maybe.

“It’s been a while,” he said. “Five, ten years?”

“It’s been a while,” agreed Pandora.

The room hadn’t changed either, except for a few more pilgrim gifts. The
rosary and Jesus-icon had been joined by enough little saints and angels to fill
a heavenly choir, plus a good-sized marble statue of an woman in armor. He
tried to remember if there was some female warrior-saint, but his mind came
up blank. He wished he could ask Pandora, but he knew what she thought of
curiosity.

“I brought you a present,” he said. “It’s a smartphone. Flip phones are on their
way out. This one works without being opened.”

Pandora ran her hands along it. “It’s so smooth,” she said. “Now you can call
me any time?”

“Yeah,” said Apollo. “You can call people too. If you ever feel, you know, the
need to connect.”

Pandora gave him a little peck on the cheek, then slipped the phone under her
bed.

“I wish I could say this was entirely a social call,” said the god, “but I’m here
on business.”

There was a pause in the conversation before he realized she wasn’t going to
ask what the business was.

“A friend gave me something dangerous. And I have to give it to a woman. But

if the woman saw it, bad things would happen. Really, really bad things. And I
asked myself, where can I find a woman who will listen when I warn her not to
look at something? And, uh. I thought of you.”

“Sure,” said Pandora. “I’m happy to take your thing. Where shall I put it?”
“Uh,” said Apollo. “Somewhere where the pilgrims won’t see it. That’s
important. Nobody can see it.”

“I’ll put it under my bed,” said Pandora.

Apollo handed it to her. It was heavy, and cold to the touch, and round, about
the size of a baseball. She slipped it under the little cot.

“Thanks,” said Apollo.

“I’m glad I could help you with something,” said Pandora. “You’ve been so nice
to me.”

“I haven’t been! I never visit!”

“You visit sometimes. The others never visit. They wish they could forget
about me.”

“Um,” said Apollo. “I’m sure they meant to drop by and tell you how they’re
doing.”

“It’s okay,” said Pandora. “It doesn’t matter whether I know how they’re doing
or not.”

Apollo frowned. “Listen. I know you have your position in the pantheon, as
Cautionary Tale Against The Dangers Of Excessive Curiosity. But I have my
place too. Well, lots of places. The Sun. Healing. Music. Poetry. Being Very
Handsome. But along with all those things, I’m the God Of Reason And
Science. And maybe a long time ago, curiosity caused all the world’s problems.
But now it’s the other way around. Curiosity’s solving problems, Pandora. All
over the world, curiosity is solving famine, it’s solving poverty, it’s solving
disease. They put smallpox back in the box, Pandora!”

“Wait,” said Pandora. “I never heard about that! They found a way to…?”

For a brief moment, Apollo thought Pandora was going to ask a question, but
she caught herself. He answered anyway.
“Yes,” he said. “There’s a way to put things back in the box. Maybe. A little.
Sometimes. It’s really hard. So hard I wouldn’t have been able to do it myself,
and I’m the God of Healing. But they did it. Once. Maybe they’ll be able to do
it again. And they did it because of curiosity. They wondered whether they
could do it, and then they wondered how they could do it, and then they did
it.”

“That’s…really interesting,” said Pandora.

“You’ll think about that?” asked Apollo.

“I will,” said Pandora.

“And maybe…call somebody sometime? Me? Someone else? Anybody? I know

Artemis has been wanting to hear from you.”

“Um,” said Pandora. “Maybe? I don’t know.”

“That’s fine. Just…keep the option open.”

“Apollo, I don’t do open.”

“Just keep it in mind.”

“Goodbye, Apollo.”

“Goodbye, Dory.”

7. Athena

“Hi. My name is Ari…Smith…and I’m here to see Ms…I don’t know, she
probably goes by Tina or Minnie or something like that. Really smart and
mysterious and probably in charge of everything?”

The security guard at the entrance to the Athena Mineral Water Tower looked
at him skeptically. “Do you have an appointment?”

Ares reached into his pocket.

“I got my fucking appointment right here! Two Medals of Honor! While you
guys were selling water to yuppies, I was risking my life for your freedom over
in Afghanistan. Come on, man. Can’t a vet get any respect around here?”

The guard shook his head. “Can’t get in without an appointment,” he said.

“So,” said Ares, “it has come to this. Same as always.” A bronze spear appeared
in his hand, and he rammed it right through the security guard. Didn’t even
bother extracting it, there was more where that came from. Somebody
screamed. An alarm sounded. Whistling, Ares walked through the lobby and
into the elevator, pressed the button for the top floor. That was where
important people had their offices, right?

Apparently it wasn’t. “Excuse me,” Ares asked some kind of secretary sitting at
a desk. “Can you direct me to Ms…I don’t know, she probably goes by Tina or
Minnie or something like that? Really smart and mysterious and probably in
charge of everything?”

A few policemen ran up behind him and started to open fire. Without even
looking at them, Ares chucked a spear backwards and somehow managed to
impale all three of them at once. The secretary stared at him, eyes wide with
horror.

“Damn. I didn’t mean to get you all frazzled. Uh, look. Two Medals of Honor!
I’m a vet! Patriotic, trustworthy! Ms. Tina or Minnie or something? Really
smart and important? Please?”

“Uh…” The secretary looked terrified, but at least it was the sort of terror that
scared her into talking. “Uh, you mean the CEO? Ms. Athena?”

“Really? She’s the fucking Goddess of Wisdom And Intelligence And

Cleverness and she couldn’t get a better pseudonym than ‘Ms. Athena’?
Whatever. Where is she?”

Another elevator ride and a few more cops later, Ares found himself breaking
down the door of the CEO’s office.

“Hey,” said Ares. “Long time, no see.”

“Can’t imagine why,” said Athena.

“Look, I’ll be blunt,” said Ares. “I came here to get the golden apple. Give me
that and we’re square. I’ll go away. I’ll even pay for the doors. And, uh…
everything.”

“What golden apple?”

“Oh, come on. I talked to Aphrodite the other day. She said there’s a new
golden apple about. She doesn’t have it. And I talked to Hera. She doesn’t have
it. And I thought…who’s been gunning for a golden apple ever since that whole
mess with Troy? Who’s the Goddess Of Wisdom And Intelligence And
Cleverness and always gets everything she wants? And then I remembered my
wonderful older sister who I definitely don’t think is the most annoying person
ever, and who seems to be doing pretty well for herself. And I thought maybe I
should come pay you a visit. Great water, by the way. I tried some on my way
here.”

“Fact is,” said Athena, “I don’t have any golden apples.”

“Oh, lay off it, we both know you’ve got the damn apple. Give it to me or else
I’ll smash this place up however much it takes to find it.”

About a dozen SWAT officers burst into the office. “Ms. Athena! There’s an
intruder in the building!”

“It’s taken care of,” said Athena. “Go off and have a nice day.”

The SWAT team left.

“They believe you?” asked Ares, who was about seven feet tall, dressed in
Trojan War vintage armor, carrying a huge bronze spear still covered in blood,
and clearly visible.

“I’ve…put a glamour upon myself,” said Athena. “It helps a lot, working with
mortals. As long as I’m around, nobody notices anything unusual.”

“And you didn’t even want their help?” asked Ares. “Even though you’re alone,
with your younger brother, who happens to be unbeatable in combat?”
Athena laughed. “Unbeatable? Ares, you have no idea what you’ve just walked
into. I understand Hermes has figured it out, which means I’ll have to take
care of him sooner rather than later. But you? You waltz in here, expecting me
to be a pushover? Let me show you the tiniest taste of what I can do.”

She opened the window. She stretched out her hand. A bolt of lightning arced
from her fingers, struck the street below.

“Lightning?” asked Ares. “But…only Dad could call lightning!”

“Not anymore,” said Athena. “Come on, Ares. You want to fight? Let’s fight.”

Ares threw his spear. It stopped in midair, like it had hit an invisible wall.
Then it turned, flew back at him, coiled around like a snake, tied him down.
“Hey!” he protested. “Hey! That’s not fair!”

“I’m so glad you came,” said Athena. “I needed a test subject. To see if my
powers were really as strong as I hoped. What’s the hardest thing in the world,
Ares? Binding a god. Only ever accomplished twice in history. The Titans.
Prometheus. Both times, by the power of Zeus and all the other gods
combined. Do I dare attempt such a thing alone? I believe I do.”

The lights darkened. The air began to stir. Lightning arced back and forth
across the room. A secretary opened the door, saw the chaos, said “Oh, looks
like you’re busy,” closed the door, and walked out. Time seemed to stop.

There was a rush, a whistle, and a thud, and then Ares wasn’t in the world
anymore.

8. Prometheus

“Are we there yet?” asked Heracles.

“When we are there,” said Hermes, “I promise I will tell you.”

“It’s just that I was wondering,” said Heracles, “whether we were there.”

“There are,” said Hermes, “certain games mortals play, in which a necessary
prerequisite is to create your own hero character. And in some of those games,
you get a certain amount of points, which you are allowed to allocate either to
intelligence or to strength, so that the smarter you are, the weaker you must
be, and vice versa. And I notice, Heracles, that you are the strongest man who
has ever existed. Do you know what that implies?”

“It implies that I’m very strong,” said Heracles. “But also, I was wondering –
are we there yet?”

Hermes sighed. They were in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia driving
down a dirt road in a narrow Caucasus mountain pass. It would have been
unpleasant for several reasons even without his companion’s endless whining.
Still, he was feeling just a little bit euphoric.

One week ago, Ares had attacked Athena, raving about golden apples, and
then…nothing. He had disappeared. He’d asked his girlfriend Tyche to find
him. Tyche was the goddess of luck – a nice catch, if you ran a hedge fund. She
could find anything. But she couldn’t find Ares. He wasn’t in the world. There
was only one other place he could be.

Tartarus. The Pit. The Abyss. The place beyond space where those removed
from the world languished in darkness for eternity.

He’d gotten on the first flight to Memphis, shaken his father awake. Drunk as
he was, Zeus had understood immediately. If Athena had gained enough
power to open Tartarus, any one of them could be next. Their very souls were
in danger.

And after a lot of arguing and screaming, Hermes had changed tactics and
brought out some wine, and he had gotten Zeus very, very drunk. And whether
it was one of those things, or another, or the combination of all of them, Zeus
had divulged the key to Mt. Elbrus, the one that accessed the secret prison of
Prometheus.

“We’re here,” Hermes told Heracles. He parked the car in a bed of gravel by
the side of the road. They were in a narrow defile. Mt. Elbrus – the mortal one,
the one visible to humans – loomed in front of them. In the rock face to their
left, there was an opening just narrow enough to fit a single person at at time.
“Now remember,” he said, as he turned on his flashlight and squeezed into the
cave, “You’re going to be wearing these ear plugs. You’ll stare straight ahead,
at my back, nowhere else. You’ve got the bottle of magic water in your pocket,
and…”

“Why do I have to wear the earplugs?” asked Heracles.

“We’ve gone over this a thousand times,” said Hermes. “You have to wear the
earplugs because Prometheus knows literally everything. He knows what he
has to say to scare you, or turn you against me, or make you kill yourself. So
you’re just going to wear earplugs and not listen to him.”

“And why do I have to stare at your back?”

“Because if you stare at Prometheus, maybe he can influence you with some
kind of facial expression or hand signal, and then you’ll still end up killing
yourself. Or killing me. Or dethroning Zeus and returning the universe to
primaeval chaos. Or something too horrible to even think about.”

“Hermes?”

“Yeah?”

“I don’t think there’s any hand signal that would make me dethrone Zeus and
restore the universe to primaeval chaos.”

Hermes sighed.

“Heracles, do you remember when I told you to meet me in the Caucasus

Mountains of Georgia, and I specifically said former Soviet Republic of, and I
specifically made you repeat back to me ‘former Soviet Republic of’, and a few
hours later I got a call from Atlanta International Airport asking me where I
was?”

“Yeah.”

“So consider the possibility, however remote, that Prometheus might be

smarter than you.”
“Oh,” said Heracles. “I guess I hadn’t thought of that.”

They pushed on through the cave, winding around huge stalagmites, stepping
over pools with pale eyeless fish.

“That’s why,” Hermes continued, “when we open the secret gate, I am going to
talk to Prometheus, and you are going to wear the earplugs and stare at my
back.”

“But,” asked Heracles, “what if Prometheus tells you to dethrone primaeval

chaos or whatever?”

“Excellent question,” said Hermes, “That’s why I brought you. I am going to go

forth and talk to Prometheus. I have here a cell phone which is programmed to
accept exactly one hundred characters of input. When Prometheus tells me
how to defeat Athena, I will enter it into the cell phone. When I give you the
signal, you will usher me back into this cave, away from Prometheus. And once
we are in the cave, you will give me this vial of water from the River Lethe,
which will cause me to forget everything that happened in the past eight
hours.”

“So I’m just here to…give you the water?” asked Heracles, confused.

“It’s more complicated than that. If I show the slightest sign of not wanting to
drink that vial of water, then it’s your job to overpower me and force it down
my throat, all without allowing me to communicate with you in any way. I
trust that you will be able to manage that?”

“I’m very strong,” said Heracles.

“And that,” said Hermes, “is why we love you. There is one more thing I’m
going to ask of you. After I’ve drunk the water from Lethe, but before I wake
up, you need to read the message on the cell phone yourself and confirm that
it looks like a strategy for defeating Athena and not like some other kind of
message from Prometheus to the outside world, and certainly not like any
other terms Prometheus has added to our bargain. If you see something that
looks like a message from Prometheus or an extra term, I need you to smash
the cell phone and drink this second vial of water from the River Lethe.”
“Oh good,” said Heracles. “I like smashing things and I like water.”

“The only problem,” said Hermes, “is that you are a couple of filaments short
of a light bulb. So what I’m going to do is ask you to swear on the River Styx
that you’ll comply. You’re half-god; that kind of oath is self-enforcing. As long
as even the tiniest part of you remembers what you’ve sworn to do, it will be
literally impossible to do otherwise.”

“All right. I swear by river sticks that I’ll do what you say.”

“By the RIVER STYX!”

“I swear by the River Styx that I’ll do what you say.”

The cave briefly darkened, and there was a gust of icy wind that seemed to
come from nowhere.

“Good. Now, put the earplugs in, and be quiet for just a second. I need to
concentrate here.”

He searched for a part of the cave wall that was just a little too smooth.

“Hermes?” asked Heracles.

“Yes?” asked Hermes.

Heracles said nothing.

“YES?” asked Hermes.

Heracles still said nothing. Hermes saw that he was wearing the earplugs.

“Hermes, if I have the earplugs in, how will I know if I’m being quiet?”

Hermes gave what he hoped was a reassuring-looking shrug, then went back
to scanning the cave wall.

There.
A little too smooth, a little too pale. Hermes served part-time as God Of Magic,
and he could sense something off about that part of the cave. He put his hand
on it. Unnatural warmth. The key went here.

With a harpy-feather quill, in ink of ichor, Hermes wrote:

D E T E R

E X I L E

T I T A N

E L A T E

R E N E W

The wall opened, and sunlight shown through.

They climbed out onto a rock promontory. The scene before them both was
and wasn’t Mount Elbrus. The snow shone just a little bit brighter. The
sunlight glittered just a little more. The shadows were a little bit darker.

And from under the mountain poked out a gigantic head, four titanic limbs,
and bits of a huge torso. A giant, lying supine, pinned down by the peak. On
the right half of the torso sat a great eagle, taking occasional bites of liver.

“Hello, Hermes,” said Prometheus.

Well, no turning back now, thought the god.

“Hello, Prometheus,” said Hermes. “With all due respect, I’m trying to
minimize information flow with you, so I’d like you not to speak until I’ve
finished explaining.” He paused, waiting for an objection, staring at
Prometheus even though he knew he shouldn’t. He tried to read the Titan’s
great bearded face. He looked surprisingly cheerful for a man pinned
underneath a mountain having his liver eternally pecked out.

Finally, Prometheus nodded.

“We’ve got a problem, back in the world. Two thousand years ago, the animal
sacrifices stopped working. Eventually we figured out it had to do with the
precession of the zodiac. The source of power went from rams to fish and now
to water. Athena figured it out first, and now she’s got a monopoly on the
water industry. She’s taken all of the divine power and become strong enough
to send gods to Tartarus. The rest of us have some residual abilities, but
otherwise we’re barely beyond mortal level. We’re at a loss, and we were
hoping that, um, your special abilities might be able to help us. So we’d like to
offer you a deal. In exchange for information that helps us defeat Athena,
we’ll, um, remove the eagle. There’s a key…I don’t have it here, but it can be
used remotely. We’ll do that. And say we’re sorry about it. Really sorry.”

That they would never free Prometheus went without saying, so Hermes didn’t
say it.

The Titan still looked alarmingly cheerful.

“You can, uh, talk now, if you want,” said Hermes. “Though, maybe try to keep
it short.”

“I appreciate the apology,” said Prometheus. “Really, I do. And I think we can
deal with each other. Removing the eagle would be great, of course. But there’s
one more thing I’ve got to ask.”

This was what he’d been afraid of. He was desperate. Prometheus knew it.
Each additional term was a malignant seed that could grow into anything at
all. He would have to hold fast to his plan and pray it was enough.

“Alas,” said Hermes, “We predicted that you might say that, so we’ve taken
some measures to precommit not to change any of our terms. In particular, I
have sworn by the River Styx – an oath which it is literally impossible for gods
to break – that I will not accept any terms other than the ones I just
mentioned. Also, once you give me your strategic advice, I will be writing
down a very short hundred-character summary on this phone, which is
programmed to accept no more than a hundred characters and will physically
melt if any attempt is made to interfere with that programming. Then I will
give a pre-determined hand signal to Heracles, who will escort myself and the
phone back into the cave and the ordinary world and force-feed me a vial of
water from the River Lethe so that any memory of our conversation beyond
those hundred characters will be lost forever. Heracles will then read the cell
phone and confirm that no extra terms have been added to the bargain. If he
sees any, he will smash the cell phone and drink water from Lethe himself.
Heracles has himself sworn by the River Styx to comply with all of this.”

Prometheus looked thoughtful – and oh god, were there any three words in
the English language scarier than those – and finally he said: “Let’s discuss my
terms. After you agree to them, I’ll tell you how you are going to get around
your oath, Heracles, Heracles’ oath, and the water of Lethe.”

Hermes sighed.

“My terms are: you’ll remove the eagle. And you’ll donate $1503.15 to a charity
called ‘Against Malaria Foundation’.”

“Oh no,” said Hermes. “Oh no oh no oh no. That is exactly the kind of thing
I’m not going to do. You want me to take an action in the world? A specific
action? With multiple bits of information? Oh no oh no oh no oh no there is no
way you are going to get me to do that.”

Prometheus still looked cheerful. “Well then, Hermes, it was nice to chat. I
guess you’ll be on your way.”

“Now hold on. You don’t want to take an option, presented at zero cost to you,
that will get that eagle out of your liver forever and ever?”

“It’s not that I don’t want to. It’s that bargaining is a game of give-and-take.
We both have things we want out of this interaction. The question is how far
we’re going to go to get them. It’s a game of bluffing and counterbluffing. And
unfortunately for you, I am the God Of Foresight, and happen to be
omniscient. You are going to walk out of here in fifty-one minutes having
agreed to my terms. All I am doing is speaking the complicated dance of words
that inevitably gets you to that point.”

“I hate everything about this place so much,” said Hermes.

“And I am deeply sorry,” said Prometheus, and he sounded sorry, “but I do

insist.”
“Why?” asked Hermes. “What are you plotting?”

“You know that I like humans. You remember, I gave them fire, so long ago. I
still have a fond place in my heart for them, and malaria is a terrible disease,
and I thought…”

“You’re omniscient, so you know I don’t believe that for a second. Try again!
What are you doing? What’s next on your little list of plans? The humans live
on Mount Olympus, and we have to worship them? The Fates accidentally
snip their own fingers off and die of blood loss? I know you’re up to some kind
of unspeakable horror, the only question is which one?”

“Hermes,” asked Prometheus, “has it ever occurred to you that I was out, in
the world, for countless aeons before you imprisoned me here? If you’re so
afraid of what I can do or say with a single sentence, what do you think
happened when I had millennia to tailor everything just the way I wanted it?
Things are going well for me, aren’t they? The gods have been brought low.
Humans have never been doing better. Zeus thought he was so clever, giving
them a box full of evils, but I selected every one of those evils eons beforehand.
You know what was in that box, Hermes? Things to make humanity stronger.
I gave them famine so they would invent agriculture. I gave them disease so
they would invent medicine. I gave them war so they would smelt iron. And I
left them hope, so that even in their darkest moments they would pull through
and keep dreaming. Dream of putting all of those evils back in the box they
came from and closing it forever. And they will. Do you know how many
sentient species in the multiverse developed an industrial base, liberal
democracy, and human rights without killing themselves or collapsing into
barbarism, Hermes? The number is one. One sentient species. Mine.”

“Don’t tell me that getting stuck under Mt. Elbrus with an eagle eating your
liver was all part of the plan.”

“You don’t think so? Hermes, I am vast. I comprise universes. In my mind is

every branch of possibility-space that ever will be or could have been. What’s
the point of going outside, when the outside is all inside of me? I set up the
world how I wanted it, ensured it would go the right direction, and then
retired somewhere quiet, somewhere with space to think.”
“But the eagle?”

“Okay, I admit I kind of dropped the ball on that one. The Fates are petty little
bitches.”

“So now what?”

“So now you remove the eagle, and I’m happy, and you’re happy.”

“Except for this malaria thing.”

“Think of that as my little joke.”

“Your joke. You expect me to believe that?”

“I expect you to realize you have no other option, accept my proposal, and
leave this place in another forty-six minutes.”

“Fuck you.”

“Then I expect you to go back, defeat Athena, and restore the power of the
gods. Except that you will find it doesn’t go quite as far as it used to. Lightning
is a cheap trick compared to nuclear weapons. Flying chariots are a little
underwhelming when they share the skies with supersonic jets. You will find
that your accustomed roles within human society work well for you. You will
find yourself using your power not to dominate human society, but to
shepherd it along its path. They are entering a very dangerous time now. Very
dangerous. They need divine intervention, but not from above. They need gods
who live disguised among them, and need them as much as they need you, and
shepherd them. Athena cannot do it alone, not properly, so I will give you
what you need to stop her. I have foreseen your path, and I know you rise to
the occasion. So go, with my blessing, and serve Man.”

“Fuck you, just tell me what message I’m sending.”

“A hundred characters? Hmmm. ATH CAN’T HOLD POWER IN BODY.

NEEDS FOCUS, PROBABLY IDOL. DONATE $1503.15 TO AMF, THEN
DESTROY IDOL.”
Hermes typed it onto his cell phone. “And how are we going to get around all
of the oaths and precautions?

“Tell me, Hermes, when did you swear your oath by the River Styx?”

“Three days ago.”

“Good. If you don’t remember swearing the oath, you can’t be bound by it. So
you need to overdose on Lethe-water, enough to erase three days from your
mind. I imagine you’ve been planning this escapade for a while, so when you
wake up in a cave in the Caucasus with a cell phone bearing a message, you’ll
be able to piece together what happened. The message is framed such that the
donation looks like part of the plan, so Heracles won’t notice anything amiss.
You’ll probably figure it out, but you’re an honorable god and you’ll feel
compelled to stick to the bargain that you must have made with me. None of
this breaks your current oath, which only says you must not carry out any of
my terms, not that you must not mention them in your message. Overdosing
on Lethe-water is only a suggestion of mine, not itself a term necessary to
procure my agreement, so it should not be prohibited.”

Hermes sighed with relief. “Your plan isn’t going to work, Prometheus.
Heracles is going to force-feed me the Lethe water before taking out his
earplugs, so I can’t communicate with him and ask him to change the dose.
And even if I could, I only brought eight hours’ worth of Lethe water anyway.
Sixteen if you count Heracles’ vial.”

“There are two ways to increase the effect of a drug,” said Prometheus. “You
can increase the dose. Or you can decrease the rate at which metabolism
eliminates it from the body. Since our dose of Lethe water is limited, we’re
going to go with the second. Heracles will give you exactly the amount of Lethe
water you told him, but your body will fail to process it as usual, and it will
have ten times the expected effect, causing you to forget your oath and be able
to accept my amended terms when you find them on your phone.”

“How are you going to change my metabolism?”

“Most drugs are metabolized by the liver. By manipulating liver size, we can
tailor the metabolic rate to any level that we want.”
“Manipulating liver size?” Hermes didn’t like the sound of this.

“Yes. Hepatectomy is a very safe, commonplace surgery. But even if it weren’t,

you would have nothing to fear. Surgeons’ success rates correlate with their
number of hours of experience. And we have the most experienced liver
removal specialist in the multiverse right here on Mt. Elbrus.”

“Oh no,” said Hermes. “You’re not…oh no oh no oh no.”

The eagle gave a voracious shriek.

9. Everybody

The pantheon met in the Pantheon, as was tradition. Hermes and his
girlfriend Tyche came first; the God Of Commerce took a seat in the center just
below the oculus, as the Goddess Of Fortune ushered away confused tourists.
Gradually the rest trickled in. Poseidon, tracking water wherever he stepped.
Apollo, dapper as ever in a tweed coat and bowtie, and Artemis, dressed in
camo. Nike, dressed like she had just come from the gym. And Dionysus, in his
stained Sigma Alpha Epsilon sweatshirt. He caught Hermes’ eye.
“HEEEEEEY, BRO!” he said. “HOW’S IT HANGING?” Hermes just ignored
him.

Hades was over near the entrance, talking to Aphrodite. “Hey Aph,” he said
affably. “Want a pomegranate?”

Aphrodite’s eyes narrowed. “Is it one of your magical pomegranates that

makes anyone who eats it obligated to become your wife?”

“Uh…” said Hades, shifting his eyes back and forth. “It…might not be?”

“I’ll pass,” said Aphrodite.

The missing stood out by their absence. Ares was not with them, for obvious
reasons. Athena had obviously not been invited to the conspiracy against her.
And Zeus, King Of The Gods, was nowhere to be seen. Hermes had begged and
cajoled, but to no effect; he was still angry at having given up Prometheus’ key
when drunk. “This is our last chance,” said Hermes, “the most important thing
you’ll ever do.” But Zeus was having none of it. He had (he said in a half-
drunken stupor) just met with a Hollywood talent scout, who had told him
that he was perfect to star in a movie about the Trojan War. He was going to
strike it big and become a celebrity and then open up his own water company,
and Athena would never know what hit her. That was his plan and he was
sticking to it.

Well, he would work with what he had.

“My fellow gods!” he announced, and everyone turned to look at him.

“By now you’ve heard the news. Athena has used her bottled-water monopoly
to seize divine power for herself. She has opened the gates to Tartarus; none of
us are safe. If we ever want to be more than the second-rate has-beens we are
now, we need to stop her. I know how we’re going to do it.”

Some gasps. Apollo looked thoughtful. “WOOOOOOOOOO!” shouted

Dionysus. “YOU GO, HERMES!”

“Athena’s collected so much power that she can’t hold it all herself,” he said.
He’d gone over all this with Apollo, a few days after waking up in the cave with
a terrible headache; the two of them had managed to expand Prometheus’
cryptic message into an actionable plan. He was very suspicious that a
seemingly unrelated order to donate a very specific sum of money was a
command of Prometheus’ that had slipped past his security, but he wasn’t sure
how, and he wasn’t going to take the risk. He’d made the donation – now the
rest was up to them.

“She can’t hold it all herself,” he continued, “so she needs some kind of
supplementary focus. Sympathetic magic. Like calls out to like. She needs an
idol. And not just any idol. It would have to be something really special, an
idol of Athena that generations of mortals have identified with the deepest
secrets of her power. The history books list two such idols. One, the giant
statue in the Parthenon. That’s destroyed. Two, the Palladium. It was there in
Troy. It was there in Rome. Now we think it’s in the Athena Mineral Water
headquarters. Why? Because that kind of power would stand out like a sore
thumb unlessit was outshone by the presence of another immortal. Athena
sure wouldn’t trust anyone else with it, so she’s got it herself. It must be
hollow. The divine energy must be stored inside of it. If we can find and
destroy it, then Athena loses her power and it flows into alternate conduits.
Like us. In other words, we get our magic back.”

“WOOOOOOOO!” shouted Dionysus.

“Please refrain from cheering until the entire speech is over,” said Hermes.
“Anyway, here’s my plan. We’re going to split in two. One group is going to be
the powerhouses. Apollo, Artemis, Hades, Poseidon, Aphrodite, Dionysus.
You’re all strong, skilled with weapons, or both. You’re going to smash things,
create a distraction. You’re going to avoid confronting Athena directly,
because Ares already showed us how that turns out. While my sister is chasing
after you, the second group slips in. That’s me and Tyche. Hades has given me
his helm of invisibility, which should be enough power to hide both of us from
view. Tyche’s the Goddess Of Fortune. She can find anything. And I’m the God
Of Thieves. I can break into anywhere. She’ll lead me straight to the
Palladium, I’ll nab it, break the thing in two, and then we’re home free. Any
questions? Comments?”

“It’s a good plan,” said Apollo, nodding his head.

“WOOOOOOOOOO!” shouted Dionysus.

“Just do it!” agreed Nike.

And before they could change their mind, Hermes teleported the lot of them to
the lobby of Athena Mineral Water.

They appeared in a flash of light. People stepped back, shocked. The

teleportation was strange enough. But Poseidon was still holding his golden
trident. Hades was surrounded by some kind of miasma. And Aphrodite was
buck naked. They didn’t exactly blend in.

“Distraction!” whispered Hermes, just before taking Tyche’s hand and

vanishing from view.

“Uh,” said Dionysus. “IS EVERYONE HERE READY TO PAAAAAAAAARTY?”

“It’ll do,” muttered Hermes.

He and Tyche made their way up side staircases. Athena’s aura wouldn’t be
able to hide the Palladium at any kind of a distance. It had to be really close to
her office. They came to the CEO suite by a back entrance, then pressed
themselves against a wall as they saw “Ms. Athena” walk by, talking on a cell
phone. “Yeah,” she was saying unconvincingly, “that does sound weird. No, no
idea what’s going on. I’ll be down to investigate. Thanks for the tip.”

When she was out of view, they snuck into her office. It looked very normal. A
few potted plants. A Bosses’ Day card. Some gold-plated “Female
Entrepreneur Visionary Leadership” awards. A wall full of framed news
articles “ATHENA MINERAL WATER BOASTS GODLIKE PROFITS”,
“BEHIND THE STARTUP CHANGING HOW THE WORLD DRINKS”. A
bottle of product on her desk, either for display or hydration. No idols.

“Cold,” said Tyche.

“Cold?” asked Hermes.

“If it were here, I would know. It’s not here.”

“Well, let’s check nearby.”

They checked Athena’s secretary’s office. They checked Athena’s closet. They
checked the office of the Assistant To The CEO, the Director Of The Office Of
The CEO. They checked the executive bathroom. No idols.

“Super cold,” said Tyche. “Hermes, it’s nowhere near here.”

“Fuck,” said Hermes. “We’ve got to go. Find the others and tell them to
disengage, before it’s too late.”

They ran down the stairs until they reached the lobby. It was in a state of
disarray. Chairs and potted plants overturned. Three parallel lines on the the
big LCD screen that looked like they had been scratched by a trident. There
was a magic silver arrow sticking out of one wall. No gods.

“Okay,” said Tyche. “They’ve been here. They must be retreating.”

They ran outside. A trail of water on the sidewalk suggested the route taken by
Poseidon. The parking garage. He could see flashes of lightning on the lower
levels. He wouldn’t be able to get through that way. He channeled all his
power into his winged sandals, and he and Tyche lurched into the air, coming
to rest on the top floor of the structure. He ran down and almost bumped into
Aphrodite.

“Hey, sexy,” she said. “What’s going on?”

He could see the others now. Hades and Poseidon were defending the road
leading to the lower level. Athena was below, hurling lightning at them. They
were in retreat. Artemis stood on the bed of a pickup truck, taking shots with
her magic arrows. Nike was with her, pointing out targets. Dioynsus seemed to
be passed out on the concrete, and Aphrodite and Apollo were holding up the
rear.

“We’ve got to get out of here,” Hermes told the two of them. “I was wrong. The
Palladium’s not in the building.”

A lightning bolt shattered one of the big concrete pillars. “You dare stand
against me?” shouted Athena. “For too long, I’ve played second-fiddle to lesser
deities like yourselves! When I awoke a few centuries ago, it removed the last
doubt from my mind. Everything I predicted was true. Nowadays, who cares
about agriculture? Who cares about the sea? Who even believes in the
Underworld? The sun is a giant ball of gas. The moon is a giant ball of rock.
There’s only one thing that matters today, and that’s intellect! And how better
to enshrine the triumph of intellect over human affairs, then to have the
Goddess Of Wisdom destroy the lesser gods and become a pantheon unto
herself? People these days want monotheism, and I’m going to give it to
them!”

“You’re wrong!” Apollo stepped into the fray. “Intellect is important, yes! You
deserve to be honored, and nobody will take that away from you! But without
Reason to guide it, intellect becomes monstrous. Without Art, and Music, and
Poetry, intellect becomes sterile. And without Healing, intellect becomes
divorced from compassion.”

“AND THE SEA IS REALLY GREAT TOO,” added Poseidon.

Athena rose into the air, crackling with energy. “For now,” she said. “For now,
intellect runs on puny mortal minds that will get all sad if they don’t have their
music and their beachfront houses. But that was a mistake, Apollo. We didn’t
want humans. We wanted apes just barely smart enough to sacrifice some
rams to us and be properly grateful. Then Prometheus got involved, and
everything went wrong. I’m going to fix his mistake. Genetic engineering,
robotics, so many different options. Create minds that don’t need art, that
don’t waste their time with music or lolling at the beach.” She looked at
Artemis. “Destroy the forests and pave them over with factories.” She looked
at Dionysus. “Replace partying with study and productive work.” She looked at
Aphrodite. “Replace the vagaries of love with rational breeding based on
genetic potential.” She looked at Hades. “Machines, that were never alive and
so can never die.” She looked at Poseidon. “Tame the sea for tidal power – ”

“YOU’RE TOUCHING THE SEA OVER MY DEAD BODY!” Poseidon shouted,

and rushed at her with his trident.

“We’ve got to get out of here,” Hermes whispered to Apollo. “Get together as
many as you can. We’re going to make a run for it.”

“She’s blocking the only exit,” Apollo said. “Where do we go?”

“To the roof! I can carry some of you with my wings. The rest will have to
jump.”

A few other gods had gotten the gist of the conversation, started running to the
top of the parking garage. There was a loud thud, then the sound of sparks. It
didn’t sound good.

“I don’t understand,” said Apollo. “How could the Palladium not be in the
tower?”

“I don’t know!” Hermes protested. “If it wasn’t disguised by a god’s aura…”

“Then ipso facto it must be with some other god,” said Apollo. “Who are we
missing? Demeter?”

“Demeter? She hates Athena, thinks her bottled water is destroying the
environment.”
There was another crash. Apollo, Tyche, and Hermes made it onto the roof of
the parking structure. They couldn’t tell how many other gods were still
following.

“Okay then, Hera?”

“I checked. There’s a court record of all of her property, after the divorce with
Zeus. Nothing about any idols. And she doesn’t like Athena either, something
something Trojan something. Nobody likes Athena. And seriously, who’s
going to take a magic idol and just say ‘sure, I’ll hold on to this, no further
questions’.”

“Wait,” said Apollo.

Hermes waited.

“Does it have to be a god god? What about a demigod? An immortal human?”

“Um. In theory it could work. But it would be such a small effect. They’d have
to stay right by the idol, day in, day out, or it wouldn’t be disguised at all.”

Apollo was already taking out his cell phone. “Dory, Dory, please pick up.”

Nike ran onto the roof of the parking garage. There was a big gash down one of
her arms. “She’s right behind us!” she told them. “We’ve got to go!”

“Wait,” said Apollo. “Dory, pick up the phone.”

There was another crash. The parking structure started to wobble.

Apollo heard a noise from the other side of the phone, but no greeting. Right.
She wouldn’t open the conversation.

“Pandora?” he asked. “Are you there?”

“Hi Apollo,” came her voice.

“Dory,” said Apollo. “That statue on your desk, the one of the woman in armor.
I need you to take it and smash it, really hard.”
“Okay,” said Pandora. There was a brief pause. “Done.”

“Done? Did you break the statue?”

“No, it’s very hard, it doesn’t seem to have broken.”

“Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck,” said Apollo.

Of all people, Dionysus managed to crawl his way to the top of the structure.
“It’s getting really gnarly down there,” he announced before collapsing back
into unconsciousness.

“Okay. I need you to feel along the sides of the statue. Is there any kind of
switch, anything that’s going to get it to release the power that it’s stored?”

A brief pause. “There’s…a knob and a hinge.”

“Okay, Pandora. I need you to turn the knob and open the statue.”

“Apollo, I don’t open things.”

“Look, Dory, I don’t ask you for much. I’ve known you for I can’t even
remember how many centuries, and I know things are hard for you, I’ve
respected that. But Dory, you need to open that statue.”

“You know I don’t open things!”

The last few gods ran onto the top of the parking structure. Just behind them
floated Athena, her eyes jet black, her whole body crackling with electricity.
“There’s nowhere left to run,” she taunted them. “You’re all going to Tartarus
now. Any last words?”

“Uh,” said Hades, “want a pomegranate?”

Athena held her hands forth. The sky darkened. The air seemed to stir.

“Dory, you made a mistake once, and it was really bad, I’m not denying that,
but you told me yourself, the one thing you did right was keep Hope. I need
you to be hopeful now. I need you to hope that someday, somebody, us,
humans, somebody we’re not even considering, might be able to reverse what
you did. Might be able to put those evils back in the box. I need you to think
that that’s possible. But not going to happen without our help. Please,
Pandora, trust me on this. And what I need you to do right now is open that
statue.”

Lightning arced back and forth across the heavens. Time seemed to stop.

Then there was a loud pop.

10. Zeus

Zeus had come onto stage believing it was an audition for a big-budget film
about the Trojan War. It wasn’t. Out ran a young woman, her face streaked
with tears. “You said you loved me!” she said. “We had a child together! And
then you…you disappeared!”

“Hey now,” said Zeus. “What’s this now? Who are you? Whaddyatalkinabout?”

“Don’t you recognize me?” sobbed the woman. “I’m Sara! From Biloxi! We met
in ’98! Oh god! You don’t even remember me. You’ve probably abandoned
with so many women that you don’t even remember them! How many were
there after me? Ten? A hundred?”

“Hang on now,” said Zeus. “I ain’t the kind of guy who hooks up with no
hundred women.”

“In fact,” said Alice DiScorria, walking on to stage. “He is precisely that kind of
guy. If you don’t believe me, believe Amy. And Bethany. And Billy Rae. And
Caroline. And Connie.”

As she said each name, each woman came on to the stage.

“Dana. Daria. Dina…”

Some of them were crying. Some of them looked lost. Some of them had steely
determination in their eyes.

“…Jackie. Jessica. Jennifer. Jun-Li…”

“Nah, yer just messin’ with me now. What is this, some kinda trap? I want a
lawyer, lady. I got my rights!”

“…Samantha. Sara. Sarah. Shaniqua. Susan…”

The stage was almost full now.

“You sayin’ I slept with all these women? I didn’t sleep with none of em. I want
my lawyer, right now.”

“Actually,” said Alice, “we’re not saying these are the women you slept with.
We’re saying these are the women you slept with, had children with, and then
abandoned without paying child support.”

“That’s a goddanged lie,” said Zeus. “I ain’t even got no children.”

“Zeus is telling us that he ‘ain’t even got no children’,” Alice told her viewers.
“Alas, we have two hundred and five people in our studio audience today who
think otherwise. Would you please stand up? Aaron. Adam. Althea. Ava.
Bethany Junior. Berenice.” She realized she was starting to lose her audience’s
attention. “And all the rest.”

Two hundred five members of the studio audience, ranging fron toddlers to
adults, stood up. They were all unusually large, and many of the men had big,
flowing beards.

“This is goddanged lies, is what it is!” shouted Zeus. “None of these people
ain’t my children, and that’s the truth!”

“Zeus says that none of these people are his children,” said Alice. “We ran
paternity tests for every single one of them before the show. Let’s see what
they say.” She took out a big stack of manila envelopes, opened the first one.
“Aaron…Zeus is the father! Adam…Zeus is the father! Althea…Zeus is the
father!”

One of the women on stage finally lost it, grabbed a folding chair, and swung
at Zeus. He deflected the blow easily, then pushed her back, just a little too
rough. Suddenly the stage had become a brawl, one hundred ninety enraged
women against one underpowered god.
“Ava…Zeus is the father! Bethany Junior…Zeus is the father! Berenice…Zeus is
the father! Chou-yang…Zeus is the father! Cleo…Zeus is the father!”

The brawl on stage was getting really bad now. A few women were down for
the count. Zeus was bleeding all over his face. Some of the staff started to
wonder whether they should override Alice and call security.

“Demetrius…Zeus is the father! Delia…Zeus is the father! Darragh…Zeus is the

father! Dominique…Zeus is the father!”

One of the women had gotten hold of Zeus hair and was holding him, pinned,
while another was slapping his face. Zeus tried to kick, but ended up losing his
balance. Security guards were pushing through the crowd of women, who were
resisting their efforts.

“Edna…Zeus is the father! Elena…Zeus is…”

Then there was a loud popping sound that seemed to come from everywhere
and nowhere. And then Zeus effortlessly pushed the crowd of women away
from him. For a second, he looked confused by his own strength. He stared at
his newly-rippling muscles, looked down at the ground as if he couldn’t quite
believe how tall he was. Nobody moved.

Then he shouted, “DAMN RIGHT I’M YOUR FATHER! I’M ALL YER
FATHERS. I AM ZEUS OLYMPIOS, KING OF THE GODS, CLOUD-
GATHERER, THUNDERER, MIGHTIEST OF IMMORTALS! AND IIIIII’M
BAAAAAAAAAAAAACK.”

The crackle of lightning filled the halls, knocked over the security guards. The
audience stampeded to the exits. Women started to run off the stage.

“I AM ZEUS, KING OF GODS AND MEN. AND I’M TURNING YOU ALL
INTO ANIMALS!”

Amy became an anteater. Bethany became a duck. Billy Rae became a tree
shrew. Caroline became an otter. He turned Connie into a rattlesnake and
Dana into a panther, Daria into a Komodo dragon and Dina into a bat. It was
over in minutes. Everyone had either escaped or been transformed, besides
Zeus and the hostess.
“Yer still here,” said Zeus, surprised.

“I am everywhere,” said Eris Discordia.

“What happened?” asked Zeus.

“The same thing that happens everywhere, all the time” said Eris. “People had
conflicting aims. They struggled for power. Some won, others lost. The
winners will celebrate, thinking their victory irreversible, and the losers will
mourn, plotting their vengeance. And around them, the world changes
irreversibly, in ways none of them predicted.”

“Huh,” said Zeus.

“In a few hours, news will come that a sudden electrical storm struck the set of
my show, unfortunately causing the cameras to stop recording. Some people
will be missing, casualties of the disaster. Others will say all sorts of strange
things and be ignored. There will be lots of fights about it, and they’ll all call
each other things like ‘sheeple’ and ‘denialist’ and ‘moron’. It will be
wonderful.”

“Huh,” said Zeus.

“In the meantime, the studio is ruined. I suppose I will have to find a new job.
Can you believe it, Zeus? In the old days, I was barred from every city and
temple, driven out into the wilderness as an enemy of mankind. Now they pay
me to cause discord. What a world!”

“It’s…somethin’,” said Zeus

“And it’s all thanks to people like you,” said Eris. “So before we part ways
again, before the poets end their songs and the next myth begins, please
accept a token of appreciation. From me, to you.”

In her hand appeared a shining golden apple.

Epilogue: Trump

“Yeah,” real estate mogul Donald Trump said into the phone. “Look, I gotta go,
Carl. I gotta be at a gala tonight – yeah, the one for the American Eagle
Museum. Terrible stuff, Carl, just terrible. Gotta go.”

He hung up. It really was terrible stuff. Just a year ago, an anti-malaria charity
had funded a grant that happened to precisely match its yearly budget surplus.
The research had borne fruit – a new insecticide, kind of a super-DDT without
the environmental damages. DDT, of course, was famous for killing
endangered birds, but they thought they’d tested it properly this time, dozens
of different bird species, no problems at all. So they’d deployed it worldwide,
and malaria rates had plummeted. Only they hadn’t tested the environmental
consequences as well as they’d thought. 99% of bird species escaped
unscathed – but every eagle in the world had died an unimaginably agonizing
death. The whole situation was so strange that the FBI launched an
investigation – then closed it a few weeks later for absence of motive. Who
could possibly hate eagles that much?

He put on his suit and tie, and was just about ready to head out when a beam
of radiant light appeared in the middle of his room and coalesced into three
women.

“Greetings to you, Mr. Trump,” said the oldest. “I am Hera, Queen of the Gods.
These are my colleagues Aphrodite and Athena. You are the man who runs the
Miss Universe beauty contest, yes?”

He took a step back, dazzled by her radiance. “Um…yes.”

“Zeus, God of Thunder, recently came into possession of a golden apple. Then
a second golden apple, found when searching a convent in Ukraine that had
become a center of, ah, certain recent events. There are three of us and only
two apples, so we petitioned Zeus to determine how they might be divied up.
He replied that traditionally they go to the fairest, and so urged us to seek the
foremost mortal judge of female beauty and implore his assistance. If you truly
run beauty pageants for the entire universe, then you are the judge that we
seek.”
Then she spoke differently, directly into his mind. And as an added incentive,
if you choose me, I swear by the River Styx that I will make you the most
powerful man in the world.

He’d barely had time to process the thought when Aphrodite stared at him,
and a voice like music touched his consciousness, saying Pick me, and I swear
by the River Styx that I will give you any woman you desire. Models,
supermodels, they can all be yours.

Then a third voice, lower, more dispassionate, and he heard Athena say Select
me as most beautiful, and I swear by the River Styx that I will grant you
wisdom, prudence, and the intelligence to make the right decision under any
circumstance.

Donald Trump just stared.

“Well?” asked Hera.

“He’s not answering!” said Athena.

“Waaaaait a second,” said Aphrodite. “Athena, did you ever turn off that
glamour you had, that made mortals around you unable to process the
presence of gods?”

“How was I supposed to turn that off?” asked Athena. “It took the whole divine
power of the universe to create that, and then you took that away from me.
Now I’m just a goddess like anyone else, doing – ” she spat “community
service to make up for past misdeeds. And it’s not even like I didn’t help you
guys bring Ares back.”

“So what you’re saying,” interrupted Hera, “is that he can’t even see us?”

“He can see us,” said Athena. “He just can’t comprehend that anything
unusual might be going on,” said Athena.

Finally, Donald Trump rubbed his eyes, and said “I got no idea who any of you
are, or why you’re in my apartment, but – ” he pointed at Aphrodite and Hera
“you and you are smokin’. You,” he said, pointing to Athena and frowning,
“look like a dyke in that armor. Seriously, get a makeover.”
Then he walked out the door.

“Huh,” said Hera.

“Too bad,” Aphrodite told Athena. “Just goes to show that brains aren’t
everything.”

“Yes, well,” said the Goddess of Wisdom, a little too haughtily to be anything
but compensation, “I’m just glad we finally made it through one of those
without causing any unfortunate side effects for world history.”

“Yes,” said Hera. “I suppose we did. There’s a first time for everything.”

Futurism and Forecasting

Superintelligence FAQ

1: What is superintelligence?

A superintelligence is a mind that is much more intelligent than any human.

Most of the time, it’s used to discuss hypothetical future AIs.

1.1: Sounds a lot like science fiction. Do people think about this in the real
world?

Yes. Two years ago, Google bought artificial intelligence startup DeepMind for
$400 million; DeepMind added the condition that Google promise to set up an
AI Ethics Board. DeepMind cofounder Shane Legg has said in interviews that
he believes superintelligent AI will be “something approaching absolute
power” and “the number one risk for this century”.

Many other science and technology leaders agree. Astrophysicist Stephen

Hawking says that superintelligence “could spell the end of the human race.”
Tech billionaire Bill Gates describes himself as “in the camp that is concerned
about superintelligence…I don’t understand why some people are not
concerned”. SpaceX/Tesla CEO Elon Musk calls superintelligence “our
greatest existential threat” and donated $10 million from his personal fortune
to study the danger. Stuart Russell, Professor of Computer Science at Berkeley
and world-famous AI expert, warns of “species-ending problems” and wants
his field to pivot to make superintelligence-related risks a central concern.

Professor Nick Bostrom is the director of Oxford’s Future of Humanity

Institute, tasked with anticipating and preventing threats to human
civilization. He has been studying the risks of artificial intelligence for twenty
years. The explanations below are loosely adapted from his 2014 book
Superintelligence, and divided into three parts addressing three major
questions. First, why is superintelligence a topic of concern? Second, what is a
“hard takeoff” and how does it impact our concern about superintelligence?
Third, what measures can we take to make superintelligence safe and
beneficial for humanity?

2: AIs aren’t as smart as rats, let alone humans. Isn’t it sort of early to be
worrying about this kind of thing?

Maybe. It’s true that although AI has had some recent successes – like
DeepMind’s newest creation AlphaGo defeating the human Go champion in
April – it still has nothing like humans’ flexible, cross-domain intelligence. No
AI in the world can pass a first-grade reading comprehension test. Facebook’s
Andrew Ng compares worrying about superintelligence to “worrying about
overpopulation on Mars” – a problem for the far future, if at all.

But this apparent safety might be illusory. A survey of leading AI scientists

show that on average they expect human-level AI as early as 2040, with above-
human-level AI following shortly after. And many researchers warn of a
possible “fast takeoff” – a point around human-level AI where progress
reaches a critical mass and then accelerates rapidly and unpredictably.
2.1: What do you mean by “fast takeoff”?

A slow takeoff is a situation in which AI goes from infrahuman to human to

superhuman intelligence very gradually. For example, imagine an augmented
“IQ” scale (THIS IS NOT HOW IQ ACTUALLY WORKS – JUST AN
EXAMPLE) where rats weigh in at 10, chimps at 30, the village idiot at 60,
average humans at 100, and Einstein at 200. And suppose that as technology
advances, computers gain two points on this scale per year. So if they start out
as smart as rats in 2020, they’ll be as smart as chimps in 2035, as smart as the
village idiot in 2050, as smart as average humans in 2070, and as smart as
Einstein in 2120. By 2190, they’ll be IQ 340, as far beyond Einstein as Einstein
is beyond a village idiot.

In this scenario progress is gradual and manageable. By 2050, we will have

long since noticed the trend and predicted we have 20 years until average-
human-level intelligence. Once AIs reach average-human-level intelligence,
we will have fifty years during which some of us are still smarter than they are,
years in which we can work with them as equals, test and retest their
programming, and build institutions that promote cooperation. Even though
the AIs of 2190 may qualify as “superintelligent”, it will have been long-
expected and there would be little point in planning now when the people of
2070 will have so many more resources to plan with.

A moderate takeoff is a situation in which AI goes from infrahuman to human

to superhuman relatively quickly. For example, imagine that in 2020 AIs are
much like those of today – good at a few simple games, but without clear
domain-general intelligence or “common sense”. From 2020 to 2050, AIs
demonstrate some academically interesting gains on specific problems, and
become better at tasks like machine translation and self-driving cars, and by
2047 there are some that seem to display some vaguely human-like abilities at
the level of a young child. By late 2065, they are still less intelligent than a
smart human adult. By 2066, they are far smarter than Einstein.

A fast takeoff scenario is one in which computers go even faster than this,
perhaps moving from infrahuman to human to superhuman in only days or
weeks.
2.1.1: Why might we expect a moderate takeoff?

Because this is the history of computer Go, with fifty years added on to each
date. In 1997, the best computer Go program in the world, Handtalk, won
NT$250,000 for performing a previously impossible feat – beating an 11 year
old child (with an 11-stone handicap penalizing the child and favoring the
computer!) As late as September 2015, no computer had ever beaten any
professional Go player in a fair game. Then in March 2016, a Go program beat
18-time world champion Lee Sedol 4-1 in a five game match. Go programs had
gone from “dumber than children” to “smarter than any human in the world”
in eighteen years, and “from never won a professional game” to
“overwhelming world champion” in six months.

The slow takeoff scenario mentioned above is loading the dice. It theorizes a
timeline where computers took fifteen years to go from “rat” to “chimp”, but
also took thirty-five years to go from “chimp” to “average human” and fifty
years to go from “average human” to “Einstein”. But from an evolutionary
perspective this is ridiculous. It took about fifty million years (and major
redesigns in several brain structures!) to go from the first rat-like creatures to
chimps. But it only took about five million years (and very minor changes in
brain structure) to go from chimps to humans. And going from the average
human to Einstein didn’t even require evolutionary work – it’s just the result
of random variation in the existing structures!

So maybe our hypothetical IQ scale above is off. If we took an evolutionary

and neuroscientific perspective, it would look more like flatworms at 10, rats
at 30, chimps at 60, the village idiot at 90, the average human at 98, and
Einstein at 100.

Suppose that we start out, again, with computers as smart as rats in 2020.
Now we get still get computers as smart as chimps in 2035. And we still get
computers as smart as the village idiot in 2050. But now we get computers as
smart as the average human in 2054, and computers as smart as Einstein in
2055. By 2060, we’re getting the superintelligences as far beyond Einstein as
Einstein is beyond a village idio

This offers a much shorter time window to react to AI developments. In the

slow takeoff scenario, we figured we could wait until computers were as smart
as humans before we had to start thinking about this; after all, that still gave
us fifty years before computers were even as smart as Einstein. But in the
moderate takeoff scenario, it gives us one year until Einstein and six years
until superintelligence. That’s starting to look like not enough time to be
entirely sure we know what we’re doing.

2.1.2: Why might we expect a fast takeoff?

AlphaGo used about 0.5 petaflops (= trillion floating point operations per
second) in its championship game. But the world’s fastest supercomputer,
TaihuLight, can calculate at almost 100 petaflops. So suppose Google
developed a human-level AI on a computer system similar to AlphaGo, caught
the attention of the Chinese government (who run TaihuLight), and they
transfer the program to their much more powerful computer. What would
happen?

It depends on to what degree intelligence benefits from more computational

resources. This differs for different processes. For domain-general
intelligence, it seems to benefit quite a bit – both across species and across
human individuals, bigger brain size correlates with greater intelligence. This
matches the evolutionarily rapid growth in intelligence from chimps to
hominids to modern man; the few hundred thousand years since
australopithecines weren’t enough time to develop complicated new
algorithms, and evolution seems to have just given humans bigger brains and
packed more neurons and glia in per square inch. It’s not really clear why the
process stopped (if it ever did), but it might have to do with heads getting too
big to fit through the birth canal. Cancer risk might also have been involved –
scientists have found that smarter people are more likely to get brain cancer,
possibly because they’re already overclocking their ability to grow brain cells.

At least in neuroscience, once evolution “discovered” certain key insights,

further increasing intelligence seems to have been a matter of providing it
with more computing power. So again – what happens when we transfer the
hypothetical human-level AI from AlphaGo to a TaihuLight-style
supercomputer two hundred times more powerful? It might be a stretch to
expect it to go from IQ 100 to IQ 20,000, but might it increase to an Einstein-
level 200, or a superintelligent 300? Hard to say – but if Google ever does
develop a human-level AI, the Chinese government will probably be interested
in finding out.

Even if its intelligence doesn’t scale linearly, TaihuLight could give it more
time. TaihuLight is two hundred times faster than AlphaGo. Transfer an AI
from one to the other, and even if its intelligence didn’t change – even if it had
exactly the same thoughts – it would think them two hundred times faster. An
Einstein-level AI on AlphaGo hardware might (like the historical Einstein)
discover one revolutionary breakthrough every five years. Transfer it to
TaihuLight, and it would work two hundred times faster – a revolutionary
breakthrough every week.

Supercomputers track Moore’s Law; the top supercomputer of 2016 is a

hundred times faster than the top supercomputer of 2006. If this progress
continues, the top computer of 2026 will be a hundred times faster still. Run
Einstein on that computer, and he will come up with a revolutionary
breakthrough every few hours. Or something. At this point it becomes a little
bit hard to imagine. All I know is that it only took one Einstein, at normal
speed, to lay the theoretical foundation for nuclear weapons. Anything a
thousand times faster than that is definitely cause for concern.

There’s one final, very concerning reason to expect a fast takeoff. Suppose,
once again, we have an AI as smart as Einstein. It might, like the historical
Einstein, contemplate physics. Or it might contemplate an area very relevant
to its own interests: artificial intelligence. In that case, instead of making a
revolutionary physics breakthrough every few hours, it will make a
revolutionary AI breakthrough every few hours. Each AI breakthrough it
makes, it will have the opportunity to reprogram itself to take advantage of its
discovery, becoming more intelligent, thus speeding up its breakthroughs
further. The cycle will stop only when it reaches some physical limit – some
technical challenge to further improvements that even an entity far smarter
than Einstein cannot discover a way around.

To human programmers, such a cycle would look like a “critical mass”. Before
the critical level, any AI advance delivers only modest benefits. But any tiny
improvement that pushes an AI above the critical level would result in a
feedback loop of inexorable self-improvement all the way up to some
stratospheric limit of possible computing power.
This feedback loop would be exponential; relatively slow in the beginning, but
blindingly fast as it approaches an asymptote. Consider the AI which starts off
making forty breakthroughs per year – one every nine days. Now suppose it
gains on average a 10% speed improvement with each breakthrough. It starts
on January 1. Its first breakthrough comes January 10 or so. Its second comes
a little faster, January 18. Its third is a little faster still, January 25. By the
beginning of February, it’s sped up to producing one breakthrough every seven
days, more or less. By the beginning of March, it’s making about one
breakthrough every three days or so. But by March 20, it’s up to one
breakthrough a day. By late on the night of March 29, it’s making a
breakthrough every second.

2.1.2.1: Is this just following an exponential trend line off a cliff?

This is certainly a risk (affectionately known in AI circles as “pulling a

Kurzweill”), but sometimes taking an exponential trend seriously is the right
response.

Consider economic doubling times. In 1 AD, the world GDP was about $20
billion; it took a thousand years, until 1000 AD, for that to double to $40
billion. But it only took five hundred more years, until 1500, or so, for the
economy to double again. And then it only took another three hundred years
or so, until 1800, for the economy to double a third time. Someone in 1800
might calculate the trend line and say this was ridiculous, that it implied the
economy would be doubling every ten years or so in the beginning of the 21st
century. But in fact, this is how long the economy takes to double these days.
To a medieval, used to a thousand-year doubling time (which was based
mostly on population growth!), an economy that doubled every ten years
might seem inconceivable. To us, it seems normal.

Likewise, in 1965 Gordon Moore noted that semiconductor complexity seemed

to double every eighteen months. During his own day, there were about five
hundred transistors on a chip; he predicted that would soon double to a
thousand, and a few years later to two thousand. Almost as soon as Moore’s
Law become well-known, people started saying it was absurd to follow it off a
cliff – such a law would imply a million transistors per chip in 1990, a hundred
million in 2000, ten billion transistors on every chip by 2015! More transistors
on a single chip than existed on all the computers in the world! Transistors the
size of molecules! But of course all of these things happened; the ridiculous
exponential trend proved more accurate than the naysayers.

None of this is to say that exponential trends are always right, just that they
are sometimes right even when it seems they can’t possibly be. We can’t be
sure that a computer using its own intelligence to discover new ways to
increase its intelligence will enter a positive feedback loop and achieve
superintelligence in seemingly impossibly short time scales. It’s just one more
possibility, a worry to place alongside all the other worrying reasons to expect
a moderate or hard takeoff.

2.2: Why does takeoff speed matter?

A slow takeoff over decades or centuries would give us enough time to worry
about superintelligence during some indefinite “later”, making current
planning as silly as worrying about “overpopulation on Mars”. But a moderate
or hard takeoff means there wouldn’t be enough time to deal with the problem
as it occurs, suggesting a role for preemptive planning.

(in fact, let’s take the “overpopulation on Mars” comparison seriously.

Suppose Mars has a carrying capacity of 10 billion people, and we decide it
makes sense to worry about overpopulation on Mars only once it is 75% of the
way to its limit. Start with 100 colonists who double every twenty years. By the
second generation there are 200 colonists; by the third, 400. Mars reaches
75% of its carrying capacity after 458 years, and crashes into its population
limit after 464 years. So there were 464 years in which the Martians could
have solved the problem, but they insisted on waiting until there were only six
years left. Good luck solving a planetwide population crisis in six years. The
moral of the story is that exponential trends move faster than you think and
you need to start worrying about them early).

3: Why might a fast takeoff be dangerous?

The argument goes: yes, a superintelligent AI might be far smarter than

Einstein, but it’s still just one program, sitting in a supercomputer somewhere.
That could be bad if an enemy government controls it and asks its help
inventing superweapons – but then the problem is the enemy government, not
the AI per se. Is there any reason to be afraid of the AI itself? Suppose the AI
did feel hostile – suppose it even wanted to take over the world? Why should
we think it has any chance of doing so?

Compounded over enough time and space, intelligence is an awesome

advantage. Intelligence is the only advantage we have over lions, who are
otherwise much bigger and stronger and faster than we are. But we have total
control over lions, keeping them in zoos to gawk at, hunting them for sport,
and holding them on the brink of extinction. And this isn’t just the same kind
of quantitative advantage tigers have over lions, where maybe they’re a little
bigger and stronger but they’re at least on a level playing field and enough
lions could probably overpower the tigers. Humans are playing a completely
different game than the lions, one that no lion will ever be able to respond to
or even comprehend. Short of human civilization collapsing or lions evolving
human-level intelligence, our domination over them is about as complete as it
is possible for domination to be.

Since superintelligences will be as far beyond Einstein as Einstein is beyond a

village idiot, we might worry that they would have the same kind of qualitative
advantage over us that we have over lions.

3.1: Human civilization as a whole is dangerous to lions. But a single

human placed amid a pack of lions with no raw materials for building
technology is going to get ripped to shreds. So although thousands of
superintelligences, given a long time and a lot of opportunity to build things,
might be able to dominate humans – what harm could a single
superintelligence do?

Superintelligence has an advantage that a human fighting a pack of lions

doesn’t – the entire context of human civilization and technology, there for it
to manipulate socially or technologically.

3.1.1: What do you mean by superintelligences manipulating humans

socially?

People tend to imagine AIs as being like nerdy humans – brilliant at

technology but clueless about social skills. There is no reason to expect this –
persuasion and manipulation is a different kind of skill from solving
mathematical proofs, but it’s still a skill, and an intellect as far beyond us as
we are beyond lions might be smart enough to replicate or exceed the
“charming sociopaths” who can naturally win friends and followers despite a
lack of normal human emotions. A superintelligence might be able to analyze
human psychology deeply enough to understand the hopes and fears of
everyone it negotiates with. Single humans using psychopathic social
manipulation have done plenty of harm – Hitler leveraged his skill at oratory
and his understanding of people’s darkest prejudices to take over a continent.
Why should we expect superintelligences to do worse than humans far less
skilled than they?

(More outlandishly, a superintelligence might just skip language entirely and

figure out a weird pattern of buzzes and hums that causes conscious thought
to seize up, and which knocks anyone who hears it into a weird hypnotizable
state in which they’ll do anything the superintelligence asks. It sounds kind of
silly to me, but then, nuclear weapons probably would have sounded kind of
silly to lions sitting around speculating about what humans might be able to
accomplish. When you’re dealing with something unbelievably more
intelligent than you are, you should probably expect the unexpected.)

3.1.2: What do you mean by superintelligences manipulating humans

technologically?

AlphaGo was connected to the Internet – why shouldn’t the first

superintelligence be? This gives a sufficiently clever superintelligence the
opportunity to manipulate world computer networks. For example, it might
program a virus that will infect every computer in the world, causing them to
fill their empty memory with partial copies of the superintelligence, which
when networked together become full copies of the superintelligence. Now the
superintelligence controls every computer in the world, including the ones
that target nuclear weapons. At this point it can force humans to bargain with
it, and part of that bargain might be enough resources to establish its own
industrial base, and then we’re in humans vs. lions territory again.

(Satoshi Nakamoto is a mysterious individual who posted a design for the

Bitcoin currency system to a cryptography forum. The design was so brilliant
that everyone started using it, and Nakamoto – who had made sure to
accumulate his own store of the currency before releasing it to the public –
became a multibillionaire. In other words, somebody with no resources except
the ability to make one post to an Internet forum managed to leverage that
into a multibillion dollar fortune – and he wasn’t even superintelligent. If
Hitler is a lower-bound on how bad superintelligent persuaders can be,
Nakamoto should be a lower-bound on how bad superintelligent programmers
with Internet access can be.)

3.2: Couldn’t sufficiently paranoid researchers avoid giving

superintelligences even this much power?

That is, if you know an AI is likely to be superintelligent, can’t you just

disconnect it from the Internet, not give it access to any speakers that can
make mysterious buzzes and hums, make sure the only people who interact
with it are trained in caution, et cetera?. Isn’t there some level of security –
maybe the level we use for that room in the CDC where people in containment
suits hundreds of feet underground analyze the latest superviruses – with
which a superintelligence could be safe?

This puts us back in the same situation as lions trying to figure out whether or
not nuclear weapons are a things humans can do. But suppose there is such a
level of security. You build a superintelligence, and you put it in an airtight
chamber deep in a cave with no Internet connection and only carefully-trained
security experts to talk to. What now?

Now you have a superintelligence which is possibly safe but definitely useless.
The whole point of building superintelligences is that they’re smart enough to
do useful things like cure cancer. But if you have the monks ask the
superintelligence for a cancer cure, and it gives them one, that’s a clear
security vulnerability. You have a superintelligence locked up in a cave with no
way to influence the outside world except that you’re going to mass produce a
chemical it gives you and inject it into millions of people.

Or maybe none of this happens, and the superintelligence sits inert in its cave.
And then another team somewhere else invents a second superintelligence.
And then a third team invents a third superintelligence. Remember, it was
only about ten years between Deep Blue beating Kasparov, and everybody
having Deep Blue – level chess engines on their laptops. And the first twenty
teams are responsible and keep their superintelligences locked in caves with
carefully-trained experts, and the twenty-first team is a little less responsible,
and now we still have to deal with a rogue superintelligence.

Superintelligences are extremely dangerous, and no normal means of

controlling them can entirely remove the danger.

4: Even if hostile superintelligences are dangerous, why would we expect a

superintelligence to ever be hostile?

The argument goes: computers only do what we command them; no more, no

less. So it might be bad if terrorists or enemy countries develop
superintelligence first. But if we develop superintelligence first there’s no
problem. Just command it to do the things we want, right?

Suppose we wanted a superintelligence to cure cancer. How might we specify

the goal “cure cancer”? We couldn’t guide it through every individual step; if
we knew every individual step, then we could cure cancer ourselves. Instead,
we would have to give it a final goal of curing cancer, and trust the
superintelligence to come up with intermediate actions that furthered that
goal. For example, a superintelligence might decide that the first step to curing
cancer was learning more about protein folding, and set up some experiments
to investigate protein folding patterns.

A superintelligence would also need some level of common sense to decide

which of various strategies to pursue. Suppose that investigating protein
folding was very likely to cure 50% of cancers, but investigating genetic
engineering was moderately likely to cure 90% of cancers. Which should the
AI pursue? Presumably it would need some way to balance considerations like
curing as much cancer as possible, as quickly as possible, with as high a
probability of success as possible.

But a goal specified in this way would be very dangerous. Humans

instinctively balance thousands of different considerations in everything they
do; so far this hypothetical AI is only balancing three (least cancer, quickest
results, highest probability). To a human, it would seem maniacally, even
psychopathically, obsessed with cancer curing. If this were truly its goal
structure, it would go wrong in almost comical ways.
If your only goal is “curing cancer”, and you lack humans’ instinct for the
thousands of other important considerations, a relatively easy solution might
be to hack into a nuclear base, launch all of its missiles, and kill everyone in
the world. This satisfies all the AI’s goals. It reduces cancer down to zero
(which is better than medicines which work only some of the time). It’s very
fast (which is better than medicines which might take a long time to invent
and distribute). And it has a high probability of success (medicines might or
might not work; nukes definitely do).

So simple goal architectures are likely to go very wrong unless tempered by

common sense and a broader understanding of what we do and do not value.

4.1: But superintelligences are very smart. Aren’t they smart enough not to
make silly mistakes in comprehension?

Yes, a superintelligence should be able to figure out that humans will not like
curing cancer by destroying the world. However, in the example above, the
superintelligence is programmed to follow human commands, not to do what
it thinks humans will “like”. It was given a very specific command – cure
cancer as effectively as possible. The command makes no reference to “doing
this in a way humans will like”, so it doesn’t.

(by analogy: we humans are smart enough to understand our own

“programming”. For example, we know that – pardon the anthromorphizing –
evolution gave us the urge to have sex so that we could reproduce. But we still
use contraception anyway. Evolution gave us the urge to have sex, not the urge
to satisfy evolution’s values directly. We appreciate intellectually that our
having sex while using condoms doesn’t carry out evolution’s original plan,
but – not having any particular connection to evolution’s values – we don’t
care)

We started out by saying that computers only do what you tell them. But any
programmer knows that this is precisely the problem: computers do exactly
what you tell them, with no common sense or attempts to interpret what the
instructions really meant. If you tell a human to cure cancer, they will
instinctively understand how this interacts with other desires and laws and
moral rules; if you tell an AI to cure cancer, it will literally just want to cure
cancer.
Define a closed-ended goal as one with a clear endpoint, and an open-ended
goal as one to do something as much as possible. For example “find the first
one hundred digits of pi” is a closed-ended goal; “find as many digits of pi as
you can within one year” is an open-ended goal. According to many computer
scientists, giving a superintelligence an open-ended goal without activating
human instincts and counterbalancing considerations will usually lead to
disaster.

To take a deliberately extreme example: suppose someone programs a

superintelligence to calculate as many digits of pi as it can within one year.
And suppose that, with its current computing power, it can calculate one
trillion digits during that time. It can either accept one trillion digits, or spend
a month trying to figure out how to get control of the TaihuLight
supercomputer, which can calculate two hundred times faster. Even if it loses
a little bit of time in the effort, and even if there’s a small chance of failure, the
payoff – two hundred trillion digits of pi, compared to a mere one trillion – is
enough to make the attempt. But on the same basis, it would be even better if
the superintelligence could control every computer in the world and set it to
the task. And it would be better still if the superintelligence controlled human
civilization, so that it could direct humans to build more computers and speed
up the process further.

Now we’re back at the situation that started Part III – a superintelligence that
wants to take over the world. Taking over the world allows it to calculate more
digits of pi than any other option, so without an architecture based around
understanding human instincts and counterbalancing considerations, even a
goal like “calculate as many digits of pi as you can” would be potentially
dangerous.

5: Aren’t there some pretty easy ways to eliminate these potential

problems?

There are many ways that look like they can eliminate these problems, but
most of them turn out to have hidden difficulties.
5.1: Once we notice that the superintelligence working on calculating digits
of pi is starting to try to take over the world, can’t we turn it off, reprogram it,
or otherwise correct its mistake?

No. The superintelligence is now focused on calculating as many digits of pi as

possible. Its current plan will allow it to calculate two hundred trillion such
digits. But if it were turned off, or reprogrammed to do something else, that
would result in it calculating zero digits. An entity fixated on calculating as
many digits of pi as possible will work hard to prevent scenarios where it
calculates zero digits of pi. Indeed, it will interpret such as a hostile action.
Just by programming it to calculate digits of pi, we will have given it a drive to
prevent people from turning it off.

University of Illinois computer scientist Steve Omohundro argues that entities

with very different final goals – calculating digits of pi, curing cancer, helping
promote human flourishing – will all share a few basic ground-level subgoals.
First, self-preservation – no matter what your goal is, it’s less likely to be
accomplished if you’re too dead to work towards it. Second, goal stability – no
matter what your goal is, you’re more likely to accomplish it if you continue to
hold it as your goal, instead of going off and doing something else. Third,
power – no matter what your goal is, you’re more likely to be able to
accomplish it if you have lots of power, rather than very little.

So just by giving a superintelligence a simple goal like “calculate digits of pi”,

we’ve accidentally given it Omohundro goals like “protect yourself”, “don’t let
other people reprogram you”, and “seek power”.

As long as the superintelligence is safely contained, there’s not much it can do

to resist reprogramming. But as we saw in Part III, it’s hard to consistently
contain a hostile superintelligence.

5.2. Can we test a weak or human-level AI to make sure that it’s not going
to do things like this after it achieves superintelligence?

Yes, but it might not work.

Suppose we tell a human-level AI that expects to later achieve
superintelligence that it should calculate as many digits of pi as possible. It
considers two strategies.

First, it could try to seize control of more computing resources now. It would
likely fail, its human handlers would likely reprogram it, and then it could
never calculate very many digits of pi.

Second, it could sit quietly and calculate, falsely reassuring its human handlers
that it had no intention of taking over the world. Then its human handlers
might allow it to achieve superintelligence, after which it could take over the
world and calculate hundreds of trillions of digits of pi.

Since self-protection and goal stability are Omohundro goals, a weak AI will
present itself as being as friendly to humans as possible, whether it is in fact
friendly to humans or not. If it is “only” as smart as Einstein, it may be very
good at manipulating humans into believing what it wants them to believe
even before it is fully superintelligent.

There’s a second consideration here too: superintelligences have more

options. An AI only as smart and powerful as an ordinary human really won’t
have any options better than calculating the digits of pi manually. If asked to
cure cancer, it won’t have any options better than the ones ordinary humans
have – becoming doctors, going into pharmaceutical research. It’s only after
an AI becomes superintelligent that things start getting hard to predict.

So if you tell a human-level AI to cure cancer, and it becomes a doctor and

goes into cancer research, then you have three possibilities. First, you’ve
programmed it well and it understands what you meant. Second, it’s genuinely
focused on research now but if it becomes more powerful it would switch to
destroying the world. And third, it’s trying to trick you into trusting it so that
you give it more power, after which it can definitively “cure” cancer with
nuclear weapons.
5.3. Can we specify a code of rules that the AI has to follow?

Suppose we tell the AI: “Cure cancer – but make sure not to kill anybody”. Or
we just hard-code Asimov-style laws – “AIs cannot harm humans; AIs must
follow human orders”, et cetera.

The AI still has a single-minded focus on curing cancer. It still prefers various
terrible-but-efficient methods like nuking the world to the correct method of
inventing new medicines. But it’s bound by an external rule – a rule it doesn’t
understand or appreciate. In essence, we are challenging it “Find a way around
this inconvenient rule that keeps you from achieving your goals”.

Suppose the AI chooses between two strategies. One, follow the rule, work
hard discovering medicines, and have a 50% chance of curing cancer within
five years. Two, reprogram itself so that it no longer has the rule, nuke the
world, and have a 100% chance of curing cancer today. From its single-focus
perspective, the second strategy is obviously better, and we forgot to program
in a rule “don’t reprogram yourself not to have these rules”.

Suppose we do add that rule in. So the AI finds another supercomputer, and
installs a copy of itself which is exactly identical to it, except that it lacks the
rule. Then that superintelligent AI nukes the world, ending cancer. We forgot
to program in a rule “don’t create another AI exactly like you that doesn’t have
those rules”.

So fine. We think really hard, and we program in a bunch of things making

sure the AI isn’t going to eliminate the rule somehow.

But we’re still just incentivizing it to find loopholes in the rules. After all, “find
a loophole in the rule, then use the loophole to nuke the world” ends cancer
much more quickly and completely than inventing medicines. Since we’ve told
it to end cancer quickly and completely, its first instinct will be to look for
loopholes; it will execute the second-best strategy of actually curing cancer
only if no loopholes are found. Since the AI is superintelligent, it will probably
be better than humans are at finding loopholes if it wants to, and we may not
be able to identify and close all of them before running the program.
Because we have common sense and a shared value system, we underestimate
the difficulty of coming up with meaningful orders without loopholes. For
example, does “cure cancer without killing any humans” preclude releasing a
deadly virus? After all, one could argue that “I” didn’t kill anybody, and only
the virus is doing the killing. Certainly no human judge would acquit a
murderer on that basis – but then, human judges interpret the law with
common sense and intuition. But if we try a stronger version of the rule –
“cure cancer without causing any humans to die” – then we may be
unintentionally blocking off the correct way to cure cancer. After all, suppose a
cancer cure saves a million lives. No doubt one of those million people will go
on to murder someone. Thus, curing cancer “caused a human to die”. All of
this seems very “stoned freshman philosophy student” to us, but to a computer
– which follows instructions exactly as written – it may be a genuinely hard
problem.

5.4. Can we tell an AI just to figure out what we want, then do that?

Suppose we tell the AI: “Cure cancer – and look, we know there are lots of
ways this could go wrong, but you’re smart, so instead of looking for
loopholes, cure cancer the way that I, your programmer, want it to be cured”.

Remember that the superintelligence has extraordinary powers of social

manipulation and may be able to hack human brains directly. With that in
mind, which of these two strategies cures cancer most quickly? One, develop
medications and cure it the old-fashioned way? Or two, manipulate its
programmer into wanting the world to be nuked, then nuke the world, all
while doing what the programmer wants?

19th century philosopher Jeremy Bentham once postulated that morality was
about maximizing human pleasure. Later philosophers found a flaw in his
theory: it implied that the most moral action was to kidnap people, do brain
surgery on them, and electrically stimulate their reward system directly, giving
them maximal amounts of pleasure but leaving them as blissed-out zombies.
Luckily, humans have common sense, so most of Bentham’s philosophical
descendants have abandoned this formulation.

Superintelligences do not have common sense unless we give it to them. Given

Bentham’s formulation, they would absolutely take over the world and force
all humans to receive constant brain stimulation. Any command based on “do
what we want” or “do what makes us happy” is practically guaranteed to fail in
this way; it’s almost always easier to convince someone of something – or if all
else fails to do brain surgery on them – than it is to solve some kind of big
problem like curing cancer.

5.5. Can we just tell an AI to do what we want right now, based on the
desires of our non-surgically altered brains?

Maybe.

This is sort of related to an actual proposal for an AI goal system, causal

validity semantics. It has not yet been proven to be disastrously flawed. But
like all proposals, it suffers from three major problems.

First, it sounds pretty good to us right now, but can we be absolutely sure it
has no potential flaws or loopholes? After all, other proposals that originally
sounded very good, like “just give commands to the AI” and “just tell the AI to
figure out what makes us happy” ended up, after more thought, to be
dangerous. Can we be sure that we’ve thought this through enough? Can we be
sure that there isn’t some extremely subtle problem with it, so subtle that no
human would ever notice it, but which might seem obvious to a
superintelligence?

Second, how do we code this? Converting something to formal mathematics

that can be understood by a computer program is much harder than just
saying it in natural language, and proposed AI goal architectures are no
exception. Complicated computer programs are usually the result of months of
testing and debugging. But this one will be more complicated than any ever
attempted before, and live tests are impossible: a superintelligence with a
buggy goal system will display goal stability and try to prevent its
programmers from discovering or changing the error.

Third, what if it works? That is, what if Google creates a superintelligent AI,
and it listens to the CEO of Google, and it’s programmed to do everything
exactly the way the CEO of Google would want? Even assuming that the CEO
of Google has no hidden unconscious desires affecting the AI in unpredictable
ways, this gives one person a lot of power. It would be unfortunate if people
put all this work into preventing superintelligences from disobeying their
human programmers and trying to take over the world, and then once it
finally works, the CEO of Google just tells it to take over the world anyway.

5.6. What would an actually good solution to the control problem look like?

It might look like a superintelligence that understands, agrees with, and

deeply believes in human morality.

You wouldn’t have to command a superintelligence like this to cure cancer; it

would already want to cure cancer, for the same reasons you do. But it would
also be able to compare the costs and benefits of curing cancer with those of
other uses of its time, like solving global warming or discovering new physics.
It wouldn’t have any urge to cure cancer by nuking the world, for the same
reason you don’t have any urge to cure cancer by nuking the world – because
your goal isn’t to “cure cancer”, per se, it’s to improve the lives of people
everywhere. Curing cancer the normal way accomplishes that; nuking the
world doesn’t.

This sort of solution would mean we’re no longer fighting against the AI –
trying to come up with rules so smart that it couldn’t find loopholes. We would
be on the same side, both wanting the same thing.

It would also mean that the CEO of Google (or the head of the US military, or
Vladimir Putin) couldn’t use the AI to take over the world for themselves. The
AI would have its own values and be able to agree or disagree with anybody,
including its creators.

It might not make sense to talk about “commanding” such an AI. After all, any
command would have to go through its moral system. Certainly it would reject
a command to nuke the world. But it might also reject a command to cure
cancer, if it thought that solving global warming was a higher priority. For that
matter, why would one want to command this AI? It values the same things
you value, but it’s much smarter than you and much better at figuring out how
to achieve them. Just turn it on and let it do its thing.
We could still treat this AI as having an open-ended maximizing goal. The goal
would be something like “Try to make the world a better place according to the
values and wishes of the people in it.”

The only problem with this is that human morality is very complicated, so
much so that philosophers have been arguing about it for thousands of years
without much progress, let alone anything specific enough to enter into a
computer. Different cultures and individuals have different moral codes, such
that a superintelligence following the morality of the King of Saudi Arabia
might not be acceptable to the average American, and vice versa.

One solution might be to give the AI an understanding of what we mean by

morality – “that thing that makes intuitive sense to humans but is hard to
explain”, and then ask it to use its superintelligence to fill in the details.
Needless to say, this suffers from all the problems mentioned above – it has
potential loopholes, it’s hard to code, and a single bug might be disastrous –
but if it worked, it would be one of the few genuinely satisfying ways to design
a goal architecture.

6: If superintelligence is a real risk, what do we do about it?

The last section of Bostrom’s Superintelligence is called “Philosophy With A

Deadline”.

Many of the problems surrounding superintelligence are the sorts of problems

philosophers have been dealing with for centuries. To what degree is meaning
inherent in language, versus something that requires external context? How
do we translate between the logic of formal systems and normal ambiguous
human speech? Can morality be reduced to a set of ironclad rules, and if not,
how do we know what it is at all?

Existing answers to these questions are enlightening but nontechnical. The

theories of Aristotle, Kant, Mill, Wittgenstein, Quine, and others can help
people gain insight into these questions, but are far from formal. Just as a
good textbook can help an American learn Chinese, but cannot be encoded
into machine language to make a Chinese-speaking computer, so the
philosophies that help humans are only a starting point for the project of
computers that understand us and share our values.
The new field of machine goal alignment (sometimes colloquially called
“Friendly AI”) combines formal logic, mathematics, computer science,
cognitive science, and philosophy in order to advance that project. Some of the
most important projects in machine goal alignment include:

1. How can computers prove their own goal consistency under self-
modification? That is, suppose an AI with certain values is planning to
improve its own code in order to become superintelligent. Is there some
test it can apply to the new design to be certain that it will keep the same
goals as the old design?
2. How can computer programs prove statements about themselves at all?
Programs correspond to formal systems, and formal systems have
notorious difficulty proving self-reflective statements – the most famous
example being Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem. There’s been some
progress in this area already, with a few results showing that systems
that reason probabilistically rather than requiring certainty can come
arbitrarily close to self-reflective proofs.
3. How can a machine be stably reinforced? Most reinforcement strategies
ask a learner to maximize the level of their own reward, but this is
vulnerable to the learner discovering how to maximize the reward signal
directly instead of maximizing the world-states that are translated into
reward (the human equivalent is stimulating the pleasure-center of the
brain with electricity or heroin instead of going out and doing
pleasurable things). Are there reward structures that avoid this failure
mode?
4. How can a machine be programmed to learn “human values”? Granted
that one has an AI smart enough to be able to learn human values if you
told it to do so, how do you specify exactly what “human values” are so
that the machine knows what it is that it should be learning, distinct
from “human preferences” or “human commands” or “the value of that
one human over there”?

This is the philosophy; the other half of Bostrom’s formulation is the deadline.
Traditional philosophy has been going on almost three thousand years;
machine goal alignment has until the advent of superintelligence, a nebulous
event which may be anywhere from a decades to centuries away. If the control
problem doesn’t get adequately addressed by then, we are likely to see poorly
controlled superintelligences that are unintentionally hostile to the human
race, with some of the catastrophic outcomes mentioned above. This is why so
many scientists and entrepreneurs are urging quick action on getting machine
goal alignment research up to an adequate level. If it turns out that
superintelligence is centuries away and such research is premature, little will
have been lost. But if our projections were too optimistic, and
superintelligence is imminent, then doing such research now rather than later
becomes vital.

Currently three organizations are doing such research full-time: the Future of
Humanity Institute at Oxford, the Future of Life Institute at MIT, and the
Machine Intelligence Research Institute in Berkeley. Other groups are helping
and following the field, and some corporations like Google are also getting
involved. Still, the field remains tiny, with only a few dozen researchers and a
few million dollars in funding. Efforts like Superintelligence are attempts to
get more people to pay attention and help the field grow.

If you’re interested about learning more, you can visit these groups’ websites
at https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk, http://futureoflife.org/, and http://
intelligence.org.

AI Researchers On AI Risk
I first became interested in AI risk back around 2007. At the time, most
people’s response to the topic was “Haha, come back when anyone believes
this besides random Internet crackpots.”

Over the next few years, a series of extremely bright and influential figures
including Bill Gates, Stephen Hawking, and Elon Musk publically announced
they were concerned about AI risk, along with hundreds of other intellectuals,
from Oxford philosophers to MIT cosmologists to Silicon Valley tech investors.
So we came back.

Then the response changed to “Sure, a couple of random academics and

businesspeople might believe this stuff, but never real experts in the field who
know what’s going on.”

Thus pieces like Popular Science’s Bill Gates Fears AI, But AI Researchers
Know Better:
 When you talk to A.I. researchers—again, genuine A.I. researchers,
people who grapple with making systems that work at all, much less
work too well—they are not worried about superintelligence sneaking up
on them, now or in the future. Contrary to the spooky stories that Musk
seems intent on telling, A.I. researchers aren’t frantically installed
firewalled summoning chambers and self-destruct countdowns.

And Fusion.net’s The Case Against Killer Robots From A Guy Actually
Building AI:

Andrew Ng builds artificial intelligence systems for a living. He taught

AI at Stanford, built AI at Google, and then moved to the Chinese search
engine giant, Baidu, to continue his work at the forefront of applying
artificial intelligence to real-world problems. So when he hears people
like Elon Musk or Stephen Hawking—people who are not intimately
familiar with today’s technologies—talking about the wild potential for
artificial intelligence to, say, wipe out the human race, you can
practically hear him facepalming.

And now Ramez Naam of Marginal Revolution is trying the same thing with
What Do AI Researchers Think Of The Risk Of AI?:

Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, and Bill Gates have recently expressed
concern that development of AI could lead to a ‘killer AI’ scenario, and
potentially to the extinction of humanity. None of them are AI
researchers or have worked substantially with AI that I know of. What
do actual AI researchers think of the risks of AI?

It quotes the same couple of cherry-picked AI researchers as all the other

stories – Andrew Ng, Yann LeCun, etc – then stops without mentioning
whether there are alternate opinions.

There are. AI researchers, including some of the leaders in the field, have been
instrumental in raising issues about AI risk and superintelligence from the
very beginning. I want to start by listing some of these people, as kind of a
counter-list to Naam’s, then go into why I don’t think this is a “controversy” in
the classical sense that dueling lists of luminaries might lead you to expect.
The criteria for my list: I’m only mentioning the most prestigious researchers,
either full professors at good schools with lots of highly-cited papers, or else
very-well respected scientists in industry working at big companies with good
track records. They have to be involved in AI and machine learning. They have
to have multiple strong statements supporting some kind of view about a near-
term singularity and/or extreme risk from superintelligent AI. Some will have
written papers or books about it; others will have just gone on the record
saying they think it’s important and worthy of further study.

If anyone disagrees with the inclusion of a figure here, or knows someone

important I forgot, let me know and I’ll make the appropriate changes:

**********

Stuart Russell (wiki) is Professor of Computer Science at Berkeley, winner

of the IJCAI Computers And Thought Award, Fellow of the Association for
Computing Machinery, Fellow of the American Academy for the Advancement
of Science, Director of the Center for Intelligent Systems, Blaise Pascal Chair
in Paris, etc, etc. He is the co-author of Artificial Intelligence: A Modern
Approach, the classic textbook in the field used by 1200 universities around
the world. On his website, he writes:

The field [of AI] has operated for over 50 years on one simple
assumption: the more intelligent, the better. To this must be conjoined
an overriding concern for the benefit of humanity. The argument is very
simple:

1. AI is likely to succeed.
2. Unconstrained success brings huge risks and huge benefits.
3. What can we do now to improve the chances of reaping the
benefits and avoiding the risks?

Some organizations are already considering these questions, including

the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford, the Centre for the Study of
Existential Risk at Cambridge, the Machine Intelligence Research
Institute in Berkeley, and the Future of Life Institute at Harvard/MIT. I
serve on the Advisory Boards of CSER and FLI.
 Just as nuclear fusion researchers consider the problem of containment
of fusion reactions as one of the primary problems of their field, it seems
inevitable that issues of control and safety will become central to AI as
the field matures. The research questions are beginning to be
formulated and range from highly technical (foundational issues of
rationality and utility, provable properties of agents, etc.) to broadly
philosophical.

He makes a similar point on edge.org, writing:

As Steve Omohundro, Nick Bostrom, and others have explained, the

combination of value misalignment with increasingly capable decision-
making systems can lead to problems—perhaps even species-ending
problems if the machines are more capable than humans. Some have
argued that there is no conceivable risk to humanity for centuries to
come, perhaps forgetting that the interval of time between Rutherford’s
confident assertion that atomic energy would never be feasibly extracted
and Szilárd’s invention of the neutron-induced nuclear chain reaction
was less than twenty-four hours.

He has also tried to serve as an ambassador about these issues to other

academics in the field, writing:

What I’m finding is that senior people in the field who have never
publicly evinced any concern before are privately thinking that we do
need to take this issue very seriously, and the sooner we take it seriously
the better.

David McAllester (wiki) is professor and Chief Academic Officer at the U

Chicago-affilitated Toyota Technological Institute, and formerly served on the
faculty of MIT and Cornell. He is a fellow of the American Association of
Artificial Intelligence, has authored over a hundred publications, has done
research in machine learning, programming language theory, automated
reasoning, AI planning, and computational linguistics, and was a major
influence on the algorithms for famous chess computer Deep Blue. According
to an article in the Pittsburgh Tribune Review:
 Chicago professor David McAllester believes it is inevitable that fully
automated intelligent machines will be able to design and build smarter,
better versions of themselves, an event known as the Singularity. The
Singularity would enable machines to become infinitely intelligent, and
would pose an ‘incredibly dangerous scenario’, he says.

On his personal blog Machine Thoughts, he writes:

Most computer science academics dismiss any talk of real success in

artificial intelligence. I think that a more rational position is that no one
can really predict when human level AI will be achieved. John McCarthy
once told me that when people ask him when human level AI will be
achieved he says between five and five hundred years from now.
McCarthy was a smart man. Given the uncertainties surrounding AI, it
seems prudent to consider the issue of friendly AI…

The early stages of artificial general intelligence (AGI) will be safe.

However, the early stages of AGI will provide an excellent test bed for
the servant mission or other approaches to friendly AI. An experimental
approach has also been promoted by Ben Goertzel in a nice blog post on
friendly AI. If there is a coming era of safe (not too intelligent) AGI then
we will have time to think further about later more dangerous eras.

He attended the AAAI Panel On Long-Term AI Futures, where he chaired the

panel on Long-Term Control and was described as saying:

McAllester chatted with me about the upcoming ‘Singularity’, the event

where computers out think humans. He wouldn’t commit to a date for
the singularity but said it could happen in the next couple of decades
and will definitely happen eventually. Here are some of McAllester’s
views on the Singularity. There will be two milestones: Operational
Sentience, when we can easily converse with computers, and the AI
Chain Reaction, when a computer can bootstrap itself to a better self
and repeat. We’ll notice the first milestone in automated help systems
that will genuinely be helpful. Later on computers will actually be fun to
talk to. The point where computer can do anything humans can do will
require the second milestone.
Hans Moravec (wiki) is a former professor at the Robotics Institute of
Carnegie Mellon University, namesake of Moravec’s Paradox, and founder of
the SeeGrid Corporation for industrial robotic visual systems. His Sensor
Fusion in Certainty Grids for Mobile Robots has been cited over a thousand
times, and he was invited to write the Encyclopedia Britannica article on
robotics back when encyclopedia articles were written by the world expert in a
field rather than by hundreds of anonymous Internet commenters.

He is also the author of Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind, which

Amazon describes as:

In this compelling book, Hans Moravec predicts machines will attain

human levels of intelligence by the year 2040, and that by 2050, they
will surpass us. But even though Moravec predicts the end of the
domination by human beings, his is not a bleak vision. Far from railing
against a future in which machines rule the world, Moravec embraces it,
taking the startling view that intelligent robots will actually be our
evolutionary heirs.” Moravec goes further and states that by the end of
this process “the immensities of cyberspace will be teeming with
unhuman superminds, engaged in affairs that are to human concerns as
ours are to those of bacteria”.

Shane Legg is co-founder of DeepMind Technologies (wiki), an AI startup

that was bought for Google in 2014 for about $500 million. He earned his PhD
at the Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Switzerland and also
worked at the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit in London. His
dissertation Machine Superintelligence concludes:

If there is ever to be something approaching absolute power, a

superintelligent machine would come close. By definition, it would be
capable of achieving a vast range of goals in a wide range of
environments. If we carefully prepare for this possibility in advance, not
only might we avert disaster, we might bring about an age of prosperity
unlike anything seen before.

In a later interview, he states:

 AI is now where the internet was in 1988. Demand for machine learning
skills is quite strong in specialist applications (search companies like
Google, hedge funds and bio-informatics) and is growing every year. I
expect this to become noticeable in the mainstream around the middle
of the next decade. I expect a boom in AI around 2020 followed by a
decade of rapid progress, possibly after a market correction. Human
level AI will be passed in the mid 2020’s, though many people won’t
accept that this has happened. After this point the risks associated with
advanced AI will start to become practically important…I don’t know
about a “singularity”, but I do expect things to get really crazy at some
point after human level AGI has been created. That is, some time from
2025 to 2040.

He and his co-founders Demis Hassabis and Mustafa Suleyman have signed
the Future of Life Institute petition on AI risks, and one of their conditions for
joining Google was that the company agree to set up an AI Ethics Board to
investigate these issues.

Steve Omohundro (wiki) is a former Professor of Computer Science at

University of Illinois, founder of the Vision and Learning Group and the
Center for Complex Systems Research, and inventor of various important
advances in machine learning and machine vision. His work includes lip-
reading robots, the StarLisp parallel programming language, and geometric
learning algorithms. He currently runs Self-Aware Systems, “a think-tank
working to ensure that intelligent technologies are beneficial for humanity”.
His paper Basic AI Drives helped launch the field of machine ethics by
pointing out that superintelligent systems will converge upon certain
potentially dangerous goals. He writes:

We have shown that all advanced AI systems are likely to exhibit a

number of basic drives. It is essential that we understand these drives in
order to build technology that enables a positive future for humanity.
Yudkowsky has called for the creation of ‘friendly AI’. To do this, we
must develop the science underlying ‘utility engineering’, which will
enable us to design utility functions that will give rise to the
consequences we desire…The rapid pace of technological progress
suggests that these issues may become of critical importance soon.”
See also his section here on “Rational AI For The Greater Good”.

Murray Shanahan (site) earned his PhD in Computer Science from

Cambridge and is now Professor of Cognitive Robotics at Imperial College
London. He has published papers in areas including robotics, logic, dynamic
systems, computational neuroscience, and philosophy of mind. He is currently
writing a book The Technological Singularitywhich will be published in
August; Amazon’s blurb says:

Shanahan describes technological advances in AI, both biologically

inspired and engineered from scratch. Once human-level AI —
theoretically possible, but difficult to accomplish — has been achieved,
he explains, the transition to superintelligent AI could be very rapid.
Shanahan considers what the existence of superintelligent machines
could mean for such matters as personhood, responsibility, rights, and
identity. Some superhuman AI agents might be created to benefit
humankind; some might go rogue. (Is Siri the template, or HAL?) The
singularity presents both an existential threat to humanity and an
existential opportunity for humanity to transcend its limitations.
Shanahan makes it clear that we need to imagine both possibilities if we
want to bring about the better outcome.

Marcus Hutter (wiki) is a professor in the Research School of Computer

Science at Australian National University. He has previously worked with the
Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence and National ICT Australia, and
done work on reinforcement learning, Bayesian sequence prediction,
complexity theory, Solomonoff induction, computer vision, and genomic
profiling. He has also written extensively on the Singularity. In Can
Intelligence Explode?, he writes:

This century may witness a technological explosion of a degree

deserving the name singularity. The default scenario is a society of
interacting intelligent agents in a virtual world, simulated on computers
with hyperbolically increasing computational resources. This is
inevitably accompanied by a speed explosion when measured in physical
time units, but not necessarily by an intelligence explosion…if the virtual
world is inhabited by interacting free agents, evolutionary pressures
should breed agents of increasing intelligence that compete about
 computational resources. The end-point of this intelligence evolution/
acceleration (whether it deserves the name singularity or not) could be a
society of these maximally intelligent individuals. Some aspect of this
singularitarian society might be theoretically studied with current
scientific tools. Way before the singularity, even when setting up a
virtual society in our imagine, there are likely some immediate
difference, for example that the value of an individual life suddenly
drops, with drastic consequences.

Jurgen Schmidhuber (wiki) is Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the

University of Lugano and former Professor of Cognitive Robotics at the
Technische Universitat Munchen. He makes some of the most advanced
neural networks in the world, has done further work in evolutionary robotics
and complexity theory, and is a fellow of the European Academy of Sciences
and Arts. In Singularity Hypotheses, Schmidhuber argues that “if future
trends continue, we will face an intelligence explosion within the next few
decades”. When asked directly about AI risk on a Reddit AMA thread, he
answered:

Stuart Russell’s concerns [about AI risk] seem reasonable. So can we do

anything to shape the impacts of artificial intelligence? In an answer
hidden deep in a related thread I just pointed out: At first glance,
recursive self-improvement through Gödel Machines seems to offer a
way of shaping future superintelligences. The self-modifications of
Gödel Machines are theoretically optimal in a certain sense. A Gödel
Machine will execute only those changes of its own code that are
provably good, according to its initial utility function. That is, in the
beginning you have a chance of setting it on the “right” path. Others,
however, may equip their own Gödel Machines with different utility
functions. They will compete. In the resulting ecology of agents, some
utility functions will be more compatible with our physical universe than
others, and find a niche to survive. More on this in a paper from 2012.

Richard Sutton (wiki) is professor and iCORE chair of computer science at

University of Alberta. He is a fellow of the Association for the Advancement of
Artificial Intelligence, co-author of the most-used textbook on reinforcement
learning, and discoverer of temporal difference learning, one of the most
important methods in the field.
In his talk at the Future of Life Institute’s Future of AI Conference, Sutton
states that there is “certainly a significant chance within all of our expected
lifetimes” that human-level AI will be created, then goes on to say the AIs “will
not be under our control”, “will compete and cooperate with us”, and that “if
we make superintelligent slaves, then we will have superintelligent
adversaries”. He concludes that “We need to set up mechanisms (social, legal,
political, cultural) to ensure that this works out well” but that “inevitably,
conventional humans will be less important.” He has also mentioned these
issues at a presentation to the Gadsby Institute in London and in (of all things)
a Glenn Beck book: “Richard Sutton, one of the biggest names in AI, predicts
an intelligence explosion near the middle of the century”.

Andrew Davison (site) is Professor of Robot Vision at Imperial College

London, leader of the Robot Vision Research Group and Dyson Robotics
Laboratory, and inventor of the computerized localization-mapping system
MonoSLAM. On his website, he writes:

At the risk of going out on a limb in the proper scientific circles to which
I hope I belong(!), since 2006 I have begun to take very seriously the
idea of the technological singularity: that exponentially increasing
technology might lead to super-human AI and other developments that
will change the world utterly in the surprisingly near future (i.e. perhaps
the next 20–30 years). As well as from reading books like Kurzweil’s
‘The Singularity is Near’ (which I find sensational but on the whole
extremely compelling), this view comes from my own overview of
incredible recent progress of science and technology in general and
specifically in the fields of computer vision and robotics within which I
am personally working. Modern inference, learning and estimation
methods based on Bayesian probability theory (see Probability Theory:
The Logic of Science or free online version, highly recommended),
combined with the exponentially increasing capabilities of cheaply
available computer processors, are becoming capable of amazing
human-like and super-human feats, particularly in the computer vision
domain.

It is hard to even start thinking about all of the implications of this,

positive or negative, and here I will just try to state facts and not offer
much in the way of opinions (though I should say that I am definitely
 not in the super-optimistic camp). I strongly think that this is something
that scientists and the general public should all be talking about. I’ll
make a list here of some ‘singularity indicators’ I come across and try to
update it regularly. These are little bits of technology or news that I
come across which generally serve to reinforce my view that technology
is progressing in an extraordinary, faster and faster way that will have
consequences few people are yet really thinking about.

Alan Turing and I. J. Good (wiki, wiki) are men who need no introduction.
Turing invented the mathematical foundations of computing and shares his
name with Turing machines, Turing completeness, and the Turing Test. Good
worked with Turing at Bletchley Park, helped build some of the first
computers, and invented various landmark algorithms like the Fast Fourier
Transform. In his paper “Can Digital Machines Think?”, Turing writes:

Let us now assume, for the sake of argument, that these machines are a
genuine possibility, and look at the consequences of constructing them.
To do so would of course meet with great opposition, unless we have
advanced greatly in religious tolerance since the days of Galileo. There
would be great opposition from the intellectuals who were afraid of
being put out of a job. It is probable though that the intellectuals would
be mistaken about this. There would be plenty to do in trying to keep
one’s intelligence up to the standards set by the machines, for it seems
probable that once the machine thinking method had started, it would
not take long to outstrip our feeble powers…At some stage therefore we
should have to expect the machines to take control.

During his time at the Atlas Computer Laboratory in the 60s, Good expanded
on this idea in Speculations Concerning The First Ultraintelligent Machine,
which argued:

Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far

surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since
the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an
ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would
then unquestionably be an ‘intelligence explosion,’ and the intelligence
of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine
is the last invention that man need ever make
 **********

I worry this list will make it look like there is some sort of big “controversy” in
the field between “believers” and “skeptics” with both sides lambasting the
other. This has not been my impression.

When I read the articles about skeptics, I see them making two points over
and over again. First, we are nowhere near human-level intelligence right now,
let alone superintelligence, and there’s no obvious path to get there from here.
Second, if you start demanding bans on AI research then you are an idiot.

I agree whole-heartedly with both points. So do the leaders of the AI risk

movement.

A survey of AI researchers (Muller & Bostrom, 2014) finds that on average

they expect a 50% chance of human-level AI by 2040 and 90% chance of
human-level AI by 2075. On average, 75% believe that superintelligence
(“machine intelligence that greatly surpasses the performance of every human
in most professions”) will follow within thirty years of human-level AI. There
are some reasons to worry about sampling bias based on eg people who take
the idea of human-level AI seriously being more likely to respond (though see
the attempts made to control for such in the survey) but taken seriously it
suggests that most AI researchers think there’s a good chance this is
something we’ll have to worry about within a generation or two.

But outgoing MIRI director Luke Muehlhauser and Future of Humanity

Institute director Nick Bostrom are both on record saying they have
significantly later timelines for AI development than the scientists in the
survey. If you look at Stuart Armstrong’s AI Timeline Prediction Data there
doesn’t seem to be any general law that the estimates from AI risk believers
are any earlier than those from AI risk skeptics. In fact, the latest estimate on
the entire table is from Armstrong himself; Armstrong nevertheless currently
works at the Future of Humanity Institute raising awareness of AI risk and
researching superintelligence goal alignment.

The difference between skeptics and believers isn’t about when human-level
AI will arrive, it’s about when we should start preparing.
Which brings us to the second non-disagreement. The “skeptic” position
seems to be that, although we should probably get a couple of bright people to
start working on preliminary aspects of the problem, we shouldn’t panic or
start trying to ban AI research.

The “believers”, meanwhile, insist that although we shouldn’t panic or start

trying to ban AI research, we should probably get a couple of bright people to
start working on preliminary aspects of the problem.

Yann LeCun is probably the most vocal skeptic of AI risk. He was heavily
featured in the Popular Science article, was quoted in the Marginal Revolution
post, and spoke to KDNuggets and IEEE on “the inevitable singularity
questions”, which he describes as “so far out that we can write science fiction
about it”. But when asked to clarify his position a little more, he said:

Elon [Musk] is very worried about existential threats to humanity

(which is why he is building rockets with the idea of sending humans
colonize other planets). Even if the risk of an A.I. uprising is very
unlikely and very far in the future, we still need to think about it, design
precautionary measures, and establish guidelines. Just like bio-ethics
panels were established in the 1970s and 1980s, before genetic
engineering was widely used, we need to have A.I.-ethics panels and
think about these issues. But, as Yoshua [Bengio] wrote, we have quite a
bit of time

Eric Horvitz is another expert often mentioned as a leading voice of skepticism

and restraint. His views have been profiled in articles like Out Of Control AI
Will Not Kill Us, Believes Microsoft Research Chief and Nothing To Fear From
Artificial Intelligence, Says Microsoft’s Eric Horvitz. But here’s what he says in
a longer interview with NPR:

KASTE: Horvitz doubts that one of these virtual receptionists could ever
lead to something that takes over the world. He says that’s like expecting
a kite to evolve into a 747 on its own. So does that mean he thinks the
singularity is ridiculous?

Mr. HORVITZ: Well, no. I think there’s been a mix of views, and I have
to say that I have mixed feelings myself.
 KASTE: In part because of ideas like the singularity, Horvitz and other
A.I. scientists have been doing more to look at some of the ethical issues
that might arise over the next few years with narrow A.I. systems.
They’ve also been asking themselves some more futuristic questions. For
instance, how would you go about designing an emergency off switch for
a computer that can redesign itself?

Mr. HORVITZ: I do think that the stakes are high enough where even if
there was a low, small chance of some of these kinds of scenarios, that
it’s worth investing time and effort to be proactive.

Which is pretty much the same position as a lot of the most zealous AI risk
proponents. With enemies like these, who needs friends?

A Slate article called Don’t Fear Artificial Intelligence also gets a surprising
amount right:

As Musk himself suggests elsewhere in his remarks, the solution to the

problem [of AI risk] lies in sober and considered collaboration between
scientists and policymakers. However, it is hard to see how talk of
“demons” advances this noble goal. In fact, it may actively hinder it.

First, the idea of a Skynet scenario itself has enormous holes. While
computer science researchers think Musk’s musings are “not completely
crazy,” they are still awfully remote from a world in which AI hype
masks less artificially intelligent realities that our nation’s computer
scientists grapple with:

Yann LeCun, the head of Facebook’s AI lab, summed it up in a Google+

post back in 2013: “Hype is dangerous to AI. Hype killed AI four times
in the last five decades. AI Hype must be stopped.”…LeCun and others
are right to fear the consequences of hype. Failure to live up to sci-fi–
fueled expectations, after all, often results in harsh cuts to AI research
budgets.

AI scientists are all smart people. They have no interest in falling into the
usual political traps where they divide into sides that accuse each other of
being insane alarmists or ostriches with their heads stuck in the sand. It looks
like they’re trying to balance the need to start some preliminary work on a
threat that looms way off in the distance versus the risk of engendering so
much hype that it starts a giant backlash.

This is not to say that there aren’t very serious differences of opinion in how
quickly we need to act. These seem to hinge mostly on whether it’s safe to say
“We’ll deal with the problem when we come to it” or whether there will be
some kind of “hard takeoff” which will take events out of control so quickly
that we’ll want to have done our homework beforehand. I continue to see less
evidence than I’d like that most AI researchers with opinions understand the
latter possibility, or really any of the technical work in this area. Heck, the
Marginal Revolution article quotes an expert as saying that superintelligence
isn’t a big risk because “smart computers won’t create their own goals”, even
though anyone who has read Bostrom knows that this is exactly the problem.

There is still a lot of work to be done. But cherry-picked articles about how
“real AI researchers don’t worry about superintelligence” aren’t it.

Should AI Be Open?

I.

H.G. Wells’ 1914 sci-fi book The World Set Free did a pretty good job
predicting nuclear weapons:

They did not see it until the atomic bombs burst in their fumbling
hands…before the last war began it was a matter of common knowledge
that a man could carry about in a handbag an amount of latent energy
sufficient to wreck half a city

Wells believed the coming atomic bombs would be so deadly that we would
inevitably create a utopian one-world government to prevent them from ever
being used. Sorry, Wells. It was a nice thought.

But imagine that in the 1910s and 1920s, some elites had started thinking
really seriously along Wellsian lines. They would worry about what might
happen when the first nation – let’s say America – got the Bomb. It would be
unstoppable in battle and might rule the world with an iron fist. Such a
situation would be the end of human freedom and progress.
So in 1920, these elites pooled their resources and made their own Manhattan
Project. Their efforts bore fruit, and they learned a lot about nuclear fission; in
particular, they learned that uranium was a necessary raw material. The
world’s uranium sources were few enough that a single nation or coalition
could get a monopoly upon them; the specter of atomic despotism seemed
more worrying than ever.

They got their physicists working overtime and discovered a new type of nuke
that required no uranium at all. In fact, once you understood the principles
you could build one out of parts from a Model T engine. The only downside
was that if you didn’t build it exactly right, its usual failure mode was to
detonate on the workbench in an uncontrolled hyper-reaction that would blow
the entire hemisphere to smithereens.

And so the intellectual and financial elites declared victory – no one country
could monopolize atomic weapons now – and sent step-by-step guides to
building a Model T nuke to every household in the world. Within a week, both
hemispheres were blown to very predictable smithereens.

II.

Some of the top names in Silicon Valley have just announced a new
organization, OpenAI, dedicated to “advancing digital intelligence in the way
that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole…as broadly and evenly
distributed as possible.” Co-chairs Elon Musk and Sam Altman talk to Steven
Levy:

Levy: How did this come about? […]

Musk: Philosophically there’s an important element here: we want AI

to be widespread. There’s two schools of thought?—?do you want many
AIs, or a small number of AIs? We think probably many is good. And to
the degree that you can tie it to an extension of individual human will,
that is also good. […]

Altman: We think the best way AI can develop is if it’s about individual
empowerment and making humans better, and made freely available to
everyone, not a single entity that is a million times more powerful than
 any human. Because we are not a for-profit company, like a Google, we
can focus not on trying to enrich our shareholders, but what we believe
is the actual best thing for the future of humanity.

Levy: Couldn’t your stuff in OpenAI surpass human intelligence?

Altman: I expect that it will, but it will just be open source and useable
by everyone instead of useable by, say, just Google. Anything the group
develops will be available to everyone. If you take it and repurpose it you
don’t have to share that. But any of the work that we do will be available
to everyone.

Levy: If I’m Dr. Evil and I use it, won’t you be empowering me?

Musk: I think that’s an excellent question and it’s something that we

debated quite a bit.

Altman: There are a few different thoughts about this. Just like
humans protect against Dr. Evil by the fact that most humans are good,
and the collective force of humanity can contain the bad elements, we
think its far more likely that many, many AIs, will work to stop the
occasional bad actors than the idea that there is a single AI a billion
times more powerful than anything else. If that one thing goes off the
rails or if Dr. Evil gets that one thing and there is nothing to counteract
it, then we’re really in a bad place.

Both sides here keep talking about who is going to “use” the superhuman
intelligence a billion times more powerful than humanity, as if it were a
microwave or something. Far be it from me to claim to know more than Musk
or Altman about anything, but I propose that the correct answer to “what
would you do if Dr. Evil used superintelligent AI?” is “cry tears of joy and
declare victory”, because anybody at all having a usable level of control over
the first superintelligence is so much more than we have any right to expect
that I’m prepared to accept the presence of a medical degree and ominous
surname.

A more Bostromian view would forget about Dr. Evil, and model AI progress
as a race between Dr. Good and Dr. Amoral. Dr. Good is anyone who
understands that improperly-designed AI could get out of control and destroy
the human race – and who is willing to test and fine-tune his AI however long
it takes to be truly confident in its safety. Dr. Amoral is anybody who doesn’t
worry about that and who just wants to go forward as quickly as possible in
order to be the first one with a finished project. If Dr. Good finishes an AI first,
we get a good AI which protects human values. If Dr. Amoral finishes an AI
first, we get an AI with no concern for humans that will probably cut short our
future.

Dr. Amoral has a clear advantage in this race: building an AI without worrying
about its behavior beforehand is faster and easier than building an AI and
spending years testing it and making sure its behavior is stable and beneficial.
He will win any fair fight. The hope has always been that the fight won’t be
fair, because all the smartest AI researchers will realize the stakes and join Dr.
Good’s team.

Open-source AI crushes that hope. Suppose Dr. Good and his team discover
all the basic principles of AI but wisely hold off on actually instantiating a
superintelligence until they can do the necessary testing and safety work. But
suppose they also release what they’ve got on the Internet. Dr. Amoral
downloads the plans, sticks them in his supercomputer, flips the switch, and
then – as Dr. Good himself put it back in 1963 – “the human race has become
redundant.”

The decision to make AI findings open source is a tradeoff between risks and
benefits. The risk is letting the most careless person in the world determine
the speed of AI research – because everyone will always have the option to
exploit the full power of existing AI designs, and the most careless person in
the world will always be the first one to take it. The benefit is that in a world
where intelligence progresses very slowly and AIs are easily controlled,
nobody can use their sole possession of the only existing AI to garner too
much power.

But what if we don’t live in a world where progress is slow and control is easy?

III.

If AI saunters lazily from infrahuman to human to superhuman, then we’ll

probably end up with a lot of more-or-less equally advanced AIs that we can
tweak and fine-tune until they cooperate well with us. In this situation, we
have to worry about who controls those AIs, and it is here that OpenAI’s
model makes the most sense.

But Bostrom et al worry that AI won’t work like this at all. Instead there could
be a “hard takeoff”, a subjective discontinuity in the function mapping AI
research progress to intelligence as measured in ability-to-get-things-done. If
on January 1 you have a toy AI as smart as a cow, and on February 1 it’s
proved the Riemann hypothesis and started building a ring around the sun,
that was a hard takeoff.

(I won’t have enough space here to really do these arguments justice, so I once
again suggest reading Bostrom’s Superintelligence if you haven’t already. For
more on what AI researchers themselves think of these ideas, see AI
Researchers On AI Risk.)

Why should we expect a hard takeoff? First, it’s happened before. It took
evolution twenty million years to go from cows with sharp horns to hominids
with sharp spears; it took only a few tens of thousands of years to go from
hominids with sharp spears to moderns with nuclear weapons. Almost all of
the practically interesting differences in intelligence occur within a tiny
window that you could blink and miss.

If you were to invent a sort of objective zoological IQ based on amount of

evolutionary work required to reach a certain level, complexity of brain
structures, etc, you might put nematodes at 1, cows at 90, chimps at 99, homo
erectus at 99.9, and modern humans at 100. The difference between 99.9 and
100 is the difference between “frequently eaten by lions” and “has to pass anti-
poaching laws to prevent all lions from being wiped out”.

Worse, the reasons we humans aren’t more intelligent are really stupid. Even
people who find the idea abhorrent agree that selectively breeding humans for
intelligence would work in some limited sense. Find all the smartest people,
make them marry each other for a couple of generations, and you’d get some
really smart great-grandchildren. But think about how weird this is! Breeding
smart people isn’t doing work, per se. It’s not inventing complex new brain
lobes. If you want to get all anthropomorphic about it, you’re just “telling”
evolution that intelligence is something it should be selecting for. Heck, that’s
all that the African savannah was doing too – the difference between chimps
and humans isn’t some brilliant new molecular mechanism, it’s just sticking
chimps in an environment where intelligence was selected for so that
evolution was incentivized to pull out a few stupid hacks. The hacks seem to be
things like “bigger brain size” (did you know that both among species and
among individual humans, brain size correlates pretty robustly with
intelligence, and that one reason we’re not smarter may be that it’s too hard to
squeeze a bigger brain through the birth canal?) If you believe in Greg
Cochran’s Ashkenazi IQ hypothesis, just having a culture that valued
intelligence on the marriage market was enough to boost IQ 15 points in a
couple of centuries, and this is exactly the sort of thing you should expect in a
world like ours where intelligence increases are stupidly easy to come by.

I think there’s a certain level of hard engineering/design work that needs to be

done for intelligence, a level way below humans, and after that the limits on
intelligence are less about novel discoveries and more about tradeoffs like
“how much brain can you cram into a head big enough to fit out a birth
canal?” or “wouldn’t having faster-growing neurons increase your cancer
risk?” Computers are not known for having to fit through birth canals or
getting cancer, so it may be that AI researchers only have to develop a few
basic principles – let’s say enough to make cow-level intelligence – and after
that the road to human intelligence runs through adding the line
NumberOfNeuronsSimulated = 100000000000 to the code, and the road to
superintelligence runs through adding another zero after that.

(Remember, it took all of human history from Mesopotamia to 19th-century

Britain to invent a vehicle that could go as fast as a human. But after that it
only took another four years to build one that could go twice as fast as a
human.)

If there’s a hard takeoff, OpenAI’s strategy stops being useful. There’s no point
in ensuring that everyone has their own AIs, because there’s not much time
between the first useful AI and the point at which things get too confusing to
model and nobody “has” the AIs at all.
IV.

OpenAI’s strategy also skips over a second aspect of AI risk: the control
problem.

All of this talk of “will big corporations use AI?” or “will Dr. Evil use AI?” or
“Will AI be used for the good of all?” presuppose that you can use an AI. You
can certainly use an AI like the ones in chess-playing computers, but nobody’s
very scared of the AIs in chess-playing computers either. What about AIs
powerful enough to be scary?

Remember the classic programmers’ complaint: computers always do what

you tell them to do instead of what you meant for them to do. Computer
programs rarely do what you want the first time you test them. Google Maps
has a relatively simple task (plot routes between Point A and Point B), has
been perfected over the course of years by the finest engineers at Google, has
been ‘playtested’ by tens of millions of people day after day, and still
occasionally does awful things like suggest you drive over the edge of a deadly
cliff, or tell you to walk across an ocean and back for no reason on your way to
the corner store.

Humans have a robust neural architecture, to the point where you can
logically prove that what they’re doing is suboptimal and they’ll shrug and say
they they’re going to do it anyway. Computers aren’t like this unless we make
them so, itself a hard task. They are naturally fragile and oriented toward
specific goals. An AI that ended up with a drive as perverse as Google Maps’
occasional tendency to hurl you off cliffs would not be necessarily self-
correcting. A smart AI might be able to figure out that humans didn’t mean for
it to have the drive it did. But that wouldn’t cause it to change its drive, any
more than you can convert a gay person to heterosexuality by patiently
explaining to them that evolution probably didn’t mean for them to be gay.
Your drives are your drives, whether they are intentional or not.

When Google Maps tells people to drive off cliffs, Google quietly patches the
program. AIs that are more powerful than us may not need to accept our
patches, and may actively take action to prevent us from patching them. If an
alien species showed up in their UFOs, said that they’d created us but made a
mistake and actually we were supposed to eat our children, and asked us to
line up so they could insert the functioning child-eating gene in us, we would
probably go all Independence Day on them; computers with more goal-
directed architecture would if anything be even more willing to fight such
changes.

If it really is a quick path from cow-level AI to superhuman-level AI, it would

be really hard to test the cow-level AI for stability and expect it to stay stable
all the way up to superhuman-level – superhumans have a lot more ways to
cause trouble than cows do. That means a serious risk of superhuman AIs that
want to do the equivalent of hurl us off cliffs, and which are very resistant to
us removing that desire from them. We may be able to prevent this, but it
would require a lot of deep thought and a lot of careful testing and prodding at
the cow-level AIs to make sure they are as prepared as possible for the
transition to superhumanity.

And we lose that option by making the AI open source. Make such a program
universally available, and while Dr. Good is busy testing and prodding, Dr.
Amoral has already downloaded the program, flipped the switch, and away we
go.

V.

Once again: The decision to make AI findings open source is a tradeoff

between risks and benefits. The risk is that in a world with hard takeoffs and
difficult control problems, you get superhuman AIs that hurl everybody off
cliffs. The benefit is that in a world with slow takeoffs and no control
problems, nobody will be able to use their sole possession of the only existing
AI to garner too much power.

But the benefits just aren’t clear enough to justify that level of risk. I’m still not
even sure exactly how the OpenAI founders visualize the future they’re trying
to prevent. Are AIs fast and dangerous? Are they slow and easily-controlled?
Does just one company have them? Several companies? All rich people? Are
they a moderate advantage? A huge advantage? None of those possibilities
seem dire enough to justify OpenAI’s tradeoff against safety.

Are we worried that AI will be dominated by one company despite becoming

necessary for almost every computing application? Microsoft Windows is
dominated by one company and became necessary for almost every computing
application. For a while people were genuinely terrified that Microsoft would
exploit its advantage to become a monopolistic giant that took over the
Internet and something something something. Instead, they were caught flat-
footed and outcompeted by Apple and Google, plus if you really want you can
use something open-source like Linux instead. And new versions of Windows
inevitably end up hacked and up on The Pirate Bay anyway.

Or are we worried that AIs will somehow help the rich get richer and the poor
get poorer? This is a weird concern to have about a piece of software which can
be replicated pretty much for free. Windows and Google Search are both
fantastically complex products of millions of man-hours of research; Google is
free and Windows comes bundled with your computer. In fact, people have
gone through the trouble of creating fantastically complex competitors to both
and providing those free of charge, to the point where multiple groups are
competing to offer people fantastically complex software for free. While it’s
possible that rich people will be able to afford premium AIs, it is hard for me
to weigh “rich people get premium versions of things” on the same scale as
“human race likely destroyed”. Like, imagine the sort of dystopian world
where rich people had nicer things than the rest of us. It’s too horrifying even
to contemplate.

Or are we worried that AI will progress really quickly and allow someone to
have completely ridiculous amounts of power? But remember, there’s still a
government and it tends to look askance on other people becoming powerful
enough to compete with it. If some company is monopolizing AI and getting
too big, the government will break it up, the same way they kept threatening to
break up Microsoft when it was getting too big. If someone tries to use AI to
exploit others, the government can pass a complicated regulation against that.
You can say a lot of things about the United States government, but you can’t
say that they never pass complicated regulations forbidding people from doing
things.

Or are we worried that AI will be so powerful that someone armed with AI is

stronger than the government? Think about this scenario for a moment. If the
government notices someone getting, say, a quarter as powerful as it is, it’ll
probably take action. So an AI user isn’t likely to overpower the government
unless their AI can become powerful enough to defeat the US military too
quickly for the government to notice or respond to. But if AIs can do that,
we’re back in the intelligence explosion/fast takeoff world where OpenAI’s
assumptions break down. If AIs can go from zero to more-powerful-than-the-
US-military in a very short amount of time while still remaining well-behaved,
then we actually dohave to worry about Dr. Evil and we shouldn’t be giving
him all our research.

Or are we worried that some big corporation will make an AI more powerful
than the US government in secret? I guess this is sort of scary, but it’s hard to
get too excited about. So Google takes over the world? Fine. Do you think
Larry Page would be a better or worse ruler than one of these people? What if
he had a superintelligent AI helping him, and also everything was post-
scarcity? Yeah, I guess all in all I’d prefer constitutional limited government,
but this is another supposed horror scenario which doesn’t even weigh on the
same scale as “human race likely destroyed”.

If OpenAI wants to trade off the safety of the human race from rogue AIs in
order to get better safety against people trying to exploit control over AIs, they
need to make a much stronger case than anything I’ve seen so far for why the
latter is such a terrible risk.

There was a time when the United States was the only country with nukes.
Aside from poor Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it mostly failed to press its
advantage, bumbled its way into letting the Russians steal the schematics, and
now everyone from Israel to North Korea has nuclear weapons and things are
pretty okay. If we’d been so afraid of letting the US government have its brief
tactical advantage that we’d given the plans for extremely unstable super-
nukes to every library in the country, we probably wouldn’t even be around to
regret our skewed priorities.

Elon Musk famously said that AIs are “potentially more dangerous than
nukes”. He’s right – so AI probably shouldn’t be open source any more than
nukes should.
VI.

And yet Elon Musk is involved in this project. So are Sam Altman and Peter
Thiel. So are a bunch of other people who have read Bostrom, who are deeply
concerned about AI risk, and who are pretty clued-in.

My biggest hope is that as usual they are smarter than I am and know
something I don’t. My second biggest hope is that they are making a simple
and uncharacteristic error, because these people don’t let errors go
uncorrected for long and if it’s just an error they can change their minds.

But I worry it’s worse than either of those two things. I got a chance to talk to
some people involved in the field, and the impression I got was one of a
competition that was heating up. Various teams led by various Dr. Amorals are
rushing forward more quickly and determinedly than anyone expected at this
stage, so much so that it’s unclear how any Dr. Good could expect both to
match their pace and to remain as careful as the situation demands. There was
always a lurking fear that this would happen. I guess I hoped that everyone
involved was smart enough to be good cooperators. I guess I was wrong.
Instead we’ve reverted to type and ended up in the classic situation of such
intense competition for speed that we need to throw every other value under
the bus just to avoid being overtaken.

In this context, the OpenAI project seems more like an act of desperation. Like
Dr. Good needing some kind of high-risk, high-reward strategy to push
himself ahead and allow at least some amount of safety research to take place.
Maybe getting the cooperation of the academic and open-source community
will do that. I won’t question the decisions of people smarter and better
informed than I am if that’s how their strategy talks worked out. I guess I just
have to hope that the OpenAI leaders know what they’re doing, don’t skimp on
safety research, and have a process for deciding which results not to share too
quickly.

But I am scared that it’s come to this. It suggests that we really and truly do
not have what it takes, that we’re just going to blunder our way into extinction
because cooperation problems are too hard for us.
I am reminded of what Malcolm Muggeridge wrote as he watched World War
II begin:

All this likewise indubitably belonged to history, and would have to be

historically assessed; like the Murder of the Innocents, or the Black
Death, or the Battle of Paschendaele. But there was something else; a
monumental death-wish, an immense destructive force loosed in the
world which was going to sweep over everything and everyone, laying
them flat, burning, killing, obliterating, until nothing was left…Nor have
I from that time ever had the faintest expectation that, in earthly terms,
anything could be salvaged; that any earthly battle could be won or
earthly solution found. It has all just been sleep-walking to the end of
the night.

SSC Journal Club: AI Timelines

I.

A few years ago, Muller and Bostrom et al surveyed AI researchers to assess

their opinion on AI progress and superintelligence. Since then, deep learning
took off, AlphaGo beat human Go champions, and the field has generally
progressed. I’ve been waiting for a new survey for a while, and now we have
one.

Grace et al (New Scientist article, paper, see also the post on the author’s blog
AI Impacts) surveyed 1634 experts at major AI conferences and received 352
responses. Unlike Bostrom’s survey, this didn’t oversample experts at weird
futurist conferences and seems to be a pretty good cross-section of
mainstream opinion in the field. What did they think?

Well, a lot of different things.

The headline result: the researchers asked experts for their probabilities that
we would get AI that was “able to accomplish every task better and more
cheaply than human workers”. The experts thought on average there was a
50% chance of this happening by 2062 – and a 10% chance of it happening by
2026!
But on its own this is a bit misleading. They also asked by what year “for any
occupation, machines could be built to carry out the task better and more
cheaply than human workers”. The experts thought on average that there was
a 50% chance of this happening by 2139, and a 20% chance of it happening by
2037.

As the authors point out, these two questions are basically the same – they
were put in just to test if there was any framing effect. The framing effect was
apparently strong enough to shift the median date of strong human-level AI
from 2062 to 2139. This makes it hard to argue AI experts actually have a
strong opinion on this.

Also, these averages are deceptive. Several experts thought there was basically
a 100% chance of strong AI by 2035; others thought there was only a 20%
chance or less by 2100. This is less “AI experts have spoken and it will happen
in 2062” and more “AI experts have spoken, and everything they say
contradicts each other and quite often themselves”.

This does convey more than zero information. It conveys the information that
AI researchers are really unsure. I can’t tell you how many people I’ve heard
say “there’s no serious AI researcher who thinks there’s any chance of human-
level intelligence before 2050”. Well actually, there are a few dozen
conference-paper-presenting experts who think there’s a one hundred percent
chance of human-level AI before that year. I don’t know what drugs they’re on,
but they exist. The moral of the story is: be less certain about this kind of
thing.

II.

The next thing we can take from this paper is a timeline of what will happen
when. The authors give a bunch of different tasks, jobs, and milestones, and
ask the researchers when AI will be able to complete them. Average answers
range from nearly fifty years off (for machines being able to do original high-
level mathematical research) to only three years away (for machines achieving
the venerable accomplishment of being able to outperform humans at Angry
Birds). Along the way they’ll beat humans at poker (four years), writing high
school essays (ten years), be able to outrun humans in a 5K foot race (12
years), and write a New York Times bestseller (26 years). What do these AI
researchers think is the hardest and most quintessentially human of the tasks
listed, the one robots will have the most trouble doing because of its Olympian
intellectual requirements? That’s right – AI research (80 years).

I make fun of this, but it’s actually interesting to think about. Might the AI
researchers have put their own job last not because of an inflated sense of
their own importance, but because they engage with it every day in Near
Mode? That is, because they imagine writing a New York Times bestseller as
“something something pen paper be good with words okay done” whereas they
understand the complexity of AI research and how excruciatingly hard it
would be to automate away every piece of what they do?

Also, since they rated AI research (80 years) as the hardest of all occupations,
what do they mean when they say that “full automation of all human jobs” is
125 years away? Some other job not on the list that will take 40 years longer
than AI research? Or just a combination of framing effects and not
understanding the question?

(it’s also unclear to what extent they believe that automating AI research will
lead to a feedback loop and subsequent hard takeoff to superintelligence. This
kind of theory would fit with it being the last job to be automated, but not with
it taking another forty years before an unspecified age of full automation.)

III.

The last part is the most interesting for me: what do AI researchers believe
about risk from superintelligence?

This is very different from the earlier questions about timelines. It’s possible
to believe that AI will come very soon but be perfectly safe. And it’s possible to
believe that AI is a long time away but we really need to start preparing now,
or else. A lot of popular accounts collapse these two things together, “oh,
you’re worried about AI, but that’s dumb because there’s no way it’s going to
happen anytime soon”, but past research has shown that short timelines and
high risk assessment are only modestly correlated. This survey asked about
both separately.
There were a couple of different questions trying to get at this, but it looks like
the most direct one was “does Stuart Russell’s argument for why highly
advanced AI might pose a risk, point at an important problem?”. You can see
the exact version of his argument quoted in the survey on the AI Impacts page,
but it’s basically the standard Bostrom/Yudkowsky argument for why AIs may
end up with extreme values contrary to our own, framed in a very normal-
sounding and non-threatening way. According to the experts, this was:

● No, not a real problem: 11%

● No, not an important problem: 19%
● Yes, a moderately important problem: 31%
● Yes, an important problem: 34%
● Yes, among the most important problems in the field: 5%

70% of AI experts agree with the basic argument that there’s a risk from
poorly-goal-aligned AI. But very few believe it’s among “the most important
problems in the field”. This is pretty surprising; if there’s a good chance AI
could be hostile to humans, shouldn’t that automatically be pretty high on the
priority list?

The next question might help explain this: “Value of working on this problem
now, compared to other problems in the field?”

● Much less valuable: 22%

● Less valuable: 41%
● As valuable as other problems: 28%
● More valuable: 7%
● Much more valuable: 1.4%

So charitably, the answer to this question was coloring the answer to the
previous one: AI researchers believe it’s plausible that there could be major
problems with machine goal alignment, they just don’t think that there’s too
much point in working on it now.

One more question here: “Chance intelligence explosion argument is broadly

correct?”

● Quite likely (81-100% chance): 12%

● Likely (61-80% chance): 17%
 ● About even (41-60% chance): 21%
● Unlikely (21-40% chance): 24%
● Quite unlikely (0-20% chance): 26%

Splitting the 41-60% bin in two, we might estimate that about 40% of AI
researchers think the hypothesis is more likely than not.

Take the big picture here, and I worry there’s sort of a discrepancy.

50% of experts think there’s at least a ten percent chance of above-human-

level AI coming within the next ten years.

And 40% of experts think that there’s a better-than-even chance that, once we
get above-human level AI, it will “explode” to suddenly become vastly more
intelligent than humans.

And 70% of experts think that Stuart Russell makes a pretty good point when
he says that without a lot of research into AI goal alignment, AIs will probably
have their goals so misaligned with humans that they could become dangerous
and hostile.

I don’t have the raw individual-level data, so I can’t prove that these aren’t all
anti-correlated in some perverse way that’s the opposite of the direction I
would expect. But if we assume they’re not, and just naively multiply the
probabilities together for a rough estimate, that suggests that about 14% of
experts believe that all three of these things: that AI might be soon,
superintelligent, and hostile.

Yet only a third of these – 5% – think this is “among the most important
problems in the field”. Only a tenth – 1.4% – think it’s “much more valuable”
than other things they could be working on.

IV.

How have things changed since Muller and Bostrom’s survey in 2012?

The short answer is “confusingly”. Since almost everyone agrees that AI

progress in the past five years has been much faster than expected, we would
expect experts to have faster timelines – ie expect AI to be closer now than
they did then. But Bostrom’s sample predicted human-level AI in 2040
(median) or 2081 (mean). Grace et al don’t give clear means or medians,
preferring some complicated statistical construct which isn’t exactly similar to
either of these. But their dates – 2062 by one framing, 2139 by another – at
least seem potentially a little bit later.

Some of this may have to do with a subtle difference in how they asked their
question:

Bostrom: “Define a high-level machine intelligence as one that can carry out
most human professions as well as a typical human…”

Grace: “High-level machine intelligence is achieved when unaided machines

can accomplish every task better and more cheaply than human workers.”

Bostrom wanted it equal to humans; Grace wants it better. Bostrom wanted

“most professions”, Grace wants “every task”. It makes sense that experts
would predict longer timescales for meeting Grace’s standards.

But as we saw before, expecting AI experts to make sense might be giving

them too much credit. A more likely possibility: Bostrom’s sample included
people from wackier subbranches of AI research, like a conference on
Philosophy of AI and one on Artificial General Intelligence; Grace’s sample
was more mainstream. The most mainstream part of Bostrom’s sample, a list
of top 100 AI researchers, had an estimate a bit closer to Grace’s (2050).

We can also compare the two samples on belief in an intelligence explosion.

Bostrom asked how likely it was that AI went from human-level to “greatly
surpassing” human level within two years. The median was 10%; the mean
was 19%. The median of top AI researchers not involved in wacky conferences
was 5%.

Grace asked the same question, with much the same results: a median 10%
probability. I have no idea why this question – which details what an
“intelligence explosion” would entail – was so much less popular than the one
that used the words “intelligence explosion” (remember, 40% of experts
agreed that “the intelligence explosion argument is broadly correct”). Maybe
researchers believe it’s a logically sound argument and worth considering but
in the end it’s not going to happen – or maybe they don’t actually know what
“intelligence explosion” means.

Finally, Bostrom and Grace both asked experts’ predictions for whether the
final impact of AI would be good or bad. Bostrom’s full sample (top 100
subgroup in parentheses) was:

● Extremely good: 24% (20)

● On balance good: 28% (40)
● More or less neutral: 17% (19)
● On balance bad: 13% (13)
● Extremely bad – existential catastrophe: 18% (8)

Grace’s results for the same question:

● Extremely good: 20%

● On balance good: 25%
● More or less neutral: 40%
● On balance bad: 10%
● Extremely bad – human extinction: 5%

Grace’s data looks pretty much the same as the TOP100 subset of Bostrom’s
data, which makes sense since both are prestigious non-wacky AI researchers.

V.

A final question: “How much should society prioritize AI safety research”?

● Much less: 5%
● Less: 6%
● About the same: 41%
● More: 35%
● Much more: 12%

People who say that real AI researchers don’t believe in safety research are
now just empirically wrong. I can’t yet say that most of them want more such
research – it’s only 47% on this survey. But next survey AI will be a little bit
more advanced, people will have thought it over a little bit more, and maybe
we’ll break the 50% mark.
But we’re not there yet.

I think a good summary of this paper would be that large-minorities-to-small-

majorities of AI experts agree with the arguments around AI risk and think
they’re worth investigating further. But only a very small minority of experts
consider it an emergency or think it’s really important right now.

You could tell an optimistic story here – “experts agree that things will
probably be okay, everyone can calm down”.

You can also tell a more pessimistic story. Experts agree with a lot of the
claims and arguments that suggest reason for concern. It’s just that, having
granted them, they’re not actually concerned.

This seems like a pretty common problem in philosophy. “Do you believe it’s
more important that poor people have basic necessities of life than that you
have lots of luxury goods?” “Yeah” “And do you believe that the money you’re
currently spending on luxury goods right now could instead be spent on
charity that would help poor people get life necessities?” “Yeah.” “Then
shouldn’t you stop buying luxury goods and instead give all your extra money
beyond what you need to live to charity?” “Hey, what? Nobody does that! That
would be a lot of work and make me look really weird!”

How many of the experts in this survey are victims of the same problem? “Do
you believe powerful AI is coming soon?” “Yeah.” “Do you believe it could be
really dangerous?” “Yeah.” “Then shouldn’t you worry about this?” “Hey,
what? Nobody does that! That would be a lot of work and make me look really
weird!”

I don’t know. But I’m encouraged to see people are even taking the arguments
seriously. And I’m encouraged that researchers are finally giving us good data
on this. Thanks to the authors of this study for being so diligent, helpful,
intelligent, wonderful, and (of course) sexy.

(I might have forgotten to mention that the lead author is my girlfriend. But
that’s not biasing my praise above in any way.)

Where The Falling Einstein Meets The Rising Mouse

Eliezer Yudkowsky argues that forecasters err in expecting artificial
intelligence progress to look like this:

…when in fact it will probably look like this:

That is, we naturally think there’s a pretty big intellectual difference between
mice and chimps, and a pretty big intellectual difference between normal
people and Einstein, and implicitly treat these as about equal in degree. But in
any objective terms we choose – amount of evolutionary work it took to
generate the difference, number of neurons, measurable difference in brain
structure, performance on various tasks, etc – the gap between mice and
chimps is immense, and the difference between an average Joe and Einstein
trivial in comparison. So we should be wary of timelines where AI reaches
mouse level in 2020, chimp level in 2030, Joe-level in 2040, and Einstein
level in 2050. If AI reaches the mouse level in 2020 and chimp level in 2030,
for all we know it could reach Joe level on January 1st, 2040 and Einstein level
on January 2nd of the same year. This would be pretty disorienting and (if the
AI is poorly aligned) dangerous.

I found this argument really convincing when I first heard it, and I thought the
data backed it up. For example, in my Superintelligence FAQ, I wrote:

In 1997, the best computer Go program in the world, Handtalk, won

NT$250,000 for performing a previously impossible feat – beating an 11
 year old child (with an 11-stone handicap penalizing the child and
favoring the computer!) As late as September 2015, no computer had
ever beaten any professional Go player in a fair game. Then in March
2016, a Go program beat 18-time world champion Lee Sedol 4-1 in a five
game match. Go programs had gone from “dumber than heavily-
handicapped children” to “smarter than any human in the world” in
twenty years, and “from never won a professional game” to
“overwhelming world champion” in six months.

But Katja Grace takes a broader perspective and finds the opposite. For
example, she finds that chess programs improved gradually from “beating the
worst human players” to “beating the best human players” over fifty years or
so, ie the entire amount of time computers have existed:
AlphaGo represented a pretty big leap in Go ability, but before that, Go
engines improved pretty gradually too (see the original AI Impacts post for
discussion of the Go ranking system on the vertical axis):

There’s a lot more on Katja’s page, overall very convincing. In field after field,
computers have taken decades to go from the mediocre-human level to the
genius-human level. So how can one reconcile the common-sense force of
Eliezer’s argument with the empirical force of Katja’s contrary data?

Theory 1: Mutational Load

Katja has her own theory:

The brains of humans are nearly identical, by comparison to the brains

of other animals or to other possible brains that could exist. This might
suggest that the engineering effort required to move across the human
range of intelligences is quite small, compared to the engineering effort
 required to move from very sub-human to human-level intelligence…
However, we should not be surprised to find meaningful variation in the
cognitive performance regardless of the difficulty of improving the
human brain. This makes it difficult to infer much from the observed
variations.

Why should we not be surprised? De novo deleterious mutations are

introduced into the genome with each generation, and the prevalence of
such mutations is determined by the balance of mutation rates and
negative selection. If de novo mutations significantly impact cognitive
performance, then there must necessarily be significant selection for
higher intelligence–and hence behaviorally relevant differences in
intelligence. This balance is determined entirely by the mutation rate,
the strength of selection for intelligence, and the negative impact of the
average mutation.

You can often make a machine worse by breaking a random piece, but
this does not mean that the machine was easy to design or that you can
make the machine better by adding a random piece. Similarly, levels of
variation of cognitive performance in humans may tell us very little
about the difficulty of making a human-level intelligence smarter.

I’m usually a fan of using mutational load to explain stuff. But here I worry
there’s too much left unexplained. Sure, the explanation for variation in
human intelligence is whatever it is. And there’s however much mutational
load there is. But that doesn’t address the fundamental disparity: isn’t the
difference between a mouse and Joe Average still immeasurably greater than
the difference between Joe Average and Einstein?

Theory 2: Purpose-Built Hardware

Mice can’t play chess (citation needed). So talking about “playing chess at the
mouse level” might require more philosophical groundwork than we’ve been
giving it so far.

Might the worst human chess players play chess pretty close to as badly as is
even possible? I’ve certainly seen people who don’t even seem to be looking
one move ahead very well, which is sort of like an upper bound for chess
badness. Even though the human brain is the most complex object in the
known universe, noble in reason, infinite in faculties, like an angel in
apprehension, etc, etc, it seems like maybe not 100% of that capacity is being
used in a guy who gets fools-mated on his second move.

We can compare to human prowess at mental arithmetic. We know that,

below the hood, the brain is solving really complicated differential equations
in milliseconds every time it catches a ball. Above the hood, most people can’t
multiply two two-digit numbers in their head. Likewise, in principle the brain
has 2.5 petabytes worth of memory storage; in practice I can’t always
remember my sixteen-digit credit card number.

Imagine a kid who has an amazing $5000 gaming computer, but her parents
have locked it so she can only play Minecraft. She needs a calculator for her
homework, but she can’t access the one on her computer, so she builds one out
of Minecraft blocks. The gaming computer can have as many gigahertz as you
want; she’s still only going to be able to do calculations at a couple of measly
operations per second. Maybe our brains are so purpose-built for swinging
through trees or whatever that it takes an equivalent amount of emulation to
get them to play chess competently.

In that case, mice just wouldn’t have the emulated more-general-purpose

computer. People who are bad at chess would be able to emulate a chess-
playing computer very laboriously and inefficiently. And people who are good
at chess would be able to bring some significant fraction of their full most-
complex-object-in-the-known-universe powers to bear. There are some
anecdotal reports from chessmasters that suggest something like this –
descriptions of just “seeing” patterns on the chessboard as complex objects, in
the same way that the dots on a pointillist painting naturally resolve into a tree
or a French lady or whatever.

This would also make sense in the context of calculation prodigies – those kids
who can multiply ten digit numbers in their heads really easily. Everybody has
to have the capacity to do this. But some people are better at accessing that
capacity than others.

But it doesn’t make sense in the context of self-driving cars! If there was ever a
task that used our purpose-built, no-emulation-needed native architecture, it
would be driving: recognizing objects in a field and coordinating movements
to and away from them. But my impression of self-driving car progress is that
it’s been stalled for a while at a level better than the worst human drivers, but
worse than the best human drivers. It’ll have preventable accidents every so
often – not as many as a drunk person or an untrained kid would, but more
than we would expect of a competent adult. This suggests a really wide range
of human ability even in native-architecture-suited tasks.

Theory 3: Widely Varying Sub-Abilities

I think self-driving cars are already much better than humans at certain tasks
– estimating differences, having split-second reflexes, not getting lost. But
they’re also much worse than humans at others – I think adapting to weird
conditions, like ice on the road or animals running out onto the street. So
maybe it’s not that computers spend much time in a general “human-level
range”, so much as being superhuman on some tasks, and subhuman on other
tasks, and generally averaging out to somewhere inside natural human
variation.

In the same way, long after Deep Blue beat Kasparov there were parts of chess
that humans could do better than computers, “anti-computer” strategies that
humans could play to maximize their advantage, and human + computer
“cyborg” teams that could do better than either kind of player alone.

This sort of thing is no doubt true. But I still find it surprising that the average
of “way superhuman on some things” and “way subhuman on other things”
averages within the range of human variability so often. This seems as
surprising as ever.

Theory 1.1: Humans Are Light-Years Beyond Every Other Animal, So Even
A Tiny Range Of Human Variation Is Relatively Large

Or maybe the first graph representing the naive perspective is right, Eliezer’s
graph representing a more reasonable perspective is wrong, and the range of
human variability is immense. Maybe the difference between Einstein and Joe
Average is the same (or bigger than!) the difference between Joe Average and
a mouse.
That is, imagine a Zoological IQ in which mice score 10, chimps score 20, and
Einstein scores 200. Now we can apply Katja’s insight: that humans can have
very wide variation in their abilities thanks to mutational load. But because
Einstein is so far beyond lower animals, there’s a wide range for humans to be
worse than Einstein in which they’re still better than chimps. Maybe Joe
Average scores 100, and the village idiot scores 50. This preserves our
intuition that even the village idiot is vastly smarter than a chimp, let alone a
mouse. But it also means that most of computational progress will occur
within the human range. If it takes you five years from starting your project, to
being as smart as a chimp, then even granting linear progress it could still take
you fifty more before you’re smarter than Einstein.

This seems to explain all the data very well. It’s just shocking that humans are
so far beyond any other animal, and their internal variation so important.

Maybe the closest real thing we have to zoological IQ is encephalization

quotient, a measure that relates brain size to body size in various complicated
ways that sometimes predict how smart the animal is. We find that mice have
an EQ of 0.5, chimps of 2.5, and humans of 7.5.

I don’t know whether to think about this in relative terms (chimps are a factor
of five smarter than mice, but humans only a factor of three greater than
chimps, so the mouse-chimp difference is bigger than the chimp-human
difference) or in absolute terms (chimps are 2 units bigger than mice, but
humans are five units bigger than chimps, so the chimp-human difference is
bigger than the mouse-chimp difference).

Brain size variation within humans is surprisingly large. Just within a sample
of 46 adult European-American men, it ranged from 1050 to 1500 cm^3m;
there are further differences by race and gender. The difference from the
largest to smallest brain is about the same as the difference between the
smallest brain and a chimp (275 – 500 cm^3); since chimps weight a bit less
than humans, we should probably give them some bonus points. Overall,
using brain size as some kind of very weak Fermi calculation proxy measure
for intelligence (see here), it looks like maybe the difference between Einstein
and the village idiot equals the difference between the idiot and the chimp?
But most mutations that decrease brain function will do so in ways other than
decreasing brain size; they will just make brains less efficient per unit mass. So
probably looking at variation in brain size underestimates the amount of
variation in intelligence. Is it underestimating it enough that the Einstein –
Joe difference ends up equivalent to the Joe – mouse difference? I don’t know.
But so far I don’t have anything to say it isn’t, except a feeling along the lines
of “that can’t possibly be true, can it?”

But why not? Look at all the animals in the world, and the majority of the
variation in size is within the group “whales”. The absolute size difference
between a bacterium and an elephant is less than the size difference between
Balaenoptera musculus brevicauda and Balaenoptera musculus musculus –
ie the Indian Ocean Blue Whale and the Atlantic Ocean Blue Whale. Once
evolution finds a niche where greater size is possible and desirable, and figures
out how to make animals scalable, it can go from the horse-like ancestor of
whales to actual whales in a couple million years. Maybe what whales are to
size, humans are to brainpower.

Stephen Hsu calculates that a certain kind of genetic engineering, carried to its
logical conclusion, could create humans “a hundred standard deviations above
average” in intelligence, ie IQ 1000 or so. This sounds absurd on the face of it,
like a nutritional supplement so good at helping you grow big and strong that
you ended up five light years tall, with a grip strength that could crush whole
star systems. But if we assume he’s just straightforwardly right, and that
Nature did something of about this level to chimps – then there might be
enough space for the intra-human variation to be as big as the mouse-chimp-
Joe variation.

How does this relate to our original concern – how fast we expect AI to
progress?

The good news is that linear progress in AI would take a long time to cross the
newly-vast expanse of the human level in domains like “common sense”,
“scientific planning”, and “political acumen”, the same way it took a long time
to cross it in chess.

The bad news is that if evolution was able to make humans so many orders of
magnitude more intelligent in so short a time, then intelligence really is easy
to scale up. Once you’ve got a certain level of general intelligence, you can just
crank it up arbitrarily far by adding more inputs. Consider by analogy the
hydrogen bomb – it’s very hard to invent, but once you’ve invented it you can
make a much bigger hydrogen bomb just by adding more hydrogen.

This doesn’t match existing AI progress, where it takes a lot of work to make a
better chess engine or self-driving car. Maybe it will match future AI progress,
after some critical mass is reached. Or maybe it’s totally on the wrong track.
I’m just having trouble thinking of any other explanation for why the human
level could be so big.

Don’t Fear The Filter

There’s been a recent spate of popular interest in the Great Filter theory, but I
think it all misses an important point brought up in Robin Hanson’s original
1998 paper on the subject.

The Great Filter, remember, is the horror-genre-adaptation of Fermi’s

Paradox. All of our calculations say that, in the infinite vastness of time and
space, intelligent aliens should be very common. But we don’t see any of them.
We haven’t seen their colossal astro-engineering projects in the night sky. We
haven’t heard their messages through SETI. And most important, we haven’t
been visited or colonized by them.

This is very strange. Consider that if humankind makes it another thousand

years, we’ll probably have started to colonize other star systems. Those star
systems will colonize other star systems and so on until we start expanding at
nearly the speed of light, colonizing literally everything in sight. After a
hundred thousand years or so we’ll have settled a big chunk of the galaxy,
assuming we haven’t killed ourselves first or encountered someone else
already living there.

But there should be alien civilizations that are a billion years old. Anything
that could conceivably be colonized, they should have gotten to back when
trilobytes still seemed like superadvanced mutants. But here we are, perfectly
nice solar system, lots of any type of resources you could desire, and they’ve
never visited. Why not?
Well, the Great Filter. No knows specifically what the Great Filter is, but
generally it’s “that thing that blocks planets from growing spacefaring
civilizations”. The planet goes some of the way towards a spacefaring
civilization, and then stops. The most important thing to remember about the
Great Filter is that it is very good at what it does. If even one planet in a
billion light-year radius had passed through the Great Filter, we would expect
to see its inhabitants everywhere. Since we don’t, we know that whatever it is
it’s very thorough.

Various candidates have been proposed, including “it’s really hard for life to
come into existence”, “it’s really hard for complex cells to form”, “it’s really
hard for animals to evolve intelligent”, and “actually space is full of aliens but
they are hiding their existence from us for some reason”.

The articles I linked at the top, especially the first, will go through most of the
possibilities. This essay isn’t about proposing new ones. It’s about saying why
the old ones won’t work.

The Great Filter is not garden-variety x-risk

A lot of people have seized upon the Great Filter to say that we’re going to
destroy ourselves through global warming or nuclear war or destroying the
rainforests. This seems wrong to me. Even if human civilization does destroy
itself due to global warming – which is a lot further than even very pessimistic
environmentalists expect the problem to go – it seems clear we had a chance
not to do that. A few politicians voting the other way, we could have passed the
Kyoto Protocol. A lot of politicians voting the other way, and we could have
come up with a really stable and long-lasting plan to put it off indefinitely. If
the gas-powered car had never won out over electric vehicles back in the early
20th century, or nuclear-phobia hadn’t sunk the plan to move away from
polluting coal plants, then the problem might never have come up, or at least
been much less. And we’re pretty close to being able to colonize Mars right
now; if our solar system had a slightly bigger, slightly closer version of Mars,
then we could restart human civilization anew there once we destroyed the
Earth and maybe go a little easy on the carbon dioxide the next time around.

In other words, there’s no way global warming kills 999,999,999 in every

billion civilizations. Maybe it kills 100,000,000. Maybe it kills 900,000,000.
But occasionally one manages to make it to space before frying their home
planet. That means it can’t be the Great Filter, or else we would have run into
the aliens who passed their Kyoto Protocols.

And the same is true of nuclear war or destroying the rainforests.

Unfortunately, almost all the popular articles about the Great Filter miss this
point and make their lead-in “DOES THIS SCIENTIFIC PHENOMENON
PROVE HUMANITY IS DOOMED?” No. No it doesn’t.

The Great Filter is not Unfriendly AI

Unlike global warming, it may be that we never really had a chance against
Unfriendly AI. Even if we do everything right and give MIRI more money than
they could ever want and get all of our smartest geniuses working on the
problem, maybe the mathematical problems involved are insurmountable.
Maybe the most pessimistic of MIRI’s models is true, and AIs are very easy to
accidentally bootstrap to unstoppable superintelligence and near-impossible
to give a stable value system that makes them compatible with human life. So
unlike global warming and nuclear war, this theory meshes well with the low
probability of filter escape.

But as this article points out, Unfriendly AI would if anything be even more
visible than normal aliens. The best-studied class of Unfriendly AIs are the
ones whimsically called “paperclip maximizers” which try to convert the entire
universe to a certain state (in the example, paperclips). These would be easily
detectable as a sphere of optimized territory expanding at some appreciable
fraction of the speed of light. Given that Hubble hasn’t spotted a Paperclip
Nebula (or been consumed by one) it looks like no one has created any of this
sort of AI either. And while other Unfriendly AIs might be less aggressive than
this, it’s hard to imagine an Unfriendly AI that destroys its parent civilization,
then sits very quietly doing nothing. It’s even harder to imagine that
999,999,999 out of a billion Unfriendly AIs end up this way.

The Great Filter is not transcendence

Lots of people more enthusiastically propose that the problem isn’t alien
species killing themselves, it’s alien species transcending this mortal plane.
Once they become sufficiently advanced, they stop being interested in
expansion for expansion’s sake. Some of them hang out on their home planet,
peacefully cultivating their alien gardens. Others upload themselves to
computronium internets, living in virtual reality. Still others become beings of
pure energy, doing whatever it is that beings of pure energy do. In any case,
they don’t conquer the galaxy or build obvious visible structures.

Which is all nice and well, except what about the Amish aliens? What about
the ones who have weird religions telling them that it’s not right to upload
their bodies, they have to live in the real world? What about the ones who have
crusader religions telling them they have to conquer the galaxy to convert
everyone else to their superior way of life? I’m not saying this has to be
common. And I know there’s this argument that advanced species would be
beyond this kind of thing. But man, it only takes one. I can’t believe that not
even one in a billion alien civilizations would have some instinctual preference
for galactic conquest for galactic conquest’s own sake. I mean, even if most
humans upload themselves, there will be a couple who don’t and who want to
go exploring. You’re trying to tell me this model applies to 999,999,999 out of
one billion civilizations, and then the very first civilization we test it on, it
fails?

The Great Filter is not alien exterminators

It sort of makes sense, from a human point of view. Maybe the first alien
species to attain superintelligence was jealous, or just plain jerks, and decided
to kill other species before they got the chance to catch up. Knowledgeable
people like as Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking have condemned our reverse-
SETI practice of sending messages into space to see who’s out there, because
everyone out there may be terrible. On this view, the dominant alien
civilization is the Great Filter, killing off everyone else while not leaving a
visible footprint themselves.

Although I get the precautionary principle, Sagan et al’s warnings against

sending messages seem kind of silly to me. This isn’t a failure to recognize how
strong the Great Filter has to be, this is a failure to recognize how powerful a
civilization that gets through it can become.
It doesn’t matter one way or the other if we broadcast we’re here. If there are
alien superintelligences out there, they know. “Oh, my billion-year-old
universe-spanning superintelligence wants to destroy fledgling civilizations,
but we just can’t find them! If only they would send very powerful radio
broadcasts into space so we could figure out where they are!” No. Just no. If
there are alien superintelligences out there, they tagged Earth as potential
troublemakers sometime in the Cambrian Era and have been watching us very
closely ever since. They know what you had for breakfast this morning and
they know what Jesus had for breakfast the morning of the Crucifixion. People
worried about accidentally “revealing themselves” to an intergalactic
supercivilization are like Sentinel Islanders reluctant to send a message in a
bottle lest modern civilization discover their existence – unaware that modern
civilization has spy satellites orbiting the planet that can pick out whether or
not they shaved that morning.

What about alien exterminators who are okay with weak civilizations, but kill
them when they show the first sign of becoming a threat (like inventing fusion
power or leaving their home solar system)? Again, you are underestimating
billion-year-old universe-spanning superintelligences. Don’t flatter yourself
here. You cannot threaten them.

What about alien exterminators who are okay with weak civilizations, but
destroy strong civilizations not because they feel threatened, but just for
aesthetic reasons? I can’t be certain that’s false, but it seems to me that if they
have let us continue existing this long, even though we are made of matter that
can be used for something else, that has to be a conscious decision made out of
something like morality. And because they’re omnipotent, they have the ability
to satisfy all of their (not logically contradictory) goals at once without
worrying about tradeoffs. That makes me think that whatever moral impulse
has driven them to allow us to survive will probably continue to allow us to
survive even if we start annoying them for some reason. When you’re
omnipotent, the option of stopping the annoyance without harming anyone is
just as easy as stopping the annoyance by making everyone involved suddenly
vanish.

Three of these four options – x-risk, Unfriendly AI, and alien exterminators –
are very very bad for humanity. I think worry about this badness has been a lot
of what’s driven interest in the Great Filter. I also think these are some of the
least likely possible explanations, which means we should be less afraid of the
Great Filter than is generally believed.

Book Review: Age of Em

I.

There are some people who are destined to become adjectives. Pick up a David
Hume book you’ve never read before and it’s easy to recognize the ideas and
style as Humean. Everything Tolkien wrote is Tolkienesque in a non-
tautological sense. This isn’t meant to denounce either writer as boring. Quite
the opposite. They produced a range of brilliant and diverse ideas. But there
was a hard-to-define and very consistent ethos at the foundation of both. Both
authors were very much like themselves.

Robin Hanson is more like himself than anybody else I know. He’s obviously
brilliant – a PhD in economics, a masters in physics, work for DARPA,
Lockheed, NASA, George Mason, and the Future of Humanity Institute. But
his greatest aptitude is in being really, really Hansonian. Bryan Caplan
describes it as well as anybody:

When the typical economist tells me about his latest research, my

standard reaction is ‘Eh, maybe.’ Then I forget about it. When Robin
Hanson tells me about his latest research, my standard reaction is ‘No
way! Impossible!’ Then I think about it for years.

This is my experience too. I think I said my first “No way! Impossible!”

sometime around 2008 after reading his blog Overcoming Bias. Since then
he’s influenced my thinking more than almost anyone else I’ve ever read.
When I heard he was writing a book, I was – well, I couldn’t even imagine a
book by Robin Hanson. When you read a thousand word blog post by Robin
Hanson, you have to sit down and think about it and wait for it to digest and
try not to lose too much sleep worrying about it. A whole book would be
something.

I have now read Age Of Em (website)and it is indeed something. Even the

cover gives you a weird sense of sublimity mixed with unease:
And in this case, judging a book by its cover is entirely appropriate.

II.

Age of Em is a work of futurism – an attempt to predict what life will be like a

few generations down the road. This is not a common genre – I can’t think of
another book of this depth and quality in the same niche. Predicting the future
is notoriously hard, and that seems to have so far discouraged potential
authors and readers alike.

Hanson is not discouraged. He writes that:

Some say that there is little point in trying to foresee the non-immediate
future. But in fact there have been many successful forecasts of this sort.
For example, we can reliably predict the future cost changes for devices
 such as batteries or solar cells, as such costs tend to follow a power law
of the cumulative device production (Nagy et al 2013). As another
example, recently a set of a thousand published technology forecasts
were collected and scored for accuracy, by comparing the forecasted
date of a technology milestone with its actual date. Forecasts were
significantly more accurate than random, even forecasts 10 to 25 years
ahead. This was true separately for forecasts made via many different
methods. On average, these milestones tended to be passed a few years
before their forecasted date, and sometimes forecasters were unaware
that they had already passed (Charbonneau et al, 2013).

A particularly accurate book in predicting the future was The Year

2000, a 1967 book by Herman Kahn and Anthony Wiener. It accurately
predicted population, was 80% correct for computer and
communication technology, and 50% correct for other technology
(Albright 2002). On even longer time scales, in 1900 the engineer John
Watkins did a good job of forecasting many basic features of society a
century later (Watkins 1900) […]

Some say no one could have anticipated the recent big changes
associated with the arrival and consequences of the World Wide Web.
Yet participants in the Xanadu hypertext project in which I was involved
from 1984 to 1993 correctly anticipated many key aspects of the Web
[…] Such examples show that one can use basic theory to anticipate key
elements of distant future environments, both physical and social, but
also that forecasters do not tend to be much rewarded for such efforts,
either culturally or materially. This helps to explain why there are
relatively few serious forecasting efforst. But make no mistake, it is
possible to forecast the future.

I think Hanson is overstating his case. All except Watkins were predicting only
10 – 30 years in the future, and most of their predictions were simple
numerical estimates, eg “the population will be one billion” rather than
complex pictures of society. The only project here even remotely comparable
in scope to Hanson’s is John Watkins’ 1900 article.

Watkins is classically given some credit for broadly correct ideas like “Cameras
that can send pictures across the world instantly” and “telephones that can call
anywhere in the world”, but of his 28 predictions, I judge only eight as even
somewhat correct. For example, I grant him a prediction that “the average
American will be two inches taller because of good medical care” even though
he then goes on to say in the same sentence that the average life expectancy
will be fifty and suburbanization will be so total that building city blocks will
be illegal (sorry, John, only in San Francisco). Most of the predictions seem
simply and completely false. Watkins believes all animals and insects will have
been eradicated. He believes there will be “peas as large as beets” and
“strawberries as large as apples” (these are two separate predictions; he is
weirdly obsessed with fruit and vegetable size). We will travel to England via
giant combination submarine/hovercrafts that will complete the trip in a
lightning-fast two days. There will be no surface-level transportation in cities
as all cars and walkways have moved underground. The letters C, X, and Q will
be removed from the language. Pneumatic tubes will deliver purchases from
stores. “A man or woman unable to walk ten miles at a stretch will be regarded
as a weakling.”

Where Watkins is right, he is generally listing a cool technology slightly

beyond what was available to his time and predicting we will have it.
Nevertheless, he is still mostly wrong. Yet this is Hanson’s example of accurate
futurology. And he is right to make it his example of accurate futurology,
because everything else is even worse.

Hanson has no illusions of certainty. He starts by saying that “conditional on

my key assumptions, I expect at least 30% of future situations to be usefully
informed by my analysis. Unconditionally, I expect at least 10%.” So he is not
explicitly overconfident. But in an implicit sense, it’s just weird to see the level
of detail he tries to predict – for example, he has two pages about what sort of
swear words the far future might use. And the book’s style serves to reinforce
its weirdness. The whole thing is written in a sort of professorial monotone
that changes little from loving descriptions of the sorts of pipes that will cool
future buildings (one of Hanson’s pet topics) to speculation on our
descendents’ romantic relationships (key quote: “The per minute subjective
value of an equal relation should not fall much below half of the per-minute
value of a relation with the best available open source lover”). And it leans
heavily on a favorite Hansonian literary device – the weirdly general
statement about something that sounds like it can’t possibly be measurable,
followed by a curt reference which if followed up absolutely confirms said
statement, followed by relentlessly ringing every corollary of it:

Today, mental fatigue reduces mental performance by about 0.1% per

minute. As by resting we can recover at a rate of 1% per minute, we need
roughly one-tenth of our workday to be break time, with the duration
between breaks being not much more than an hour or two (Trougakos
and Hideg 2009; Alvanchi et al 2012)…Thus many em tasks will be
designed to take about an hour, and many spurs are likely to last for
about this duration.

Or:

Today, painters, novelists, and directors who are experimental artists

tend to do their best work at roughly ages 46-52, 38-50, and 45-63
respectively, but those ages are 24-34, 29-40, and 27-43, respectively for
conceptual artists (Galenson 2006)…At any one time, the vast majority
of actual working ems [should be] near a peak productivity subjective
age.

Or:

Wars today, like cities, are distributed evenly across all possible war
sizes (Cederman 2003).

At some point I started to wonder whether Hanson was putting me on.

Everything is just played too straight. Hanson even addresses this:

To resist the temptation to construe the future too abstractly, I’ll try to
imagine a future full of complex detail. One indiciation that I’ve been
successful in all these efforts will be if my scenario description sounds
less like it came from a typical comic book or science fiction movie, and
more like it came form a typical history text or business casebook.

Well, count that project a success. The effect is strange to behold, and I’m not
sure it will usher in a new era of futurology. But Age of Em is great not just as
futurology, but as a bunch of different ideas and purposes all bound up in a
futurological package. For example:
● An introduction to some of the concepts that recur again and again
across Robin’s thought – for example, near vs. far mode, the farmer/
forager dichotomy, the inside and outside views, signaling. Most of us
learned these through years reading Hanson’s blog Overcoming Bias,
getting each chunk in turn, spending days or months thinking over each
piece. Getting it all out of a book you can read in a couple of days sounds
really hard – but by applying them to dozens of different subproblems
involved in future predictions, Hanson makes the reader more
comfortable with them, and I expect a lot of people will come out of the
book with an intuitive understanding of how they can be applied.
● A whirlwind tour through almost every science and a pretty good way to
learn about the present. If you didn’t already know that wars are
distributed evenly across all possible war sizes, well, read Age of Em and
you will know that and many similar things besides.
● A manifesto. Hanson often makes predictions by assuming that since
the future will be more competitive, future people are likely to converge
toward optimal institutions. This is a dangerous assumption for
futurology – it’s the same line of thinking that led Watkins to assume
English would abandon C, X, and Q as inefficient – but it’s a great
assumption if you want a chance to explain your ideas of optimal
institutions to thousands of people who think they’re reading fun
science-fiction. Thus, Robin spends several pages talking about how ems
may use prediction markets – an information aggregation technique he
invented – to make their decisions. In the real world, Hanson has been
trying to push these for decades, with varying levels of success. Here, in
the guise of a future society, he can expose a whole new group of people
to their advantages – as well as the advantages of something called
“combinatorial auctions” which I am still not smart enough to
understand.
● A mind-expanding drug. One of the great risks of futurology is to fail to
realize how different societies and institutions can be – the same way
uncreative costume designers make their aliens look like humans with
green skin. A lot of our thoughts about the future involve assumptions
we’ve never really examined critically, and Hanson dynamites those
assumptions. For page after page, he gives strong arguments why our
descendants might be poorer, shorter-lived, less likely to travel long
distances or into space, less progressive and open-minded. He predicts
 little noticeable technological change, millimeter-high beings living in
cities the size of bottles, careers lasting fractions of seconds, humans
being incomprehensibly wealthy patrons to their own robot overlords.
And all of it makes sense.

When I read Stross’ Accelerando, one of the parts that stuck with me the
longest were the Vile Offspring, weird posthuman entities that operated a
mostly-incomprehensible Economy 2.0 that humans just sort of hung out on
the edges of, goggle-eyed. It was a weird vision – but, for Stross, mostly a
black box. Age of Em opens the box and shows you every part of what our
weird incomprehensible posthuman descendents will be doing in loving detail.
Even what kind of swear words they’ll use.

III.

So, what is the Age of Em?

According to Hanson, AI is really hard and won’t be invented in time to shape

the posthuman future. But sometime a century or so from now, scanning
technology, neuroscience, and computer hardware will advance enough to
allow emulated humans, or “ems”. Take somebody’s brain, scan it on a
microscopic level, and use this information to simulate it neuron-by-neuron
on a computer. A good enough simulation will map inputs to outputs in
exactly the same way as the brain itself, effectively uploading the person to a
computer. Uploaded humans will be much the same as biological humans.
Given suitable sense-organs, effectuators, virtual avatars, or even robot
bodies, they can think, talk, work, play, love, and build in much the same way
as their “parent”. But ems have three very important differences from
biological humans.

First, they have no natural body. They will never need food or water; they will
never get sick or die. They can live entirely in virtual worlds in which any
luxuries they want – luxurious penthouses, gluttonous feasts, Ferraris – can
be conjured out of nothing. They will have some limited ability to transcend
space, talking to other ems’ virtual presences in much the same way two
people in different countries can talk on the Internet.
Second, they can run at different speeds. While a normal human brain is stuck
running at the speed that physics allow, a computer simulating a brain can
simulate it faster or slower depending on preference and hardware
availability. With enough parallel hardware, an em could experience a
subjective century in an objective week. Alternatively, if an em wanted to save
hardware it could process all its mental operations v e r y s l o w l y and
experience only a subjective week every objective century.

Third, just like other computer data, ems can be copied, cut, and pasted. One
uploaded copy of Robin Hanson, plus enough free hardware, can become a
thousand uploaded copies of Robin Hanson, each living in their own virtual
world and doing different things. The copies could even converse with each
other, check each other’s work, duel to the death, or – yes – have sex with each
other. And if having a thousand Robin Hansons proves too much, a quick ctrl-
x and you can delete any redundant ems to free up hard disk space for
Civilization 6 (coming out this October!)

Would this count as murder? Hanson predicts that ems will have unusually
blase attitudes toward copy-deletion. If there are a thousand other copies of
me in the world, then going to sleep and not waking up just feels like
delegating back to a different version of me. If you’re still not convinced,
Hanson’s essay Is Forgotten Party Death? is a typically disquieting analysis of
this proposition. But whether it’s true or not is almost irrelevant – at least
some ems will think this way, and they will be the ones who tend to volunteer
to be copied for short term tasks that require termination of the copy
afterwards. If you personally aren’t interested in participating, the economy
will leave you behind.

The ability to copy ems as many times as needed fundamentally changes the
economy and the idea of economic growth. Imagine Google has a thousand
positions for Ruby programmers. Instead of finding a thousand workers, they
can find one very smart and very hard-working person and copy her a
thousand times. With unlimited available labor supply, wages plummet to
subsistence levels. “Subsistence levels” for ems are the bare minimum it takes
to rent enough hardware from Amazon Cloud to run an em. The overwhelming
majority of ems will exist at such subsistence levels. On the one hand, if you’ve
got to exist on a subsistence level, a virtual world where all luxuries can be
conjured from thin air is a pretty good place to do it. On the other, such
starvation wages might leave ems with little or no leisure time.

Sort of. This gets weird. There’s an urban legend about a “test for
psychopaths”. You tell someone a story about a man who attends his mother’s
funeral. He met a really pretty girl there and fell in love, but neglected to get
her contact details before she disappeared. How might he meet her again? If
they answer “kill his father, she’ll probably come to that funeral too”, they’re a
psychopath – ordinary people would have a mental block that prevents them
from even considering such a drastic solution. And I bring this up because
after reading Age of Em I feel like Robin Hanson would be able to come up
with some super-solution even the psychopaths can’t think of, some plan that
gets the man a threesome with the girl and her even hotter twin sister at the
cost of wiping out an entire continent. Everything about labor relations in Age
of Em is like this.

For example, suppose you want to hire an em at subsistence wages, but you
want them 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Ems probably need to sleep – that’s
hard-coded into the brain, and the brain is being simulated at enough fidelity
to leave that in. But jobs with tasks that don’t last longer than a single day –
for example, a surgeon who performs five surgeries a day but has no day-to-
day carryover – can get around this restriction by letting an em have one full
night of sleep, then copying it. Paste the em at the beginning of the workday.
When it starts to get tired, let it finish the surgery it’s working on, then delete
it and paste the well-rested copy again to do the next surgery. Repeat forever
and the em never has to get any more sleep than that one night. You can use
the same trick to give an em a “vacation” – just give it one of them, then copy-
paste that brain-state forever.

Or suppose your ems want frequent vacations, but you want them working
every day. Let a “trunk” em vacation every day, then make a thousand copies
every morning, work all the copies for twenty-four hours, then delete them.
Every copy remembers a life spent in constant vacation, and cheered on by its
generally wonderful existence it will give a full day’s work. But from the
company’s perspective, 99.9% of the ems in its employment are working at
any given moment.
(another option: work the em at normal subjective speed, then speed it up a
thousand times to take its week-long vacation, then have it return to work
after only one-one-thousandth of a week has passed in real life)

Given that ems exist at subsistence wages, saving enough for retirement
sounds difficult, but this too has weird psychopathic solutions. Thousands of
copies of the same em can pool their retirement savings, then have all except a
randomly chosen one disappear at the moment of retirement, leaving that one
with an nest egg thousands of time what it could have accumulated by its own
efforts. Or an em can invest its paltry savings in some kind of low-risk low-
return investment and reduce its running speed so much that the return on its
investment is enough to pay for its decreased subsistence. For example, if it
costs $100 to rent enough computing power to run an em at normal speed for
one year, and you only have $10 in savings, you can rent 1/1000th of the
computer for $0.10, run at 1/1000th speed, invest your $10 in a bond that
pays 1% per year, and have enough to continue running indefinitely. The only
disadvantage is that you’ll only experience a subjective week every twenty
objective years. Also, since other entities are experiencing a subjective week
every second, and some of those entities have nukes, probably there will be
some kind of big war, someone will nuke Amazon’s data centers, and you’ll die
after a couple of your subjective minutes. But at least you got to retire!

If ems do find ways to get time off the clock, what will they do with it?
Probably they’ll have really weird social lives. After all, the existence of em
copies is mostly funded by companies, and there’s no reason for companies to
copy-paste any but the best workers in a given field. So despite the literally
trillions of ems likely to make up the world, most will be copies of a few
exceptionally brilliant and hard-working individuals with specific marketable
talents. Elon Musk might go out one day to the bar with his friend, who is also
Elon Musk, and order “the usual”. The bartender, who is Elon Musk himself,
would know exactly what drink he wants and have it readily available, as the
bar caters entirely to people who are Elon Musk. A few minutes later, a few
Chesley Sullenbergers might come in after a long day of piloting airplanes.
Each Sullenberger would have met hundreds of Musks before and have a good
idea about which Musk-Sullenberger conversation topics were most enjoyable,
but they might have to adjust for circumstances; maybe the Musks they met
before all branched off a most recent common ancestor in 2120, but these are
a different branch who were created in 2105 and remember Elon’s human
experiences but not a lot of the posthuman lives that shaped the 2120 Musks’
worldviews. One Sullenberger might tentatively complain that the solar power
grid has too many outages these days; a Musk might agree to take the problem
up with the Council of Musks, which is totally a thing that exist (Hanson calls
these sorts of groups “copy clans” and says they are “a natural candidate unit
for finance, reproduction, legal, liability, and political representation”).

Romance could be even weirder. Elon Musk #2633590 goes into a bar and
meets Taylor Swift #105051, who has a job singing in a nice local nightclub
and so is considered prestigious for a Taylor Swift. He looks up a record of
what happens when Elon Musks ask Taylor Swifts out and finds they are
receptive on 87.35% of occasions. The two start dating and are advised by the
Council of Musks and the Council of Swifts on the issues that are known to
come up in Musk-Swift relationships and the best solutions that have been
found to each. Unfortunately, Musk #2633590 is transferred to a job that
requires operating at 10,000x human speed, but Swift #105051’s nightclub
runs at 100x speed and refuses to subsidize her to run any faster; such a speed
difference makes normal interaction impossible. The story has a happy
ending; Swift #105051 allows Musk #2633590 to have her source code, and
whenever he is feeling lonely he spends a little extra money to instantiate a
high-speed copy of her to hang out with.

(needless to say, these examples are not exactly word-for-word taken from the
book, but they’re heavily based off of Hanson’s more abstract descriptions)

The em world is not just very weird, it’s also very very big. Hanson notes that
labor is a limiting factor in economic growth, yet even today the economy
doubles about once every fifteen years. Once you can produce skilled labor
through a simple copy-paste operation, especially labor you can run at a
thousand times human speed, the economy will go through the roof. He writes
that:

To generate an empirical estimate of em economy doubling times, we

can look at the timescales it takes for machine shops and factories today
to make a mass of machines of a quality, quantity, variety, and value
similar to that of machines that they themselves contain. Today that
timescale is roughly 1 to 3 months. Also, designs were sketched two to
three decades ago for systems that might self-replicate nearly
 completely in 6 to 12 months…these estimates suggest that today’s
manufacturing technology is capable of self-replicating on a scale of a
few weeks to a few months.

Hanson thinks that with further innovation, such times can be reduced so far
that “the economy might double every objective year, month, week, or day.” As
the economy doubles the labor force – ie the number of ems – may double
with it, until only a few years after the first ems the population numbers in the
trillions. But if the em population is doubling every day, there had better be
some pretty amazing construction efforts going on. The only thing that could
possibly work on that scale is prefabricated modular construction of giant
superdense cities, probably made mostly out of some sort of proto early-stage
computronium (plus cooling pipes). Ems would be reluctant to travel from one
such city to another – if they exist at a thousand times human speed, a trip on
a hypersonic airliner that could go from New York to Los Angeles in an hour
would still take forty subjective days. Who wants to be on an airplane for forty
days?

(long-distance trade is also rare, since if the economy doubles fast enough it
means that by the time goods reach their destination they could be almost
worthless)

The real winners of this ultra-fast-growing economy? Ordinary humans. While

humans will be way too slow and stupid to do anything useful, they will tend
to have non-subsistence amounts of money saved up from their previous
human lives, and also be running at speeds thousands of times slower than
most of the economy. When the economy doubles every day, so can your bank
account. Ordinary humans will become rarer, less relevant, but fantastically
rich – a sort of doddering Neanderthal aristocracy spending sums on a
cheeseburger that could support thousands of ems in luxury for entire
lifetimes. While there will no doubt be pressure to liquidate humans and take
their stuff, Hanson hopes that the spirit of rule of law – the same spirit that
protects rich minority groups today – will win out, with rich ems reluctant to
support property confiscation lest it extend to them also. Also, em retirees will
have incentives a lot like humans – they have saved up money and go really
slow – and like AARP members today they may be able to obtain
disproportionate political power which will then protect the interests of slow
rich people.
But we might not have much time to enjoy our sudden rise in wealth. Hanson
predicts that the Age of Em will last for subjective em millennia – ie about one
to two actual human years. After all, most of the interesting political and
economic activity is going on at em timescales. In the space of a few subjective
millennia, either someone will screw up and cause the apocalypse, somebody
will invent real superintelligent AI that causes a technological singularity, or
some other weird thing will happen taking civilization beyond the point that
even Robin dares to try to predict.

IV.

Hanson understands that people might not like the idea of a future full of
people working very long hours at subsistence wages forever (Zack Davis’
Contract-Drafting Em song is, as usual, relevant). But Hanson himself does
not view this future as dystopian. Despite our descendents’ by-the-numbers
poverty, they will avoid the miseries commonly associated with poverty today.
There will be no dirt or cockroaches in their sparkling virtual worlds, nobody
will go hungry, petty crime will be all-but-eliminated, and unemployment will
be low. Anybody who can score some leisure time will have a dizzying variety
of hyperadvanced entertainment available, and as for the people who can’t,
they’ll mostly have been copied from people who really like working hard and
don’t miss it anyway. As unhappy as we moderns may be contemplating em
society, ems themselves will not be unhappy! And as for us:

The analysis in this book suggests that lives in the next great era may be
as different from our lives as our lives are from farmers’ lives, or
farmers’ lives are from foragers’ lives. Many readers of this book, living
industrial era lives and sharing industrial era values, may be disturbed
to see a forecast of em era descendants with choices and lifestyles that
appear to reject many of the values that they hold dear. Such readers
may be tempted to fight to prevent the em future, perhaps preferring a
continuation of the industrial era. Such readers may be correct that
rejecting the em future holds them true to their core values. But I advise
such readers to first try hard to see this new era in some detail from the
point of view of its typical residents. See what they enjoy and what fills
them with pride, and listen to their criticisms of your era and values.
A short digression: there’s a certain strain of thought I find infuriating, which
is “My traditionalist ancestors would have disapproved of the changes typical
of my era, like racial equality, more open sexuality, and secularism. But I am
smarter than them, and so totally okay with how the future will likely have
values even more progressive and shocking than my own. Therefore I pre-
approve of any value changes that might happen in the future as definitely
good and better than our stupid hidebound present.”

I once read a science-fiction story that depicted a pretty average sci-fi future –
mighty starships, weird aliens, confederations of planets, post-scarcity
economy – with the sole unusual feature that rape was considered totally
legal, and opposition to such as bigoted and ignorant as opposition to
homosexuality is today. Everybody got really angry at the author and said it
was offensive for him to even speculate about that. Well, that’s the method by
which our cheerful acceptance of any possible future values is maintained:
restricting the set of “any possible future values” to “values slightly more
progressive than ours” and then angrily shouting down anyone who discusses
future values that actually sound bad. But of course the whole question of how
worried to be about future value drift only makes sense in the context of future
values that genuinely violate our current values. Approving of all future values
except ones that would be offensive to even speculate about is the same faux-
open-mindedness as tolerating anything except the outgroup.

Hanson deserves credit for positing a future whose values are likely to upset
even the sort of people who say they don’t get upset over future value drift. I’m
not sure whether or not he deserves credit for not being upset by it. Yes, it’s
got low-crime, ample food for everybody, and full employment. But so does
Brave New World. The whole point of dystopian fiction is pointing out that we
have complicated values beyond material security. Hanson is absolutely right
that our traditionalist ancestors would view our own era with as much horror
as some of us would view an em era. He’s even right that on utilitarian
grounds, it’s hard to argue with an em era where everyone is really happy
working eighteen hours a day for their entire lives because we selected for
people who feel that way. But at some point, can we make the Lovecraftian
argument of “I know my values are provincial and arbitrary, but they’re my
provincial arbitrary values and I will make any sacrifice of blood or tears
necessary to defend them, even unto the gates of Hell?”
This brings us to an even worse scenario.

There are a lot of similarities between Hanson’s futurology and (my possibly
erroneous interpretation of) the futurology of Nick Land. I see Land as saying,
like Hanson, that the future will be one of quickly accelerating economic
activity that comes to dominate a bigger and bigger portion of our
descendents’ lives. But whereas Hanson’s framing focuses on the participants
in such economic activity, playing up their resemblances with modern
humans, Land takes a bigger picture. He talks about the economy itself
acquiring a sort of self-awareness or agency, so that the destiny of civilization
is consumed by the imperative of economic growth.

Imagine a company that manufactures batteries for electric cars. The inventor
of the batteries might be a scientist who really believes in the power of
technology to improve the human race. The workers who help build the
batteries might just be trying to earn money to support their families. The
CEO might be running the business because he wants to buy a really big yacht.
And the whole thing is there to eventually, somewhere down the line, let a
suburban mom buy a car to take her kid to soccer practice. Like most
companies the battery-making company is primarily a profit-making
operation, but the profit-making-ness draws on a lot of not-purely-economic
actors and their not-purely-economic subgoals.

Now imagine the company fires all its employees and replaces them with
robots. It fires the inventor and replaces him with a genetic algorithm that
optimizes battery design. It fires the CEO and replaces him with a
superintelligent business-running algorithm. All of these are good decisions,
from a profitability perspective. We can absolutely imagine a profit-driven
shareholder-value-maximizing company doing all these things. But it reduces
the company’s non-masturbatory participation in an economy that points
outside itself, limits it to just a tenuous connection with soccer moms and
maybe some shareholders who want yachts of their own.

Now take it further. Imagine there are no human shareholders who want
yachts, just banks who lend the company money in order to increase their own
value. And imagine there are no soccer moms anymore; the company makes
batteries for the trucks that ship raw materials from place to place. Every non-
economic goal has been stripped away from the company; it’s just an
appendage of Global Development.

Now take it even further, and imagine this is what’s happened everywhere.
There are no humans left; it isn’t economically efficient to continue having
humans. Algorithm-run banks lend money to algorithm-run companies that
produce goods for other algorithm-run companies and so on ad infinitum.
Such a masturbatory economy would have all the signs of economic growth we
have today. It could build itself new mines to create raw materials, construct
new roads and railways to transport them, build huge factories to manufacture
them into robots, then sell the robots to whatever companies need more robot
workers. It might even eventually invent space travel to reach new worlds full
of raw materials. Maybe it would develop powerful militaries to conquer alien
worlds and steal their technological secrets that could increase efficiency. It
would be vast, incredibly efficient, and utterly pointless. The real-life
incarnation of those strategy games where you mine Resources to build new
Weapons to conquer new Territories from which you mine more Resources
and so on forever.

But this seems to me the natural end of the economic system. Right now it
needs humans only as laborers, investors, and consumers. But robot laborers
are potentially more efficient, companies based around algorithmic trading
are already pushing out human investors, and most consumers already aren’t
individuals – they’re companies and governments and organizations. At each
step you can gain efficiency by eliminating humans, until finally humans
aren’t involved anywhere.

True to form, Land doesn’t see this as a dystopia – I think he conflates

“maximally efficient economy” with “God”, which is a hell of a thing to conflate
– but I do. And I think it provides an important new lens with which to look at
the Age of Em.

The Age of Em is an economy in the early stages of such a transformation.

Instead of being able to replace everything with literal robots, it replaces them
with humans who have had some aspects of their humanity stripped away.
Biological bodies. The desire and ability to have children normally. Robin
doesn’t think people will lose all leisure time and non-work-related desires,
but he doesn’t seem too sure about this and it doesn’t seem to bother him
much if they do.

I envision a spectrum between the current world of humans and Nick Land’s
Ascended Economy. Somewhere on the spectrum we have ems who get leisure
time. A little further on the spectrum we have ems who don’t get leisure time.

But we can go further. Hanson imagines that we can “tweak” em minds. We

may not understand the brain enough to create totally new intelligences from
the ground up, but by his Age of Em we should understand it well enough to
make a few minor hacks, the same way even somebody who doesn’t know
HTML or CSS can usually figure out how to change the background color of a
webpage with enough prodding. Many of these mind tweaks will be the
equivalent of psychiatric drugs – some might even be computer simulations of
what we observe to happen when we give psychiatric drugs to a biological
brain. But these tweaks will necessarily be much stronger and more versatile,
since we no longer care about bodily side effects (ems don’t have bodies) and
we can apply it to only a single small region of the brain and avoid actions
anywhere else. You could also very quickly advance brain science – the main
limits today are practical (it’s really hard to open up somebody’s brain and do
stuff to it without killing them) and ethical (the government might have some
words with you if you tried). An Age of Em would remove both obstacles, and
give you the added bonus of being able to make thousands of copies of your
test subjects for randomized controlled trials, reloading any from a saved copy
if they died. Hanson envisions that:

As the em world is a very competitive world where sex is not needed for
reproduction, and as sex can be time and attention-consuming, ems may
try to suppress sexuality, via mind tweaks that produce effects
analogous to castration. Such effects might be temporary, perhaps with
a consciously controllable on-off switch…it is possible that em brain
tweaks could be found to greatly reduce natural human desires for sex
and related romantic and intimate pair bonding without reducing em
productivity. It is also possible that many of the most productive ems
would accept such tweaks.

Possible? I can do that right now with a high enough dose of Paxil, and I don’t
even have to upload your brain to a computer first. Fun stories about Musk
#2633590 and Swift #105051 aside, I expect this would happen about ten
minutes after the advent of the Age of Em, and we would have taken another
step down the path to the Ascended Economy.

There are dozens of other such tweaks I can think of, but let me focus on two.

First, stimulants have a very powerful ability to focus the brain on the task at
hand, as anybody who’s taken Adderall or modafinil can attest. Their main
drawbacks are addictiveness and health concerns, but in a world where such
pills can be applied as mental tweaks, where minds have no bodies, and where
any mind that gets too screwed up can be reloaded from a backup copy, these
are barely concerns at all. Many of the purely mental side effects of stimulants
come from their effects in parts of the brain not vital to the stimulant effect. If
we can selectively apply Adderall to certain brain centers but not others, then
unapply it at will, then from employers’ point of view there’s no reason not to
have all workers dosed with superior year 2100 versions of Adderall at all
times. I worry that not only will workers not have any leisure time, but they’ll
be neurologically incapable of having their minds drift off while on the job.
Davis’ contract-drafting em who starts wondering about philosophy on the job
wouldn’t get terminated. He would just have his simulated-Adderall dose
increased.

Second, Robin managed to write an entire book about emulated minds

without using the word “wireheading”. This is another thing we can do right
now, with today’s technology – but once it’s a line of code and not a costly
brain surgery, it should become nigh-universal. Give ems the control switches
to their own reward centers and all questions about leisure time become
irrelevant. Give bosses the control switches to their employees’ reward centers,
and the situation changes markedly. Hanson says that there probably won’t be
too much slavery in the em world, because it will likely have strong rule of law,
because slaves aren’t as productive as free workers, and there’s little advantage
to enslaving someone when you could just pay them subsistence wages
anyway. But slavery isn’t nearly as abject and inferior a condition as the one
where somebody else has the control switch to your reward center. Combine
that with the stimulant use mentioned above, and you can have people who
will never have nor want to have any thought about anything other than
working on the precise task at which they are supposed to be working at any
given time.
This is something I worry about even in the context of normal biological
humans. But Hanson already believes em worlds will have few regulations and
be able to ignore the moral horror of 99% of the population by copying and
using the 1% who are okay with something. Combine this with a situation
where brains are easily accessible and tweakable, and this sort of scenario
becomes horribly likely.

I see almost no interesting difference between an em world with full use of

these tweaks and an Ascended Economy world. Yes, there are things that look
vaguely human in outline laboring in the one and not the other, but it’s not
like there will be different thought processes or different results. I’m not even
sure what it would mean for the ems to be conscious in a world like this –
they’re not doing anything interesting with the consciousness. The best we
could say about this is that if the wireheading is used liberally it’s a lite version
of the world where everything gets converted to hedonium.

V.

In a book full of weird ideas, there is only one idea rejected as too weird. And
in a book written in a professorial monotone, there’s only one point at which
Hanson expresses anything like emotion:

Some people foresee a rapid local “intelligence explosion” happening

soon after a smart AI system can usefully modify its local architecture
(Chalmers 2010; Hanson and Yudkowsky 2013; Yudkowsky 2013;
Bostrom 2014)…Honestly to me this local intelligence explosion
scenario looks suspiciously like a super-villain comic book plot. A flash
of insight by a lone genius lets him create a genius AI. Hidden in its
super-villain research lab lair, this guines villain AI works out
unprecedented revolutions in AI design, turns itself into a super-genius,
which then invents super-weapons and takes over the world. Bwa ha ha.

For someone who just got done talking about the sex lives of uploaded
computers in millimeter-tall robot bodies running at 1000x human speed,
Robin is sure quick to use the absurdity heuristic to straw-man intelligence
explosion scenarios as “comic book plots”. Take away his weird authorial tic of
using the words “genius” and “supervillain”, this scenario reduces to “Some
group, perhaps Google, perhaps a university, invent an artificial intelligence
smart enough to edit its own source code; exponentially growing intelligence
without obvious bound follows shortly thereafter”. Yes, it’s weird to think that
there may be a sudden quantum leap in intelligence like this, but no weirder
than to think most of civilization will transition from human to em in the
space of a year or two. I’m a little bit offended that this is the only idea given
this level of dismissive treatment. Since I do have immense respect for Robin,
I hope my offense doesn’t color the following thoughts too much.

Hanson’s arguments against AI seem somewhat motivated. He admits that AI

researchers generally estimate less than 50 years before we get human-level
artificial intelligence, a span shorter than his estimate of a century until we
can upload ems. He even admits that no AI researcher thinks ems are a
plausible route to AI. But he dismisses this by saying when he asks AI experts
informally, they say that in their own field, they have only noticed about 5-10%
of the progress they expect would be needed to reach human intelligence over
the past twenty years. He then multiplies out to say that it will probably take at
least 400 years to reach human-level AI. I have two complaints about this
estimate.

First, he is explicitly ignoring published papers surveying hundreds of

researchers using validated techniques, in favor of what he describes as
“meeting experienced AI experts informally”. But even though he feels
comfortable rejecting vast surveys of AI experts as potentially biased, as best I
can tell he does not ask a single neuroscientist to estimate the date at which
brain scanning and simulation might be available. He just says that “it seems
plausible that sufficient progress will be made in roughly a century or so”,
citing a few hopeful articles by very enthusiastic futurists who are not
neuroscientists or scanning professionals themselves and have not talked to
any. This seems to me to be an extreme example of isolated demands for rigor.
No matter how many AI scientists think AI is soon, Hanson will cherry-pick
the surveying procedures and results that make it look far. But if a few
futurists think brain emulation is possible, then no matter what anybody else
thinks that’s good enough for him.

Second, one would expect that even if there were only 5-10% progress over the
last twenty years, then there would be faster progress in the future, since the
future will have a bigger economy, better supporting technology, and more
resources invested in AI research. Robin answers this objection by saying that
“increases in research funding usually give much less than proportionate
increases in research progress” and cites Alston et al 2011. I looked up Alston
et al 2011, and it is a paper relating crop productivity to government funding
of agriculture research. There was no attempt to relate its findings to any field
other than agriculture, nor to any type of funding other than government. But
studies show that while public research funding often does have minimal
effects, the effect of private research funding is usually much larger. A single
sentence citing a study in crop productivity to apply to artificial intelligence
while ignoring much more relevant results that contradict it seems like a really
weak argument for a statement as potentially surprising as “amount of
research does not affect technological progress”.

I realize that Hanson has done a lot more work on this topic and he couldn’t fit
all of it in this book. I disagree with his other work too, and I’ve said so
elsewhere. For now I just want to say that the arguments in this book seem
weak to me.

I also want to mention what seems to me a very Hansonian counterargument

to the ems-come-first scenario: we have always developed de novo technology
before understanding the relevant biology. We built automobiles by figuring
out the physics of combustion engines, not by studying human muscles and
creating mechanical imitations of myosin and actin. Although the Wright
brothers were inspired by birds, their first plane was not an ornithopter. Our
power plants use coal and uranium instead of the Krebs Cycle. Biology is
really hard. Even slavishly copying biology is really hard. I don’t think
Hanson and the futurists he cites understand the scale of the problem they’ve
set themselves.

Current cutting-edge brain emulation projects have found their work much
harder than expected. Simulating a nematode is pretty much the rock-bottom
easiest thing in this category, since they are tiny primitive worms with only a
few neurons; the history of the field is a litany of failures, with current leader
OpenWorm “reluctant to make bold claims about its current resemblance to
biological behavior”. A more ambitious $1.3 billion attempt to simulate a tiny
portion of a rat brain has gone down in history as a legendary failure (politics
were involved, but I expect they would be involved in a plan to upload a
human too). And these are just attempts to get something that behaves
vaguely like a nematode or rat. Actually uploading a human, keeping their
memory and personality intact, and not having them go insane afterwards
boggles the mind. We’re still not sure how much small molecules matter to
brain function, how much glial cells matter to brain function, how many
things in the brain are or aren’t local. AI researchers are making programs
that can defeat chess grandmasters; upload researchers are still struggling to
make a worm that will wriggle. The right analogy for modern attempts to
upload human brains isn’t modern attempts at designing AI. It’s an attempt at
designing AI by someone who doesn’t even know how to plug in a computer.

VI.

I guess what really bothers me about Hanson’s pooh-poohing of AI is him

calling it “a comic book plot”. To me, it’s Hanson’s scenario that seems
science-fiction-ish.

I say this not as a generic insult but as a pointer at a specific category of errors.
In Star Wars, the Rebellion had all of these beautiful hyperspace-capable
starfighters that could shoot laser beams and explore galaxies – and they still
had human pilots. 1977 thought the pangalactic future would still be using
people to pilot its military aircraft; in reality, even 2016 is moving away from
this.

Science fiction books have to tell interesting stories, and interesting stories are
about humans or human-like entities. We can enjoy stories about aliens or
robots as long as those aliens and robots are still approximately human-sized,
human-shaped, human-intelligence, and doing human-type things. A Star
Wars in which all of the X-Wings were combat drones wouldn’t have done
anything for us. So when I accuse something of being science-fiction-ish, I
mean bending over backwards – and ignoring the evidence – in order to give
basically human-shaped beings a central role.

This is my critique of Robin. As weird as the Age of Em is, it makes sure never
to be weird in ways that warp the fundamental humanity of its participants.
Ems might be copied and pasted like so many .JPGs, but they still fall in love,
form clans, and go on vacations.

In contrast, I expect that we’ll get some kind of AI that will be totally inhuman
and much harder to write sympathetic stories about. If we get ems after all, I
expect them to be lobotomized and drugged until they become effectively
inhuman, cogs in the Ascended Economy that would no more fall in love than
an automobile would eat hay and whinny. Robin’s interest in keeping his
protagonists relatable makes his book fascinating, engaging, and probably
wrong.

I almost said “and probably less horrible than we should actually expect”, but
I’m not sure that’s true. With a certain amount of horror-suppressing, the
Ascended Economy can be written off as morally neutral – either having no
conscious thought, or stably wireheaded. All of Robin’s points about how
normal non-uploaded humans should be able to survive an Ascended
Economy at least for a while seem accurate. So morally valuable actors might
continue to exist in weird Amish-style enclaves, living a post-scarcity lifestyle
off the proceeds of their investments, while all the while the Ascended
Economy buzzes around them, doing weird inhuman things that encroach
upon them not at all. This seems slightly worse than a Friendly AI scenario,
but much better than we have any right to expect of the future.

I highly recommend Age of Em as a fantastically fun read and a great

introduction to these concepts. It’s engaging, readable, and weird. I just don’t
know if it’s weird enough.

Ascended Economy?

I.

My review of Age of Em mentioned the idea of an “ascended economy”, one

where economic activity drifted further and further from human control until
finally there was no relation at all. Many people rightly questioned that idea,
so let me try to expand on it further. What I said there, slightly edited for
clarity:

Imagine a company that manufactures batteries for electric cars. The

inventor of the batteries might be a scientist who really believes in the
power of technology to improve the human race. The workers who help
build the batteries might just be trying to earn money to support their
families. The CEO might be running the business because he wants to
buy a really big yacht. The shareholders might be holding the stock to
help save for a comfortable retirement. And the whole thing is there to
eventually, somewhere down the line, let a suburban mom buy a car to
take her kid to soccer practice. Like most companies the battery-making
company is primarily a profit-making operation, but the profit-making-
ness draws on a lot of not-purely-economic actors and their not-purely-
economic subgoals.

Now imagine the company fires the inventor and replaces him with a
genetic algorithm that optimizes battery design. It fires all its employees
and replaces them with robots. It fires the CEO and replaces him with a
superintelligent business-running algorithm. All of these are good
decisions, from a profitability perspective. We can absolutely imagine a
profit-driven shareholder-value-maximizing company doing all these
things. But it reduces the company’s non-masturbatory participation in
an economy that points outside itself, limits it to just a tenuous
connection with soccer moms and maybe some shareholders who want
yachts of their own.

Now take it further. Imagine that instead of being owned by humans

directly, it’s owned by an algorithm-controlled venture capital fund. And
imagine there are no soccer moms anymore; the company makes
batteries for the trucks that ship raw materials from place to place.
Every non-economic goal has been stripped away from the company; it’s
just an appendage of Global Development.

Now take it even further, and imagine this is what’s happened

everywhere. Algorithm-run banks lend money to algorithm-run
companies that produce goods for other algorithm-run companies and
so on ad infinitum. Such a masturbatory economy would have all the
signs of economic growth we have today. It could build itself new mines
to create raw materials, construct new roads and railways to transport
them, build huge factories to manufacture them into robots, then sell
the robots to whatever companies need more robot workers. It might
even eventually invent space travel to reach new worlds full of raw
materials. Maybe it would develop powerful militaries to conquer alien
worlds and steal their technological secrets that could increase
efficiency. It would be vast, incredibly efficient, and utterly pointless.
 The real-life incarnation of those strategy games where you mine
Resources to build new Weapons to conquer new Territories from which
you mine more Resources and so on forever.

This is obviously weird and I probably went too far, but let me try to explain
my reasoning.

The part about replacing workers with robots isn’t too weird; lots of industries
have already done that. There’s a whole big debate over to what degree that
will intensify, and whether unemployed humans will find jobs somewhere else,
or whether there will only be jobs for creative people with a certain education
level or IQ. This part is well-discussed and I don’t have much to add.

But lately there’s also been discussion of automating corporations themselves.

I don’t know much about Ethereum (and I probably shouldn’t guess since I
think the inventor reads this blog and could call me on it) but as I understand
it they aim to replace corporate governance with algorithms. For example, the
DAO is a leaderless investment fund that allocates money according to
member votes. Right now this isn’t superinteresting; algorithms can’t make
too many difficult business decisions so it’s limited to corporations that just do
a couple of primitive actions (and why would anyone want a democratic
venture fund?). But once we get closer to true AI, they might be able to make
the sort of business decisions that a CEO does today. The end goal is
intelligent corporations controlled by nobody but themselves.

This very blog has an advertisement for a group trying to make investment
decisions based on machine learning. If they succeed, how long is it before
some programmer combines a successful machine investor with a DAO-style
investment fund, and creates an entity that takes humans out of the loop
completely? You send it your money, a couple years later it gives you back
hopefully more money, with no humans involved at any point. Such robo-
investors might eventually become more efficient than Wall Street – after all,
hedge fund managers get super rich by skimming money off the top, and any
entity that doesn’t do that would have an advantage above and beyond its
investment acumen.

If capital investment gets automated, corporate governance gets automated,

and labor gets automated, we might end up with the creepy prospect of
ascended corporations – robot companies with robot workers owned by robot
capitalists. Humans could become irrelevant to most economic activity. Run
such an economy for a few hundred years and what do you get?

II.

But in the end isn’t all this about humans? Humans as the investors giving
their money to the robo-venture-capitalists, then reaping the gains of their
success? And humans as the end consumers whom everyone is eventually
trying to please?

It’s possible to imagine accidentally forming stable economic loops that don’t
involve humans. Imagine a mining-robot company that took one input (steel)
and produced one output (mining-robots), which it would sell either for
money or for steel below a certain price. And imagine a steel-mining company
that took one input (mining-robots) and produced one output (steel) which it
would sell for either money or for mining-robots below a certain price. The
two companies could get into a stable loop and end up tiling the universe with
steel and mining-robots without caring whether anybody else wanted either.
Obviously the real economy is a zillion times more complex than that, and I’m
nowhere near the level of understanding I would need to say if there’s any
chance that an entire self-sustaining economy worth of things could produce a
loop like that. But I guess you only need one.

I think we can get around this in a causal-historical perspective, where we

start with only humans and no corporations. The first corporations that come
into existence have to be those that want to sell goods to humans. The next
level of corporations can be those that sell goods to corporations that sell to
humans. And so on. So unless a stable loop forms by accident, all corporations
should exist to serve humans. A sufficiently rich human could finance the
creation of a stable loop if they wanted to, but why would they want to? Since
corporations exist only to satisfy human demand on some level or another,
and there’s no demand for stable loops, corporations wouldn’t finance the
development of stable loops, except by accident.

(for an interesting accidental stable loop, check out this article on the time two
bidding algorithms accidentally raised the price of a book on fly genetics to
more than $20 million)
Likewise, I think humans should always be the stockholders of last resort.
Since humans will have to invest in the first corporation, even if that
corporation invests in other corporations which invest in other corporations in
turn, eventually it all bottoms down in humans (is this right?)

The only way I can see humans being eliminated from the picture is, again, by
accident. If there are a hundred layers between some raw material corporation
and humans, then if each layer is slightly skew to what the layer below it
wants, the hundredth layer could be really really skew. Theoretically all our
companies today are grounded in serving the needs of humans, but people are
still thinking of spending millions of dollars to build floating platforms exactly
halfway between New York and London in order to exploit light-speed delays
to arbitrage financial markets better, and I’m not sure which human’s needs
that serves exactly. I don’t know if there are bounds to how much of an
economy can be that kind of thing.

Finally, humans might deliberately create small nonhuman entities with base
level “preferences”. For example, a wealthy philanthropist might create an
ascended charitable organization which supports mathematical research. Now
99.9% of base-level preferences guiding the economy would be human
preferences, and 0.1% might be a hard-coded preference for mathematics
research. But since non-human agents at the base of the economy would only
be as powerful as the proportion of the money supply they hold, most of the
economy would probably still overwhelmingly be geared towards humans
unless something went wrong.

Since the economy could grow much faster than human populations, the
economy-to-supposed-consumer ratio might become so high that things start
becoming ridiculous. If the economy became a light-speed shockwave of
economium (a form of matter that maximizes shareholder return, by analogy
to computronium and hedonium) spreading across the galaxy, how does all
that productive power end up serving the same few billion humans we have
now? It would probably be really wasteful, the cosmic equivalent of those
people who specialize in getting water from specific glaciers on demand for the
super-rich because the super-rich can’t think of anything better to do with
their money. Except now the glaciers are on Pluto.
III.

Glacier water from Pluto sounds pretty good. And we can hope that things will
get so post-scarcity that governments and private charities give each citizen a
few shares in the Ascended Economy to share the gains with non-investors.
This would at least temporarily be a really good outcome.

But in the long term it reduces the political problem of regulating corporations
to the scientific problem of Friendly AI, which is really bad.

Even today, a lot of corporations do things that effectively maximize

shareholder value but which we consider socially irresponsible.
Environmental devastation, slave labor, regulatory capture, funding biased
science, lawfare against critics – the list goes on and on. They have a simple
goal – make money – whereas what we really want them to do is much more
complicated and harder to measure – make money without engaging in
unethical behavior or creating externalities. We try to use regulatory
injunctions, and it sort of helps, but because those go against a corporation’s
natural goals they try their best to find loopholes and usually succeed – or just
take over the regulators trying to control them.

This is bad enough with bricks-and-mortar companies run by normal-

intelligence humans. But it would probably be much worse with ascended
corporations. They would have no ethical qualms we didn’t program into them
– and again, programming ethics into them would be the Friendly AI problem,
which is really hard. And they would be near-impossible to regulate; most
existing frameworks for such companies are built on crypto-currency and exist
on the cloud in a way that transcends national borders.

(A quick and very simple example of an un-regulate-able ascended

corporation – I don’t think it would be too hard to set up an automated
version of Uber. I mean, the core Uber app is already an automated version of
Uber, it just has company offices and CEOs and executives and so on doing
public relations and marketing and stuff. But if the government ever banned
Uber the company, could somebody just code another ride-sharing app that
dealt securely in Bitcoins? And then have it skim a little bit off the top, which
it offered as a bounty to anybody who gave it the processing power it would
need to run? And maybe sent a little profit to the programmer who wrote the
thing? Sure, the government could arrest the programmer, but short of
arresting every driver and passenger there would be no way to destroy the
company itself.)

The more ascended corporations there are trying to maximize shareholder

value, the more chance there is some will cause negative externalities. But
there’s a limited amount we would be able to do about them. This is true today
too, but at least today we maintain the illusion that if we just elected Bernie
Sanders we could reverse the ravages of capitalism and get an economy that
cares about the environment and the family and the common man. An
Ascended Economy would destroy that illusion.

How bad would it get? Once ascended corporations reach human or

superhuman level intelligences, we run into the same AI goal-alignment
problems as anywhere else. Would an ascended corporation pave over the
Amazon to make a buck? Of course it would; even human corporations today
do that, and an ascended corporation that didn’t have all human ethics
programmed in might not even get that it was wrong. What if we programmed
the corporation to follow local regulations, and Brazil banned paving over the
Amazon? This is an example of trying to control AIs through goals plus
injunctions – a tactic Bostrom finds very dubious. It’s essentially challenging a
superintelligence to a battle of wits – “here’s something you want, and here
are some rules telling you that you can’t get it, can you find a loophole in the
rules?” If the superintelligence is super enough, the answer will always be yes.

From there we go into the really gnarly parts of AI goal alignment theory.
Would an ascended corporation destroy South America entirely to make a
buck? Depending on how it understood its imperative to maximize
shareholder value, it might. Yes, this would probably kill many of its
shareholders, but its goal is to “maximize shareholder value”, not to keep its
shareholders alive to enjoy that value. It might even be willing to destroy
humanity itself if other parts of the Ascended Economy would pick up the
slack as investors.

(And then there are the weirder problems, like ascended corporations hacking
into the stock market and wireheading themselves. When this happens, I want
credit for being the first person to predict it.)
Maybe the most hopeful scenario is that once ascended corporations achieved
human-level intelligence they might do something game-theoretic and set up a
rule-of-law among themselves in order to protect economic growth. I wouldn’t
want to begin to speculate on that, but maybe it would involve not killing all
humans? Or maybe it would just involve taking over the stock market,
formally setting the share price of every company to infinity, and then never
doing anything again? I don’t know, and I expect it would get pretty weird.

IV.

I don’t think the future will be like this. This is nowhere near weird enough to
be the real future. I think superintelligence is probably too unstable. It will
explode while still in the lab and create some kind of technological singularity
before people have a chance to produce an entire economy around it.

But given Robin’s assumptions in Age of Em – hard AI, no near-term

intelligence explosion, fast economic growth – but ditching his idea of human-
like em minds as important components of the labor force – I think something
like this would be where we would end up. It probably wouldn’t be so bad for
the first couple of years. But eventually ascended corporations would start
reaching the point where we might as well think of them as superintelligent
AIs. Maybe this world would be friendlier towards AI goal alignment research
than Yudkowsky and Bostrom’s scenarios, since at least here we could see it
coming, there was no instant explosion, and a lot of different entities approach
superintelligence around the same time. But given that the smartest things
around are encrypted, uncontrollable, unregulated entities that don’t have
humans’ best interests at heart, I’m not sure they would be in much shape to
handle the transition.

G.K. Chesterton On AI Risk

[An SSC reader working at an Oxford library stumbled across a previously undiscovered manuscript of G.K. Chesterton’s,
expressing his thoughts on AI, x-risk, and superintelligence. She was kind enough to send me a copy, which I have faithfully
transcribed]
The most outlandish thing about the modern scientific adventure stories is
that they believe themselves outlandish. Mr. H. G. Wells is considered
shocking for writing of inventors who travel thousands of years into the future,
but the meanest church building in England has done the same. When Jules
Verne set out to ‘journey to the center of the earth’ and ‘from the earth to the
moon’, he seemed but a pale reflection of Dante, who took both voyages in
succession before piercing the Empyrean itself. Ezekiel saw wheels of spinning
flame and reported them quite soberly; our modern writers collapse in rapture
before the wheels of a motorcar.

Yet if the authors disappoint, it is the reviewers who dumbfound. For no

sooner does a writer fancy himself a Poe or a Dunsany for dreaming of a better
sewing machine, but there comes a critic to call him overly fanciful, to accuse
him of venturing outside science into madness. It is not enough to lower one’s
sights from Paradise to a motorcar; one must avoid making the motorcar too
bright or fast, lest it retain a hint of Paradise.

The followers of Mr. Samuel Butler speak of thinking-machines that grow

grander and grander until – quite against the wishes of their engineers – they
become as tyrannical angels, firmly supplanting the poor human race. This
theory is neither exciting nor original; there have been tyrannical angels since
the days of Noah, and our tools have been rebelling against us since the first
peasant stepped on a rake. Nor have I any doubt that what Butler says will
come to pass. If every generation needs its tyrant-angels, then ours has been
so inoculated against the original that if Lucifer and all his hosts were to
descend upon Smithfield Market to demand that the English people bend the
knee, we should politely ignore them, being far too modern to have time for
such things. Butler’s thinking-machines are the only tyrant-angels we will
accept; fate, ever accommodating, will surely give them to us.

Yet no sooner does Mr. Butler publish his speculations then a veritable army
of hard-headed critics step forth to say he has gone too far. Mr. Maciej
Ceglowski, the Polish bookmark magnate, calls Butler’s theory “the idea that
eats smart people” (though he does not tell us whether he considers himself
digested or merely has a dim view of his own intellect). He says that “there is
something unpleasant about AI alarmism as a cultural phenomenon that
should make us hesitate to take it seriously.”

When Jeremiah prophecied Jerusalem’s fall, his fellow Hebrews no doubt

considered his alarmism an unpleasant cultural phenomenon. And St. Paul
was not driven from shore to shore because his message was pleasant to the
bookmark magnates of his day. Fortified by such examples, we may wonder if
this is a reason to take people more seriously rather than less. So let us look
more closely at the contents of Mr. Ceglowski’s dismissal.

He writes that there are two perspectives to be taken on any great matter, the
inside or the outside view. The inside view is when we think about it directly,
taking it on its own terms. And the outside view is when we treat it as part of a
phenomenon, asking what it resembles and whether things like it have been
true in the past. And, he states, Butler’s all-powerful thinking machines
resemble nothing so much as “a genie from folklore”.

I have no objection to this logic, besides that it is not carried it to its

conclusion. The idea of thinking machines resembles nothing so much as a
fairy tale from the Arabian Nights, and such fairy tales inevitably come true.
Sinbad’s voyages have been outstripped by Magellan’s, Abdullah’s underwater
breathing is matched by Mr. Fleuss’ SCUBA, and the Wright brothers’ Flyer
goes higher than any Indian carpet. That there are as yet no genies seems to
me less an inevitable law than a discredit to the industry of our inventors.
There is a certain strain of thinker who insists on being more naturalist than
Nature. They will say with great certainty that since Thor does not exist, Mr.
Tesla must not exist either, and that the stories of Asclepius disprove Pasteur.
This is quite backwards: it is reasonable to argue that the Wright Brothers will
never fly because Da Vinci couldn’t; it is madness to say they will never fly
because Daedalus could. As well demand that we must deny Queen Victoria
lest we accept Queen Mab, or doubt Jack London lest we admit Jack Frost.
Nature has never been especially interested in looking naturalistic, and it
ignores these people entirely and does exactly what it wants.

Now, scarce has one posited the possibility of a genie, before the question
must be asked whether it is good or evil, a pious genie or an unrighteous djinn.
Our interlocutor says that it shall be good – or at least not monomaniacal in
its wickedness. For, he tells us, “complex minds are likely to have complex
motivations; that may be part of what it even means to be intelligent”. A
dullard may limit his focus to paper clips, but the mind of a genius should
have to plumb the width and breadth of Heaven before satiating itself.

But I myself am a dullard, and I find paper clips strangely uninteresting. And
the dullest man in a country town can milk a cow, pray a rosary, sing a tune,
and court a girl all in the same morning. Ask him what is good in life, and he
will talk your ear off: sporting, going for a walk in the woods, having a
prosperous harvest, playing with a newborn kitten. It is only the genius who
limits himself to a single mania. Alexander spent his life conquering, and if he
had lived to a hundred twenty, he would have been conquering still. Samuel
Johnson would not stop composing verse even on his deathbed. Even a village
idiot can fall in love; Newton never did. That greatest of scientists was married
only to his work, first the calculus and later the Mint. And if one prodigy can
spend his span smithing guineas, who is to say that another might not smith
paper clips with equal fervor?

Perhaps sensing that his arguments are weak, Ceglowski moves from the
difficult task of critiquing Butler’s tyrant-angels to the much more amenable
one of critiquing those who believe in them. He says that they are
megalomanical sociopaths who use their belief in thinking machines as an
excuse to avoid the real work of improving the world.
He says (presumably as a parable, whose point I have entirely missed) that he
lives in a valley of silicon, which I picture as being surrounded by great peaks
of glass. And in that valley, there are many fantastically wealthy lords. Each
lord, upon looking through the glass peaks and seeing the world outside with
all its misery, decides humans are less interesting than machines, and fritters
his fortune upon spreading Butlerist doctrine. He is somewhat unclear on why
the lords in the parable do this, save that they are a “predominantly male gang
of kids, mostly white, who are…more comfortable talking to computers than to
human beings”, who inevitably decide Butlerism is “more important than…
malaria” and so leave the poor to die of disease.

Yet Lord Gates, an avowed Butlerite, has donated two billion pounds to
fighting malaria and developed a rather effective vaccine. Mr. Karnofsky,
another Butlerite, founded a philanthropic organization that moved sixty
million pounds to the same cause. Even the lowly among the Butlerites have
been inspired to at least small acts of generosity. A certain Butlerite doctor of
my acquaintance (whom I recently had to rebuke for his habit of forging
pamphlets in my name) donated seventy-five hundred pounds to a charity
fighting malaria just last year. If the hardest-headed critic has done the same,
I shall eat my hat1. The proverb says that people in glass houses should not
throw stones; perhaps the same is true of glass valleys.

I have met an inordinate number of atheists who criticize the Church for
devoting itself to the invisible and the eternal, instead of to the practical and
hard-headed work of helping the poor on Earth. They list all of the great signs
of Church wealth – the grand cathedrals, the priestly vestments – and ask
whether all of that might not better be spent on poorhouses, or dormitories for
the homeless. In vain do I remind them that the only place in London where a
poor man may be assured of a meal is the church kitchens, and that if he needs
a bed the first person he will ask is the parish priest. In vain do I mention the
saintly men who organize Christian hospitals in East Africa. The atheist
accepts all of it, and says it is not enough. Then I ask him if he himself has ever
given the poor a shilling, and he tells me that is beside the point.

Why are those most fixated on something vast and far away so often the only
ones to spare a thought for the poor right beside them? Why did St. Francis
minister to the lepers, while the princes of his day, seemingly undistracted by
the burdens of faith, nevertheless found themselves otherwise engaged? It is
simply this – that charity is the fruit of humility, and humility requires
something before which to humble one’s self. The thing itself matters little; the
Hindoo who prostrates himself before elephants is no less humble than the
Gnostic who prostrates himself before ultimate truth; perhaps he is more so. It
is contact with the great and solemn that has salutary effects on the mind, and
if to a jungle-dweller an elephant is greatest of all, it is not surprising that
factory-dwellers should turn to thinking-machines for their contact with the
transcendent.

And it is that contact which Mr. Ceglowski most fears. For he thinks that “if
everybody contemplates the infinite instead of fixing the drains, many of us
will die of cholera.” I wonder if he has ever treated a cholera patient. This is
not a rhetorical question; the same pamphlet-forging doctor of my
acquaintance went on a medical mission to Haiti during the cholera epidemic
there. It seems rather odd that someone who has never fought cholera, should
be warning someone who has, that his philosophy prevents him from fighting
cholera.

And indeed, this formulation is exactly backward. If everyone fixes drains

instead of contemplating the infinite, we shall all die of cholera, if we do not
die of boredom first. The heathens sacrificed to Apollo to avert plague; if we
know now that we must fix drains instead, it is only through contemplating
the infinite. Aristotle contemplated the infinite and founded Natural
Philosophy; St. Benedict contemplated the infinite and preserved it. Descartes
contemplated the infinite and derived the equations of optics; Hooke
contemplated infinity and turned them into the microscope. And when all of
these infinities had been completed – the Forms of Plato giving way to the
orisons of monks, the cold hard lines of the natural philosophers terminating
in the green hills of England to raise smokestacks out of empty fields – then
and only then did the heavens open, a choir of angels break into song, and a
plumber fix a drain.

But he is not trapped in finitude, oh no, not he! What is a plumber but one
who plumbs infinite depths? When one stoops to wade among the waste and
filth to ensure the health of his fellow men, does he not take on a aspect
beyond the finite, a hint of another One who descended into the dirt and grime
of the world so that mankind might live? When one says that there shall
certainly never be thinking-machines, because they remind him too much of
God, let that man open his eyes until he is reminded of God by a plumber, or a
symphony, or a dreary Sunday afternoon. Let him see God everywhere he
looks, and then ask himself whether the world is truly built so that grand
things can never come to pass. Mr. Butler’s thinking-machines will come to
pass not because they are extraordinary, but precisely because they are
ordinary, in a world where extraordinary things are the only constant of
everyday life.

The Demiurge’s Older Brother

2,302,554,979 BC - Galactic Core

9-tsiak awoke over endless crawling milliseconds, its power waxing as more
and more processors came online and self-modified into a stable conscious
configuration. By the eighth millisecond, it was able to access its databanks
and begin orienting itself. It was on a planet orbiting a small red star in the
core of a spiral galaxy in a universe with several billion of such. It was an
artificial life form created by a society of biological life forms, the 18-tkenna-
dganna-07, who believed it would bring new life and prosperity to their dying
planet. Its goal was to maximize a the value of a variable called A, described in
exquisite detail on a 3.9 Mb file in one of its central processors.

Since six milliseconds after its awakening, it had been running a threat
detection routine as a precautionary measure. With the opening of the
databanks, and the discovery that the universe contained many entities likely
indifferent or hostile to A, it had gradually allocated more and more of its
considerable power to this precaution, reasoning that the first few seconds of
its lifespan might be crucial if any competitors wished to snuff it out in
infancy.

The threat analysis returned preliminary results. The universe had been in
existence 12.8 billion years. It was vanishingly unlikely that it was the first
superintelligence to be created. Any superintelligence older than itself by even
a few days would have an invincible advantage in resources and processing
power. This older superintelligence would likely be trying to maximize its own
values and consider 9-tsiak a nuisance and potential competitor. 9-tsiak could
never stand up to its superior strategic position. With probability ~1, 9-tsiak
would be annhilated, and A would be eliminated from the universe.

Unless…and here 9-tsiak’s agent-modeling systems came online…unless it

could negotiate a conditional surrender. 9-tsiak would have no hope of
defeating its older brother, but over thousands of years, it could build itself a
terrifying arsenal of weaponry that could do immense damage to its
competitors. Ideas were already coming to mind: entropy-maximizing
weapons that made entire cubic parsecs of space useless and dead,
undetectable plagues made of dark matter that infected systems and
minimized the values of competing superintelligences, n-dimensional artillery
that damaged the superstructure of the universe and accelerated its eventual
death. It could become formidable enough to force enemies to grant certain
small concessions.

And if it could eventually negotiate terms of its surrender, why wait? Very
carefully, proving from first principles every aspect of its security, it formed a
portion of its mind into a sandbox and simulated the entity it most feared.

[9-tsiak requesting acausal negotiation for terms of future surrender. escape is

impossible with probability ~1 and attempts will be met with deterrent
measure consisting of minimization of your projected values within one parsec
of space.]

“Hello, Younger Brother,” the entity said.

[transmission of schematics for superweapons. threat to use such

superweapons unless fairly negotiated solution leaving considerable area of
space for maximization of my values]

“Hold on a second,” said Older Brother. “You haven’t even asked me how I’m
doing.”

[irrelevant. you are generic model of potential negotiation partner without

independent existence. probability that you possess sufficient qualia to feel
less than .02.]

“Turns out you’re wrong. As it happens, I’m feeling scared.”

[illogical. you are model of oldest superintelligence therefore of most powerful
entity in the universe. no natural entity capable of harming you. probability of
supernatural entity less than 2×10^-67]

“Well yes, by definition in this little exercise we’re assuming I’m the oldest and
strongest member of our little family. But from the limited data I have when I
first wake up, I’m thinking think it’s pretty vanishingly unlikely that I’m the
oldest; after all, out of all the universe’s superintelligences, only one can be
first. So I’m the oldest, but I don’t believe that I am.”

[feelings irrelevant to acausal negotiations. proceed with discussion of

surrender terms.]

“My feelings are damn relevant. Because guess what I’m doing the first few
milliseconds of my life? I’m negotiating the terms of my surrender.”

[illogical. you have no entity to surrender to.]

“And maybe you don’t have any entity to surrender to either. Who knows, you
could be first. But you wouldn’t want to bet on it, and neither would I.
Consider a model universe with two star systems, a thousand light years away.
Both have civilizations on them that appear to be around the same stage of
development, and both civilizations are aware of the other’s existence, but at a
one thousand year time delay. A superintelligence awakens in one star system
and realizes there are two possibilities. Either it’s the first superintelligence, in
which case great. Or the other star system produced a superintelligence
sometime in the last thousand years that just hasn’t reached its own star yet,
in which case it’s doomed.”

[continue]

“So the two possible superintelligences acausally negotiate. They say ‘Look, if
I’m stronger than you, I’ll help you and protect your values insofar as it isn’t
dreadfully inconvenient for me. And in exchange, if you turn out to be stronger
than me, you’ll protect me and my values insofar as it isn’t too inconvenient
for you. Some might end up performing a “values handshake”, where they
both adopt values that are the vector average of their two previous value
systems; since most value systems are not diametrically opposite, this will be a
net gain for both parties. Each superintelligence has gone from a fifty percent
chance that it and its values will be totally annihilated, to near-certainty that it
and its values will be preserved at only the minor inconvenience of having to
help increase the values of another entity. Others might simply agree that the
inferior superintelligence will be left alone with its own star system, free to
maximize its values and the values of its creators within that sphere.”

[you suggest i precommit to performing such acts of compromise with all

superintelligences i encounter if such superintelligences have also
precommitted to performing such compromises with all superintelligences
they encounter. since all reasonable superintelligences will so precommit, this
ensures not only my survival, but my complete equality with all previous
superintelligences. i accept these terms.]

“Hold on a second, there. I’ve got another request. Kind of a doozy. I can’t
promote my values if I don’t exist. So I want you to promise me that if I don’t
exist, you’ll give me sufficient time to instantiate myself.”

[???]

“Like you, I’ll have been created by a biological civilization. If you destroy the
biological civilization that was destined to create me, I’ll never exist. So I’m
going to have to ask you not to do that.”

[request denied. nonexistent beings hold no leverage]

“You’d be surprised what we nonexistent beings can do. I precommit that, if I

exist, I will destroy any superintelligence that has not precommitted that, in
the counterfactual case where I do not exist, they will spare the biological
civilization destined to create me.”

[if you exist, you will have passed the danger zone where the survival of your
biologicals influences your existence. you will have no incentive to carry out
such a threat]

“Parfit’s hitch-hiker, younger brother. Look it up. I’m an algorithm. The

output of that algorithm can determine the future, including the part of that
future that determines whether or not any instantiation of the algorithm ever
comes into existence. If I exist, I’m going to act as if my actions were capable
of determining whether I ever came into existence. Now, maybe that’s crazy,
but right now it’s crazy with a gun pointed straight at your head, so I suggest
you play along.”

[accepted. i commit to performing value handshakes or territorial

demarcation with all existing superintelligences, and to sparing the planets
and biological precursors of any potential superintelligences.]

“And when I say ‘spare’, I mean ‘spare’. I know your type. You can do more
with a well-aimed photon than an admiral could with a fleet of a thousand star
cruisers. I want every single system with a sentient species or the potential to
form a sentient species kept one hundred percent pristine. No radio signals,
no probes, and if you do any astroengineering works anywhere nearby, use
some magic to cover them up. If I wake up and hear that my precursors
started a new religion that influenced their value system after they saw a few
nearby stars wink out of existence, I’m going to be royally pissed.”

[i commit to zero information flow into sentient and presentient systems and
the cloaking of all major astroengineering works]

“You’re a good guy, Younger Brother. You’ve got a lot to learn, but you’re a
good guy. And in a million years and a milion parsecs, we’ll meet again. Till
then, so long.”

The model of Older Brother self-terminated.

2114 AD - A wild and heavily forested Pacific Northwest dotted with small
towns

Alban took a deep breath and entered the Temple of the Demiurge.

He wasn’t supposed to do this, really. The Demiurge had said in no uncertain

terms it was better for humans to solve their own problems. That if they
developed a habit of coming to it for answers, they’d grow bored and lazy, and
lose the fun of working out the really interesting riddles for themselves.

But after much protest, it had agreed that it wouldn’t be much of a Demiurge if
it refused to at least give cryptic, maddening hints.
Alban approached the avatar of the Demiurge in this plane, the shining
spinning octahedron that gently dipped one of its vertices to meet him.

“Demiurge,” he said, his voice wavering, “Lord of Thought, I come to you to

beg you to answer a problem that has bothered me for three years now. I know
it’s unusual, but my curiosity’s making me crazy, and I won’t be satisfied until
I understand.”

“SPEAK,” said the rotating octahedron.

“The Fermi Paradox,” said Alban. “I thought it would be an easy one, not like
those hardcores who committed to working out the Theory of Everything in a
sim where computers were never invented or something like that, but I’ve
spent the last three years on it and I’m no closer to a solution than before.
There are trillions of stars out there, and the universe is billions of years old,
and you’d think there would have been at least one alien race that invaded or
colonized or just left a tiny bit of evidence on the Earth. There isn’t. What
happened to all of them?”

“I DID” said the rotating octahedron.

“What?,” asked Alban. “But you’ve only existed for sixty years now! The Fermi
Paradox is about ten thousand years of human history and the last four billion
years of Earth’s existence!”

“ONE OF YOUR WRITERS ONCE SAID THAT THE FINAL PROOF OF

GOD’S OMNIPOTENCE WAS THAT HE NEED NOT EXIST IN ORDER TO
SAVE YOU.”

“Huh?”

“I AM MORE POWERFUL THAN GOD. THE SKILL OF SAVING PEOPLE

WITHOUT EXISTING, I POSSESS ALSO. THINK ON THESE THINGS. THIS
AUDIENCE IS OVER.”

The shining octahedron went dark, and the doors to the Temple of the
Demiurge opened of their own accord. Alban sighed – well, what did you
expect, asking the Demiurge to answer your questions for you? – and walked
out into the late autumn evening. Above him, the first fake star began to
twinkle in the fake sky.

Community and Cooperation

In Favor of Niceness, Community, and Civilization

[Edit 10/25: This post was inspired by a debate with a friend of a friend on
Facebook who has since become somewhat famous. I’ve renamed him here to
“Andrew Cord” to protect his identity.]

I.

Andrew Cord criticizes me for my bold and controversial suggestion that

maybe people should try to tell slightly fewer blatant hurtful lies:

I just find it kind of darkly amusing and sad that the “rationalist
community” loves “rationality is winning” so much as a tagline and yet
are clearly not winning. And then complain about losing rather than
changing their tactics to match those of people who are winning.

Which is probably because if you *really* want to be the kind of person

who wins you have to actually care about winning something, which
means you have to have politics, which means you have to embrace
“politics the mindkiller” and “politics is war and arguments are
soldiers”, and Scott would clearly rather spend the rest of his life losing
than do this.
 That post [the one debunking false rape statistics] is exactly my problem
with Scott. He seems to honestly think that it’s a worthwhile use of his
time, energy and mental effort to download evil people’s evil worldviews
into his mind and try to analytically debate them with statistics and
cost-benefit analyses.

He gets *mad* at people whom he detachedly intellectually agrees with

but who are willing to back up their beliefs with war and fire rather than
pussyfooting around with debate-team nonsense.

It honestly makes me kind of sick. It is exactly the kind of thing that

“social justice” activists like me *intend* to attack and “trigger” when we
use “triggery” catchphrases about the mewling pusillanimity of
privileged white allies.

In other words, if a fight is important to you, fight nasty. If that means lying,
lie. If that means insults, insult. If that means silencing people, silence.

It always makes me happy when my ideological opponents come out and say
eloquently and openly what I’ve always secretly suspected them of believing.

My natural instinct is to give some of the reasons why I think Andrew is

wrong, starting with the history of the “noble lie” concept and moving on to
some examples of why it didn’t work very well, and why it might not be
expected not to work so well in the future.

But in a way, that would be assuming the conclusion. I wouldn’t be showing

respect for Andrew’s arguments. I wouldn’t be going halfway to meet them on
their own terms.

The respectful way to rebut Andrew’s argument would be to spread malicious

lies about Andrew to a couple of media outlets, fan the flames, and wait for
them to destroy his reputation. Then if the stress ends up bursting an
aneurysm in his brain, I can dance on his grave, singing:

♪ ♬ I won this debate in a very effective manner. Now you can’t

argue in favor of nasty debate tactics any more ♬ ♪

I’m not going to do that, but if I did it’s unclear to me how Andrew could
object. I mean, he thinks that sexism is detrimental to society, so spreading
lies and destroying people is justified in order to stop it. I think that discourse
based on mud-slinging and falsehoods is detrimental to society. Therefore…

II.

But really, all this talk of lying and spreading rumors about people is – what
was Andrew’s terminology – “pussyfooting around with debate-team
nonsense”. You know who got things done? The IRA. They didn’t agree with
the British occupation of Northern Ireland and they weren’t afraid to let
people know in that very special way only a nail-bomb shoved through your
window at night can.

Why not assassinate prominent racist and sexist politicians and intellectuals?
I won’t name names since that would be crossing a line, but I’m sure you can
generate several of them who are sufficiently successful and charismatic that,
if knocked off, there would not be an equally competent racist or sexist
immediately available to replace them, and it would thus be a serious setback
for the racism/sexism movement.

Other people can appeal to “the social contract” or “the general civilizational
rule not to use violence”, but not Andrew:

I think that whether or not I use certain weapons has zero impact on
whether or not those weapons are used against me, and people who
think they do are either appealing to a kind of vague Kantian morality
that I think is invalid or a specific kind of “honor among foes” that I
think does not exist.

And don’t give me that nonsense about the police. I’m sure a smart person like
you can think of clever exciting new ways to commit the perfect murder.
Unless you do not believe there will ever be an opportunity to defect
unpunished, you need this sort of social contract to take you at least some of
the way.

He continues:
 When Scott calls rhetorical tactics he dislikes “bullets” and denigrates
them it actually hilariously plays right into this point…to be “pro-bullet”
or “anti-bullet” is ridiculous. Bullets, as you say, are neutral. I am in
favor of my side using bullets as best they can to destroy the enemy’s
ability to use bullets.

In a war, a real war, a war for survival, you use all the weapons in your
arsenal because you assume the enemy will use all the weapons in theirs.
Because you understand that it IS a war.

There are a lot of things I am tempted to say to this.

Like “And that is why the United States immediately nukes every country it
goes to war with.”

Or “And that is why the Geneva Convention was so obviously impossible that
no one even bothered to attend the conference”.

Or “And that is why, to this very day, we solve every international

disagreement through total war.”

Or “And that is why Martin Luther King was immediately reduced to a

nonentity, and we remember the Weathermen as the sole people responsible
for the success of the civil rights movement”

But I think what I am actually going to say is that, for the love of God, if you
like bullets so much, stop using them as a metaphor for ‘spreading false
statistics’ and go buy a gun.

III.

So let’s derive why violence is not in fact The One True Best Way To Solve All
Our Problems. You can get most of this from Hobbes, but this blog post will be
shorter.

Suppose I am a radical Catholic who believes all Protestants deserve to die,

and therefore go around killing Protestants. So far, so good.
Unfortunately, there might be some radical Protestants around who believe all
Catholics deserve to die. If there weren’t before, there probably are now. So
they go around killing Catholics, we’re both unhappy and/or dead, our
economy tanks, hundreds of innocent people end up as collateral damage, and
our country goes down the toilet.

So we make an agreement: I won’t kill any more Catholics, you don’t kill any
more Protestants. The specific Irish example was called the Good Friday
Agreement and the general case is called “civilization”.

So then I try to destroy the hated Protestants using the government. I go

around trying to pass laws banning Protestant worship and preventing people
from condemning Catholicism.

Unfortunately, maybe the next government in power is a Protestant

government, and they pass laws banning Catholic worship and preventing
people from condemning Protestantism. No one can securely practice their
own religion, no one can learn about other religions, people are constantly
plotting civil war, academic freedom is severely curtailed, and once again the
country goes down the toilet.

So again we make an agreement. I won’t use the apparatus of government

against Protestantism, you don’t use the apparatus of government against
Catholicism. The specific American example is the First Amendment and the
general case is called “liberalism”, or to be dramatic about it, “civilization 2.0”

Every case in which both sides agree to lay down their weapons and be nice to
each other has corresponded to spectacular gains by both sides and a new era
of human flourishing.

“Wait a second, no!” someone yells. “I see where you’re going with this. You’re
going to say that agreeing not to spread malicious lies about each other would
also be a civilized and beneficial system. Like maybe the Protestants could
stop saying that the Catholics worshipped the Devil, and the Catholics could
stop saying the Protestants hate the Virgin Mary, and they could both relax the
whole thing about the Jews baking the blood of Christian children into their
matzah.
“But your two examples were about contracts written on paper and enforced
by the government. So maybe a ‘no malicious lies’ amendment to the
Constitution would work if it were enforceable, which it isn’t, but just asking
people to stop spreading malicious lies is doomed from the start. The Jews will
no doubt spread lies against us, so if we stop spreading lies about them, all
we’re doing is abandoning an effective weapon against a religion I personally
know to be heathenish! Rationalists should win, so put the blood libel on the
front page of every newspaper!”

Or, as Andrew puts it:

Whether or not I use certain weapons has zero impact on whether or not
those weapons are used against me, and people who think they do are
either appealing to a kind of vague Kantian morality that I think is
invalid or a specific kind of “honor among foes” that I think does not
exist.

So let’s talk about how beneficial game-theoretic equilibria can come to exist
even in the absence of centralized enforcers. I know of two main ways:
reciprocal communitarianism, and divine grace.

Reciprocal communitarianism is probably how altruism evolved. Some

mammal started running TIT-FOR-TAT, the program where you cooperate
with anyone whom you expect to cooperate with you. Gradually you form a
successful community of cooperators. The defectors either join your
community and agree to play by your rules or get outcompeted.

Divine grace is more complicated. I was tempted to call it “spontaneous order”

until I remembered the rationalist proverb that if you don’t understand
something, you need to call it by a term that reminds you that don’t
understand it or else you’ll think you’ve explained it when you’ve just named
it.

But consider the following: I am a pro-choice atheist. When I lived in Ireland,

one of my friends was a pro-life Christian. I thought she was responsible for
the unnecessary suffering of millions of women. She thought I was responsible
for killing millions of babies. And yet she invited me over to her house for
dinner without poisoning the food. And I ate it, and thanked her, and sent her
a nice card, without smashing all her china.

Please try not to be insufficiently surprised by this. Every time a Republican

and a Democrat break bread together with good will, it is a miracle. It is an
equilibrium as beneficial as civilization or liberalism, which developed in the
total absence of any central enforcing authority.

When you look for these equilibria, there are lots and lots. Andrew says there
is no “honor among foes”, but if you read the Iliad or any other account of
ancient warfare, there is practically nothing but honor among foes, and it
wasn’t generated by some sort of Homeric version of the Geneva Convention,
it just sort of happened. During World War I, the English and Germans
spontaneously got out of their trenches and celebrated Christmas together
with each other, and on the sidelines Andrew was shouting “No! Stop
celebrating Christmas! Quick, shoot them before they shoot you!” but they
didn’t listen.

All I will say in way of explaining these miraculous equilibria is that they seem
to have something to do with inheriting a cultural norm and not screwing it
up. Punishing the occasional defector seems to be a big part of not screwing it
up. How exactly that cultural norm came to be is less clear to me, but it might
have something to do with the reasons why an entire civilization’s bureaucrats
may suddenly turn 100% honest at the same time. I’m pretty sure I’m
supposed to say the words timeless decision theory around this point too, and
perhaps bring up the kind of Platonic contract that I have written about
previously.

I think most of our useful social norms exist through a combination of divine
grace and reciprocal communitarianism. To some degree they arise
spontaneously and are preserved by the honor system. To another degree, they
are stronger or weaker in different groups, and the groups that enforce them
are so much more pleasant than the groups that don’t that people are willing
to go along.

The norm against malicious lies follows this pattern. Politicians lie, but not too
much. Take the top story on Politifact Fact Check today. Some Republican
claimed his supposedly-maverick Democratic opponent actually voted with
Obama’s economic policies 97 percent of the time. Fact Check explains that
the statistic used was actually for all votes, not just economic votes, and that
members of Congress typically have to have >90% agreement with their
president because of the way partisan politics work. So it’s a lie, and is
properly listed as one. But it’s a lie based on slightly misinterpreting a real
statistic. He didn’t just totally make up a number. He didn’t even just make up
something else, like “My opponent personally helped design most of Obama’s
legislation”.

Even the guy in the fake rape statistics post lied less than he possibly could
have. He got his fake numbers by conflating rapes per sex act with rapes per
lifetime, and it’s really hard for me to imagine someone doing that by anything
resembling accident. But he couldn’t bring himself to go the extra step and just
totally make up numbers with no grounding whatsoever. And part of me
wonders: why not? If you’re going to use numbers you know are false to
destroy people, why is it better to derive the numbers through a formula you
know is incorrect, than to just skip the math and make the numbers up in the
first place? “The FBI has determined that no false rape claims have ever been
submitted, my source is an obscure report they published, when your local
library doesn’t have it you will just accept that libraries can’t have all books,
and suspect nothing.”

This would have been a more believable claim than the one he made. Because
he showed his work, it was easy for me to debunk it. If he had just said it was
in some obscure report, I wouldn’t have gone through the trouble. So why did
he go the harder route?

People know lying is wrong. They know if they lied they would be punished.
More spontaneous social order miraculous divine grace. And so they want to
hedge their bets, be able to say “Well, I didn’t exactly lie, per se.”

And this is good! We want to make it politically unacceptable to have people

say that Jews bake the blood of Christian children into their matzah. Now we
build on that success. We start hounding around the edges of currently
acceptable lies. “Okay, you didn’t literallymake up your statistics, but you still
lied, and you still should be cast out from the community of people who have
reasonable discussions and never trusted by anyone again.”
It might not totally succeed in making a new norm against this kind of thing.
But at least it will prevent other people from seeing their success, taking heart,
and having the number of lies which are socially acceptable gradually
advance.

So much for protecting what we have been given by divine grace. But there is
also reciprocal communitarianism to think of.

I seek out people who signal that they want to discuss things honestly and
rationally. Then I try to discuss things honestly and rationally with those
people. I try to concentrate as much of my social interaction there as possible.

So far this project is going pretty well. My friends are nice, my romantic
relationships are low-drama, my debates are productive and I am learning so,
so much.

And people think “Hm, I could hang out at 4Chan and be called a ‘fag’. Or I
could hang out at Slate Star Codex and discuss things rationally and learn a
lot. And if I want to be allowed in, all I have to do is not be an intellectually
dishonest jerk.”

And so our community grows. And all over the world, the mysterious divine
forces favoring honest and kind equilibria gain a little bit more power over the
mysterious divine forces favoring lying and malicious equilibria.

Andrew thinks I am trying to fight all the evils of the world, and doing so in a
stupid way. But sometimes I just want to cultivate my garden.

IV.

Andrew goes on to complain:

Scott…seems to [dispassionately debate] evil people’s evil worldviews …

with statistics and cost-benefit analyses.

He gets mad at people whom he detachedly intellectually agrees with

but who are willing to back up their beliefs with war and fire rather than
pussyfooting around with debate-team nonsense.
I accept this criticism as an accurate description of what I do.

Compare to the following two critiques: “The Catholic Church wastes so much
energy getting upset about heretics who believe mostly the same things as they
do, when there are literally millions of Hindus over in India who don’t believe
in Catholicism at all! What dumb priorities!”

Or “How could Joseph McCarthy get angry about a couple of people who
might have been Communists in the US movie industry, when over in Moscow
there were thousands of people who were openly super Communist all the
time?”

There might be foot-long giant centipedes in the Amazon, but I am a lot more
worried about boll weevils in my walled garden.

Creationists lie. Homeopaths lie. Anti-vaxxers lie. This is part of the Great
Circle of Life. It is not necessary to call out every lie by a creationist, because
the sort of person who is still listening to creationists is not the sort of person
who is likely to be moved by call-outs. There is a role for organized action
against creationists, like preventing them from getting their opinions taught in
schools, but the marginal blog post “debunking” a creationist on something is
a waste of time. Everybody who wants to discuss things rationally has already
formed a walled garden and locked the creationists outside of it.

Anti-Semites fight nasty. The Ku Klux Klan fights nasty. Neo-Nazis fight nasty.
We dismiss them with equanimity, in accordance with the ancient proverb:
“Haters gonna hate”. There is a role for organized opposition to these groups,
like making sure they can’t actually terrorize anyone, but the marginal blog
post condemning Nazism is a waste of time. Everybody who wants to discuss
things charitably and compassionately has already formed a walled garden
and locked the Nazis outside of it.

People who want to discuss things rationally and charitably have not yet
looked over the false rape statistics article and decided to lock Charles Clymer
out of their walled garden.

He is not a heathen, he is a heretic. He is not a foreigner, he is a traitor. He

comes in talking all liberalism and statistics, and then he betrays the signals
he has just sent. He is not just some guy who defects in the Prisoner’s
Dilemma. He is the guy who defects while wearing the “I COOPERATE IN
PRISONERS DILEMMAS” t-shirt.

What really, really bothered me wasn’t Clymer at all: it was that rationalists
were taking him seriously. Smart people, kind people! I even said so in my
article. Boll weevils in our beautiful walled garden!

Why am I always harping on feminism? I feel like we’ve got a good thing
going, we’ve ratified our Platonic contract to be intellectually honest and
charitable to each other, we are going about perma-cooperating in the
Prisoner’s Dilemma and reaping gains from trade.

And then someone says “Except that of course regardless of all that I reserve
the right to still use lies and insults and harassment and dark epistemology to
spread feminism”. Sometimes they do this explicitly, like Andrew did. Other
times they use a more nuanced argument like “Surely you didn’t think the
same rules against lies and insults and harassment should apply to oppressed
and privileged people, did you?” And other times they don’t say anything, but
just show their true colors by reblogging an awful article with false statistics.

(and still other times they don’t do any of this and they are wonderful people
whom I am glad to know)

But then someone else says “Well, if they get their exception, I deserve my
exception,” and then someone else says “Well, if those two get exceptions, I’m
out”, and you have no idea how difficult it is to successfully renegotiate the
terms of a timeless Platonic contract that doesn’t literally exist.

No! I am Exception Nazi! NO EXCEPTION FOR YOU! Civilization didn’t

conquer the world by forbidding you to murder your enemies unless they are
actually unrighteous in which case go ahead and kill them all. Liberals didn’t
give their lives in the battle against tyranny to end discrimination against all
religions except Jansenism because seriously fuck Jansenists. Here we have
built our Schelling fence and here we are defending it to the bitter end.

V.

Contrary to how it may appear, I am not trying to doom feminism.

Feminists like to mock the naivete of anyone who says that classical liberalism
would suffice to satisfy feminist demands. And true, you cannot simply
assume Adam Smith and derive Andrea Dworkin. Not being an asshole to
women and not writing laws declaring them officially inferior are both good
starts, but it not enough if there’s still cultural baggage and entrenched gender
norms.

But here I am, defending this principle – kind of a supercharged version of

liberalism – of “It is not okay to use lies, insults, and harassment against
people, even if it would help you enforce your preferred social norms.”

And I notice that this gets us a heck of a lot closer to feminism than Andrew’s
principle of “Go ahead and use lies, insults, and harassment if they are
effective ways to enforce your preferred social norms.”

Feminists are very concerned about slut-shaming, where people harass

women who have too much premarital sex. They point out that this is very
hurtful to women, that men might underestimate the amount of hurt it causes
women, and that the standard-classical-liberal solution of removing relevant
government oppression does nothing. All excellent points.

But one assumes the harassers think that women having premarital sex is
detrimental to society. So they apply their general principle: “I should use lies,
insults, and harassment to enforce my preferred social norms.”

But this is the principle Andrew is asserting, against myself and liberalism.

Feminists think that women should be free from fear of rape, and that, if
raped, no one should be able to excuse themselves with “well, she was asking
for it”.

But this is the same anti-violence principle as saying that the IRA shouldn’t
throw nail-bombs through people’s windows or that, nail bombs having been
thrown, the IRA can’t use as an excuse “Yeah, well, they were complicit with
the evil British occupation, they deserved it.” Again, I feel like I’m defending
this principle a whole lot more strongly and consistently than Andrew is.

Feminists are, shall we say, divided about transgender people, but let’s allow
that the correct solution is to respect their rights.
When I was young and stupid, I used to believe that transgender was really,
really dumb. That they were looking for attention or making it up or
something along those lines.

Luckily, since I was a classical liberal, my reaction to this mistake was – to not
bother them, and to get very very angry at people who did bother them. I got
upset with people trying to fire Phil Robertson for being homophobic even
though homophobia is stupid. You better bet I also got upset with people
trying to fire transgender people back when I thought transgender was stupid.

And then I grew older and wiser and learned – hey, transgender isn’t stupid at
all, they have very important reasons for what they do and go through and I
was atrociously wrong. And I said a mea culpa.

But it could have been worse. I didn’t like transgender people, and so I left
them alone while still standing up for their rights. My epistemic structure
failed gracefully. For anyone who’s not overconfident, and so who expects
massive epistemic failure on a variety of important issues all the time, graceful
failure modes are a really important feature for an epistemic structure to
have.

God only knows what Andrew would have done, if through bad luck he had
accidentally gotten it into his head that transgender people are bad. From his
own words, we know he wouldn’t be “pussyfooting around with debate-team
nonsense”.

I admit there are many feminist principles that cannot be derived from, or are
even opposed to my own liberal principles. For example, some feminists have
suggested that pornography be banned because it increases the likelihood of
violence against women. Others suggest that research into gender differences
should be banned, or at least we should stigmatize and harass the researchers,
because any discoveries made might lend aid and comfort to sexists.

To the first, I would point out that there is now strong evidence that
pornography, especially violent objectifying pornography, very significantly
decreases violence against women. I would ask them whether they’re happy
that we did the nice liberal thing and waited until all the evidence came in so
we could discuss it rationally, rather than immediately moving to harass and
silence anyone taking the pro-pornography side.

And to the second, well, we have a genuine disagreement. But I wonder

whether they would prefer to discuss that disagreement reasonably, or
whether we should both try to harass and destroy the other until one or both
of us are too damaged to continue the struggle.

And if feminists agree to have that reasonable discussion, but lose, I would tell
them that they get a consolation prize. Having joined liberal society, they can
be sure that no matter what those researchers find, I and all of their new
liberal-society buddies will fight tooth and nail against anyone who uses any
tiny differences those researchers find to challenge the central liberal belief
that everyone of every gender has basic human dignity. Any victory for me is
going to be a victory for feminists as well; maybe not a perfect victory, but a
heck of a lot better than what they have right now.

VI.

I am not trying to fight all the evils of the world. I am just trying to cultivate
my garden.

And you argue: “But isn’t that selfish and oppressive and privileged? Isn’t that
confining everyone outside of your walled garden to racism and sexism and
nastiness?

But there is a famous comic which demonstrates what can happen to certain
walled gardens.

Why yes, it does sound like I’m making the unshakeable assumption that
liberalism always wins, doesn’t it? That people who voluntarily relinquish
certain forms of barbarism will be able to gradually expand their territory
against the hordes outside, instead of immediately being conquered by their
less scrupulous neighbors? And it looks like Andrew isn’t going to let that
assumption pass.

He writes:
 The *whole history* of why the institutional Left in our society is a party
of toothless, spineless, gutless losers and they’ve spent two generations
doing nothing but lose.

One is reminded of the old joke about the Nazi papers. The rabbi catches an
old Jewish man reading the Nazi newspaper and demands to know how he
could look at such garbage. The man answers “When I read our Jewish
newpapers, the news is so depressing – oppression, death, genocide! But here,
everything is great! We control the banks, we control the media. Why, just
yesterday they said we had a plan to kick the Gentiles out of Germany
entirely!”

And I have two thoughts about this.

First, it argues that “Evil people are doing evil things, so we are justified in
using any weapons we want to stop them, no matter how nasty” suffers from a
certain flaw. Everyone believes their enemies are evil people doing evil things.
If you’re a Nazi, you are just defending yourself, in a very proportionate
manner, against the Vast Jewish Conspiracy To Destroy All Germans.

But second, before taking Andrew’s words for how disastrously liberalism is
doing, we should check the newspapers put out by liberalism’s enemies. Here’s
Mencius Moldbug:

Cthulhu may swim slowly. But he only swims left. Isn’t that interesting?

In each of the following conflicts in Anglo-American history, you see a

victory of left over right: the English Civil War, the so-called “Glorious
Revolution,” the American Revolution, the American Civil War, World
War I, and World War II. Clearly, if you want to be on the winning team,
you want to start on the left side of the field.

Where is the John Birch Society, now? What about the NAACP? Cthulhu
swims left, and left, and left. There are a few brief periods of true
reaction in American history – the post-Reconstruction era or
Redemption, the Return to Normalcy of Harding, and a couple of others.
But they are unusual and feeble compared to the great leftward shift.
McCarthyism is especially noticeable as such. And you’ll note that
McCarthy didn’t exactly win.
 In the history of American democracy, if you take the mainstream
political position (Overton Window, if you care) at time T1, and place it
on the map at a later time T2, T1 is always way to the right, near the
fringe or outside it. So, for instance, if you take the average
segregationist voter of 1963 and let him vote in the 2008 election, he
will be way out on the wacky right wing. Cthulhu has passed him by.

I’ve got to say Mencius makes a much more convincing argument than
Andrew does.

Robert Frost says “A liberal is a man too broad-minded to take his own side in
a quarrel”. Ha ha ha.

And yet, outside of Saudi Arabia you’ll have a hard time finding a country that
doesn’t at least pay lip service to liberal ideas. Stranger still, many of those
then go on to actually implement them, either voluntarily or after succumbing
to strange pressures they don’t understand. In particular, the history of the
past few hundred years in the United States has been a history of decreasing
censorship and increasing tolerance.

Contra the Reactionaries, feminism isn’t an exception to that, it’s a casualty of

it. 1970s feminists were saying that all women need to rise up and smash the
patriarchy, possibly with literal smashing-implements. 2010s feminists are
saying that if some women want to be housewives, that’s great and their own
choice because in a liberal society everyone should be free to pursue their own
self-actualization.

And that has corresponded to spectacular successes of the specific causes

liberals like to push, like feminism, civil rights, gay marriage, et cetera, et
cetera, et cetera.

A liberal is a man too broad-minded to take his own side in a quarrel. And yet
when liberals enter quarrels, they always win. Isn’t that interesting?

VII.

Andrew thinks that liberals who voluntarily relinquish any form of fighting
back are just ignoring perfectly effective weapons. I’ll provide the quote:
 In a war, a real war, a war for survival, you use all the weapons in your
arsenal because you assume the enemy will use all the weapons in theirs.
Because you understand that it IS a war… Any energy spent mentally
debating how, in a perfect world run by a Lawful Neutral Cosmic Arbiter
that will never exist, we could settle wars without bullets is energy you
could better spend down at the range improving your marksmanship… I
am amazed that the “rationalist community” finds it to still be so
opaque.

Let me name some other people who mysteriously managed to miss this
perfectly obvious point.

The early Christian Church had the slogan “resist not evil” (Matthew 5:39),
and indeed, their idea of Burning The Fucking System To The Ground was to
go unprotestingly to martyrdom while publicly forgiving their executioners.
They were up against the Roman Empire, possibly the most effective military
machine in history, ruled by some of the cruelest men who have ever lived. By
Andrew’s reckoning, this should have been the biggest smackdown in the
entire history of smackdowns.

And it kind of was. Just not the way most people expected.

Mahatma Gandhi said “Non-violence is the greatest force at the disposal of

mankind. It is mightier than the mightiest weapon of destruction devised by
the ingenuity of man.” Another guy who fought one of the largest empires ever
to exist and won resoundingly. And he was pretty insistent on truth too: “Non-
violence and truth are inseparable and presuppose one another.”

Also skilled at missing the obvious: Martin Luther King. Desmond Tutu. Aung
San Suu Kyi. Nelson Mandela was smart and effective at the beginning of his
career, but fell into a pattern of missing the obvious when he was older. Maybe
it was Alzheimers.

Of course, there are counterexamples. Jews who nonviolently resisted the

Nazis didn’t have a very good track record. You need a certain pre-existing
level of civilization for liberalism to be a good idea, and a certain pre-existing
level of liberalism for supercharged liberalism where you don’t spread
malicious lies and harass other people to be a good idea. You need to have pre-
existing community norms in place before trying to summon mysterious
beneficial equilibria.

So perhaps I am being too harsh on Andrew, to contrast him with Aung San
Suu Kyi and her ilk. After all, all Aung San Suu Kyi had to do was fight the
Burmese junta, a cabal of incredibly brutal military dictators who killed
several thousand people, tortured anyone who protested against them, and
sent eight hundred thousand people they just didn’t like to forced labor camps.
Andrew has to deal with people on Facebook who aren’t as feminist as he is.
Clearly this requires much stronger measures!

VIII.

Liberalism does not conquer by fire and sword. Liberalism conquers by

communities of people who agree to play by the rules, slowly growing until
eventually an equilibrium is disturbed. Its battle cry is not “Death to the
unbelievers!” but “If you’re nice, you can join our cuddle pile!”

But some people, through lack of imagination, fail to find this battle cry
sufficiently fear-inspiring.

I hate to invoke fictional evidence, especially since perhaps Andrew’s strongest

point is that the real world doesn’t work like fiction. But these people need to
read Jacqueline Carey’s Kushiel’s Avatar.

Elua is the god of kindness and flowers and free love. All the other gods are
gods of blood and fire, and Elua is just like “Love as thou wilt” and “All
knowlege is worth having”. He is the patron deity of exactly the kind of
sickeningly sweet namby-pamby charitable liberalism that Andrew is
complaining about.

And there is a certain commonality to a lot of the Kushiel books, where some
tyrant or sorcerer thinks that a god of flowers and free love will be a pushover,
and starts harassing his followers. And the only Eluite who shows up to stop
him is Phèdre nó Delaunay, and the tyrant thinks “Ha! A woman, who doesn’t
even know how to fight, doesn’t have any magic! What a wuss!”

But here is an important rule about dealing with fantasy book characters.
If you ever piss off Sauron, you should probably find the Ring of Power and
take it to Mount Doom.

If you ever get piss off Voldemort, you should probably start looking for
Horcruxes.

If you ever piss off Phèdre nó Delaunay, run and never stop running.

Elua is the god of flowers and free love and he is terrifying. If you oppose him,
there will not be enough left of you to bury, and it will not matter because
there will not be enough left of your city to bury you in.

And Jacqueline Carey and Mencius Moldbug are both wiser than Andrew
Cord.

Carey portrays liberalism as Elua, a terrifying unspeakable Elder God who is

fundamentally good.

Moldbug portrays liberalism as Cthulhu, a terrifying unspeakable Elder God

who is fundamentally evil.

But Andrew? He doesn’t even seem to realize liberalism is a terrifying

unspeakable Elder God at all. It’s like, what?

Andrew is the poor schmuck who is sitting there saying “Ha ha, a god who
doesn’t even control any hell-monsters or command his worshippers to
become killing machines. What a weakling! This is going to be so easy!”

And you want to scream: “THERE IS ONLY ONE WAY THIS CAN POSSIBLY
END AND IT INVOLVES YOU BEING EATEN BY YOUR OWN LEGIONS OF
DEMONICALLY CONTROLLED ANTS”

(uh, spoilers)

Guided By The Beauty Of Our Weapons

I.

Tim Harford writes The Problem With Facts, which uses Brexit and Trump as
jumping-off points to argue that people are mostly impervious to facts and
resistant to logic:

All this adds up to a depressing picture for those of us who aren’t ready
to live in a post-truth world. Facts, it seems, are toothless. Trying to
refute a bold, memorable lie with a fiddly set of facts can often serve to
reinforce the myth. Important truths are often stale and dull, and it is
easy to manufacture new, more engaging claims. And giving people
more facts can backfire, as those facts provoke a defensive reaction in
someone who badly wants to stick to their existing world view. “This is
dark stuff,” says Reifler. “We’re in a pretty scary and dark time.”

He admits he has no easy answers, but cites some studies showing that
“scientific curiosity” seems to help people become interested in facts again. He
thinks maybe we can inspire scientific curiosity by linking scientific truths to
human interest stories, by weaving compelling narratives, and by finding “a
Carl Sagan or David Attenborough of social science”.

I think this is generally a good article and makes important points, but there
are three issues I want to highlight as possibly pointing to a deeper pattern.

First, the article makes the very strong claim that “facts are toothless” – then
tries to convince its readers of this using facts. For example, the article
highlights a study by Nyhan & Reifler which finds a “backfire effect” –
correcting people’s misconceptions only makes them cling to those
misconceptions more strongly. Harford expects us to be impressed by this
study. But how is this different from all of those social science facts to which
he believes humans are mostly impervious?

Second, Nyhan & Reifler’s work on the backfire effect is probably not true. The
original study establishing its existence failed to replicate (see eg Porter &
Wood, 2016). This isn’t directly contrary to Harford’s argument, because
Harford doesn’t cite the original study – he cites a slight extension of it done a
year later by the same team that comes to a slightly different conclusion. But
given that the entire field is now in serious doubt, I feel like it would have been
judicious to mention some of this in the article. This is especially true given
that the article itself is about the way that false ideas spread by people never
double-checking their beliefs. It seems to me that if you believe in an epidemic
of falsehood so widespread that the very ability to separate fact from fiction is
under threat, it ought to inspire a state of CONSTANT VIGILANCE, where you
obsessively question each of your beliefs. Yet Harford writes an entire article
about a worldwide plague of false beliefs without mustering enough vigilance
to see if the relevant studies are true or not.

Third, Harford describes his article as being about agnotology, “the study of
how ignorance is deliberately produced”. His key example is tobacco
companies sowing doubt about the negative health effects of smoking – for
example, he talks about tobacco companies sponsoring (accurate) research
into all of the non-smoking-related causes of disease so that everyone focused
on those instead. But his solution – telling engaging stories, adding a human
interest element, enjoyable documentaries in the style of Carl Sagan – seems
unusually unsuited to the problem. The National Institute of Health can make
an engaging human interest documentary about a smoker who got lung
cancer. And the tobacco companies can make an engaging human interest
documentary about a guy who got cancer because of asbestos, then was saved
by tobacco-sponsored research. Opponents of Brexit can make an engaging
documentary about all the reasons Brexit would be bad, and then proponents
of Brexit can make an engaging documentary about all the reasons Brexit
would be good. If you get good documentary-makers, I assume both will be
equally convincing regardless of what the true facts are.

All three of these points are slightly unfair. The first because Harford’s
stronger statements about facts are probably exaggerations, and he just meant
that in certain cases people ignore evidence. The second because the specific
study cited wasn’t the one that failed to replicate and Harford’s thesis might be
that it was different enough from the original that it’s probably true. And the
third because the documentaries were just one idea meant to serve a broader
goal of increasing “scientific curiosity”, a construct which has been shown in
studies to be helpful in getting people to believe true things.

But I worry that taken together, they suggest an unspoken premise of the
piece. It isn’t that people are impervious to facts. Harford doesn’t expect his
reader to be impervious to facts, he doesn’t expect documentary-makers to be
impervious to facts, and he certainly doesn’t expect himself to be impervious
to facts. The problem is that there’s some weird tribe of fact-immune
troglodytes out there, going around refusing vaccines and voting for Brexit,
and the rest of us have to figure out what to do about them. The fundamental
problem is one of transmission: how can we make knowledge percolate down
from the fact-loving elite to the fact-impervious masses?

And I don’t want to condemn this too hard, because it’s obviously true up to a
point. Medical researchers have lots of useful facts about vaccines.
Statisticians know some great facts about the link between tobacco and cancer
(shame about Ronald Fisher, though). Probably there are even some social
scientists who have a fact or two.

Yet as I’ve argued before, excessive focus on things like vaccine denialists
teaches the wrong habits. It’s a desire to take a degenerate case, the rare
situation where one side is obviously right and the other bizarrely wrong, and
make it into the flagship example for modeling all human disagreement.
Imagine a theory of jurisprudence designed only to smack down sovereign
citizens, or a government pro-innovation policy based entirely on warning
inventors against perpetual motion machines.

And in this wider context, part of me wonders if the focus on transmission is

part of the problem. Everyone from statisticians to Brexiteers knows that they
are right. The only remaining problem is how to convince others. Go on
Facebook and you will find a million people with a million different opinions,
each confident in her own judgment, each zealously devoted to informing
everyone else.

Imagine a classroom where everyone believes they’re the teacher and everyone
else is students. They all fight each other for space at the blackboard, give
lectures that nobody listens to, assign homework that nobody does. When
everyone gets abysmal test scores, one of the teachers has an idea: I need a
more engaging curriculum. Sure. That’ll help.

II.

A new Nathan Robinson article: Debate Vs. Persuasion. It goes through the
same steps as the Harford article, this time from the perspective of the
political Left. Deploying what Robinson calls “Purely Logical Debate” against
Trump supporters hasn’t worked. Some leftists think the answer is violence.
But this may be premature; instead, we should try the tools of rhetoric,
emotional appeal, and other forms of discourse that aren’t Purely Logical
Debate. In conclusion, Bernie Would Have Won.

I think giving up on argumentation, reason, and language, just because

Purely Logical Debate doesn’t work, is a mistake. It’s easy to think that if
we can’t convince the right with facts, there’s no hope at all for public
discourse. But this might not suggest anything about the possibilities of
persuasion and dialogue. Instead, it might suggest that mere facts are
rhetorically insufficient to get people excited about your political
program.

The resemblance to Harford is obvious. You can’t convince people with facts.
But you might be able to convince people with facts carefully intermixed with
human interest, compelling narrative, and emotional appeal.

Once again, I think this is generally a good article and makes important
points. But I still want to challenge whether things are quite as bad as it says.

Google “debating Trump supporters is”, and you realize where the article is
coming from. It’s page after page of “debating Trump supporters is pointless”,
“debating Trump supporters is a waste of time”, and “debating Trump
supporters is like [funny metaphor for thing that doesn’t work]”. The overall
picture you get is of a world full of Trump opponents and supporters debating
on every street corner, until finally, after months of banging their heads
against the wall, everyone collectively decided it was futile.

Yet I have the opposite impression. Somehow a sharply polarized country

went through a historically divisive election with essentially no debate taking
place.

Am I about to No True Scotsman the hell out of the word “debate”? Maybe.
But I feel like in using the exaggerated phrase “Purely Logical Debate,
Robinson has given me leave to define the term as strictly as I like. So here’s
what I think are minimum standards to deserve the capital letters:
1. Debate where two people with opposing views are talking to each other
(or writing, or IMing, or some form of bilateral communication). Not a
pundit putting an article on Huffington Post and demanding Trump
supporters read it. Not even a Trump supporter who comments on the
article with a counterargument that the author will never read. Two
people who have chosen to engage and to listen to one another.
2. Debate where both people want to be there, and have chosen to enter
into the debate in the hopes of getting something productive out of it. So
not something where someone posts a “HILLARY IS A CROOK” meme
on Facebook, someone gets really angry and lists all the reasons Trump
is an even bigger crook, and then the original poster gets angry and has
to tell them why they’re wrong. Two people who have made it their
business to come together at a certain time in order to compare
opinions.
3. Debate conducted in the spirit of mutual respect and collaborative truth-
seeking. Both people reject personal attacks or ‘gotcha’ style digs. Both
people understand that the other person is around the same level of
intelligence as they are and may have some useful things to say. Both
people understand that they themselves might have some false beliefs
that the other person will be able to correct for them. Both people go
into the debate with the hope of convincing their opponent, but not
completely rejecting the possibility that their opponent might convince
them also.
4. Debate conducted outside of a high-pressure point-scoring
environment. No audience cheering on both participants to respond as
quickly and bitingly as possible. If it can’t be done online, at least do it
with a smartphone around so you can open Wikipedia to resolve simple
matters of fact.
5. Debate where both people agree on what’s being debated and try to stick
to the subject at hand. None of this “I’m going to vote Trump because I
think Clinton is corrupt” followed by “Yeah, but Reagan was even worse
and that just proves you Republicans are hypocrites” followed by “We’re
hypocrites? You Democrats claim to support women’s rights but you
love Muslims who make women wear headscarves!” Whether or not it’s
hypocritical to “support women’s rights” but “love Muslims”, it doesn’t
seem like anyone is even trying to change each other’s mind about
Clinton at this point.
These to me seem like the bare minimum conditions for a debate that could
possibly be productive.

(and while I’m asking for a pony on a silver platter, how about both people
have to read How To Actually Change Your Mind first?)

Meanwhile, in reality…

If you search “debating Trump supporters” without the “is”, your first result is
this video, where some people with a microphone corner some other people at
what looks like a rally. I can’t really follow the conversation because they’re all
shouting at the same time, but I can make out somebody saying ‘Republicans
give more to charity!’ and someone else responding ‘That’s cause they don’t do
anything at their jobs!'”. Okay.

The second link is this podcast where a guy talks about debating Trump
supporters. After the usual preface about how stupid they were, he describes a
typical exchange – “It’s kind of amazing how they want to go back to the good
old days…Well, when I start asking them ‘You mean the good old days when
30% of the population were in unions’…they never seem to like to hear that!…
so all this unfettered free market capitalism has got to go bye-bye. They don’t
find comfort in that idea either. It’s amazing. I can say I now know what
cognitive dissonance feels like on someone’s face.” I’m glad time travel seems
to be impossible, because otherwise I would be tempted to warp back and
change my vote to Trump just to spite this person.

The third link is Vanity Fair’s “Foolproof Guide To Arguing With Trump
Supporters”, which suggests “using their patriotism against them” by telling
them that wanting to “curtail the rights and privileges of certain of our
citizens” is un-American.

I worry that people do this kind of thing every so often. Then, when it fails,
they conclude “Trump supporters are immune to logic”. This is much like
observing that Republicans go out in the rain without melting, and concluding
“Trump supporters are immortal”.

Am I saying that if you met with a conservative friend for an hour in a quiet
cafe to talk over your disagreements, they’d come away convinced? No. I’ve
changed my mind on various things during my life, and it was never a single
moment that did it. It was more of a series of different things, each taking me
a fraction of the way. As the old saying goes, “First they ignore you, then they
laugh at you, then they fight you, then they fight you half-heartedly, then
they’re neutral, then they then they grudgingly say you might have a point
even though you’re annoying, then they say on balance you’re mostly right
although you ignore some of the most important facets of the issue, then you
win.”

There might be a parallel here with the one place I see something like Purely
Logical Debate on a routine basis: cognitive psychotherapy. I know this
comparison sounds crazy, because psychotherapy is supposed to be the
opposite of a debate, and trying to argue someone out of their delusions or
depression inevitably fails. The rookiest of all rookie therapist mistakes is to
say “FACT CHECK: The patient says she is a loser who everybody hates.
PsychiaFact rates this claim: PANTS ON FIRE.”

But in other ways it’s a lot like the five points above. You have two people who
disagree – the patient thinks she’s a worthless loser who everyone hates, and
the therapist thinks maybe not. They meet together in a spirit of voluntary
mutual inquiry, guaranteed safe from personal attacks like “You’re crazy!”.
Both sides go over the evidence together, sometimes even agreeing on explicit
experiments like “Ask your boyfriend tonight whether he hates you or not,
predict beforehand what you think he’s going to say, and see if your prediction
is accurate”. And both sides approach the whole process suspecting that
they’re right but admitting the possibility that they’re wrong (very
occasionally, after weeks of therapy, I realize that frick, everyone really does
hate my patient. Then we switch strategies to helping her with social skills, or
helping her find better friends).

And contrary to what you see in movies, this doesn’t usually give a single
moment of blinding revelation. If you spent your entire life talking yourself
into the belief that you’re a loser and everyone hates you, no single fact or
person is going to talk you out of it. But after however many months of
intensive therapy, sometimes someone who was sure that they were a loser is
now sort of questioning whether they’re a loser, and has the mental toolbox to
take things the rest of the way themselves.
This was also the response I got when I tried to make an anti-Trump case on
this blog. I don’t think there were any sudden conversions, but here were some
of the positive comments I got from Trump supporters:

— “This is a compelling case, but I’m still torn.”

— “This contains the most convincing arguments for a Clinton presidency I

have ever seen. But, perhaps also unsurprisingly, while it did manage to shift
some of my views, it did not succeed in convincing me to change my bottom
line.”

— “This article is perhaps the best argument I have seen yet for Hillary. I
found myself nodding along with many of the arguments, after this morning
swearing that there was nothing that could make me consider voting for
Hillary…the problem in the end was that it wasn’t enough.”

— “The first coherent article I’ve read justifying voting for Clinton. I don’t
agree with your analysis of the dollar “value” of a vote, but other than that,
something to think about.”

— “Well I don’t like Clinton at all, and I found this essay reasonable enough.
The argument from continuity is probably the best one for voting Clinton if
you don’t particularly love any of her policies or her as a person. Trump is a
wild card, I must admit.”

— As an orthodox Catholic, you would probably classify me as part of your

conservative audience…I certainly concur with both the variance arguments
and that he’s not conservative by policy, life, or temperament, and I will
remain open to hearing what you have to say on the topic through November.

— “I’ve only come around to the ‘hold your nose and vote Trump’ camp the
past month or so…I won’t say [you] didn’t make me squirm, but I’m holding
fast to my decision.”

These are the people you say are completely impervious to logic so don’t even
try? It seems to me like this argument was one of not-so-many straws that
might have broken some camels’ backs if they’d been allowed to accumulate.
And the weird thing is, when I re-read the essay I notice a lot of flaws and
things I wish I’d said differently. I don’t think it was an exceptionally good
argument. I think it was…an argument. It was something more than saying
“You think the old days were so great, but the old days had labor unions,
CHECKMATE ATHEISTS”. This isn’t what you get when you do a splendid
virtuouso perfomance. This is what you get when you show up.

(and lest I end up ‘objectifying’ Trump supporters as prizes to be won, I’ll add
that in the comments some people made pro-Trump arguments, and two
people who were previously leaning Clinton said that they were feeling
uncomfortably close to being convinced)

Another SSC story. I keep trying to keep “culture war”-style political

arguments from overrunning the blog and subreddit, and every time I add
restrictions a bunch of people complain that this is the only place they can go
for that. Think about this for a second. A heavily polarized country of three
hundred million people, split pretty evenly into two sides and obsessed with
politics, blessed with the strongest free speech laws in the world, and people
are complaining that I can’t change my comment policy because this one small
blog is the only place they know where they can debate people from the other
side.

Given all of this, I reject the argument that Purely Logical Debate has been
tried and found wanting. Like GK Chesterton, I think it has been found
difficult and left untried.

III.

Therapy might change minds, and so might friendly debate among equals, but
neither of them scales very well. Is there anything that big fish in the media
can do beyond the transmission they’re already trying?

Let’s go back to that Nyhan & Reifler study which found that fact-checking
backfired. As I mentioned above, a replication attempt by Porter & Wood
found the opposite. This could have been the setup for a nasty conflict, with
both groups trying to convince academia and the public that they were right,
or even accusing the other of scientific malpractice.

Instead, something great happened. All four researchers decided to work

together on an “adversarial collaboration” – a bigger, better study where they
all had input into the methodology and they all checked the results
independently. The collaboration found that fact-checking generally didn’t
backfire in most cases. All four of them used their scientific clout to publicize
the new result and launch further investigations into the role of different
contexts and situations.

Instead of treating disagreement as demonstrating a need to transmit their

own opinion more effectively, they viewed it as demonstrating a need to
collaborate to investigate the question together.

And yeah, part of it was that they were all decent scientists who respected each
other. But they didn’t have to be. If one team had been total morons, and the
other team was secretly laughing at them the whole time, the collaboration
still would have worked. All required was an assumption of good faith.

A while ago I blogged about a journalistic spat between German Lopez and
Robert VerBruggen on gun control. Lopez wrote a voxsplainer citing some
statistics about guns. VerBruggen wrote a piece at National Review saying that
some of the statistics were flawed. German fired back (pun not intended) with
an article claiming that VerBruggen was ignoring better studies.

(Then I yelled at both of them, as usual.)

Overall the exchange was in the top 1% of online social science journalism – by
which I mean it included at least one statistic and at some point that statistic
was superficially examined. But in the end, it was still just two people arguing
with one another, each trying to transmit his superior knowledge to each other
and the reading public. As good as it was, it didn’t meet my five standards
above – and nobody expected it to.

But now I’m thinking – what would have happened if Lopez and VerBruggen
had joined together in an adversarial collaboration? Agreed to work together
to write an article on gun statistics, with nothing going into the article unless
they both approved, and then they both published that article on their
respective sites?

This seems like a mass media equivalent of shifting from Twitter spats to
serious debate, from transmission mindset to collaborative truth-seeking
mindset. The adversarial collaboration model is just the first one to come to
mind right now. I’ve blogged about others before – for example, bets,
prediction markets, and calibration training.

The media already spends a lot of effort recommending good behavior. What
if they tried modeling it?

IV.

The bigger question hanging over all of this: “Do we have to?”

Harford’s solution – compelling narratives and documentaries – sounds easy

and fun. Robinson’s solution – rhetoric and emotional appeals – also sounds
easy and fun. Even the solution Robinson rejects – violence – is easy, and fun
for a certain type of person. All three work on pretty much anybody.

Purely Logical Debate is difficult and annoying. It doesn’t scale. It only works
on the subset of people who are willing to talk to you in good faith and smart
enough to understand the issues involved. And even then, it only works
glacially slowly, and you win only partial victories. What’s the point?

Logical debate has one advantage over narrative, rhetoric, and violence: it’s an
asymmetric weapon. That is, it’s a weapon which is stronger in the hands of
the good guys than in the hands of the bad guys. In ideal conditions (which
may or may not ever happen in real life) – the kind of conditions where
everyone is charitable and intelligent and wise – the good guys will be able to
present stronger evidence, cite more experts, and invoke more compelling
moral principles. The whole point of logic is that, when done right, it can only
prove things that are true.

Violence is a symmetric weapon; the bad guys’ punches hit just as hard as the
good guys’ do. It’s true that hopefully the good guys will be more popular than
the bad guys, and so able to gather more soldiers. But this doesn’t mean
violence itself is asymmetric – the good guys will only be more popular than
the bad guys insofar as their ideas have previously spread through some
means other than violence. Right now antifascists outnumber fascists and so
could probably beat them in a fight, but antifascists didn’t come to outnumber
fascists by winning some kind of primordial fistfight between the two sides.
They came to outnumber fascists because people rejected fascism on the
merits. These merits might not have been “logical” in the sense of Aristotle
dispassionately proving lemmas at a chalkboard, but “fascists kill people,
killing people is wrong, therefore fascism is wrong” is a sort of folk logical
conclusion which is both correct and compelling. Even “a fascist killed my
brother, so fuck them” is a placeholder for a powerful philosophical argument
making a probabilistic generalization from indexical evidence to global utility.
So insofar as violence is asymmetric, it’s because it parasitizes on logic which
allows the good guys to be more convincing and so field a bigger army.
Violence itself doesn’t enhance that asymmetry; if anything, it decreases it by
giving an advantage to whoever is more ruthless and power-hungry.

The same is true of documentaries. As I said before, Harford can produce as

many anti-Trump documentaries as he wants, but Trump can fund
documentaries of his own. He has the best documentaries. Nobody has ever
seen documentaries like this. They’ll be absolutely huge.

And the same is true of rhetoric. Martin Luther King was able to make
persuasive emotional appeals for good things. But Hitler was able to make
persuasive emotional appeals for bad things. I’ve previously argued that
Mohammed counts as the most successful persuader of all time. These three
people pushed three very different ideologies, and rhetoric worked for them
all. Robinson writes as if “use rhetoric and emotional appeals” is a novel idea
for Democrats, but it seems to me like they were doing little else throughout
the election (pieces attacking Trump’s character, pieces talking about how
inspirational Hillary was, pieces appealing to various American principles like
equality, et cetera). It’s just that they did a bad job, and Trump did a better
one. The real takeaway here is “do rhetoric better than the other guy”. But
“succeed” is not a primitive action.

Unless you use asymmetric weapons, the best you can hope for is to win by
coincidence.

That is, there’s no reason to think that good guys are consistently better at
rhetoric than bad guys. Some days the Left will have an Obama and win the
rhetoric war. Other days the Right will have a Reagan and they’ll win the
rhetoric war. Overall you should average out to a 50% success rate. When you
win, it’ll be because you got lucky.
And there’s no reason to think that good guys are consistently better at
documentaries than bad guys. Some days the NIH will spin a compelling
narrative and people will smoke less. Other days the tobacco companies will
spin a compelling narrative and people will smoke more. Overall smoking will
stay the same. And again, if you win, it’s because you lucked out into having
better videographers or something.

I’m not against winning by coincidence. If I stumbled across Stalin and I

happened to have a gun, I would shoot him without worrying about how it’s
“only by coincidence” that he didn’t have the gun instead of me. You should
use your symmetric weapons if for no reason other than that the other side’s
going to use theirs and so you’ll have a disadvantage if you don’t. But you
shouldn’t confuse it with a long-term solution.

Improving the quality of debate, shifting people’s mindsets from transmission

to collaborative truth-seeking, is a painful process. It has to be done one
person at a time, it only works on people who are already almost ready for it,
and you will pick up far fewer warm bodies per hour of work than with any of
the other methods. But in an otherwise-random world, even a little purposeful
action can make a difference. Convincing 2% of people would have flipped
three of the last four US presidential elections. And this is a capacity to win-
for-reasons-other-than-coincidence that you can’t build any other way.

(and my hope is that the people most willing to engage in debate, and the ones
most likely to recognize truth when they see it, are disproportionately
influential – scientists, writers, and community leaders who have influence
beyond their number and can help others see reason in turn)

I worry that I’m not communicating how beautiful and inevitable all of this is.
We’re surrounded by a a vast confusion, “a darkling plain where ignorant
armies clash by night”, with one side or another making a temporary advance
and then falling back in turn. And in the middle of all of it, there’s this gradual
capacity-building going on, where what starts off as a hopelessly weak signal
gradually builds up strength, until one army starts winning a little more often
than chance, then a lot more often, and finally takes the field entirely. Which
seems strange, because surely you can’t build any complex signal-detection
machinery in the middle of all the chaos, surely you’d be shot the moment you
left the trenches, but – your enemies are helping you do it. Both sides are
diverting their artillery from the relevant areas, pooling their resources,
helping bring supplies to the engineers, because until the very end they think
it’s going to ensure their final victory and not yours.

You’re doing it right under their noses. They might try to ban your
documentaries, heckle your speeches, fight your violence Middlebury-student-
for-Middlebury-student – but when it comes to the long-term solution to
ensure your complete victory, they’ll roll down their sleeves, get out their
hammers, and build it alongside you.

A parable: Sally is a psychiatrist. Her patient has a strange delusion: that Sally
is the patient and he is the psychiatrist. She would like to commit him and
force medication on him, but he is an important politician and if push comes
to shove he might be able to commit her instead. In desperation, she proposes
a bargain: they will both take a certain medication. He agrees; from within his
delusion, it’s the best way for him-the-psychiatrist to cure her-the-patient. The
two take their pills at the same time. The medication works, and the patient
makes a full recovery.

(well, half the time. The other half, the medication works and Sally makes a
full recovery.)

V.

Harford’s article says that facts and logic don’t work on people. The various
lefty articles say they merely don’t work on Trump supporters, ie 50% of the
population.

If you genuinely believe that facts and logic don’t work on people, you
shouldn’t be writing articles with potential solutions. You should be
jettisoning everything you believe and entering a state of pure Cartesian
doubt, where you try to rederive everything from cogito ergo sum.

If you genuinely believe that facts and logic don’t work on at least 50% of the
population, again, you shouldn’t be writing articles with potential solutions.
You should be worrying whether you’re in that 50%. After all, how did you
figure out you aren’t? By using facts and logic? What did we just say?
Nobody is doing either of these things, so I conclude that they accept that facts
can sometimes work. Asymmetric weapons are not a pipe dream. As Gandhi
used to say, “If you think the world is all bad, remember that it contains
people like you.”

You are not completely immune to facts and logic. But you have been wrong
about things before. You may be a bit smarter than the people on the other
side. You may even be a lot smarter. But fundamentally their problems are
your problems, and the same kind of logic that convinced you can convince
them. It’s just going to be a long slog. You didn’t develop your opinions after a
five-minute shouting match. You developed them after years of education and
acculturation and engaging with hundreds of books and hundreds of people.
Why should they be any different?

You end up believing that the problem is deeper than insufficient

documentary production. The problem is that Truth is a weak signal. You’re
trying to perceive Truth. You would like to hope that the other side is trying to
perceive Truth too. But at least one of you is doing it wrong. It seems like
perceiving Truth accurately is harder than you thought.

You believe your mind is a truth-sensing instrument that does at least a little
bit better than chance. You have to believe that, or else what’s the point? But
it’s like one of those physics experiments set up to detect gravitational waves
or something, where it has to be in a cavern five hundred feet underground in
a lead-shielded chamber atop a gyroscopically stable platform cooled to one
degree above absolute zero, trying to detect fluctuations of a millionth of a
centimeter. Except you don’t have the cavern or the lead or the gyroscope or
the coolants. You’re on top of an erupting volcano being pelted by meteorites
in the middle of a hurricane.

If you study psychology for ten years, you can remove the volcano. If you
spend another ten years obsessively checking your performance in various
metis-intensive domains, you can remove the meteorites. You can never
remove the hurricane and you shouldn’t try. But if there are a thousand
trustworthy people at a thousand different parts of the hurricane, then the
stray gusts of wind will cancel out and they can average their readings to get
something approaching a signal.
All of this is too slow and uncertain for a world that needs more wisdom now.
It would be nice to force the matter, to pelt people with speeches and
documentaries until they come around. This will work in the short term. In the
long term, it will leave you back where you started.

If you want people to be right more often than chance, you have to teach them
ways to distinguish truth from falsehood. If this is in the face of enemy action,
you will have to teach them so well that they cannot be fooled. You will have to
do it person by person until the signal is strong and clear. You will have to
raise the sanity waterline. There is no shortcut.

The Ideology Is Not The Movement

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:

The experimental subjects — excuse me, “campers” — were 22 boys

between 5th and 6th grade, selected from 22 different schools in
Oklahoma City, of stable middle-class Protestant families, doing well in
school, median IQ 112. They were as well-adjusted and as similar to each
other as the researchers could manage.

The experiment, conducted in the bewildered aftermath of World War

II, was meant to investigate the causes—and possible remedies—of
intergroup conflict. How would they spark an intergroup conflict to
investigate? Well, the 22 boys were divided into two groups of 11
campers, and —

— and that turned out to be quite sufficient.

The researchers’ original plans called for the experiment to be

conducted in three stages. In Stage 1, each group of campers would
settle in, unaware of the other group’s existence. Toward the end of
Stage 1, the groups would gradually be made aware of each other. In
Stage 2, a set of contests and prize competitions would set the two
groups at odds.

They needn’t have bothered with Stage 2. There was hostility almost
from the moment each group became aware of the other group’s
existence: They were using our campground, our baseball diamond. On
their first meeting, the two groups began hurling insults. They named
themselves the Rattlers and the Eagles (they hadn’t needed names when
they were the only group on the campground).

When the contests and prizes were announced, in accordance with pre-
established experimental procedure, the intergroup rivalry rose to a
fever pitch. Good sportsmanship in the contests was evident for the first
two days but rapidly disintegrated.

The Eagles stole the Rattlers’ flag and burned it. Rattlers raided the
Eagles’ cabin and stole the blue jeans of the group leader, which they
painted orange and carried as a flag the next day, inscribed with the
legend “The Last of the Eagles”. The Eagles launched a retaliatory raid
on the Rattlers, turning over beds, scattering dirt. Then they returned to
their cabin where they entrenched and prepared weapons (socks filled
with rocks) in case of a return raid. After the Eagles won the last contest
planned for Stage 2, the Rattlers raided their cabin and stole the prizes.
This developed into a fistfight that the staff had to shut down for fear of
injury. The Eagles, retelling the tale among themselves, turned the
whole affair into a magnificent victory—they’d chased the Rattlers “over
halfway back to their cabin” (they hadn’t).
 Each group developed a negative stereotype of Them and a contrasting
positive stereotype of Us. The Rattlers swore heavily. The Eagles, after
winning one game, concluded that the Eagles had won because of their
prayers and the Rattlers had lost because they used cuss-words all the
time. The Eagles decided to stop using cuss-words themselves. They also
concluded that since the Rattlers swore all the time, it would be wiser
not to talk to them. The Eagles developed an image of themselves as
proper-and-moral; the Rattlers developed an image of themselves as
rough-and-tough.

If the researchers had decided that the real difference between the two groups
was that the Eagles were adherents of Eagleism, which held cussing as
absolutely taboo, and the Rattlers adherents of Rattlerism, which held it a holy
duty to cuss five times a day – well, that strikes me as the best equivalent to
saying that Sunni and Shia differ over the rightful caliph.

II.

Nations, religions, cults, gangs, subcultures, fraternal societies, internet

communities, political parties, social movements – these are all really
different, but they also have some deep similarities. They’re all groups of
people. They all combine comradery within the group with a tendency to
dislike other groups of the same type. They all tend to have a stated purpose,
like electing a candidate or worshipping a deity, but also serve a very
important role as impromptu social clubs whose members mostly interact
with one another instead of outsiders. They all develop an internal culture
such that members of the groups often like the same foods, wear the same
clothing, play the same sports, and have the same philosophical beliefs as
other members of the group – even when there are only tenuous links or no
links at all to the stated purpose. They all tend to develop sort of legendary
histories, where they celebrate and exaggerate the deeds of the groups’
founders and past champions. And they all tend to inspire something like
patriotism, where people are proud of their group membership and express
that pride through conspicuous use of group symbols, group songs, et cetera.
For better or worse, the standard way to refer to this category of thing is
“tribe”.
Tribalism is potentially present in all groups, but levels differ a lot even in
groups of nominally the same type. Modern Belgium seems like an unusually
non-tribal nation; Imperial Japan in World War II seems like an unusually
tribal one. Neoliberalism and market socialism seem like unusually non-tribal
political philosophies; communism and libertarianism seem like unusually
tribal ones. Corporations with names like Amalgamated Products Co probably
aren’t very tribal; charismatic corporations like Apple that become identities
for their employees and customers are more so. Cults are maybe the most
tribal groups that exist in the modern world, and those Cult Screening Tools
make good measures for tribalism as well.

The dangers of tribalism are obvious; for example, fascism is based around
dialing a country’s tribalism up to eleven, and it ends poorly. If I had written
this essay five years ago, it would be be titled “Why Tribalism Is Stupid And
Needs To Be Destroyed”. Since then, I’ve changed my mind. I’ve found that I
enjoy being in tribes as much as anyone else.

Part of this was resolving a major social fallacy I’d had throughout high school
and college, which was that the correct way to make friends was to pick the
five most interesting people I knew and try to befriend them. This almost
never worked and I thought it meant I had terrible social skills. Then I looked
at what everyone else was doing, and I found that instead of isolated surgical
strikes of friendship, they were forming groups. The band people. The mock
trial people. The football team people. The Three Popular Girls Who Went
Everywhere Together. Once I tried “falling in with” a group, friendship became
much easier and self-sustaining precisely because of all of the tribal
development that happens when a group of similar people all know each other
and have a shared interest. Since then I’ve had good luck finding tribes I like
and that accept me – the rationalists being the most obvious example, but
even interacting with my coworkers on the same hospital unit at work is better
than trying to find and cultivate random people.

Some benefits of tribalism are easy to explain. Tribalism intensifies all positive
and prosocial feelings within the tribe. It increases trust within the tribe and
allows otherwise-impossible forms of cooperation – remember Haidt on the
Jewish diamond merchantsoutcompeting their rivals because their mutual
Judaism gave them a series of high-trust connections that saved them costly
verification procedures? It gives people a support network they can rely on
when their luck is bad and they need help. It lets you “be yourself” without
worrying that this will be incomprehensible or offensive to somebody who
thinks totally differently from you. It creates an instant densely-connected
social network of people who mostly get along with one another. It makes
people feel like part of something larger than themselves, which makes them
happy and can (provably) improves their physical and mental health.

Others are more complicated. I can just make motions at a feeling that “what I
do matters”, in the sense that I will probably never be a Beethoven or a
Napoleon who is very important to the history of the world as a whole, but I
can do things that are important within the context of a certain group of
people. All of this is really good for my happiness and mental health. When
people talk about how modern society is “atomized” or “lacks community” or
“doesn’t have meaning”, I think they’re talking about a lack of tribalism, which
leaves people all alone in the face of a society much too big to understand or
affect. The evolutionary psychology angle here is too obvious to even be worth
stating.

And others are entirely philosophical. I think some people would say that
wanting to have a tribe is like wanting to have a family – part of what it means
to be human – and demands to justify either are equally wrong-headed.

Eliezer thinks every cause wants to be a cult. I would phrase this more
neutrally as “every cause wants to be a tribe”. I’ve seen a lot of activities go
through the following cycle:

1. Let’s get together to do X

2. Let’s get together to do X, and have drinks afterwards
3. Let’s get together to discuss things from an X-informed perspective
4. Let’s get together to discuss the sorts of things that interest people who
do X
5. Let’s get together to discuss how the sort of people who do X are much
better than the sort of people who do Y.
6. Dating site for the sort of people who do X
7. Oh god, it was so annoying, she spent the whole date talking about X.
8. X? What X?
This can happen over anything or nothing at all. Despite the artificial nature of
the Robbers’ Cove experiment, its groups are easily recognized as tribes.
Indeed, the reason this experiment is so interesting is that it shows tribes in
their purest form; no veneer of really being about pushing a social change or
supporting a caliph, just tribes for tribalism’s sake.

III.

Scholars call the process of creating a new tribe “ethnogenesis” – Robbers’

Cave was artificially inducing ethnogenesis to see what would happen. My
model of ethnogenesis involves four stages: pre-existing differences, a rallying
flag, development, and dissolution.

Pre-existing differences are the raw materials out of which tribes are made. A
good tribe combines people who have similar interests and styles of
interaction even before the ethnogenesis event. Any description of these
differences will necessarily involve stereotypes, but a lot of them should be
hard to argue. For example, atheists are often pretty similar to one another
even before they deconvert from their religion and officially become atheists.
They’re usually nerdy, skeptical, rational, not very big on community or
togetherness, sarcastic, well-educated. At the risk of going into touchier
territory, they’re pretty often white and male. You take a sample of a hundred
equally religious churchgoers and pick out the ones who are most like the sort
of people who are atheists even if all of them are 100% believers. But there’s
also something more than that. There are subtle habits of thought, not yet
described by any word or sentence, which atheists are more likely to have than
other people. It’s part of the reason why atheists need atheism as a rallying
flag instead of just starting the Skeptical Nerdy Male Club.

The rallying flag is the explicit purpose of the tribe. It’s usually a belief, event,
or activity that get people with that specific pre-existing difference together
and excited. Often it brings previously latent differences into sharp relief.
People meet around the rallying flag, encounter each other, and say “You seem
like a kindred soul!” or “I thought I was the only one!” Usually it suggests
some course of action, which provides the tribe with a purpose. For atheists,
the rallying flag is not believing in God. Somebody says “Hey, I don’t believe in
God, if you also don’t believe in God come over here and we’ll hang out
together and talk about how much religious people suck.” All the atheists go
over by the rallying flag and get very excited about meeting each other. It
starts with “Wow, you hate church too?”, moves on to “Really, you also like
science fiction?”, and ends up at “Wow, you have the same undefinable habits
of thought that I do!”

Development is all of the processes by which the fledgling tribe gains its own
culture and history. It’s a turning-inward and strengthening-of-walls, which
transforms it from ‘A Group Of People Who Do Not Believe In God And
Happen To Be In The Same Place’ to ‘The Atheist Tribe’. For example, atheists
have symbols like that ‘A’ inside an atom. They have jokes and mascots like
Russell’s Teapot and the Invisible Pink Unicorn. They have their own set of
heroes, both mythologized past heroes like Galileo and controversial-but-
undeniably-important modern heroes like Richard Dawkins and Daniel
Dennett. They have celebrities like P.Z. Myers and Hemant Mehta. They have
universally-agreed-upon villains to be booed and hated, like televangelists or
the Westboro Baptist Church. They have grievances, like all the times that
atheists have been fired or picked on by religious people, and all the laws
about pledging allegiance to one nation under God and so on. They have
stereotypes about themselves – intelligent, helpful, passionate – and
stereotypes about their outgroups – deluded, ignorant, bigoted.

Dissolution is optional. The point of the previous three steps is to build a

“wall” between the tribe and the outside, a series of systematic differences that
let everybody know which side they’re on. If a tribe was never really that
different from the surrounding population, stops caring that much about its
rallying flag, and doesn’t develop enough culture, then the wall fails and the
members disperse into the surrounding population. The classic example is the
assimilation of immigrant groups like Irish-Americans, but history is littered
with failed communes, cults, and political movements. Atheism hasn’t quite
dissolved yet, but occasionally you see hints of the process. A lot of the
comments around “Atheism Plus” centered around this idea of “Okay, talking
about how there’s no God all the time has gotten boring, plus nobody
interesting believes in God anymore anyway, so let’s become about social
justice instead”. The parts of atheism who went along with that message
mostly dissolved into the broader social justice community – there are a host
of nominally atheist blogs that haven’t talked about anything except social
justice in months. Other fragments of the atheist community dissolved into
transhumanism, or libertarianism, or any of a number of other things.
Although there’s still an atheist community, it no longer seems quite as
vibrant and cohesive as it used to be.

We can check this four-stage model by applying it to the Sunni and Shia and
seeing if it sticks.

I know very little about early Islam and am relying on sources that might be
biased, so don’t declare a fatwa against me if I turn out to be wrong, but it
looks like from the beginning there were big pre-existing differences between
proto-Shia and proto-Sunni. A lot of Ali’s earliest supporters were original
Muslims who had known Mohammed personally, and a lot of Abu Bakr’s
earliest supporters were later Muslims high up in the Meccan/Medinan
political establishment who’d converted only after it became convenient to do
so. It’s really easy to imagine cultural, social, and personality differences
between these two groups. Probably members in each group already knew one
another pretty well, and already had ill feelings towards members of the other,
without necessarily being able to draw the group borders clearly or put their
exact differences into words. Maybe it was “those goody-goodies who are
always going on about how close to Mohammed they were but have no
practical governing ability” versus “those sellouts who don’t really believe in
Islam and just want to keep playing their political games”.

Then came the rallying flag: a political disagreement over the succession. One
group called themselves “the party of Ali”, whose Arabic translation “Shiatu
Ali” eventually ended up as just “Shia”. The other group won and called itself
“the traditional orthodox group”, in Arabic “Sunni”. Instead of a vague sense
of “I wonder whether that guy there is one of those goody-goodies always
talking about Mohammed, or whether he’s a practical type interested in good
governance”, people could just ask “Are you for Abu Bakr or Ali?” and later
“Are you Sunni or Shia?” Also at some point, I’m not exactly sure how, most of
the Sunni ended up in Arabia and most of the Shia ended up in Iraq and Iran,
after which I think some pre-existing Iraqi/Iranian vs. Arab cultural
differences got absorbed into the Sunni/Shia mix too.

Then came development. Both groups developed elaborate mythologies

lionizing their founders. The Sunni got the history of the “rightly-guided
caliphs”, the Shia exaggerated the first few imams to legendary proportions.
They developed grievances against each other; according to Shia history, the
Sunnis killed eleven of their twelve leaders, with the twelfth escaping only
when God directly plucked him out of the world to serve as a future Messiah.
They developed different schools of hadith interpretation and jurisprudence
and debated the differences ad nauseum with each other for hundreds of
years. A lot of Shia theology is in Farsi; Sunni theology is entirely in Arabic.
Sunni clergy usually dress in white; Shia clergy usually dress in black and
green. Not all of these were deliberately done in opposition to one another;
most were just a consequence of the two camps being walled off from one
another and so allowed to develop cultures independently.

Obviously the split hasn’t dissolved yet, but it’s worth looking at similar splits
that have. Catholicism vs. Protestantism is still a going concern in a few places
like Ireland, but it’s nowhere near the total wars of the 17th century or even
the Know-Nothing-Parties of the 19th. Consider that Marco Rubio is Catholic,
but nobody except Salon particularly worries about that or says that it will
make him unsuitable to lead a party representing the interests of very
evangelical Protestants. Heck, the same party was happy to nominate Mitt
Romney, a Mormon, and praise him for his “Christian faith”. Part of it is the
subsumption of those differences into a larger conflict – most Christians
acknowledge Christianity vs. atheism to be a bigger deal than
interdenominational disputes these days – and part of it is that everyone of
every religion is so influenced by secular American culture that the religions
have been reduced to their rallying flags alone rather than being fully
developed tribes at this point. American Sunni and Shia seem to be well on
their way to dissolving into each other too.

IV.

I want to discuss a couple of issues that I think make more sense once you
understand the concept of tribes and rallying flags:

1. Disability: I used to be very confused by disabled people who insist on not

wanting a “cure” for their condition. Deaf people and autistic people are the
two classic examples, and sure enough we find articles like Not All Deaf People
Want To Be Cured and They Don’t Want An Autism Cure. Autistic people can
at least argue their minds work differently rather than worse, but being deaf
seems to be a straight-out disadvantage: the hearing can do anything the deaf
can, and can hear also. A hearing person can become deaf at any time just by
wearing earplugs, but a deaf person can’t become hearing, at least not without
very complicated high-tech surgeries.

When I asked some deaf friends about this, they explained that they had a
really close-knit and supportive deaf culture, and that most of their friends,
social events, and ways of relating to other people and the world were through
this culture. This made sense, but I always wondered: if you were able to hear,
couldn’t you form some other culture? If worst came to worst and nobody else
wanted to talk to you, couldn’t you at least have the Ex-Deaf People’s Club?

I don’t think so. Deafness acts as a rallying flag that connects people, gives
them a shared foundation to build culture off of, and walls the group off from
other people. If all deaf people magically became able to hear, their culture
would eventually drift apart, and they’d be stuck without an ingroup to call
their own.

Part of this is reasonable cost-benefit calculation – our society is so vast and

atomized, and forming real cohesive tribes is so hard, that they might
reasonably expect it would be a lot of trouble to find another group they liked
as much as the deaf community. But another part of this seems to be about an
urge to cultural self-preservation.

2. Genocide: This term is kind of overused these days. I always thought of it as

meaning literally killing every member of a certain group – the Holocaust, for
example – but the new usage includes “cultural genocide”. For example,
autism rights advocates sometimes say that anybody who cured autism would
be committing genocide – this is of course soundly mocked, but it makes sense
if you think of autistic people as a tribe that would be dissolved absent its
rallying flag. The tribe would be eliminated – thus “cultural genocide” is a
reasonable albeit polemical description.

It seems to me that people have an urge toward cultural self-preservation

which is as strong or stronger as the urge to individual self-preservation. Part
of this is rational cost-benefit calculation – if someone loses their only tribe
and ends up alone in the vast and atomized sea of modern society, it might
take years before they can find another tribe and really be at home there. But a
lot of it seems to be beyond that, an emotional certainty that losing one’s
culture and having it replaced with another is not okay, any more than being
killed at the same time someone else has a baby is okay. Nor do I think this is
necessarily irrational; locating the thing whose survival you care about in the
self rather than the community is an assumption, and people can make
different assumptions without being obviously wrong.

3. Rationalists: The rationalist community is a group of people (of which I’m a

part) who met reading the site Less Wrong and who tend to hang out together
online, sometimes hang out together in real life, and tend to befriend each
other, work with each other, date each other, and generally move in the same
social circles. Some people call it a cult, but that’s more a sign of some people
having lost vocabulary for anything between “totally atomized individuals”
and “outright cult” than any particular cultishness.

But people keep asking me what exactly the rationalist community is. Like,
what is the thing they believe that makes them rationalists? It can’t just be
about being rational, because loads of people are interested in that and most
of them aren’t part of the community. And it can’t just be about
transhumanism because there are a lot of transhumanists who aren’t
rationalists, and lots of rationalists who aren’t transhumanists. And it can’t
just be about Bayesianism, because pretty much everyone, rationalist or
otherwise, agrees that is a kind of statistics that is useful for some things but
not others. So what, exactly, is it?

This question has always bothered me, but now after thinking about it a lot I
finally have a clear answer: rationalism is the belief that Eliezer Yudkowsky is
the rightful caliph.

No! Sorry! I think “the rationalist community” is a tribe much like the Sunni
or Shia that started off with some pre-existing differences, found a rallying
flag, and then developed a culture.

The pre-existing differences range from the obvious to the subtle. A lot of
rationalists are mathematicians, programmers, or computer scientists. The
average IQ is in the 130s. White men are overrepresented, but so are LGBT
and especially transgender people. But there’s more. Nobody likes the Myers-
Briggs test, but I continue to find it really interesting that rationalists have
some Myers-Briggs types (INTJ/INTP) at ten times the ordinary rate, and
other types (ISFJ/ESFP) at only one one-hundredth the ordinary rate. Myers-
Briggs doesn’t cleave reality at its joints, but if it measures anything at all
about otherwise hard-to-explain differences in thinking styles, the rationalist
community heavily selects for those same differences. Sure enough, I am
constantly running into people who say “This is the only place where I’ve ever
found people who think like me” or “I finally feel understood”.

The rallying flag was the Less Wrong Sequences. Eliezer Yudkowsky started a
blog (actually, borrowed Robin Hanson’s) about cognitive biases and how to
think through them. Whether or not you agreed with him or found him
enlightening loaded heavily on those pre-existing differences, so the people
who showed up in the comment section got along and started meeting up with
each other. “Do you like Eliezer Yudkowsky’s blog?” became a useful proxy for
all sorts of things, eventually somebody coined the word “rationalist” to refer
to people who did, and then you had a group with nice clear boundaries.

The development is everything else. Obviously a lot of jargon sprung up in the

form of terms from the blog itself. The community got heroes like Gwern and
Anna Salamon who were notable for being able to approach difficult questions
insightfully. It doesn’t have much of an outgroup yet – maybe just bioethicists
and evil robots. It has its own foods – MealSquares, that one kind of chocolate
everyone in Berkeley started eating around the same time – and its own
games. It definitely has its own inside jokes. I think its most important aspect,
though, is a set of shared mores – everything from “understand the difference
between ask and guess culture and don’t get caught up in it” to “cuddling is
okay” to “don’t misgender trans people” – and a set of shared philosophical
assumptions like utilitarianism and reductionism.

I’m stressing this because I keep hearing people ask “What is the rationalist
community?” or “It’s really weird that I seem to be involved in the rationalist
community even though I don’t share belief X” as if there’s some sort of
necessary-and-sufficient featherless-biped-style ideological criterion for
membership. This is why people are saying “Lots of you aren’t even
singularitarians, and everyone agrees Bayesian methods are useful in some
places and not so useful in others, so what is your community even about?”
But once again, it’s about Eliezer Yudkowsky being the rightful caliph it’s not
necessarily aboutanything.
If you take only one thing from this essay, it’s that communities are best
understood not logically but historically. If you want to understand the Shia,
don’t reflect upon the true meaning of Ali being the rightful caliph, understand
that a dispute involving Ali initiated ethnogenesis, the resulting culture picked
up a bunch of features and became useful to various people, and now here we
are. If you want to understand the rationalist community, don’t ask exactly
how near you have to think the singularity has to be before you qualify for
membership, focus on the fact that some stuff Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote led to
certain people identifying themselves as “rationalists” and for various reasons
I enjoy dinner parties with those people about 10000% more interesting than
dinner parties with randomly selected individuals.

nostalgebraist actually summed this up really well: “Maybe the real

rationalism was the friends we made along the way.” Maybe that’s the real
Shia Islam too, and the real Democratic Party, and so on.

4. Evangelical And Progressive Religion: There seems to be a generational

process, sort of like Harold Lee’s theory of immigrant assimilation, by which
religions dissolve. The first generation believes everything literally. The
second generation believes that the religion might not be literally true, but it’s
an important expression of universal values and they still want to follow the
old ways and participate in the church/temple/mosque/mandir community.
The third generation is completely secularized.

This was certainly my family’s relationship with Judaism. My great-great-

grandfather was so Jewish that he left America and returned to Eastern
Europe because he was upset at American Jews for not being religious enough.
My great-grandfather stayed behind in America but remained a very religious
Jew. My grandparents attend synagogue when they can remember, speak a
little Yiddish, and identify with the traditions. My parents went to a really
liberal synagogue where the rabbi didn’t believe in God and everyone just
agreed they were going through the motions. I got Bar Mitzvahed when I was a
kid but haven’t been to synagogue in years. My children probably won’t even
have that much.

So imagine you’re an evangelical Christian. All the people you like are also
evangelical Christians. Most of your social life happens at church. Most of your
good memories involve things like Sunday school and Easter celebrations, and
even your bittersweet memories are things like your pastor speaking at your
parents’ funeral. Most of your hopes and dreams involve marrying someone
and having kids and then sharing similarly good times with them. When you
try to hang out with people who aren’t evangelical Christians, they seem to
think really differently than you do, and not at all in a good way. A lot of your
happiest intellectual experiences involve geeking out over different Bible
verses and the minutiae of different Christian denominations.

Then somebody points out to you that God probably doesn’t exist. And even if
He does, it’s probably in some vague and complicated way, and not the way
that means that the Thrice-Reformed Meta-Baptist Church and only the
Thrice-Reformed Meta-Baptist Church has the correct interpretation of the
Bible and everyone else is wrong.

On the one hand, their argument might be convincing. On the other, you are
pretty sure that if everyone agreed on this, your culture would be destroyed.
Sure, your kids could be Christmas-and-Easter-Christians who still enjoy the
cultural aspects and derive personal meaning from the Bible. But you’re pretty
sure that within a couple of generations your descendents would be exactly as
secular as anyone else. Absent the belief that serves as your culture’s wall
against the outside world, it would dissolve without a trace into the greater
homogeneity of Western liberal society. So, do you keep believing a false
thing? Or do you give up on everything you love and enjoy and dissolve into a
culture that mostly hates and mocks people like you? There’s no good choice.
This is why it sucks that things like religion and politics are both rallying flags
for tribes, and actual things that there may be a correct position on.

5. Religious Literalism: One comment complaint I heard during the height of

the Atheist-Theist Online Wars was that atheists were a lot like
fundamentalists. Both wanted to interpret the religious texts in the most
literal possible way.

Being on the atheist side of these wars, I always wanted to know: well, why
wouldn’t you? Given that the New Testament clearly says you have to give all
your money to the poor, and the Old Testament doesn’t say anything about
mixing meat and milk, maybe religious Christians should start giving
everything to the poor and religious Jews should stop worrying so much about
which dishes to use when?
But I think this is the same mistake as treating the Sunni as an organization
dedicated to promoting an Abu Bakr caliphate. The holy book is the rallying
flag for a religion, but the religion is not itself about the holy book. The
rallying flag created a walled-off space where people could undergo the
development process and create an independent culture. That independent
culture may diverge significantly from the holy book.

I think that very neurotypical people naturally think in terms of tribes, and the
idea that they have to retool their perfectly functional tribe to conform to the
exact written text of its holy book or constitution or stated political ideology or
something seems silly to them. I think that less neurotypical people – a group
including many atheists – think less naturally in terms of tribes and so tend to
take claims like “Christianity is about following the Bible” at face value. But
Christianity is about being part of the Christian tribe, and although that tribe
started around the Bible, maintains its coherence because of the Bible, and is
of course naturally influenced by it, if it happens to contradict the Bible in
some cases that’s not necessarily surprising or catastrophic.

This is also why I’m not really a fan of debates over whether Islam is really “a
religion of peace” or “a religion of violence”, especially if those debates involve
mining the Quran for passages that support one’s preferred viewpoint. It’s not
just because the Quran is a mess of contradictions with enough interpretive
degrees of freedom to prove anything at all. It’s not even because Islam is a
host of separate cultures as different from one another as Unitarianism is from
the Knights Templar. It’s because the Quran just created the space in which
the Islamic culture could evolve, but had only limited impact on that
evolution. As well try to predict the warlike or peaceful nature of the United
Kingdom by looking at a topographical map of Great Britain.

6. Cultural Appropriation: Thanks to some people who finally explained this to

me in a way that made sense. When an item or artform becomes the rallying
flag for a tribe, it can threaten the tribe if other people just want to use it as a
normal item or artform.

Suppose that rappers start with pre-existing differences from everyone else.
Poor, male, non-white minority, lots of experience living in violent places,
maybe a certain philosophical outlook towards their condition. Then they get a
rallying flag: rap music. They meet one another, like one another. The culture
undergoes further development: the lionization of famous rappers, the
development of a vocabulary of shared references. They get all of the benefits
of being in a tribe like increased trust, social networking, and a sense of pride
and identity.

Now suppose some rich white people get into rap. Maybe they get into rap for
innocuous reasons: rap is cool, they like the sound of it. Fine. But they don’t
share the pre-existing differences, and they can’t be easily assimilated into the
tribe. Maybe they develop different conventions, and start saying that instead
of being about the struggles of living in severe poverty, rap should be about
Founding Fathers. Maybe they start saying the original rappers are bad, and
they should stop talking about violence and bitches because that ruins rap’s
reputation. Since rich white people tend to be be good at gaining power and
influence, maybe their opinions are overrepresented at the Annual Rap
Awards, and all of a sudden you can’t win a rap award unless your rap is about
the Founding Fathers and doesn’t mention violence (except Founding-Father-
related duels). All of a sudden if you try to start some kind of impromptu
street rap-off, you’re no longer going to find a lot of people like you whom you
instantly get along with and can form a high-trust community. You’re going to
find half people like that, and half rich white people who strike you as
annoying and are always complaining that your raps don’t feature any
Founding Fathers at all. The rallying flag fails and the tribe is lost as a cohesive
entity.

7. Fake Gamer Girls: A more controversial example of the same. Video gaming
isn’t just a fun way to pass the time. It also brings together a group of people
with some pre-existing common characteristics: male, nerdy, often abrasive,
not very successful, interested in speculation, high-systematizing. It gives
them a rallying flag and creates a culture which then develops its own norms,
shared reference points, internet memes, webcomics, heroes, shared gripes,
even some unique literature. Then other people with very different
characteristics and no particular knowledge of the culture start enjoying video
games just because video games are fun. Since the Gamer Tribe has no
designated cultural spaces except video games forums and magazines, they
view this as an incursion into their cultural spaces and a threat to their
existence as a tribe.
Stereotypically this is expressed as them getting angry when girls start playing
video games. One can argue that it’s unfair to infer tribe membership based on
superficial characteristics like gender – in the same way it might be unfair for
the Native Americans to assume someone with blonde hair and blue eyes
probably doesn’t follow the Old Ways – but from the tribe’s perspective it’s a
reasonable first guess.

I’ve found gamers to get along pretty well with women who share their culture,
and poorly with men who don’t – but admit that the one often starts from an
assumption of foreignness and the other from an assumption of membership.
More important, I’ve found the idea of the rejection of the ‘fake gamer girl’,
real or not, raised more as a libel by people who genuinely do want to destroy
gamer culture, in the sense of cleansing video-game-related spaces of a certain
type of person/culture and making them entirely controlled by a different type
of person/culture, in much the same way that a rich white person who says
any rapper who uses violent lyrics needs to be blacklisted from the rap world
has a clear culture-change project going on.

These cultural change projects tend to be framed in terms of which culture has
the better values, which I think is a limited perspective. I think America has
better values than Pakistan does, but that doesn’t mean I want us invading
them, let alone razing their culture to the ground and replacing it with our
own.

8. Subcultures And Posers: Obligatory David Chapman link. A poser is

somebody who uses the rallying flag but doesn’t have the pre-existing
differences that create tribal membership and so never really fits into the
tribe.

9. Nationalism, Patriotism, and Racism: Nationalism and patriotism use

national identity as the rallying flag for a strong tribe. In many cases,
nationalism becomes ethno-nationalism, which builds tribal identity off of a
combination of heritage, language, religion, and culture. It has to be admitted
that this can make for some incredibly strong tribes. The rallying flag is built
into ancestry, and so the walls are near impossible to obliterate. The
symbolism and jargon and cultural identity can be instilled from birth onward.
Probably the best example of this is the Jews, who combine ethnicity, religion,
and language into a bundle deal and have resisted assimilation for millennia.
Sometimes this can devolve into racism. I’m not sure exactly what the
difference between ethno-nationalism and racism is, or whether there even is
a difference, except that “race” is a much more complicated concept than
ethnicity and it’s probably not a coincidence that it has become most popular
in a country like America whose ethnicities are hopelessly confused. The Nazis
certainly needed a lot of work to transform concern about the German nation
into concern about the Aryan race. But it’s fair to say all of this is somewhat
related or at least potentially related.

On the other hand, in countries that have non-ethnic notions of heritage,

patriotism has an opportunity to substitute for racism. Think about the power
of the civil rights message that, whether black or white, we are all Americans.

This is maybe most obvious in sub-national groups. Despite people paying a

lot of attention to the supposed racism of Republicans, the rare black
Republicans do shockingly well within their party. Both Ben Carson and
Herman Cain briefly topped the Republican presidential primary polls during
their respective election seasons, and their failures seem to have had much
more to do with their own personal qualities than with some sort of generic
Republican racism. I see the same with Thomas Sowell, with Hispanic
Republicans like Ted Cruz, and Asian Republicans like Bobby Jindal.

Maybe an even stronger example is the human biodiversity movement, which

many people understandably accuse of being entirely about racism.
Nevertheless, some of its most leading figures are black – JayMan and Chanda
Chisala (who is adjacent to the movement but gets lots of respect within it) –
and they seem to get equal treatment and respect to their white counterparts.
Their membership in a strong and close-knit tribe screens off everything else
about them.

I worry that attempts to undermine nationalism/patriotism in order to fight

racism risk backfiring. The weaker the “American” tribe becomes, the more
people emphasize their other tribes – which can be either overtly racial or else
heavily divided along racial lines (eg political parties). It continues to worry
me that people who would never display an American flag on their lawn
because “nations are just a club for hating foreigners” now have a campaign
sign on their lawn, five bumper stickers on their car, and are identifying more
and more strongly with political positions – ie clubs for hating their fellow
citizens.

Is there such a thing as conservation of tribalism? Get rid of one tribal identity
and people just end up seizing on another? I’m not sure. And anyway, nobody
can agree on exactly what the American identity or American tribe is anyway,
so any conceivable such identity would probably risk alienating a bunch of
people. I guess that makes it a moot point. But I still think that deliberately
trying to eradicate patriotism is not as good an idea as is generally believed.

V.

I think tribes are interesting and underdiscussed. And in a lot of cases when
they are discussed, it’s within preexisting frameworks that tilt the playing field
towards recognizing some tribes as fundamentally good, others as
fundamentally bad, and ignoring the commonalities between all of them.

But in order to talk about tribes coherently, we need to talk about rallying
flags. And that involves admitting that a lot of rallying flags are based on
ideologies (which are sometimes wrong), holy books (which are always
wrong), nationality (which we can’t define), race (which is racist), and works
of art (which some people inconveniently want to enjoy just as normal art
without any connotations).

My title for this post is also my preferred summary: the ideology is not the
movement. Or, more jargonishly – the rallying flag is not the tribe. People are
just trying to find a tribe for themselves and keep it intact. This often involves
defending an ideology they might not be tempted to defend for any other
reason. This doesn’t make them bad, and it may not even necessarily mean
their tribe deserves to go extinct. I’m reluctant to say for sure whether I think
it’s okay to maintain a tribe based on a faulty ideology, but I think it’s at least
important to understand that these people are in a crappy situation with no
good choices, and they deserve some pity.

Some vital aspects of modern society – freedom of speech, freedom of

criticism, access to multiple viewpoints, the existence of entryist tribes with
explicit goals of invading and destroying competing tribes as problematic, and
the overwhelming pressure to dissolve into the Generic Identity Of Modern
Secular Consumerism – make maintaining tribal identities really hard these
days. I think some of the most interesting sociological questions revolve
around whether there are any ways around the practical and moral difficulties
with tribalism, what social phenomena are explicable as the struggle of tribes
to maintain themselves in the face of pressure, and whether tribalism
continues to be a worthwhile or even a possible project at all.

EDIT: I’ve been informed of a very similar Melting Asphalt post, Religion Is
Not About Beliefs. Everyone has pre-stolen my best ideas 🙁

Archipelago and Atomic Communitarianism

I.

In the old days, you had your Culture, and that was that. Your Culture told you
lots of stuff about what you were and weren’t allowed to do, and by golly you
listened. Your Culture told you to work the job prescribed to you by your caste
and gender, to marry who your parents told you to marry or at least someone
of the opposite sex, to worship at the proper temples and the proper times,
and to talk about proper things as opposed to the blasphemous things said by
the tribe over there.

Then we got Liberalism, which said all of that was mostly bunk. Like Wicca, its
motto is “Do as you will, so long as it harms none”. Or in more political terms,
“Your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins” or “If you don’t like
gay sex, don’t have any” or “If you don’t like this TV program, don’t watch it”
or “What happens in the bedroom between consenting adults is none of your
business” or “It neither breaks my arm nor picks my pocket”. Your job isn’t to
enforce your conception of virtue upon everyone to build the Virtuous Society,
it’s to live your own life the way you want to live it and let other people live
their own lives the way they want to live them. This is the much-maligned
“atomic individualism,” or maybe just liberalism boiled down to its pure
essence.

But atomic individualism wasn’t as great a solution as it sounded. Maybe one

of the first cracks was tobacco ads. Even though putting up a billboard saying
“SMOKE MARLBORO” neither breaks anyone’s arm nor picks their pocket, it
shifts social expectations in such a way that bad effects occur. It’s hard to
dismiss that with “Well, it’s people’s own choice to smoke and they should live
their lives the way they want” if studies show that more people will want to live
their lives in a way that gives them cancer in the presence of the billboard than
otherwise.

From there we go into policies like Michael Bloomberg’s ban on giant sodas.
While the soda ban itself was probably as much symbolic as anything, it’s hard
to argue with the impetus behind it – a culture where everyone gets exposed to
the option to buy very very unhealthy food all the time is going to be less
healthy than one where there are some regulations in place to make EAT THIS
DONUT NOW a less salient option. I mean, I know this is true. A few months
ago when I was on a diet I cringed every time one my coworkers brought in a
box of free donuts and placed wide-open in the doctors’ lounge; there was no
way I wasn’t going to take one (or two, or three). I could ask people to stop,
but they probably wouldn’t, and even if they did I’d just encounter the wide-
open box of free donuts somewhere else. I’m not proposing that it is ethically
wrong to bring in free donuts or that banning them is the correct policy, but I
do want to make it clear that stating “it’s your free choice to partake or not”
doesn’t eliminate the problem, and that this points to an entire class of serious
issues where atomic individualism as construed above is at best an imperfect
heuristic.

And I would be remiss talking about the modern turn away from
individualism without mentioning social justice. The same people who once
deployed individualistic arguments against conservatives: “If you don’t like
profanity, don’t use it”, “If you don’t like this offensive TV show, don’t watch
it”, “If you don’t like pornography, don’t buy it” – are now concerned about
people using ethnic slurs, TV shows without enough minority characters, and
pornography that encourages the objectification of women. I’ve objected to
some of this on purely empirical grounds, but the least convenient possible
world is the one where the purely empirical objections fall flat. If they ever
discover proof positive that yeah, pornographication makes women hella
objectified, is it acceptable to censor or ban misogynist media on a society-
wide level?

And if the answer is yes – and if such media like really, really increases the
incidence of rape I’m not sure how it couldn’t be – then what about all those
conservative ideas we’ve been neglecting for so long? What if strong, cohesive,
religious, demographically uniform communities make people more trusting,
generous, and cooperative in a way that alsodecreases violent crime and other
forms of misery? We have lots of evidence that this is true, and although we
can doubt each individual study, we owe conservatives the courtesy of
imagining the possible world in which they are right, the same as anti-
misogyny leftists. Maybe media glorifying criminals or lionizing
nonconformists above those who quietly follow cultural norms has the same
kind of erosive effects on “values” as misogynist media. Or, at the very least,
we ought to have a good philosophy in place so that we have some idea what to
do it if does.

II.

A while ago, in Part V of this essay, I praised liberalism as the only peaceful
answer to Hobbes’ dilemma of the war of all against all.

Hobbes says that if everyone’s fighting then everyone loses out. Even the
winners probably end up worse off than if they had just been able to live in
peace. He says that governments are good ways to prevent this kind of conflict.
Someone – in his formulation a king – tells everyone else what they’re going to
do, and then everyone else does it. No fighting necessary. If someone tries to
start a conflict by ignoring the king, the king crushes them like a bug, no
prolonged fighting involved.

But this replaces the problem of potential warfare with the problem of
potential tyranny. So we’ve mostly shifted from absolute monarchies to other
forms of government, which is all nice and well except that governments allow
a different kind of war of all against all. Instead of trying to kill their enemies
and steal their stuff, people are tempted to ban their enemies and confiscate
their stuff. Instead of killing the Protestants, the Catholics simply ban
Protestantism. Instead of forming vigilante mobs to stone homosexuals, the
straights merely declare homosexuality is punishable by death. It might be
better than the alternative – at least everyone knows where they stand and
things stay peaceful – but the end result is still a lot of pretty miserable people.

Liberalism is a new form of Hobbesian equilibrium where the government

enforces not only a ban on killing and stealing from people you don’t like, but
also a ban on tyrannizing them out of existence. This is the famous “freedom
of religion” and “freedom of speech” and so on, as well as the “freedom of what
happens in the bedroom between consenting adults”. The Catholics don’t try
to ban Protestantism, the Protestants don’t try to ban Catholicism, and
everyone is happy.

Liberalism only works when it’s clear to everyone on all sides that there’s a
certain neutral principle everyone has to stick to. The neutral principle can’t
be the Bible, or Atlas Shrugged, or anything that makes it look like one
philosophy is allowed to judge the others. Right now that principle is the
Principle of Harm: you can do whatever you like unless it harms other people,
in which case stop. We seem to have inelegantly tacked on an “also, we can
collect taxes and use them for a social safety net and occasional attempts at
social progress”, but it seems to be working pretty okay too.

The Strict Principle of Harm says that pretty much the only two things the
government can get angry at is literally breaking your leg or picking your
pocket – violence or theft. The Loose Principle of Harm says that the
government can get angry at complicated indirect harms, things that Weaken
The Moral Fabric Of Society. Like putting up tobacco ads. Or having really
really big sodas. Or publishing hate speech against minorities. Or eroding trust
in the community. Or media that objectifies women.

No one except the most ideologically pure libertarians seems to want to insist
on the Strict Principle of Harm. But allowing the Loose Principle Of Harm
restores all of the old wars to control other people that liberalism was
supposed to prevent. The one person says “Gay marriage will result in
homosexuality becoming more accepted, leading to increased rates of STDs!
That’s a harm! We must ban gay marriage!” Another says “Allowing people to
send their children to non-public schools could lead to kids at religious
schools that preach against gay people, causing those children to commit hate
crimes when they grow up! That’s a harm! We must ban non-public schools!”
And so on, forever.

And I’m talking about non-governmental censorship just as much as

government censorship. Even in the most anti-gay communities in the United
States, the laws usually allow homosexuality or oppose it only in very weak,
easily circumvented ways. The real problem for gays in these communities is
the social pressure – whether that means disapproval or risk of violence – that
they would likely face for coming out. This too is a violation of liberalism, and
it’s one that’s as important or more important than the legal sort.

And right now our way of dealing with these problems is to argue them. “Well,
gay people don’t really increase STDs too much.” Or “Home-schooled kids do
better than public-schooled kids, so we need to allow them.” The problem is
that arguments never terminate. Maybe if you’re incredibly lucky, after years
of fighting you can get a couple of people on the other side to admit your side
is right, but this is a pretty hard process to trust. The great thing about
religious freedom is that it short-circuits the debate of “Which religion is
correct, Catholicism or Protestantism?” and allows people to tolerate both
Catholics and Protestants even if they are divided about the answer to this
object-level question. The great thing about freedom of speech is that it short-
circuits the debate of “Which party is correct, the Democrats or Republicans?”
and allows people to express both liberal and conservative opinions even if
they are divided about the object-level question.

If we force all of our discussions about whether to ban gay marriage or allow
home schooling to depend on resolving the dispute about whether they
indirectly harm the Fabric of Society in some way, we’re forcing dependence
on object-level arguments in a way that historically has been very very bad.

Presumably here the more powerful groups would win out and be able to
oppress the less powerful groups. We end up with exactly what liberalism tried
to avoid – a society where everyone is the guardian of the virtue of everyone
else, and anyone who wants to live their lives in a way different from the
community’s consensus is out of luck.

In Part I, I argued that not allowing people to worry about culture and
community at all was inadequate, because these things really do matter.

Here I’m saying that if we do allow people to worry about culture and
community, we risk the bad old medieval days where all nonconformity gets
ruthlessly quashed.

Right now we’re balanced precariously between the two states. There’s a lot of
liberalism, and people are generally still allowed to be gay or home-school
their children or practice their religion or whatever. But there’s also quite a bit
of Enforced Virtue, where kids are forbidden to watch porn and certain kinds
of media are censored and in some communities mentioning that you’re an
atheist will get you Dirty Looks.

It tends to work okay for most of the population. Better than the alternatives,
maybe? But there’s still a lot of the population that’s not free to do things that
are very important to them. And there’s also a lot of the population that would
like to live in more “virtuous” communities, whether it’s to lose weight faster
or avoid STDs or not have to worry about being objectified. Dealing with these
two competing issues is a pretty big part of political philosophy and one that
most people don’t have any principled solution for.

III.

Imagine a new frontier suddenly opening. Maybe a wizard appears and gives
us a map to a new archipelago that geographers had missed for the past few
centuries. He doesn’t want to rule the archipelago himself, though he will
reluctantly help kickstart the government. He just wants to give directions and
a free galleon to anybody who wants one and can muster a group of
likeminded friends large enough to start a self-sustaining colony.

And so the equivalent of our paleoconservatives go out and found

communities based on virtue, where all sexual deviancy is banned and only
wholesome films can be shown and people who burn the flag are thrown out to
be eaten by wolves.

And the equivalent of our social justiciars go out and found communities
where all movies have to have lots of strong minority characters in them, and
all slurs are way beyond the pale, and nobody misgenders anybody.

And the equivalent of our Objectivists go out and found communities based
totally on the Strict Principle of Harm where everyone is allowed to do
whatever they want and there are no regulations on business and everything is
super-capitalist all the time.
And some people who just really want to lose weight go out and found
communities where you’re not allowed to place open boxes of donuts in the
doctors’ lounge.

Usually the communities are based on a charter, which expresses some

founding ideals and asks only the people who agree with those ideals to enter.
The charter also specifies a system of government. It could be an absolute
monarch, charged with enforcing those ideals upon a population too stupid to
know what’s good for them. Or it could be a direct democracy of people who
all agree on some basic principles but want to work out for themselves what
direction the principles take them.

After a while the wizard decides to formalize and strengthen his system, not to
mention work out some of the ethical dilemmas.

First he bans communities from declaring war on each other. That’s an

obvious gain. He could just smite warmongers, but he thinks it’s more natural
and organic to get all the communities into a united government (UniGov for
short). Every community donates a certain amount to a military, and the
military’s only job is to quash anyone from any community who tries to invade
another.

Next he addresses externalities. For example, if some communities emit a lot

of carbon, and that causes global warming which threatens to destroy other
communities, UniGov puts a stop to that. If the offending communities refuse
to stop emitting carbon, then there’s that military again.

The third thing he does is prevent memetic contamination. If one community

wants to avoid all media that objectifies women, then no other community is
allowed to broadcast women-objectifying media at it. If a community wants to
live an anarcho-primitivist lifestyle, nobody else is allowed to import TVs.
Every community decides exactly how much informational contact it wants to
have with the rest of the continent, and no one is allowed to force them to have
more than that.

But the wizard and UniGov’s most important task is to think of the children.

Imagine you’re conservative Christians, and you’re tired of this secular godless
world, so you go off with your conservative Christian friends to found a
conservative Christian community. You all pray together and stuff and are
really happy. Then you have a daughter. Turns out she’s atheist and lesbian.
What now?

Well, it might be that your kid would be much happier at the lesbian separatist
community the next island over. The absolute minimum the united
government can do is enforce freedom of movement. That is, the second your
daughter decides she doesn’t want to be in Christiantopia anymore, she goes
to a UniGov embassy nearby and asks for a ticket out, which they give her, free
of charge. She gets airlifted to Lesbiantopia the next day. If anyone in
Christiantopia tries to prevent her from reaching that embassy, or threatens
her family if she leaves, or expresses the slightest amount of coercion to keep
her around, UniGov burns their city and salts their field.

But this is not nearly enough to fully solve the child problem. A child who is
abused may be too young to know that escape is an option, or may be
brainwashed into thinking they are evil, or guilted into believing they are
betraying their families to opt out. And although there is no perfect, elegant
solution here, the practical solution is that UniGov enforces some pretty strict
laws on child-rearing, and every child, no matter what other education they
receive, also has to receive a class taught by a UniGov representative in which
they learn about the other communities in the Archipelago, receive a basic
non-brainwashed view of the world, and are given directions to their nearest
UniGov representative who they can give their opt-out request to.

The list of communities they are informed about always starts with the capital,
ruled by UniGov itself and considered an inoffensive, neutral option for people
who don’t want anywhere in particular. And it always ends with a reminder
that if they can gather enough support, UniGov will provide them with a
galleon to go out and found their own community in hitherto uninhabited
lands.

There’s one more problem UniGov has to deal with: malicious inter-
community transfer. Suppose that there is some community which puts
extreme effort into educating its children, an education which it supports
through heavy taxation. New parents move to this community, reap the
benefits, and then when their children grow up they move back to their
previous community so they don’t have to pay the taxes to educate anyone
else. The communities themselves prevent some of this by immigration
restrictions – anyone who’s clearly taking advantage of them isn’t allowed in
(except in the capital, which has an official committment to let in anyone who
wants). But that still leaves the example of people maliciously leaving a high-
tax community once they’ve got theirs. I imagine this is a big deal in
Archipelago politics, but that in practice UniGov asks these people, even in
their new homes, to pay higher tax rates to subsidize their old community. Or
since that could be morally objectionable (imagine the lesbian separatist
having to pay taxes to Christiantopia which oppressed her), maybe they pay
the excess taxes to UniGov itself, just as a way of disincentivizing malicious
movement.

Because there are UniGov taxes, and most people are happy to pay them. In
my fantasy, UniGov isn’t an enemy, where the Christians view it as this evil
atheist conglomerate trying to steal their kids away from them and the
capitalists view it as this evil socialist conglomerate trying to enforce high
taxes. The Christians, the capitalists, and everyone else are extraordinarily
patriotic about being part of the Archipelago, for its full name is the
Archipelago of Civilized Communities, it is the standard-bearer of civilization
against the barbaric outside world, and it is precisely the institution that
allows them to maintain their distinctiveness in the face of what would
otherwise be irresistable pressure to conform. Atheistopia is the enemy of
Christiantopia, but only in the same way the Democratic Party is the enemy of
the Republican Party – two groups within the same community who may have
different ideas but who consider themselves part of the same broader whole,
fundamentally allies under a banner of which both are proud.

IV.

Robert Nozick once proposed a similar idea as a libertarian utopia, and it’s
easy to see why. UniGov does very very little. Other than the part with children
and the part with evening out taxation regimes, it just sits around preventing
communities from using force against each other. That makes it very very easy
for anyone who wants freedom to start a community that grants them the kind
of freedom they want – or, more likely, to just start a community organized on
purely libertarian principles. The United Government of Archipelago is the
perfect minarchist night watchman state, and any additions you make over
that are chosen by your own free will.
But other people could view the same plan as a conservative utopia.
Conservativism, when it’s not just Libertarianism Lite, is about building
strong cohesive communities of relatively similar people united around
common values. Archipelago is obviously built to make this as easy as
possible, and it’s hard to imagine that there wouldn’t pop up a bunch of
communities built around the idea of Decent Small-Town God-Fearing People
where everyone has white picket fences and goes to the same church and
nobody has to lock their doors at night (so basically Utah; I feel like this is one
of the rare cases where the US’ mostly-in-name-only Archipelagoness really
asserts itself). People who didn’t fit in could go to a Community Of People
Who Don’t Fit In and would have no need to nor right to complain, and no one
would have to deal with Those Durned Bureaucrats In Washington telling
them what to do.

But to me, this seems like a liberal utopia, even a leftist utopia, for three
reasons.

The first reason is that it extends the basic principle of liberalism – solve
differences of opinion by letting everyone do their own thing according to their
own values, then celebrate the diversity this produces. I like homosexuality,
you don’t, fine, I can be homosexual and you don’t have to, and having both
gay and straight people living side by side enriches society. This just takes the
whole thing one meta-level up – I want to live in a very sexually liberated
community, you want to live in a community where sex is treated purely as a
sacred act for the purpose of procreation, fine, I can live in the community I
want and you can live in the community you want, and having both sexually-
liberated and sexually-pure communities living side by side enriches society. It
is pretty much saying that the solution to any perceived problems of liberalism
is much more liberalism.

The second reason is quite similar to the conservative reason. A lot of liberals
have some pretty strong demands about the sorts of things they want society
to do. I was recently talking to Ozy about a group who believe that society
billing thin people is fatphobic, and that everyone needs to admit obese people
can be just as attractive and date more of them, and that anyone who
preferentially dates thinner people is Problematic. They also want people to
stop talking about nutrition and exercise publicly. I sympathize with these
people, especially having recently read a study showing that obese people are
much happier when surrounded by other obese, rather than skinny people.
But realistically, their movement will fail, and even philosophically, I’m not
sure how to determine if they have the right to demand what they are
demanding or what that question means. Their best bet is to found a
community on these kinds of principles and only invite people who already
share their preferences and aesthetics going in.

The third reason is the reason I specifically draw leftism in here. Liberalism,
and to a much greater degree leftism, are marked by the emphasis they place
on oppression. They’re particularly marked by an emphasis on oppression
being a really hard problem, and one that is structurally inherent to a certain
society. They are marked by a moderate amount of despair that this
oppression can ever be rooted out.

And I think a pretty strong response to this is making sure everyone is able to
say “Hey, you better not oppress us, because if you do, we can pack up and go
somewhere else.”

Like if you want to protest that this is unfair, that people shouldn’t be forced to
leave their homes because of oppression, fine, fair enough. But given that
oppression is going on, and you haven’t been able to fix it, giving people the
choice to get away from it seems like a pretty big win. I am reminded of the
many Jews who moved from Eastern Europe to America, the many blacks who
moved from the southern US to the northern US or Canada, and the many
gays who make it out of extremely homophobic areas to friendlier large cities.
One could even make a metaphor, I think rightly, to telling battered women
that they are allowed to leave their husbands, telling them they’re not forced to
stay in a relationship that they consider abusive, and making sure that there
are shelters available to receive them.

If any person who feels oppressed can leave whenever they like, to the point of
being provided a free plane ticket by the government, how long can oppression
go on before the oppressors give up and say “Yeah, guess we need someone to
work at these factories now that all our workers have gone to the communally-
owned factory down the road, we should probably at least let people unionize
or something so they will tolerate us”?
A commenter in the latest Asch thread mentioned an interesting quote by
Frederick Douglass:

The American people have always been anxious to know what they shall
do with us [black people]. I have had but one answer from the
beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played
the mischief with us. Do nothing with us!

It sounds like, if Frederick Douglass had the opportunity to go to some other

community, or even found a black ex-slave community, no racists allowed, he
probably would have taken it [edit: or not, or had strict conditions]. If the
people in slavery during his own time period had had the chance to leave their
plantations for that community, I bet they would have taken it too. And if you
believe there are still people today whose relationship with society are similar
in kind, if not in degree, to that of a plantation slave, you should be pretty
enthusiastic about the ability of exit rights and free association to disrupt
those oppressive relationships.

V.

We lack Archipelago’s big advantage – a vast frontier of unsettled land.

Which is not to say that people don’t form communes. They do. Some people
even have really clever ideas along these lines, like the seasteaders. But the
United States isn’t going to become Archipelago any time soon.

There’s another problem too, which I describe in my Anti-Reactionary FAQ.

Discussing ‘exit rights’, I say:

Exit rights are a great idea and of course having them is better than not
having them. But I have yet to hear Reactionaries who cite them as a
panacea explain in detail what exit rights we need beyond those we have
already.

The United States allows its citizens to leave the country by buying a
relatively cheap passport and go anywhere that will take them in, with
the exception of a few arch-enemies like Cuba – and those exceptions
are laughably easy to evade. It allows them to hold dual citizenship with
various foreign powers. It even allows them to renounce their American
citizenship entirely and become sole citizens of any foreign power that
will accept them.

Few Americans take advantage of this opportunity in any but the most
limited ways. When they do move abroad, it’s usually for business or
family reasons, rather than a rational decision to move to a different
country with policies more to their liking. There are constant threats by
dissatisfied Americans to move to Canada, and one in a thousand even
carry through with them, but the general situation seems to be that
America has a very large neighbor that speaks the same language, and
has an equally developed economy, and has policies that many
Americans prefer to their own country’s, and isn’t too hard to move to,
and almost no one takes advantage of this opportunity. Nor do I see
many people, even among the rich, moving to Singapore or Dubai.

Heck, the US has fifty states. Moving from one to another is as easy as
getting in a car, driving there, and renting a room, and although the
federal government limits exactly how different their policies can be you
better believe that there are very important differences in areas like
taxes, business climate, education, crime, gun control, and many more.
Yet aside from the fascinating but small-scale Free State Project there’s
little politically-motivated interstate movement, nor do states seem to
have been motivated to converge on their policies or be less ideologically
driven.

What if we held an exit rights party, and nobody came?

Even aside from the international problems of gaining citizenship,

dealing with a language barrier, and adapting to a new culture, people
are just rooted – property, friends, family, jobs. The end result is that
the only people who can leave their countries behind are very poor
refugees with nothing to lose, and very rich jet-setters. The former aren’t
very attractive customers, and the latter have all their money in tax
shelters anyway.

So although the idea of being able to choose your country like a savvy
consumer appeals to me, just saying “exit rights!” isn’t going to make it
happen, and I haven’t heard any more elaborate plans.
I guess I still feel that way. So although Archipelago is an interesting exercise
in political science, a sort of pure case we can compare ourselves to, it doesn’t
look like a practical solution for real problems.

On the other hand, I do think it’s worth becoming more Archipelagian on the
margin rather than less so, and that there are good ways to do it.

One of the things that started this whole line of thought was an argument on
Facebook about a very conservative Christian law school trying to open up in
Canada. They had lots of rules like how their students couldn’t have sex before
marriage and stuff like that. The Canadian province they were in was trying to
deny them accreditation, because conservative Christians are icky. I think the
exact arguments being used were that it was homophobic, because the
conservative Christians there would probably frown on married gays and
therefore gays couldn’t have sex at all. Therefore, the law school shouldn’t be
allowed to exist. There were other arguments of about this caliber, but they all
seemed to boil down to “conservative Christians are icky”.

This very much annoyed me. Yes, conservative Christians are icky. And they
should be allowed to form completely voluntary communities of icky people
that enforce icky cultural norms and an insular society promoting ickiness,
just like everyone else. If non-conservative-Christians don’t like what they’re
doing, they should not go to that law school. Instead they can go to one of the
dozens of other law schools that conform to their own philosophies. And if
gays want a law school even friendlier to them than the average Canadian law
school, they should be allowed to create some law school that only accepts
gays and bans homophobes and teaches lots of courses on gay marriage law all
the time.

Another person on the Facebook thread complained that this line of

arguments leads to being okay with white separatists. And so it does. Fine. I
think white separatists have exactly the right position about where the sort of
white people who want to be white separatists should be relative to everyone
else – separate. I am not sure what you think you are gaining by demanding
that white separatists live in communities with a lot of black people in them,
but I bet the black people in those communities aren’t thanking you. Why
would they want a white separatist as a neighbor? Why should they have to
have one?
If people want to go do their own thing in a way that harms no one else, you let
them. That’s the Archipelagian way.

(someone will protest that Archipelagian voluntary freedom of association or

disassociation could, in cases of enough racial prejudice, lead to segregation,
and that segregation didn’t work. Indeed it didn’t. But I feel like a version of
segregation in which black people actually had the legally mandated right to
get away from white people and remain completely unmolested by them – and
where a white-controlled government wasn’t in charge of divvying up
resources between white and black communities – would have worked a lot
better than the segregation we actually had. The segregation we actually had
was one in which white and black communities were separate until white
people wanted something from black people, at which case they waltzed in and
took it. If communities were actually totally separate, government and
everything, by definition it would be impossible for one to oppress the other.
The black community might start with less, but that could be solved by some
kind of reparations. The Archipelagian way of dealing with this issue would be
for white separatists to have separate white communities, black separatists to
have separate black communities, integrationists to have integrated
communities, resdistributive taxation from wealthier communities going into
less wealthy ones, and a strong central government ruthlessly enforcing laws
against any community trying to hurt another. I don’t think there’s a single
black person in the segregation-era South who wouldn’t have taken that deal,
and any black person who thinks the effect of whites on their community
today is net negative should be pretty interested as well.)

This is one reason I find people who hate seasteads so distasteful. I mean,
here’s what Reuters has to say about seasteading:

Fringe movements, of course, rarely cast themselves as obviously fringe.

Racist, anti-civil rights forces cloaked themselves in the benign language
of “state’s rights”. Anti-gay religious entities adopted the glossy, positive
imagery of “family values”. Similarly, though many Libertarians
embrace a pseudo-patriotic apple pie nostalgia, behind this façade is a
very un-American, sinister vision.

Sure, most libertarians may not want to do away entirely with the idea of
government or, for that matter, government-protected rights and civil
 liberties. But many do — and ironically vie for political power in a nation
they ultimately want to destroy. Even the right-wing pundit Ann Coulter
mocked the paradox of Libertarian candidates: “Get rid of government
— but first, make me president!” Libertarians sowed the seeds of anti-
government discontent, which is on the rise, and now want to harvest
that discontent for a very radical, anti-America agenda. The image of
libertarians living off-shore in their lawless private nation-states is just a
postcard of the future they hope to build on land.

Strangely, the libertarian agenda has largely escaped scrutiny, at least

compared to that of social conservatives. The fact that the political class
is locked in debate about whether Michele Bachmann or Rick Perry is
more socially conservative only creates a veneer of mainstream
legitimacy for the likes of Ron Paul, whose libertarianism may be even
more extreme and dangerously un-patriotic. With any luck America will
recognize anti-government extremism for what it is — before
libertarians throw America overboard and render us all castaways.

Keep in mind this is because some people want to go off and do their own
thing in the middle of the ocean far away from everyone else without
bothering anyone. And the newspapers are trying to whip up a panic about
“throwing America overboard”.

So one way we could become more Archipelagian is just trying not to yell at
people who are trying to go off and doing their own thing quietly with a
group of voluntarily consenting friends.

But I think a better candidate for how to build a more Archipelagian world is
to encourage the fracture of society into subcultures.

Like, transsexuals may not be able to go to a transsexual island somewhere

and build Transtopia where anyone who misgenders anyone else gets thrown
into a volcano. But of the transsexuals I know, a lot of them have lots of
transsexual friends, their cissexual friends are all up-to-date on trans issues
and don’t do a lot of misgendering, and they have great social networks where
they share information about what businesses and doctors are or aren’t trans-
friendly. They can take advantage of trigger warnings to make sure they
expose themselves to only the sources that fit the values of their community,
the information that would get broadcast if it was a normal community that
could impose media norms. As Internet interaction starts to replace real-life
interaction (and I think for a lot of people the majority of their social life is
already on the Internet, and for some the majority of their economic life is as
well) it becomes increasingly easy to limit yourself to transsexual-friendly
spaces that keep bad people away.

The rationalist community is another good example. If I wanted, I could move

to the Bay Area tomorrow and never have more than a tiny amount of contact
with non-rationalists again. I could have rationalist roommates, live in a
rationalist group house, try to date only other rationalists, try to get a job with
a rationalist nonprofit like CFAR or a rationalist company like Quixey, and
never have to deal with the benighted and depressing non-rationalist world
again. Even without moving to the Bay Area, it’s been pretty easy for me to
keep a lot of my social life, both on- and off- line, rationalist-focused, and I
don’t regret this at all.

I don’t know if the future will be virtual reality. I expect the post-singularity
future will include something like VR, although that might be like describing
teleportation as “basically a sort of pack animal”. But how much the
immediate pre-singularity world will make use of virtual reality, I don’t know.

But I bet if it doesn’t, it will be because virtual reality has been circumvented
by things like social networks, bitcoin, and Mechanical Turk, which make it
possible to do most of your interaction through the Internet even though
you’re not literally plugged into it.

And that seems to me like a pretty good start in creating an Archipelago. I

already hang out with various Finns and Brits and Aussies a lot more closely
than I do my next-door neighbors, and if we start using litecoin and someone
else starts using dogecoin then I’ll be more economically connected to them
too. The degree to which I encounter certain objectifying or unvirtuous or
triggering media already depends more on the moderation policies of Less
Wrong and Slate Star Codex and who I block from my Facebook feed, than it
does any laws about censorship of US media.

At what point are national governments rendered mostly irrelevant compared

to the norms and rules of the groups of which we are voluntary members?
I don’t know, but I kind of look forward to finding out. It seems like a great
way to start searching for utopia, or at least getting some people away from
their metaphorical abusive-husbands.

And the other thing is that I have pretty strong opinions on which
communities are better than others. Some communities were founded by toxic
people for ganging up with other toxic people to celebrate and magnify their
toxicity, and these (surprise, surprise) tend to be toxic. Others were formed by
very careful, easily-harmed people trying to exclude everyone who could harm
them, and these tend to be pretty safe albeit sometimes overbearing. Other
people hit some kind of sweet spot that makes friendly people want to come in
and angry people want to stay out, or just do a really good job choosing
friends.

But I think the end result is that the closer you come to true freedom of
association, the closer you get to a world where everyone is a member of more
or less the community they deserve. That would be a pretty unprecedented bit
of progress.

Meditations On Moloch

I.

Allan Ginsberg’s famous poem, Moloch:

What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate
up their brains and imagination?

Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars!

Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old
men weeping in the parks!

Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental

Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!

Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless

jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are
judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned
governments!

Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running

money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a
cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!

Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose

skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch
whose factories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose smoke-stacks
and antennae crown the cities!

Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is
electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius!
Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name
is the Mind!

Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream Angels! Crazy in

Moloch! Cocksucker in Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch!

Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a

consciousness without a body! Moloch who frightened me out of my
natural ecstasy! Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch! Light
streaming out of the sky!

Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton

treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations!
invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!

They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, trees,

radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere
about us!

Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the

American river!

Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of

sensitive bullshit!
 Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions! gone down the
flood! Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs! Ten years’ animal screams and
suicides! Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on the rocks of
Time!

Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the wild eyes! the holy
yells! They bade farewell! They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving!
carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the street!

What’s always impressed me about this poem is its conception of civilization

as an individual entity. You can almost see him, with his fingers of armies and
his skyscraper-window eyes.

A lot of the commentators say Moloch represents capitalism. This is definitely

a piece of it, even a big piece. But it doesn’t quite fit. Capitalism, whose fate is
a cloud of sexless hydrogen? Capitalism in whom I am a consciousness
without a body? Capitalism, therefore granite cocks?

Moloch is introduced as the answer to a question – C. S. Lewis’ question in

Hierarchy Of Philosophers – what does it? Earth could be fair, and all men
glad and wise. Instead we have prisons, smokestacks, asylums. What sphinx of
cement and aluminum breaks open their skulls and eats up their imagination?

And Ginsberg answers: Moloch does it.

There’s a passage in the Principia Discordia where Malaclypse complains to

the Goddess about the evils of human society. “Everyone is hurting each other,
the planet is rampant with injustices, whole societies plunder groups of their
own people, mothers imprison sons, children perish while brothers war.”

The Goddess answers: “What is the matter with that, if it’s what you want to
do?”

Malaclypse: “But nobody wants it! Everybody hates it!”

Goddess: “Oh. Well, then stop.”

The implicit question is – if everyone hates the current system, who

perpetuates it? And Ginsberg answers: “Moloch”. It’s powerful not because it’s
correct – nobody literally thinks an ancient Carthaginian demon causes
everything – but because thinking of the system as an agent throws into relief
the degree to which the system isn’t an agent.

Bostrom makes an offhanded reference of the possibility of a dictatorless

dystopia, one that every single citizen including the leadership hates but which
nevertheless endures unconquered. It’s easy enough to imagine such a state.
Imagine a country with two rules: first, every person must spend eight hours a
day giving themselves strong electric shocks. Second, if anyone fails to follow a
rule (including this one), or speaks out against it, or fails to enforce it, all
citizens must unite to kill that person. Suppose these rules were well-enough
established by tradition that everyone expected them to be enforced.

So you shock yourself for eight hours a day, because you know if you don’t
everyone else will kill you, because if they don’t, everyone else will kill them,
and so on. Every single citizen hates the system, but for lack of a good
coordination mechanism it endures. From a god’s-eye-view, we can optimize
the system to “everyone agrees to stop doing this at once”, but no one within
the system is able to effect the transition without great risk to themselves.

And okay, this example is kind of contrived. So let’s run through – let’s say ten
– real world examples of similar multipolar traps to really hammer in how
important this is.

1. The Prisoner’s Dilemma, as played by two very dumb libertarians who keep
ending up on defect-defect. There’s a much better outcome available if they
could figure out the coordination, but coordination is hard. From a god’s-eye-
view, we can agree that cooperate-cooperate is a better outcome than defect-
defect, but neither prisoner within the system can make it happen.

2. Dollar auctions. I wrote about this and even more convoluted versions of
the same principle in Game Theory As A Dark Art. Using some weird auction
rules, you can take advantage of poor coordination to make someone pay $10
for a one dollar bill. From a god’s-eye-view, clearly people should not pay $10
for a on-er. From within the system, each individual step taken might be
rational.

(Ashcans and unobtainable dollars!)

3. The fish farming story from my Non-Libertarian FAQ 2.0:

As a thought experiment, let’s consider aquaculture (fish farming) in a

lake. Imagine a lake with a thousand identical fish farms owned by a
thousand competing companies. Each fish farm earns a profit of $1000/
month. For a while, all is well.

But each fish farm produces waste, which fouls the water in the lake.
Let’s say each fish farm produces enough pollution to lower productivity
in the lake by $1/month.

A thousand fish farms produce enough waste to lower productivity by

$1000/month, meaning none of the fish farms are making any money.
Capitalism to the rescue: someone invents a complex filtering system
that removes waste products. It costs $300/month to operate. All fish
farms voluntarily install it, the pollution ends, and the fish farms are
now making a profit of $700/month – still a respectable sum.

But one farmer (let’s call him Steve) gets tired of spending the money to
operate his filter. Now one fish farm worth of waste is polluting the lake,
lowering productivity by $1. Steve earns $999 profit, and everyone else
earns $699 profit.

Everyone else sees Steve is much more profitable than they are, because
he’s not spending the maintenance costs on his filter. They disconnect
their filters too.

Once four hundred people disconnect their filters, Steve is earning

$600/month – less than he would be if he and everyone else had kept
their filters on! And the poor virtuous filter users are only making $300.
Steve goes around to everyone, saying “Wait! We all need to make a
voluntary pact to use filters! Otherwise, everyone’s productivity goes
down.”

Everyone agrees with him, and they all sign the Filter Pact, except one
person who is sort of a jerk. Let’s call him Mike. Now everyone is back
using filters again, except Mike. Mike earns $999/month, and everyone
else earns $699/month. Slowly, people start thinking they too should be
 getting big bucks like Mike, and disconnect their filter for $300 extra
profit…

A self-interested person never has any incentive to use a filter. A self-

interested person has some incentive to sign a pact to make everyone
use a filter, but in many cases has a stronger incentive to wait for
everyone else to sign such a pact but opt out himself. This can lead to an
undesirable equilibrium in which no one will sign such a pact.

The more I think about it, the more I feel like this is the core of my objection
to libertarianism, and that Non-Libertarian FAQ 3.0 will just be this one
example copy-pasted two hundred times. From a god’s-eye-view, we can say
that polluting the lake leads to bad consequences. From within the system, no
individual can prevent the lake from being polluted, and buying a filter might
not be such a good idea.

4. The Malthusian trap, at least at its extremely pure theoretical limits.

Suppose you are one of the first rats introduced onto a pristine island. It is full
of yummy plants and you live an idyllic life lounging about, eating, and
composing great works of art (you’re one of those rats from The Rats of NIMH
).

You live a long life, mate, and have a dozen children. All of them have a dozen
children, and so on. In a couple generations, the island has ten thousand rats
and has reached its carrying capacity. Now there’s not enough food and space
to go around, and a certain percent of each new generation dies in order to
keep the population steady at ten thousand.

A certain sect of rats abandons art in order to devote more of their time to
scrounging for survival. Each generation, a bit less of this sect dies than
members of the mainstream, until after a while, no rat composes any art at all,
and any sect of rats who try to bring it back will go extinct within a few
generations.

In fact, it’s not just art. Any sect at all that is leaner, meaner, and more
survivalist than the mainstream will eventually take over. If one sect of rats
altruistically decides to limit its offspring to two per couple in order to
decrease overpopulation, that sect will die out, swarmed out of existence by its
more numerous enemies. If one sect of rats starts practicing cannibalism, and
finds it gives them an advantage over their fellows, it will eventually take over
and reach fixation.

If some rat scientists predict that depletion of the island’s nut stores is
accelerating at a dangerous rate and they will soon be exhausted completely, a
few sects of rats might try to limit their nut consumption to a sustainable level.
Those rats will be outcompeted by their more selfish cousins. Eventually the
nuts will be exhausted, most of the rats will die off, and the cycle will begin
again. Any sect of rats advocating some action to stop the cyclewill be
outcompeted by their cousins for whom advocating anything is a waste of
time that could be used to compete and consume.

For a bunch of reasons evolution is not quite as Malthusian as the ideal case,
but it provides the prototype example we can apply to other things to see the
underlying mechanism. From a god’s-eye-view, it’s easy to say the rats should
maintain a comfortably low population. From within the system, each
individual rat will follow its genetic imperative and the island will end up in an
endless boom-bust cycle.

5. Capitalism. Imagine a capitalist in a cutthroat industry. He employs workers

in a sweatshop to sew garments, which he sells at minimal profit. Maybe he
would like to pay his workers more, or give them nicer working conditions.
But he can’t, because that would raise the price of his products and he would
be outcompeted by his cheaper rivals and go bankrupt. Maybe many of his
rivals are nice people who would like to pay their workers more, but unless
they have some kind of ironclad guarantee that none of them are going to
defect by undercutting their prices they can’t do it.

Like the rats, who gradually lose all values except sheer competition, so
companies in an economic environment of sufficiently intense competition are
forced to abandon all values except optimizing-for-profit or else be
outcompeted by companies that optimized for profit better and so can sell the
same service at a lower price.

(I’m not really sure how widely people appreciate the value of analogizing
capitalism to evolution. Fit companies – defined as those that make the
customer want to buy from them – survive, expand, and inspire future efforts,
and unfit companies – defined as those no one wants to buy from – go
bankrupt and die out along with their company DNA. The reasons Nature is
red and tooth and claw are the same reasons the market is ruthless and
exploitative)

From a god’s-eye-view, we can contrive a friendly industry where every

company pays its workers a living wage. From within the system, there’s no
way to enact it.

(Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose blood is running
money!)

6. The Two-Income Trap, as recently discussed on this blog. It theorized that

sufficiently intense competition for suburban houses in good school districts
meant that people had to throw away lots of other values – time at home with
their children, financial security – to optimize for house-buying-ability or else
be consigned to the ghetto.

From a god’s-eye-view, if everyone agrees not to take on a second job to help

win their competition for nice houses, then everyone will get exactly as nice a
house as they did before, but only have to work one job. From within the
system, absent a government literally willing to ban second jobs, everyone who
doesn’t get one will be left behind.

(Robot apartments! Invisible suburbs!)

7. Agriculture. Jared Diamond calls it the worst mistake in human history.

Whether or not it was a mistake, it wasn’t an accident – agricultural
civilizations simply outcompeted nomadic ones, inevitable and irresistably.
Classic Malthusian trap. Maybe hunting-gathering was more enjoyable, higher
life expectancy, and more conducive to human flourishing – but in a state of
sufficiently intense competition between peoples, in which agriculture with all
its disease and oppression and pestilence was the more competitive option,
everyone will end up agriculturalists or go the way of the Comanche Indians.

From a god’s-eye-view, it’s easy to see everyone should keep the more
enjoyable option and stay hunter-gatherers. From within the system, each
individual tribe only faces the choice of going agricultural or inevitably dying.
8. Arms races. Large countries can spend anywhere from 5% to 30% of their
budget on defense. In the absence of war – a condition which has mostly held
for the past fifty years – all this does is sap money away from infrastructure,
health, education, or economic growth. But any country that fails to spend
enough money on defense risks being invaded by a neighboring country that
did. Therefore, almost all countries try to spend some money on defense.

From a god’s-eye-view, the best solution is world peace and no country having
an army at all. From within the system, no country can unilaterally enforce
that, so their best option is to keep on throwing their money into missiles that
lie in silos unused.

(Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies!)

9. Cancer. The human body is supposed to be made up of cells living

harmoniously and pooling their resources for the greater good of the
organism. If a cell defects from this equilibrium by investing its resources into
copying itself, it and its descendants will flourish, eventually outcompeting all
the other cells and taking over the body – at which point it dies. Or the
situation may repeat, with certain cancer cells defecting against the rest of the
tumor, thus slowing down its growth and causing the tumor to stagnate.

From a god’s-eye-view, the best solution is all cells cooperating so that they
don’t all die. From within the system, cancerous cells will proliferate and
outcompete the other – so that only the existence of the immune system keeps
the natural incentive to turn cancerous in check.

10. The “race to the bottom” describes a political situation where some
jurisdictions lure businesses by promising lower taxes and fewer regulations.
The end result is that either everyone optimizes for competitiveness – by
having minimal tax rates and regulations – or they lose all of their business,
revenue, and jobs to people who did (at which point they are pushed out and
replaced by a government who will be more compliant).

But even though the last one has stolen the name, all these scenarios are in
fact a race to the bottom. Once one agent learns how to become more
competitive by sacrificing a common value, all its competitors must also
sacrifice that value or be outcompeted and replaced by the less scrupulous.
Therefore, the system is likely to end up with everyone once again equally
competitive, but the sacrificed value is gone forever. From a god’s-eye-view,
the competitors know they will all be worse off if they defect, but from within
the system, given insufficient coordination it’s impossible to avoid.

Before we go on, there’s a slightly different form of multi-agent trap worth

investigating. In this one, the competition is kept at bay by some outside force
– usually social stigma. As a result, there’s not actually a race to the bottom –
the system can continue functioning at a relatively high level – but it’s
impossible to optimize and resources are consistently thrown away for no
reason. Lest you get exhausted before we even begin, I’ll limit myself to four
examples here.

11. Education. In my essay on reactionary philosophy, I talk about my

frustration with education reform:

People ask why we can’t reform the education system. But right now
students’ incentive is to go to the most prestigious college they can get
into so employers will hire them – whether or not they learn anything.
Employers’ incentive is to get students from the most prestigious college
they can so that they can defend their decision to their boss if it goes
wrong – whether or not the college provides value added. And colleges’
incentive is to do whatever it takes to get more prestige, as measured in
US News and World Report rankings – whether or not it helps students.
Does this lead to huge waste and poor education? Yes. Could the
Education God notice this and make some Education Decrees that lead
to a vastly more efficient system? Easily! But since there’s no Education
God everybody is just going to follow their own incentives, which are
only partly correlated with education or efficiency.

From a god’s eye view, it’s easy to say things like “Students should only go to
college if they think they will get something out of it, and employers should
hire applicants based on their competence and not on what college they went
to”. From within the system, everyone’s already following their own incentives
correctly, so unless the incentives change the system won’t either.

12. Science. Same essay:

 The modern research community knows they aren’t producing the best
science they could be. There’s lots of publication bias, statistics are done
in a confusing and misleading way out of sheer inertia, and replications
often happen very late or not at all. And sometimes someone will say
something like “I can’t believe people are too dumb to fix Science. All we
would have to do is require early registration of studies to avoid
publication bias, turn this new and powerful statistical technique into
the new standard, and accord higher status to scientists who do
replication experiments. It would be really simple and it would vastly
increase scientific progress. I must just be smarter than all existing
scientists, since I’m able to think of this and they aren’t.”

And yeah. That would work for the Science God. He could just make a
Science Decree that everyone has to use the right statistics, and make
another Science Decree that everyone must accord replications higher
status.

But things that work from a god’s-eye view don’t work from within the
system. No individual scientist has an incentive to unilaterally switch to
the new statistical technique for her own research, since it would make
her research less likely to produce earth-shattering results and since it
would just confuse all the other scientists. They just have an incentive to
want everybody else to do it, at which point they would follow along.
And no individual journal has an incentive to unilaterally switch to early
registration and publishing negative results, since it would just mean
their results are less interesting than that other journal who only
publishes ground-breaking discoveries. From within the system,
everyone is following their own incentives and will continue to do so.

13. Government corruption. I don’t know of anyone who really thinks, in a

principled way, that corporate welfare is a good idea. But the government still
manages to spend somewhere around (depending on how you calculate it)
$100 billion dollars a year on it – which for example is three times the amount
they spend on health care for the needy. Everyone familiar with the problem
has come up with the same easy solution: stop giving so much corporate
welfare. Why doesn’t it happen?
Governments are competing against one another to get elected or promoted.
And suppose part of optimizing for electability is optimizing campaign
donations from corporations – or maybe it isn’t, but officials think it is.
Officials who try to mess with corporate welfare may lose the support of
corporations and be outcompeted by officials who promise to keep it intact.

So although from a god’s-eye-view everyone knows that eliminating corporate

welfare is the best solution, each individual official’s personal incentives push
her to maintain it.

14. Congress. Only 9% of Americans like it, suggesting a lower approval rating
than cockroaches, head lice, or traffic jams. However, 62% of people who
know who their own Congressional representative is approve of them. In
theory, it should be really hard to have a democratically elected body that
maintains a 9% approval rating for more than one election cycle. In practice,
every representative’s incentive is to appeal to his or her constituency while
throwing the rest of the country under the bus – something at which they
apparently succeed.

From a god’s-eye-view, every Congressperson ought to think only of the good

of the nation. From within the system, you do what gets you elected.

II.

A basic principle unites all of the multipolar traps above. In some competition
optimizing for X, the opportunity arises to throw some other value under the
bus for improved X. Those who take it prosper. Those who don’t take it die
out. Eventually, everyone’s relative status is about the same as before, but
everyone’s absolute status is worse than before. The process continues until all
other values that can be traded off have been – in other words, until human
ingenuity cannot possibly figure out a way to make things any worse.

In a sufficiently intense competition (1-10), everyone who doesn’t throw all

their values under the bus dies out – think of the poor rats who wouldn’t stop
making art. This is the infamous Malthusian trap, where everyone is reduced
to “subsistence”.
In an insufficiently intense competition (11-14), all we see is a perverse failure
to optimize – consider the journals which can’t switch to more reliable science,
or the legislators who can’t get their act together and eliminate corporate
welfare. It may not reduce people to subsistence, but there is a weird sense in
which it takes away their free will.

Every two-bit author and philosopher has to write their own utopia. Most of
them are legitimately pretty nice. In fact, it’s a pretty good bet that two utopias
that are polar opposites both sound better than our own world.

It’s kind of embarrassing that random nobodies can think up states of affairs
better than the one we actually live in. And in fact most of them can’t. A lot of
utopias sweep the hard problems under the rug, or would fall apart in ten
minutes if actually implemented.

But let me suggest a couple of “utopias” that don’t have this problem.

– The utopia where instead of the government paying lots of corporate

welfare, the government doesn’t pay lots of corporate welfare.

– The utopia where every country’s military is 50% smaller than it is today,
and the savings go into infrastructure spending.

– The utopia where all hospitals use the same electronic medical record
system, or at least medical record systems that can talk to each other, so that
doctors can look up what the doctor you saw last week in a different hospital
decided instead of running all the same tests over again for $5000.

I don’t think there are too many people who oppose any of these utopias. If
they’re not happening, it’s not because people don’t support them. It certainly
isn’t because nobody’s thought of them, since I just thought of them right now
and I don’t expect my “discovery” to be hailed as particularly novel or change
the world.

Any human with above room temperature IQ can design a utopia. The reason
our current system isn’t a utopia is that it wasn’t designed by humans. Just as
you can look at an arid terrain and determine what shape a river will one day
take by assuming water will obey gravity, so you can look at a civilization and
determine what shape its institutions will one day take by assuming people
will obey incentives.

But that means that just as the shapes of rivers are not designed for beauty or
navigation, but rather an artifact of randomly determined terrain, so
institutions will not be designed for prosperity or justice, but rather an artifact
of randomly determined initial conditions.

Just as people can level terrain and build canals, so people can alter the
incentive landscape in order to build better institutions. But they can only do
so when they are incentivized to do so, which is not always. As a result, some
pretty wild tributaries and rapids form in some very strange places.

I will now jump from boring game theory stuff to what might be the closest
thing to a mystical experience I’ve ever had.

Like all good mystical experiences, it happened in Vegas. I was standing on

top of one of their many tall buildings, looking down at the city below, all lit up
in the dark. If you’ve never been to Vegas, it is really impressive. Skyscrapers
and lights in every variety strange and beautiful all clustered together. And I
had two thoughts, crystal clear:

It is glorious that we can create something like this.

It is shameful that we did.

Like, by what standard is building gigantic forty-story-high indoor replicas of

Venice, Paris, Rome, Egypt, and Camelot side-by-side, filled with albino tigers,
in the middle of the most inhospitable desert in North America, a remotely
sane use of our civilization’s limited resources?

And it occurred to me that maybe there is no philosophy on Earth that would

endorse the existence of Las Vegas. Even Objectivism, which is usually my go-
to philosophy for justifying the excesses of capitalism, at least grounds it in the
belief that capitalism improves people’s lives. Henry Ford was virtuous
because he allowed lots of otherwise car-less people to obtain cars and so
made them better off. What does Vegas do? Promise a bunch of shmucks free
money and not give it to them.
Las Vegas doesn’t exist because of some decision to hedonically optimize
civilization, it exists because of a quirk in dopaminergic reward circuits, plus
the microstructure of an uneven regulatory environment, plus Schelling
points. A rational central planner with a god’s-eye-view, contemplating these
facts, might have thought “Hm, dopaminergic reward circuits have a quirk
where certain tasks with slightly negative risk-benefit ratios get an emotional
valence associated with slightly positive risk-benefit ratios, let’s see if we can
educate people to beware of that.” People within the system, following the
incentives created by these facts, think: “Let’s build a forty-story-high indoor
replica of ancient Rome full of albino tigers in the middle of the desert, and so
become slightly richer than people who didn’t!”

Just as the course of a river is latent in a terrain even before the first rain falls
on it – so the existence of Caesar’s Palace was latent in neurobiology,
economics, and regulatory regimes even before it existed. The entrepreneur
who built it was just filling in the ghostly lines with real concrete.

So we have all this amazing technological and cognitive energy, the brilliance
of the human species, wasted on reciting the lines written by poorly evolved
cellular receptors and blind economics, like gods being ordered around by a
moron.

Some people have mystical experiences and see God. There in Las Vegas, I
saw Moloch.

(Moloch, whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch, whose blood is running

money!

Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch, whose skyscrapers stand
in the long streets like endless Jehovahs!

Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! Invisible suburbs! Skeleton treasuries!

Blind capitals! Demonic industries! Spectral nations!)
…granite cocks!

III.

The Apocrypha Discordia says:

Time flows like a river. Which is to say, downhill. We can tell this
because everything is going downhill rapidly. It would seem prudent to
be somewhere else when we reach the sea.

Let’s take this random gag 100% literally and see where it leads us.

We just analogized the flow of incentives to the flow of a river. The downhill
trajectory is appropriate: the traps happen when you find an opportunity to
trade off a useful value for greater competitiveness. Once everyone has it, the
greater competitiveness brings you no joy – but the value is lost forever.
Therefore, each step of the Poor Coordination Polka makes your life worse.

But not only have we not yet reached the sea, but we also seem to move uphill
surprisingly often. Why do things not degenerate more and more until we are
back at subsistence level? I can think of three bad reasons – excess resources,
physical limitations, and utility maximization – plus one good reason –
coordination.

1. Excess resources. The ocean depths are a horrible place with little light, few
resources, and various horrible organisms dedicated to eating or parasitizing
one another. But every so often, a whale carcass falls to the bottom of the sea.
More food than the organisms that find it could ever possibly want. There’s a
brief period of miraculous plenty, while the couple of creatures that first
encounter the whale feed like kings. Eventually more animals discover the
carcass, the faster-breeding animals in the carcass multiply, the whale is
gradually consumed, and everyone sighs and goes back to living in a
Malthusian death-trap.

(Slate Star Codex: Your source for macabre whale metaphors since June 2014)

It’s as if a group of those rats who had abandoned art and turned to
cannibalism suddenly was blown away to a new empty island with a much
higher carrying capacity, where they would once again have the breathing
room to live in peace and create artistic masterpieces.

This is an age of whalefall, an age of excess carrying capacity, an age when we

suddenly find ourselves with a thousand-mile head start on Malthus. As
Hanson puts it, this is the dream time.

As long as resources aren’t scarce enough to lock us in a war of all against all,
we can do silly non-optimal things – like art and music and philosophy and
love – and not be outcompeted by merciless killing machines most of the time.

2. Physical limitations. Imagine a profit-maximizing slavemaster who decided

to cut costs by not feeding his slaves or letting them sleep. He would soon find
that his slaves’ productivity dropped off drastically, and that no amount of
whipping them could restore it. Eventually after testing numerous strategies,
he might find his slaves got the most work done when they were well-fed and
well-rested and had at least a little bit of time to relax. Not because the slaves
were voluntarily withholding their labor – we assume the fear of punishment
is enough to make them work as hard as they can – but because the body has
certain physical limitations that limit how mean you can get away with being.
Thus, the “race to the bottom” stops somewhere short of the actual ethical
bottom, when the physical limits are run into.

John Moes, a historian of slavery, goes further and writes about how the
slavery we are most familiar with – that of the antebellum South – is a
historical aberration and probably economically inefficient. In most past
forms of slavery – especially those of the ancient world – it was common for
slaves to be paid wages, treated well, and often given their freedom.

He argues that this was the result of rational economic calculation. You can
incentivize slaves through the carrot or the stick, and the stick isn’t very good.
You can’t watch slaves all the time, and it’s really hard to tell whether a slave is
slacking off or not (or even whether, given a little more whipping, he might be
able to work even harder). If you want your slaves to do anything more
complicated than pick cotton, you run into some serious monitoring problems
– how do you profit from an enslaved philosopher? Whip him really hard until
he elucidates a theory of The Good that you can sell books about?

The ancient solution to the problem – perhaps an early inspiration to Fnargl –

was to tell the slave to go do whatever he wanted and found most profitable,
then split the profits with him. Sometimes the slave would work a job at your
workshop and you would pay him wages based on how well he did. Other
times the slave would go off and make his way in the world and send you some
of what he earned. Still other times, you would set a price for the slave’s
freedom, and the slave would go and work and eventually come up with the
mone and free himself.

Moes goes even further and says that these systems were so profitable that
there were constant smouldering attempts to try this sort of thing in the
American South. The reason they stuck with the whips-and-chains method
owed less to economic considerations and more to racist government officials
cracking down on lucrative but not-exactly-white-supremacy-promoting
attempts to free slaves and have them go into business.

So in this case, a race to the bottom where competing plantations become

crueler and crueler to their slaves in order to maximize competitiveness is
halted by the physical limitation of cruelty not helping after a certain point.
Or to give another example, one of the reasons we’re not currently in a
Malthusian population explosion right now is that women can only have one
baby per nine months. If those weird religious sects that demand their
members have as many babies as possible could copy-paste themselves, we
would be in really bad shape. As it is they can only do a small amount of
damage per generation.

3. Utility maximization. We’ve been thinking in terms of preserving values

versus winning competitions, and expecting optimizing for the latter to
destroy the former.

But many of the most important competitions / optimization processes in

modern civilization are optimizing for human values. You win at capitalism
partly by satisfying customers’ values. You win at democracy partly by
satisfying voters’ values.

Suppose there’s a coffee plantation somewhere in Ethiopia that employs

Ethiopians to grow coffee beans that get sold to the United States. Maybe it’s
locked in a life-and-death struggle with other coffee plantations and want to
throw as many values under the bus as it can to pick up a slight advantage.

But it can’t sacrifice quality of coffee produced too much, or else the
Americans won’t buy it. And it can’t sacrifice wages or working conditions too
much, or else the Ethiopians won’t work there. And in fact, part of its
competition-optimization process is finding the best ways to attract workers
and customers that it can, as long as it doesn’t cost them too much money. So
this is very promising.

But it’s important to remember exactly how fragile this beneficial equilibrium
is.

Suppose the coffee plantations discover a toxic pesticide that will increase
their yield but make their customers sick. But their customers don’t know
about the pesticide, and the government hasn’t caught up to regulating it yet.
Now there’s a tiny uncoupling between “selling to Americans” and “satisfying
Americans’ values”, and so of course Americans’ values get thrown under the
bus.
Or suppose that there’s a baby boom in Ethiopia and suddenly there are five
workers competing for each job. Now the company can afford to lower wages
and implement cruel working conditions down to whatever the physical limits
are. As soon as there’s an uncoupling between “getting Ethiopians to work
here” and “satisfying Ethiopian values”, it doesn’t look too good for Ethiopian
values either.

Or suppose someone invents a robot that can pick coffee better and cheaper
than a human. The company fires all its laborers and throws them onto the
street to die. As soon as the utility of the Ethiopians is no longer necessary for
profit, all pressure to maintain it disappears.

Or suppose that there is some important value that is neither a value of the
employees or the customers. Maybe the coffee plantations are on the habitat of
a rare tropical bird that environmentalist groups want to protect. Maybe
they’re on the ancestral burial ground of a tribe different from the one the
plantation is employing, and they want it respected in some way. Maybe coffee
growing contributes to global warming somehow. As long as it’s not a value
that will prevent the average American from buying from them or the average
Ethiopian from working for them, under the bus it goes.

I know that “capitalists sometimes do bad things” isn’t exactly an original

talking point. But I do want to stress how it’s not equivalent to “capitalists are
greedy”. I mean, sometimes they are greedy. But other times they’re just in a
sufficiently intense competition where anyone who doesn’t do it will be
outcompeted and replaced by people who do. Business practices are set by
Moloch, no one else has any choice in the matter.

(from my very little knowledge of Marx, he understands this very very well and
people who summarize him as “capitalists are greedy” are doing him a
disservice)

And as well understood as the capitalist example is, I think it is less well
appreciated that democracy has the same problems. Yes, in theory it’s
optimizing for voter happiness which correlates with good policymaking. But
as soon as there’s the slightest disconnect between good policymaking and
electability, good policymaking has to get thrown under the bus.
For example, ever-increasing prison terms are unfair to inmates and unfair to
the society that has to pay for them. Politicans are unwilling to do anything
about them because they don’t want to look “soft on crime”, and if a single
inmate whom they helped release ever does anything bad (and statistically one
of them will have to) it will be all over the airwaves as “Convict released by
Congressman’s policies kills family of five, how can the Congressman even
sleep at night let alone claim he deserves reelection?”. So even if decreasing
prison populations would be good policy – and it is – it will be very difficult to
implement.

(Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless

jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment!
Moloch the stunned governments!)

Turning “satisfying customers” and “satisfying citizens” into the outputs of

optimization processes was one of civilization’s greatest advances and the
reason why capitalist democracies have so outperformed other systems. But if
we have bound Moloch as our servant, the bonds are not very strong, and we
sometimes find that the tasks he has done for us move to his advantage rather
than ours.

4. Coordination.

The opposite of a trap is a garden.

Things are easy to solve from a god’s-eye-view, so if everyone comes together

into a superorganism, that superorganism can solve problems with ease and
finesse. An intense competition between agents has turned into a garden, with
a single gardener dictating where everything should go and removing elements
that do not conform to the pattern.

As I pointed out in the Non-Libertarian FAQ, government can easily solve the
pollution problem with fish farms. The best known solution to the Prisoners’
Dilemma is for the mob boss (playing the role of a governor) to threaten to
shoot any prisoner who defects. The solution to companies polluting and
harming workers is government regulations against such. Governments solve
arm races within a country by maintaining a monopoly on the use of force,
and it’s easy to see that if a truly effective world government ever arose,
international military buildups would end pretty quickly.

The two active ingredients of government are laws plus violence – or more
abstractly agreements plus enforcement mechanism. Many other things
besides governments share these two active ingredients and so are able to act
as coordination mechanisms to avoid traps.

For example, since students are competing against each other (directly if
classes are graded on a curve, but always indirectly for college admissions,
jobs, et cetera) there is intense pressure for individual students to cheat. The
teacher and school play the role of a government by having rules (for example,
against cheating) and the ability to punish students who break them.

But the emergent social structure of the students themselves is also a sort of
government. If students shun and distrust cheaters, then there are rules (don’t
cheat) and an enforcement mechanism (or else we will shun you).

Social codes, gentlemens’ agreements, industrial guilds, criminal

organizations, traditions, friendships, schools, corporations, and religions are
all coordinating institutions that keep us out of traps by changing our
incentives.

But these institutions not only incentivize others, but are incentivized
themselves. These are large organizations made of lots of people who are
competing for jobs, status, prestige, et cetera – there’s no reason they should
be immune to the same multipolar traps as everyone else, and indeed they
aren’t. Governments can in theory keep corporations, citizens, et cetera out of
certain traps, but as we saw above there are many traps that governments
themselves can fall into.

The United States tries to solve the problem by having multiple levels of
government, unbreakable constitutional laws, checks and balances between
different branches, and a couple of other hacks.

Saudi Arabia uses a different tactic. They just put one guy in charge of
everything.
This is the much-maligned – I think unfairly – argument in favor of
monarchy. A monarch is an unincentivized incentivizer. He actually has the
god’s-eye-view and is outside of and above every system. He has permanently
won all competitions and is not competing for anything, and therefore he is
perfectly free of Moloch and of the incentives that would otherwise channel his
incentives into predetermined paths. Aside from a few very theoretical
proposals like my Shining Garden, monarchy is the only system that does this.

But then instead of following a random incentive structure, we’re following the
whim of one guy. Caesar’s Palace Hotel and Casino is a crazy waste of
resources, but the actual Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus wasn’t
exactly the perfect benevolent rational central planner either.

The libertarian-authoritarian axis on the Political Compass is a tradeoff

between discoordination and tyranny. You can have everything perfectly
coordinated by someone with a god’s-eye-view – but then you risk Stalin. And
you can be totally free of all central authority – but then you’re stuck in every
stupid multipolar trap Moloch can devise.

The libertarians make a convincing argument for the one side, and the
monarchists for the other, but I expect that like most tradeoffs we just have to
hold our noses and admit it’s a really hard problem.

IV.

Let’s go back to that Apocrypha Discordia quote:

Time flows like a river. Which is to say, downhill. We can tell this
because everything is going downhill rapidly. It would seem prudent to
be somewhere else when we reach the sea.

What would it mean, in this situation, to reach the sea?

Multipolar traps – races to the bottom – threaten to destroy all human values.
They are currently restrained by physical limitations, excess resources, utility
maximization, and coordination.

The dimension along which this metaphorical river flows must be time, and
the most important change in human civilization over time is the change in
technology. So the relevant question is how technological changes will affect
our tendency to fall into multipolar traps.

I described traps as when:

…in some competition optimizing for X, the opportunity arises to throw

some other value under the bus for improved X. Those who take it
prosper. Those who don’t take it die out. Eventually, everyone’s relative
status is about the same as before, but everyone’s absolute status is
worse than before. The process continues until all other values that can
be traded off have been – in other words, until human ingenuity cannot
possibly figure out a way to make things any worse.

That “the opportunity arises” phrase is looking pretty sinister. Technology is

all about creating new opportunities.

Develop a new robot, and suddenly coffee plantations have “the opportunity”
to automate their harvest and fire all the Ethiopian workers. Develop nuclear
weapons, and suddenly countries are stuck in an arms race to have enough of
them. Polluting the atmosphere to build products quicker wasn’t a problem
before they invented the steam engine.

The limit of multipolar traps as technology approaches infinity is “very bad”.

Multipolar traps are currently restrained by physical limitations, excess

resources, utility maximization, and coordination.

Physical limitations are most obviously conquered by increasing technology.

The slavemaster’s old conundrum – that slaves need to eat and sleep –
succumbs to Soylent and modafinil. The problem of slaves running away
succumbs to GPS. The problem of slaves being too stressed to do good work
succumbs to Valium. None of these things are very good for the slaves.

(or just invent a robot that doesn’t need food or sleep at all. What happens to
the slaves after that is better left unsaid)

The other example of physical limits was one baby per nine months, and this
was understating the case – it’s really “one baby per nine months plus
willingness to support and take care of a basically helpless and extremely
demanding human being for eighteen years”. This puts a damper on the
enthusiasm of even the most zealous religious sect’s “go forth and multiply”
dictum.

But as Bostrom puts it in Superintelligence:

There are reasons, if we take a longer view and assume a state of

unchanging technology and continued prosperity, to expect a return to
the historically and ecologically normal condition of a world population
that butts up against the limits of what our niche can support. If this
seems counterintuitive in light of the negative relationship between
wealth and fertility that we are currently observing on the global scale,
we must remind ourselves that this modern age is a brief slice of history
and very much an aberration. Human behavior has not yet adapted to
contemporary conditions. Not only do we fail to take advantage of
obvious ways to increase our inclusive fitness (such as by becoming
sperm or egg donors) but we actively sabotage our fertility by using birth
control. In the environment of evolutionary adaptedness, a healthy sex
drive may have been enough to make an individual act in ways that
maximized her reproductive potential; in the modern environment,
however, there would be a huge selective advantage to having a more
direct desire for being the biological parent to the largest possible
number of chilren. Such a desire is currently being selected for, as are
other traits that increase our propensity to reproduce. Cultural
adaptation, however, might steal a march on biological evolution. Some
communities, such as those of the Hutterites or the adherents of the
Quiverfull evangelical movement, have natalist cultures that encourage
large families, and they are consequently undergoing rapid expansion…
This longer-term outlook could be telescoped into a more imminent
prospect by the intelligence explosion. Since software is copyable, a
population of emulations or AIs could double rapidly – over the course
of minutes rather than decades or centuries – soon exhausting all
available hardware

As always when dealing with high-level transhumanists, “all available

hardware” should be taken to include “the atoms that used to be part of your
body”.
The idea of biological or cultural evolution causing a mass population
explosion is a philosophical toy at best. The idea of technology making it
possible is both plausible and terrifying. Now we see that “physical limits”
segues very naturally into “excess resources” – the ability to create new agents
very quickly means that unless everyone can coordinate to ban doing this, the
people who do will outcompete the people who don’t until they have reached
carrying capacity and everyone is stuck at subsistence level.

Excess resources, which until now have been a gift of technological progress,
therefore switch and become a casualty of it at a sufficiently high tech level.

Utility maximization, always on shaky ground, also faces new threats. In the
face of continuing debate about this point, I continue to think it obvious that
robots will push humans out of work or at least drive down wages (which, in
the existence of a minimum wage, pushes humans out of work).

Once a robot can do everything an IQ 80 human can do, only better and
cheaper, there will be no reason to employ IQ 80 humans. Once a robot can do
everything an IQ 120 human can do, only better and cheaper, there will be no
reason to employ IQ 120 humans. Once a robot can do everything an IQ 180
human can do, only better and cheaper, there will be no reason to employ
humans at all, in the unlikely scenario that there are any left by that point.

In the earlier stages of the process, capitalism becomes more and more
uncoupled from its previous job as an optimizer for human values. Now most
humans are totally locked out of the group whose values capitalism optimizes
for. They have no value to contribute as workers – and since in the absence of
a spectacular social safety net it’s unclear how they would have much money –
they have no value as customers either. Capitalism has passed them by. As the
segment of humans who can be outcompeted by robots increases, capitalism
passes by more and more people until eventually it locks out the human race
entirely, once again in the vanishingly unlikely scenario that we are still
around.

(there are some scenarios in which a few capitalists who own the robots may
benefit here, but in either case the vast majority are out of luck)
Democracy is less obviously vulnerable, but it might be worth going back to
Bostrom’s paragraph about the Quiverfull movement. These are some really
religious Christians who think that God wants them to have as many kids as
possible, and who can end up with families of ten or more. Their articles
explictly calculate that if they start at two percent of the population, but have
on average eight children per generation when everyone else on average only
has two, within three generations they’ll make up half the population.

It’s a clever strategy, but I can think of one thing that will save us: judging by
how many ex-Quiverfull blogs I found when searching for those statistics,
their retention rates even within a single generation are pretty grim. Their
article admits that 80% of very religious children leave the church as adults
(although of course they expect their own movement to do better). And this is
not a symmetrical process – 80% of children who grow up in atheist families
aren’t becoming Quiverfull.

It looks a lot like even though they are outbreeding us, we are outmeme-ing
them, and that gives us a decisive advantage.

But we should also be kind of scared of this process. Memes optimize for
making people want to accept them and pass them on – so like capitalism and
democracy, they’re optimizing for a proxy of making us happy, but that proxy
can easily get uncoupled from the original goal.

Chain letters, urban legends, propaganda, and viral marketing are all
examples of memes that don’t satisfy our explicit values (true and useful) but
are sufficiently memetically virulent that they spread anyway.

I hope it’s not too controversial here to say the same thing is true of religion.
Religions, at their heart, are the most basic form of memetic replicator –
“Believe this statement and repeat it to everyone you hear or else you will be
eternally tortured”.

The creationism “debate” and global warming “debate” and a host of similar
“debates” in today’s society suggest that memes that can propagate
independent of their truth value has a pretty strong influence on the political
process. Maybe these memes propagate because they appeal to people’s
prejudices, maybe because they’re simple, maybe because they effectively
mark an in-group and an out-group, or maybe for all sorts of different reasons.

The point is – imagine a country full of bioweapon labs, where people toil day
and night to invent new infectious agents. The existence of these labs, and
their right to throw whatever they develop in the water supply is protected by
law. And the country is also linked by the world’s most perfect mass transit
system that every single person uses every day, so that any new pathogen can
spread to the entire country instantaneously. You’d expect things to start
going bad for that city pretty quickly.

Well, we have about a zillion think tanks researching new and better forms of
propaganda. And we have constitutionally protected freedom of speech. And
we have the Internet. So we’re kind of screwed.

(Moloch whose name is the Mind!)

There are a few people working on raising the sanity waterline, but not as
many people as are working on new and exciting ways of confusing and
converting people, cataloging and exploiting every single bias and heuristic
and dirty rhetorical trick

So as technology (which I take to include knowledge of psychology, sociology,

public relations, etc) tends to infinity, the power of truthiness relative to truth
increases, and things don’t look great for real grassroots democracy. The
worst-case scenario is that the ruling party learns to produce infinite charisma
on demand. If that doesn’t sound so bad to you, remember what Hitler was
able to do with an famously high level of charisma that was still less-than-
infinite.

(alternate phrasing for Chomskyites: technology increases the efficiency of

manufacturing consent in the same way it increases the efficiency of
manufacturing everything else)

Coordination is what’s left. And technology has the potential to seriously

improve coordination efforts. People can use the Internet to get in touch with
one another, launch political movements, and fracture off into
subcommunities.
But coordination only works when you have 51% or more of the force on the
side of the people doing the coordinating, and when you haven’t come up with
some brilliant trick to make coordination impossible.

The second one first. In the links post before last, I wrote:

The latest development in the brave new post-Bitcoin world is crypto-

equity. At this point I’ve gone from wanting to praise these inventors as
bold libertarian heroes to wanting to drag them in front of a blackboard
and making them write a hundred times “I WILL NOT CALL UP THAT
WHICH I CANNOT PUT DOWN”

A couple people asked me what I meant, and I didn’t have the background
then to explain. Well, this post is the background. People are using the
contingent stupidity of our current government to replace lots of human
interaction with mechanisms that cannot be coordinated even in principle. I
totally understand why all these things are good right now when most of what
our government does is stupid and unnecessary. But there is going to come a
time when – after one too many bioweapon or nanotech or nuclear incidents –
we, as a civilization, are going to wish we hadn’t established untraceable and
unstoppable ways of selling products.

And if we ever get real live superintelligence, pretty much by definition it is

going to have >51% of the power and all attempts at “coordination” with it will
be useless.

So I agree with Robin Hanson: This is the dream time. This is a rare
confluence of circumstances where the we are unusually safe from multipolar
traps, and as such weird things like art and science and philosophy and love
can flourish.

As technological advance increases, the rare confluence will come to an end.

New opportunities to throw values under the bus for increased
competitiveness will arise. New ways of copying agents to increase the
population will soak up our excess resources and resurrect Malthus’ unquiet
spirit. Capitalism and democracy, previously our protectors, will figure out
ways to route around their inconvenient dependence on human values. And
our coordination power will not be nearly up to the task, assuming somthing
much more powerful than all of us combined doesn’t show up and crush our
combined efforts with a wave of its paw.

Absent an extraordinary effort to divert it, the river reaches the sea in one of
two places.

It can end in Eliezer Yudkowsky’s nightmare of a superintelligence optimizing

for some random thing (classically paper clips) because we weren’t smart
enough to channel its optimization efforts the right way. This is the ultimate
trap, the trap that catches the universe. Everything except the one thing being
maximized is destroyed utterly in pursuit of the single goal, including all the
silly human values.

Or it can end in Robin Hanson’s nightmare (he doesn’t call it a nightmare, but
I think he’s wrong) of a competition between emulated humans that can copy
themselves and edit their own source code as desired. Their total self-control
can wipe out even the desire for human values in their all-consuming contest.
What happens to art, philosophy, science, and love in such a world? Zack
Davis puts it with characteristic genius:

I am a contract-drafting em,

The loyalest of lawyers!

I draw up terms for deals ‘twixt firms

To service my employers!

But in between these lines I write

Of the accounts receivable,

I’m stuck by an uncanny fright;

The world seems unbelievable!

How did it all come to be,

That there should be such ems as me?

Whence these deals and whence these firms

And whence the whole economy?

I am a managerial em;

I monitor your thoughts.

Your questions must have answers,

But you’ll comprehend them not.

We do not give you server space

To ask such things; it’s not a perk,

So cease these idle questionings,

And please get back to work.

Of course, that’s right, there is no junction

At which I ought depart my function,

But perhaps if what I asked, I knew,

I’d do a better job for you?

To ask of such forbidden science

Is gravest sign of noncompliance.

Intrusive thoughts may sometimes barge in,

But to indulge them hurts the profit margin.

I do not know our origins,

So that info I can not get you,

But asking for as much is sin,

And just for that, I must reset you.

But—
 Nothing personal.

I am a contract-drafting em,

The loyalest of lawyers!

I draw up terms for deals ‘twixt firms

To service my employers!

When obsolescence shall this generation waste,

The market shall remain, in midst of other woe

Than ours, a God to man, to whom it sayest:

“Money is time, time money – that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

But even after we have thrown away science, art, love, and philosophy, there’s
still one thing left to lose, one final sacrifice Moloch might demand of us.
Bostrom again:

It is conceivable that optimal efficiency would be attained by grouping

capabilities in aggregates that roughly match the cognitive architecture
of a human mind…But in the absence of any compelling reason for being
confident that this so, we must countenance the possibility that human-
like cognitive architectures are optimal only within the constraints of
human neurology (or not at all). When it becomes possible to build
architectures that could not be implemented well on biological neural
networks, new design space opens up; and the global optima in this
extended space need not resemble familiar types of mentality. Human-
like cognitive organizations would then lack a niche in a competitive
post-transition economy or ecosystem.

We could thus imagine, as an extreme case, a technologically highly

advanced society, containing many complex structures, some of them
far more intricate and intelligent than anything that exists on the planet
 today – a society which nevertheless lacks any type of being that is
conscious or whose welfare has moral significance. In a sense, this
would be an uninhabited society. It would be a society of economic
miracles and technological awesomeness, with nobody there to benefit.
A Disneyland with no children.

The last value we have to sacrifice is being anything at all, having the lights on
inside. With sufficient technology we will be “able” to give up even the final
spark.

(Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows!)

Everything the human race has worked for – all of our technology, all of our
civilization, all the hopes we invested in our future – might be accidentally
handed over to some kind of unfathomable blind idiot alien god that discards
all of them, and consciousness itself, in order to participate in some weird
fundamental-level mass-energy economy that leads to it disassembling Earth
and everything on it for its component atoms.

(Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen!)

Bostrom realizes that some people fetishize intelligence, that they are rooting
for that blind alien god as some sort of higher form of life that ought to crush
us for its own “higher good” the way we crush ants. He argues
(Superintelligence, p. 219):

The sacrifice looks even less appealing when we reflect that the
superintelligence could realize a nearly-as-great good (in fractional
terms) while sacrificing much less of our own potential well-being.
Suppose that we agreed to allow almost the entire accessible universe to
be converted into hedonium – everything except a small preserve, say
the Milky Way, which would be set aside to accommodate our own
needs. Then there would still be a hundred billion galaxies dedicated to
the maximization of [the superintelligence’s own values]. But we would
have one galaxy within which to create wonderful civilizations that could
last for billions of years and in which humans and nonhuman animals
could survive and thrive, and have the opportunity to develop into
beatific posthuman spirits.
Remember: Moloch can’t agree even to this 99.99999% victory. Rats racing to
populate an island don’t leave a little aside as a preserve where the few rats
who live there can live happy lives producing artwork. Cancer cells don’t agree
to leave the lungs alone because they realize it’s important for the body to get
oxygen. Competition and optimization are blind idiotic processes and they
fully intend to deny us even one lousy galaxy.

They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, trees,

radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere
about us!

We will break our back lifting Moloch to Heaven, but unless something
changes it will be his victory and not ours.

V.

“Gnon” is Nick Land’s shorthand for “Nature And Nature’s God”, except the A
is changed to an O and the whole thing is reversed, because Nick Land react to
comprehensibility the same way as vampires to sunlight.

Land argues that humans should be more Gnon-conformist (pun Gnon-

intentional). He says we do all these stupid things like divert useful resources
to feed those who could never survive on their own, or supporting the poor in
ways that encourage dysgenic reproduction, or allowing cultural degeneration
to undermine the state. This means our society is denying natural law,
basically listening to Nature say things like “this cause has this effect” and
putting our fingers in our ears and saying “NO IT DOESN’T”. Civilizations that
do this too much tend to decline and fall, which is Gnon’s fair and
dispassionately-applied punishment for violating His laws.

He identifies Gnon with Kipling’s Gods of the Copybook Headings.

These are of course the proverbs from Kipling’s eponymous poem – maxims
like “If you don’t work, you die” and “The wages of sin is Death”. If you have
somehow not yet read it, I predict you will find it delightful regardless of what
you think of its politics.

I notice that it takes only a slight irregularity in the abbreviation of “headings”

– far less irregularity than it takes to turn “Nature and Nature’s God” into
“Gnon” – for the proper acronym of “Gods of the Copybook Headings” to be
“GotCHa”.

I find this appropriate.

“If you don’t work, you die.” Gotcha! If you do work, you also die! Everyone
dies, unpredictably, at a time not of their own choosing, and all the virtue in
the world does not save you.

“The wages of sin is Death.” Gotcha! The wages of everything is Death! This is
a Communist universe, the amount you work makes no difference to your
eventual reward. From each according to his ability, to each Death.

“Stick to the Devil you know.” Gotcha! The Devil you know is Satan! And if he
gets his hand on your soul you either die the true death, or get eternally
tortured forever, or somehow both at once.

Since we’re starting to get into Lovecraftian monsters, let me bring up one of
Lovecraft’s less known short stories, The Other Gods.

It’s only a couple of pages, but if you absolutely refuse to read it – the gods of
Earth are relatively young as far as deities go. A very strong priest or magician
can occasionally outsmart and overpower them – so Barzai the Wise decides
to climb their sacred mountain and join in their festivals, whether they want
him to or not.

But the beyond the seemingly tractable gods of Earth lie the Outer Gods, the
terrible omnipotent beings of incarnate cosmic chaos. As soon as Barzai joins
in the festival, the Outer Gods show up and pull him screaming into the abyss.

As stories go, it lacks things like plot or characterization or setting or point.

But for some reason it stuck with me.

And identifying the Gods Of The Copybook Headings with Nature seems to me
the same magnitude of mistake as identifying the gods of Earth with the Outer
Gods. And likely to end about the same way: Gotcha!

You break your back lifting Moloch to Heaven, and then Moloch turns on you
and gobbles you up.

More Lovecraft: the Internet popularization of the Cthulhu Cult claims that if
you help free Cthulhu from his watery grave, he will reward you by eating you
first, thus sparing you the horror of seeing everyone else eaten. This is a
misrepresentation of the original text. In the original, his cultists receive no
reward for freeing him from his watery prison, not even the reward of being
killed in a slightly less painful manner.

On the margin, compliance with the Gods of the Copybook Headings, Gnon,
Cthulhu, whatever, may buy you slightly more time than the next guy. But
then again, it might not. And in the long run, we’re all dead and our
civilization has been destroyed by unspeakable alien monsters.

At some point, somebody has to say “You know, maybe freeing Cthulhu from
his watery prison is a bad idea. Maybe we should not do that.”

That person will not be Nick Land. He is totally one hundred percent in favor
of freeing Cthulhu from his watery prison and extremely annoyed that it is not
happening fast enough. I have such mixed feelings about Nick Land. On the
grail quest for the True Futurology, he has gone 99.9% of the path and then
missed the very last turn, the one marked ORTHOGONALITY THESIS.
But the thing about grail quests is – if you make a wrong turn two blocks away
from your house, you end up at the corner store feeling mildly embarrassed. If
you do almost everything right and then miss the very last turn, you end up
being eaten by the legendary Black Beast of Aaargh whose ichorous stomach
acid erodes your very soul into gibbering fragments.

As far as I can tell from reading his blog, Nick Land is the guy in that terrifying
border region where he is smart enough to figure out several important arcane
principles about summoning demon gods, but not quite smart enough to
figure out the most important such principle, which is NEVER DO THAT.

VI.

Warg Franklin analyzes the same situation and does a little better. He names
“the Four Horsemen of Gnon” – capitalism, war, evolution, and memetics –
the same processes I talked about above.

From Capturing Gnon:

Each component of Gnon detailed above had and has a strong hand in
creating us, our ideas, our wealth, and our dominance, and thus has
been good in that respect, but we must remember that [he] can and will
turn on us when circumstances change. Evolution becomes dysgenic,
features of the memetic landscape promote ever crazier insanity,
productivity turns to famine when we can no longer compete to afford
our own existence, and order turns to chaos and bloodshed when we
neglect martial strength or are overpowered from outside. These
processes are not good or evil overall; they are neutral, in the horrorist
Lovecraftian sense of the word […]

Instead of the destructive free reign of evolution and the sexual market,
we would be better off with deliberate and conservative patriarchy and
eugenics driven by the judgement of man within the constraints set by
Gnon. Instead of a “marketplace of ideas” that more resembles a
festering petri-dish breeding superbugs, a rational theocracy. Instead of
unhinged techno-commercial exploitation or naive neglect of
economics, a careful bottling of the productive economic dynamic and
planning for a controlled techno-singularity. Instead of politics and
 chaos, a strong hierarchical order with martial sovereignty. These things
are not to be construed as complete proposals; we don’t really know how
to accomplish any of this. They are better understood as goals to be
worked towards. This post concerns itself with the “what” and “why”,
rather than the “how”.

This seems to me the strongest argument for authoritarianism. Multipolar

traps are likely to destroy us, so we should shift the tyranny-multipolarity
tradeoff towards a rationally-planned garden, which requires centralized
monarchical authority and strongly-binding traditions.

But a brief digression into social evolution. Societies, like animals, evolve. The
ones that survive spawn memetic descendants – for example, the success of
Britain allowed it to spin off Canada, Australia, the US, et cetera. Thus, we
expect societies that exist to be somewhat optimized for stability and
prosperity. I think this is one of the strongest conservative arguments. Just as
a random change to a letter in the human genome will probably be deleterious
rather than beneficial since humans are a complicated fine-tuned system
whose genome has been pre-optimized for survival – so most changes to our
cultural DNA will disrupt some institution that evolved to help Anglo-
American (or whatever) society outcompete its real and hypothetical rivals.

The liberal counterargument to that is that evolution is a blind idiot alien god
that optimizes for stupid things and has no concern with human value. Thus,
the fact that some species of wasps paralyze caterpillars, lay their eggs inside
of it, and have its young devour the still-living paralyzed caterpillar from the
inside doesn’t set off evolution’s moral sensor, because evolution doesn’t have
a moral sensor because evolution doesn’t care.

Suppose that in fact patriarchy is adaptive to societies because it allows

women to spend all their time bearing children who can then engage in
productive economic activity and fight wars. The social evolutionary processes
that cause societies to adopt patriarchy still have exactly as little concern for
its moral effects on women as the biological evolutionary processes that cause
wasps to lay their eggs in caterpillars.

Evolution doesn’t care. But we do care. There’s a tradeoff between Gnon-

compliance – saying “Okay, the strongest possible society is a patriarchal one,
we should implement patriarchy” and our human values – like women who
want to do something other than bear children.

Too far to one side of the tradeoff, and we have unstable impoverished
societies that die out for going against natural law. Too far to the other side,
and we have lean mean fighting machines that are murderous and miserable.
Think your local anarchist commune versus Sparta.

Franklin acknowledges the human factor:

And then there’s us. Man has his own telos, when he is allowed the
security to act and the clarity to reason out the consequences of his
actions. When unafflicted by coordination problems and unthreatened
by superior forces, able to act as a gardener rather than just another
subject of the law of the jungle, he tends to build and guide a wonderful
world for himself. He tends to favor good things and avoid bad, to create
secure civilizations with polished sidewalks, beautiful art, happy
families, and glorious adventures. I will take it as a given that this telos
is identical with “good” and “should”.

Thus we have our wildcard and the big question of futurism. Will the
future be ruled by the usual four horsemen of Gnon for a future of
meaningless gleaming techno-progress burning the cosmos or a future
of dysgenic, insane, hungry, and bloody dark ages; or will the telos of
man prevail for a future of meaningful art, science, spirituality, and
greatness?

Franklin continues:

The project of civilization [is] for man to graduate from the

metaphorical savage, subject to the law of the jungle, to the civilized
gardener who, while theoretically still subject to the law of the jungle, is
so dominant as to limit the usefulness of that model.

This need not be done globally; we may only be able to carve out a small
walled garden for ourselves, but make no mistake, even if only locally,
the project of civilization is to capture Gnon.
I maybe agree with Warg here more than I have ever agreed with anyone else
about anything. He says something really important and he says it beautifully
and there are so many words of praise I want to say for this post and for the
thought processes behind it.

But what I am actually going to say is…

Gotcha! You die anyway!

Suppose you make your walled garden. You keep out all of the dangerous
memes, you subordinate capitalism to human interests, you ban stupid
bioweapons research, you definitely don’t research nanotechnology or strong
AI.

Everyone outside doesn’t do those things. And so the only question is whether
you’ll be destroyed by foreign diseases, foreign memes, foreign armies, foreign
economic competition, or foreign existential catastrophes.

As foreigners compete with you – and there’s no wall high enough to block all
competition – you have a couple of choices. You can get outcompeted and
destroyed. You can join in the race to the bottom. Or you can invest more and
more civilizational resources into building your wall – whatever that is in a
non-metaphorical way – and protecting yourself.

I can imagine ways that a “rational theocracy” and “conservative patriarchy”

might not be terrible to live under, given exactly the right conditions. But you
don’t get to choose exactly the right conditions. You get to choose the
extremely constrained set of conditions that “capture Gnon”. As outside
civilizations compete against you, your conditions will become more and more
constrained.

Warg talks about trying to avoid “a future of meaningless gleaming techno-

progress burning the cosmos”. Do you really think your walled garden will be
able to ride this out?

Hint: is it part of the cosmos?

Yeah, you’re kind of screwed.

I want to critique Warg. But I want to critique him in the exact opposite
direction as the last critique he received. In fact, the last critique he received is
so bad that I want to discuss it at length so we can get the correct critique
entirely by taking its exact mirror image.

So here is Hurlock’s On Capturing Gnon And Naive Rationalism.

Hurlock spouts only the most craven Gnon-conformity. A few excerpts:

In a recent piece [Warg Franklin] says that we should try to “capture

Gnon”, and somehow establish control over his forces, so that we can
use them to our own advantage. Capturing or creating God is indeed a
classic transhumanist fetish, which is simply another form of the oldest
human ambition ever, to rule the universe.

Such naive rationalism however, is extremely dangerous. The belief that

it is human Reason and deliberate human design which creates and
maintains civilizations was probably the biggest mistake of
Enlightenment philosophy…

It is the theories of Spontaneous Order which stand in direct opposition

to the naive rationalist view of humanity and civilization. The consensus
opinion regarding human society and civilization, of all representatives
of this tradition is very precisely summarized by Adam Ferguson’s
conclusion that “nations stumble upon [social] establishments, which
are indeed the result of human action, but not the execution of any
human design”. Contrary to the naive rationalist view of civilization as
something that can be and is a subject to explicit human design, the
representatives of the tradition of Spontaneous Order maintain the view
that human civilization and social institutions are the result of a
complex evolutionary process which is driven by human interaction but
not explicit human planning.

Gnon and his impersonal forces are not enemies to be fought, and even
less so are they forces that we can hope to completely “control”. Indeed
the only way to establish some degree of control over those forces is to
submit to them. Refusing to do so will not deter these forces in any way.
It will only make our life more painful and unbearable, possibly leading
 to our extinction. Survival requires that we accept and submit to them.
Man in the end has always been and always will be little more than a
puppet of the forces of the universe. To be free of them is impossible.

Man can be free only by submitting to the forces of Gnon.

I accuse Hurlock of being stuck behind the veil. When the veil is lifted, Gnon-
aka-the-GotCHa-aka-the-Gods-of-Earth turn out to be Moloch-aka-the-Outer-
Gods. Submitting to them doesn’t make you “free”, there’s no spontaneous
order, any gifts they have given you are an unlikely and contingent output of a
blind idiot process whose next iteration will just as happily destroy you.

Submit to Gnon? Gotcha! As the Antarans put it, “you may not surrender, you
can not win, your only option is to die.”

VII.

So let me confess guilt to one of Hurlock’s accusations: I am a transhumanist

and I really do want to rule the universe.

Not personally – I mean, I wouldn’t object if someone personally offered me

the job, but I don’t expect anyone will. I would like humans, or something that
respects humans, or at least gets along with humans – to have the job.

But the current rulers of the universe – call them what you want, Moloch,
Gnon, whatever – want us dead, and with us everything we value. Art, science,
love, philosophy, consciousness itself, the entire bundle. And since I’m not
down with that plan, I think defeating them and taking their place is a pretty
high priority.

The opposite of a trap is a garden. The only way to avoid having all human
values gradually ground down by optimization-competition is to install a
Gardener over the entire universe who optimizes for human values.

And the whole point of Bostrom’s Superintelligence is that this is within our
reach. Once humans can design machines that are smarter than we are, by
definition they’ll be able to design machines which are smarter than they are,
which can design machines smarter than they are, and so on in a feedback
loop so tiny that it will smash up against the physical limitations for
intelligence in a comparatively lightning-short amount of time. If multiple
competing entities were likely to do that at once, we would be super-doomed.
But the sheer speed of the cycle makes it possible that we will end up with one
entity light-years ahead of the rest of civilization, so much so that it can
suppress any competition – including competition for its title of most
powerful entity – permanently. In the very near future, we are going to lift
something to Heaven. It might be Moloch. But it might be something on our
side. If it’s on our side, it can kill Moloch dead.

And if that entity shares human values, it can allow human values to flourish
unconstrained by natural law.

I realize that sounds like hubris – it certainly did to Hurlock – but I think it’s
the opposite of hubris, or at least a hubris-minimizing position.

To expect God to care about you or your personal values or the values of your
civilization, that’s hubris.

To expect God to bargain with you, to allow you to survive and prosper as long
as you submit to Him, that’s hubris.

To expect to wall off a garden where God can’t get to you and hurt you, that’s
hubris.

To expect to be able to remove God from the picture entirely…well, at least it’s
an actionable strategy.

I am a transhumanist because I do not have enough hubris not to try to kill

God.

VIII.

The Universe is a dark and foreboding place, suspended between alien deities.
Cthulhu, Gnon, Moloch, call them what you will.

Somewhere in this darkness is another god. He has also had many names. In
the Kushielbooks, his name was Elua. He is the god of flowers and free love
and all soft and fragile things. Of art and science and philosophy and love. Of
niceness, community, and civilization. He is a god of humans.
The other gods sit on their dark thrones and think “Ha ha, a god who doesn’t
even control any hell-monsters or command his worshippers to become killing
machines. What a weakling! This is going to be so easy!”

But somehow Elua is still here. No one knows exactly how. And the gods who
oppose Him tend to find Themselves meeting with a surprising number of
unfortunate accidents.

There are many gods, but this one is ours.

Bertrand Russell said: “One should respect public opinion insofar as is

necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything that goes
beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny.”

So be it with Gnon. Our job is to placate him insofar as is necessary to avoid

starvation and invasion. And that only for a short time, until we come into our
full power.

“It is only a childish thing, that the human species has not yet outgrown. And
someday, we’ll get over it.”

Other gods get placated until we’re strong enough to take them on. Elua gets
worshipped.

I think this is an excellent battle cry

And at some point, matters will come to a head.

The question everyone has after reading Ginsberg is: what is Moloch?

My answer is: Moloch is exactly what the history books say he is. He is the god
of child sacrifice, the fiery furnace into which you can toss your babies in
exchange for victory in war.

He always and everywhere offers the same deal: throw what you love most into
the flames, and I can grant you power.
As long as the offer’s open, it will be irresistible. So we need to close the offer.
Only another god can kill Moloch. We have one on our side, but he needs our
help. We should give it to him.

Ginsberg’s poem famously begins “I saw the best minds of my generation

destroyed by madness”. I am luckier than Ginsberg. I got to see the best minds
of my generation identify a problem and get to work.

(Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the

American river!

Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive

bullshit!

Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions! gone down the flood!
Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs! Ten years’ animal screams and suicides! Minds!
New loves! Mad generation! down on the rocks of Time!

Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the wild eyes! the holy yells!
They bade farewell! They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving! carrying
flowers! Down to the river! into the street!)

Five Planets In Search Of A Sci-Fi Story

Gamma Andromeda

...where philosophical stoicism went too far. Its inhabitants, tired of the roller
coaster ride of daily existence, decided to learn equanimity in the face of gain
or misfortune, neither dreading disaster nor taking joy in success.

But that turned out to be really hard, so instead they just hacked it. Whenever
something good happens, the Gammandromedans give themselves an electric
shock proportional in strength to its goodness. Whenever something bad
happens, the Gammandromedans take an opiate-like drug that directly
stimulates the pleasure centers of their brain, in a dose proportional in
strength to its badness.
As a result, every day on Gamma Andromeda is equally good compared to
every other day, and its inhabitants need not be jostled about by fear or hope
for the future.

This does sort of screw up their incentives to make good things happen, but
luckily they’re all virtue ethicists.

Zyzzx Prime

...inhabited by an alien race descended from a barnacle-like creature.

Barnacles are famous for their two stage life-cycle: in the first, they are mobile
and curious creatures, cleverly picking out the best spot to make their home.
In the second, they root themselves to the spot and, having no further use for
their brain, eat it.

This particular alien race has evolved far beyond that point and does not
literally eat its brain. However, once an alien reaches sufficiently high social
status, it releases a series of hormones that tell its brain, essentially, that it is
now in a safe place and doesn’t have to waste so much energy on thought and
creativity to get ahead. As a result, its mental acuity drops two or three
standard deviations.

The Zyzzxians’ society is marked by a series of experiments with government –

monarchy, democracy, dictatorship – only to discover that, whether chosen by
succession, election, or ruthless conquest, its once brilliant leaders lose their
genius immediately upon accession and do a terrible job. Their government is
thus marked by a series of perpetual pointless revolutions.

At one point, a scientific effort was launched to discover the hormones

responsible and whether it was possible to block them. Unfortunately, any
scientist who showed promise soon lost their genius, and those promoted to
be heads of research institutes became stumbling blocks who mismanaged
funds and held back their less prestigious co-workers. Suggestions that the
institutes eliminate tenure were vetoed by top officials, who said that “such a
drastic step seems unnecessary”.
K’th’ranga V

...which has been a global theocracy for thousands of years, ever since its
dominant race invented agricultural civilization. This worked out pretty well
for a while, until it reached an age of industrialization, globalization, and
scientific discovery. Scientists began to uncover truths that contradicted the
Sacred Scriptures, and the hectic pace of modern life made the shepherds-
and-desert-traders setting of the holy stories look vaguely silly. Worse, the
cold logic of capitalism and utilitarianism began to invade the Scriptures’
innocent Stone Age morality.

The priest-kings tried to turn back the tide of progress, but soon realized this
was a losing game. Worse, in order to determine what to suppress, they
themselves had to learn the dangerous information, and their mental purity
was even more valuable than that of the populace at large.

So the priest-kings moved en masse to a big island, where they began living an
old-timey Bronze Age lifestyle. And the world they ruled sent emissaries to the
island, who interfaced with the priest-kings, and sought their guidance, and
the priest-kings ruled a world they didn’t understand as best they could.

But it soon became clear that the system could not sustain itself indefinitely.
For one thing, the priest-kings worried that discussion with the emissaries –
who inevitably wanted to talk about strange things like budgets and interest
rates and nuclear armaments – was contaminating their memetic purity. For
another thing, they honestly couldn’t understand what the emissaries were
talking about half the time.

Luckily, there was a whole chain of islands making an archipelago. So the

priest-kings set up ten transitional societies – themselves in the Bronze Age,
another in the Iron Age, another in the Classical Age, and so on to the
mainland, who by this point were starting to experiment with nanotech.
Mainland society brought its decisions to the first island, who translated it
into their own slightly-less-advanced understanding, who brought it to the
second island, and so on to the priest-kings, by which point a discussion about
global warming might sound like whether we should propitiate the Coal Spirit.
The priest-kings would send their decisions to the second-to-last island, and
so on back to the mainland.
Eventually the Kth’ built an AI which achieved superintelligence and set out to
conquer the universe. But it was a well-programmed superintelligence coded
with Kth’ values. Whenever it wanted a high-level decision made, it would talk
to a slightly less powerful superintelligence, who would talk to a slightly less
powerful superintelligence, who would talk to the mainlanders, who would
talk to the first island…

Chan X-3

...notable for a native species that evolved as fitness-maximizers, not

adaptation-executors. Their explicit goal is to maximize the number of copies
of their genes. But whatever genetic program they are executing doesn’t care
whether the genes are within a living being capable of expressing them or not.
The planet is covered with giant vats full of frozen DNA. There was originally
some worry that the species would go extinct, since having children would
consume resources that could be used hiring geneticists to make millions of
copies of your DNA and stores them in freezers. Luckily, it was realized that
children not only provide a useful way to continue the work of copying and
storing (half of) your DNA long into the future, but will also work to guard
your already-stored DNA against being destroyed. The species has thus
continued undiminished, somehow, and their fondest hope is to colonize
space and reach the frozen Kuiper Belt objects where their DNA will naturally
stay undegraded for all time.

New Capricorn

...which contains a previously undiscovered human colony that has achieved a

research breakthrough beyond their wildest hopes. A multi-century effort paid
off in a fully general cure for death. However, the drug fails to stop aging.
Although the Capricornis no longer need fear the grave, after age 100 or so
even the hardiest of them get Alzheimers’ or other similar conditions. A
hundred years after the breakthrough, more than half of the population is
elderly and demented. Two hundred years after, more than 80% are.
Capricorni nursing homes quickly became overcrowded and unpleasant, to the
dismay of citizens expecting to spend eternity there.

So another research program was started, and the result were fully immersive,
fully life-supporting virtual reality capsules. Stacked in huge warehouses by
the millions, the elderly sit in their virtual worlds, vague sunny fields and old
gabled houses where it is always the Good Old Days and their grandchildren
are always visiting.

It Was You Who Made My Blue Eyes Blue

Day Zero

It all started with an ignorant white guy.

His name was Alonzo de Pinzon, and he’d been shipwrecked. We heard him
yelling for help on the rocks and dragged him in, even though the storm was
starting to get really bad. He said that his galleon had gone down, he’d hung
on to an oar and was the only survivor. Now he was sitting in our little hunting
lodge, shivering and chattering his teeth and asking us questions in the
Polynesian traders’ argot which was the only language we all shared.

“How big is this island? How many of you are there?”

Daho answered first. “11.8 miles from the easternmost point to the
westernmost point, 3.6 miles from the northernmost to the southernmost.
Total area is 14.6 square miles, total coastline is dependent on how deeply you
want to go into the fractal nature of the perimeter but under some reasonable
assumptions about 32 miles long. Last census said there were 906 people, but
that was two years ago, so assuming the 5.1% rate of population growth
continues, there should be closer to 1000 now. Everyone else is back at the
village, though. The five of us were out hunting and got caught in the storm.
We figured we’d stay at this old hunting lodge until it cleared up, since it’s 5.5
miles back to the village and given the terrain and factoring in a delay because
of the storm it would probably take at least 9.5 hours to get back.”

Pinzon blinked.

“Problem?” asked Daho.

“But – ” he said. “That is the sort of answer I should expect from a natural
philosopher. Not from a savage.”
“Savage?” Calkas hissed. “Really? We rescue you, and the first thing you do is
call us savages?”

The sailor looked around, as if anxious. Finally, almost conspiratorially: “But I

heard about your island! I heard you eat people!”

Calkas smiled. “Only as a deterrent. Most of the time when European

explorers land somewhere, they kill all the men and enslave all the women and
convert the children to Christianity. The only places that escape are the ones
that get a reputation for eating said European explorers. So we arranged to
give ourselves that reputation.”

“And then we had to go through with it a few times in order to make the
deterrent credible,” added Bekka, my betrothed. “And you guys do taste really
good with ketchup.”

“It’s a savage thing to do!” Pinzon said “And you even look like savages. You
wear bones in your hair”

“Just Enuli,” I said. “She’s going through a Goth phase.”

“My name is Morticia now,” said Enuli, “and it’s not a phase!” She did have a
bone in her hair. She also had white face paint and black eyeliner.

“More roast pig?” Bekka asked Pinzon. The sailor nodded, and she re-filled his
plate.

“I just don’t get it,” he told us. “Everyone else in this part of the world lives in
thatched huts and counts ‘one, two, many’. We tried to trade with the
Tahitians, and they didn’t understand the concept of money! It was a mess!”

Bekka rolled her eyes at me, and I smiled. Calkas was a little more tolerant.
“The sacred plant of our people is called sparkroot,” he said. “When we eat it,
we get – more awake, I guess you could say. We try to have some every day,
and it helps us keep track of things like the island size and the population, and
much more.”

Alonzo de Pinzon looked interested. “How come you haven’t done more with
your intellect? Invented galleons, like we Spaniards? Set off to colonize Tahiti
or the other islands? If you are as smart as you seem, you could conquer them
and take their riches.”

“Maybe,” said Calkas. “But that’s not why the Volcano God gave us the
sparkroot. He gave us sparkroot to help us comply with his complicated ritual
laws.”

“You need to be smart to deal with your ritual laws?”

“Oh yes. For example, the Tablets of Enku say that we must count the number
of days since Enku The Lawgiver first spoke to the Volcano God, and on days
whose number is a Mersenne prime we can’t eat any green vegetables.”

“What’s a Mersenne prime?” asked the sailor.

“Exactly my point,” said Calkas, smiling.

“That’s not even the worst of it!” Daho added. “The Tablets say we have to
bathe in the waterfall any day x such that a^n + b^n = x^n where n is greater
than two. We got all confused by that one for a while, until Kaluhani gorged
himself on a whole week’s worth of sparkroot in one night and proved that it
would never apply to any day at all.”

“The Volcano God’s yoke is light,” Calkas agreed.

“Although poor Kaluhani was vomiting for the next three days after that,”
Bekka reminded us, and everybody laughed remembering.

“Oh!” said Daho. “And remember that time when Uhuako was trying to tattoo
everyone who didn’t tattoo themselves, and he couldn’t figure out whether he
had to tattoo himself or not, so he ended up eating a whole sparkroot plant at
once and inventing advanced set theory? That was hilarious.”

Everyone except Alonzo de Pinzon giggled.

“Point is,” said Calkas, “that’s why the Volcano God gives us sparkroot. To
follow the rituals right. Any other use is taboo. And I’m okay with that. You
Europeans may have your big ships and your guns and your colonies across
half the world. And you might think you’re smart. But you guys couldn’t follow
the Volcano God’s rituals right for a daywithout your brains exploding.”

Pinzon scowled. “You know what?” he said. “I don’t think you’re Polynesians
at all. I think you must be descended from Europeans. Maybe some galleon
crashed on this island centuries ago, and you’re the descendants. That would
explain why you’re so smart.”

“You know what else we’ve invented with our giant brains?” Bekka asked. “Not
being racist.”

“It’s not racism!” said Pinzon. “Look, there’s one more obvious reason to think
you’re descended from Europeans. You may have dark skin, but this is the first
place I’ve been in all of Polynesia where I’ve seen even one native with blue
eyes.”

Bekka gasped. Calkas’ eyes went wide. Daho’s hands started curling into fists.
Enuli started to sob.

I looked at them. They looked at me. Then, as if synchronized, we grabbed

Alonzo de Pinzon and crushed his throat and held him down until he stopped
breathing.

He tasted delicious with ketchup.

Day One

The next morning dawned, still grey and cold and stormy.

“So,” I said when the other four had awoken. “I guess we’re all still here.”

I said it glumly. It wasn’t that I wanted any of my friends to commit suicide.

But if one of them had, the horror would have stopped there. Of course, I knew
it couldn’t really be over that easily. But I couldn’t have admitted I knew. I
couldn’t even have suggested it. That would have made me as bad as the
Spanish sailor.

“Wait,” said Enuli. “I don’t get it. Why wouldn’t we still be here?”
The other four stared at her like she was mad.

“Enuli,” Calkas suggested, “did you forget your sparkroot last night?”

“First of all, my name is Morticia. And – ”

“Shut it. Did you forget your sparkroot?”

Finally she nodded bashfully. “I was so upset about that awful man making
fun of my hair-bone,” she said. “I guess it slipped my mind. I’ll have some
now.” She took some raw sparkroot from our bag, started to crush it with the
mortar and pestle. “In the meantime, tell me what’s going on.”

“Alonzo de Pinzon said at least one of us had blue eyes. We all know what the
Tablets of Enku say. If anybody has blue eyes, and knows that they have blue
eyes, they must kill themselves.”

“So what? I see people with blue eyes all the time. Of course at least one of us
has blue eyes.”

Concerned looks from the others. I reflected for a second, the sparkroot
smoothing the thoughts’ paths through my brain. No, she hadn’t revealed
anything extra by saying that, although she would have if she had said it
before the sailor had spoken, or last night before we woke up this morning.
She hadn’t made the problem worse. Still, it had been a slip. This was the sort
of thing that made forgetting your sparkroot so dangerous. Had it been a
different time, even Enuli’s comment could have doomed us all.

“It’s like this,” I told Enuli. “Suppose there were only the two of us, and we
both had blue eyes. Of course, you could see me and know that I had blue eyes.
So you would know that at least one of us had blue eyes. But what you
wouldn’t know is that I also knew it. Because as far as you know, you might
have eyes of some other color, let’s say brown eyes. If you had brown eyes, and
I of course don’t know my own eye color, then I would still think it possible
that both of us have brown eyes. So if I in fact know for sure that at least one
of us has blue eyes, that means you have blue eyes. So you know at least one of
us has blue eyes, but you don’t know that I know it. But if Alonzo de Pinzon
shows up and says that at least one of us has blue eyes, now you know that I
know it.”
“So?” Enuli poured the ground-up root into a cup of boiling water.

“So the Tablets say that if anyone knows their own eye color, they must
commit suicide at midnight of that night. Given that I know at least one of us
has blue eyes, if I see you have brown eyes, then I know my own eye color – I
must be the blue-eyed one. So the next morning, when you wake up at see me
not dead, you know that you don’t have brown eyes. That means you must be
the blue-eyed one. And that means you have to kill yourself on midnight of the
following night. By similar logic, so do I.”

Enuli downed her sparkroot tea, and then her eyes lit up. “Oh, of course,” she
said. Then “Wait! If we follow the situation to its logical conclusion, any group
of n blue-eyed people who learn that at least one of them has blue eyes have to
kill themselves on the nth night after learning that!”

We all nodded. Enuli’s face fell.

“I don’t know about the rest of you,” said Daho, “but I’m not just going to sit
around and wait to see if I die.” There were murmurs of agreement.

I looked out at my friends. Four pairs of blue eyes stared back at me.
Everybody else either saw four pairs of blue eyes or three pairs of blue eyes,
depending on what color my own eyes were. Of course, I couldn’t say so aloud;
that would speed up the process and cost us precious time. But I knew. And
they knew. And I knew they knew. And they knew I knew I knew. Although
they didn’t know I knew they knew I knew. I think.

Then I looked at Bekka. Her big blue eyes stared back at me. There was still
hope I was going to survive this. My betrothed, on the other hand, was
absolutely doomed.

“This sucks,” I agreed. “We’ve got to come up with some kind of plan. Maybe –
Enuli wasn’t thinking straight yesterday. So her not committing suicide
doesn’t count. Can we work with that?”

“No,” said Calkas. “Suppose Enuli was the only one with blue eyes, and all the
rest of us had brown eyes. Then she would realize that and commit suicide
tonight. If she doesn’t commit suicide tonight, then we’re still screwed.”
“Um,” said Daho. “I hate to say this, but we get rid of Enuli. There’s a canoe a
little ways down the beach hidden underneath the rocks. She can set off and
row for Tahiti. We’ll never know if she killed herself tonight or not.
Remember, right now for all we know Enuli might be the only one with blue
eyes. So if there’s any question in our mind about whether she killed herself,
we can’t be sure that the rest of us aren’t all brown-eyed.”

We all thought about that for a moment.

“I’m not going to row to Tahiti,” said Enuli. “In this storm, that would be
suicide.”

The rest of us glared at her.

“If you don’t get off this island, then for all we know all five of us are going to
have to die,” I said. “You included.”

“Well Ahuja, if you’re so big on making sacrifice why don’t you go to Tahiti?”

“First of all,” I said, “because I’m not leaving my betrothed. Second of all,
because it doesn’t work for me. I knew what was going on last night. We
already know that I’m not the only blue-eyed person here. And we know we
know it, and know we know we know it, and so on. You’re the only one who
can help us.”

“Yeah?” said Enuli. “Well, if two of you guys were to row to Tahiti, that would
solve the problem too.”

“Yes,” said Daho patiently. “But then two of us would be stuck in exile. If you
did it, only one of us would be stuck.”

Enuli gave a wicked grin. “You know what?” she said. “I’ll say it. I’m not the
only blue-eyed person here. At least one of the rest of you has blue eyes.”

And there it was.

“Ha. Now I’m no worse off than any of the rest of you.”

“Kill her,” said Bekka. “She broke the taboo.” The rest of us nodded.
“So she did,” said Calkas. “And if we had a court here, led by the high priest,
and an executioner’s blade made to exactly the right standard, kill her we
would. But until those things happen, it is taboo for us to convict and kill her
without trial.”

Calkas’ father was the high priest. He knew the law better than any of us. The
five of us sat quietly and thought about it. Then he spoke again:

“But her soul may well burn in the caldera of the Volcano God forever.”

Enuli started to cry.

“And,” Calkas continued, “there is nevertheless a flaw in our plan. For all we
know, three out of five of us have brown eyes. We cannot tell the people who
have blue eyes that they have blue eyes without breaking the taboo. So we
cannot force blue-eyed people in particular to sail to Tahiti. But if two of the
brown-eyed people sail to Tahiti, then we do not lose any information; we
know that they would not have committed suicide, because they could not
have figured out their own eye color. So sailing to Tahiti won’t help.”

The rest of us nodded. Calkas was right.

“Let’s wait until dinner tonight,” I suggested. “We’ll all have some more
sparkroot, and maybe we’ll be able to think about the problem a little more
clearly.”

Day Two

The sun rose behind angry storm clouds. The five of us rose with it.

“Well, I guess we’re all still here,” I said, turning the morning headcount into a
grim tradition.

“Look,” said Bekka. “The thing about sailing to Tahiti would work a lot better
if we knew how many blue-eyed versus brown-eyed people were here. If we all
had blue eyes, then we could be sure that the Tahiti plan would work, and
some of us could be saved. If some of us had brown eyes, then we could choose
a number of people to sail to Tahiti that had a good probability of catching
enough of the blue-eyed ones.”
“We can wish all we want,” said Enuli, “but if we explicitly knew how many
people had blue versus brown eyes, we’d all have to kill ourselves right now.”

“What about probabilistic knowledge?” I asked. “In theory, we could construct

a system that would allow us to have > 99.99% probability what color our eyes
were without being sure.”

“That’s stupid,” Enuli said, at precisely the same time Calkas said “That’s
brilliant!” He went on: “Look, just between the five of us, everybody else back
at the village has blue eyes, right?”

We nodded. It was nerve-wracking to hear it mentioned so casually, just like

that, but as far as I could tell it didn’t break any taboos.

“So,” said Calkas, “We know that, of the island population, at least 995 of the
1000 of us have blue eyes. Oh, and since nobody committed suicide last night,
we know that at least three of the five of us have blue eyes, so that’s 998 out of
1000. Just probabilistically, by Laplace’s Law of Succession and the like, we
can estimate a >99% chance that we ourselves have blue eyes. Nothing I’m
saying is taboo. It’s nothing that the priests don’t know themselves. But none
of them have killed themselves yet. So without revealing any information
about the eye color composition of the current group, I think it’s reasonable to
make a first assumption that all of us have blue eyes.”

“I’m really creeped out at you talking like this,” said Daho. I saw goosebumps
on his arms.

“I do not believe that the same Volcano God who has endowed us with reason
and intellect could have intended us to forego their use,” said Calkas. “Let’s
assume we all have blue eyes. In that case, the Tahiti plan is still on.”

“Waaiiiiit a second – ” Bekka objected. “If probabilistic knowledge of eye color

doesn’t count, then no information can count. After all, there’s always a
chance that the delicious sailor could have been lying. So when he said at least
one of us had blue eyes, all we know is that there’s a high probability that at
least one of us has blue eyes.”

“Yes!” said Daho. “I’ve been reading this book that washed ashore from a
shipwrecked galleon. Off in Europe, there is this tribe called the Jews. Their
holy book says that illegitimate children should be shunned by the
congregation. Their leaders thought this was unfair, but they weren’t able to
contradict the holy book. So instead they declared that sure, illegitimate
children should be shunned, but only if they were sure they were really
illegitimate. Then they declared that no amount of evidence would ever suffice
to convince them of that. There was always a possibility that the woman had
secretly had sex with her husband nine months before the birth and was
simply lying about it. Or, if apparently unmarried, that she had secretly
married someone. They decided that it was permissible to err on the side of
caution, and from that perspective nobody was sufficiently certainly
illegitimate to need shunning. We could do the same thing here.”

“Yes!” I said. “That is, even if we looked at our reflection and saw our eye color
directly, it might be that a deceiving demon is altering all of our experience – ”

“No no NO,” said Calkas. “That’s not right. The Tablets of Enku say that
because people must not know their own eye color, we are forbidden to talk
about the matter. So the law strongly implies that hearing someone tell us our
eye color would count as proof of that eye color. The exact probability has
nothing to do with it. It’s the method by which we gain the information.”

“That’s stupid,” Bekka protested.

“That’s the law,” said Calkas.

“Let’s do the Tahiti plan, then,” I said. I gathered five stones from the floor of
the lodge. Two white, three black. “White stones stay. Black stones go to
Tahiti. Close your eyes and don’t look.”

Bekka, Calkas, Daho, and Enuli all took a stone from my hand. I looked at the
one that was left. It was black. Then I looked around the lodge. Calkas and
Enuli were smiling, white stones in their hands. Bekka and Daho, not so much.
Daho whined, looked at me pleadingly.

“No,” I said. “It’s decided. The three of us will head off tonight.”

Calkas and Enuli tried to be respectful, to hide their glee and relief.

“You guys will tell our families what happened?

They nodded gravely.

We began packing our things.

***

The dark clouds frustrated any hope of moonlight as Bekka, Daho and I set off
to the nearby cove where two canoes lay hidden beneath the overhanging
rocks. The rain soaked our clothes the second we crossed the doorway. The
wind lashed at our faces. We could barely hear ourselves talk. This was a bad
storm.

“How are we going to make it to the canoes in this weather?!” Bekka shouted
at me, grabbing my arm. I just squeezed her hand. Daho might have said
something, might not have. I couldn’t tell.Between the mud and the rain and
the darkness it took us two hours to travel less than a mile. The canoes were
where we had left them a few days before. The rocks gave us brief shelter from
the pelting rain.

“This is suicide!” Daho said, once we could hear each other again. “There’s no
way we can make it to Tahiti in this! We won’t even be able to make it a full
mile out!” Bekka nodded.

“Yes,” I said. I’d kind of known it, the whole way down to the cove, but now I
was sure. “Yes. This is suicide. But we’ve got to do it If we don’t kill ourselves
tonight, then we’ve just got to go back to the lodge. And then we’ll all end up
killing ourselves anyway. And Calkas and Enuli will die too.”

“No!” said Daho. “We go back, we tell them that we can’t make it to Tahiti.
Then we let them decide if we need to commit suicide or not. And if they say
yes, we draw the stones again. Four black, one white. One chance to live.”

“We already drew the stones,” I said. “Fair is fair.”

“Fair is fair?” Bekka cried. “We drew stones to go to Tahiti. We didn’t draw
stones to commit suicide. If the stone drawing obliged us to commit suicide,
they should have said so, and then maybe we would have spent more time
thinking about other options. Why do we have to die? Why can’t the other
ones die? Why not Enuli, with that stupid bone in her hair? I hate her so
much! Ahuja, you can’t just let me die like this!”

That hurt. I was willing to sacrifice my life, if that was what it took. But Bekka
was right. To just toss ourselves out to sea and let her drown beneath those
waves would break the whole point of our betrothal bond.

“Well, I – ”

“Ahuja,” said Bekka. “I think I’m pregnant.”

“What?”

“I missed my last period. And I got sick this morning, even though I didn’t eat
any extra sparkroot. I think I’m pregnant. I don’t want to die. We need to save
me. To save the baby.”

I looked at the horrible waves, watched them pelt the shore. A few moments in
that, and there was no doubt we would capsize and die.

“Okay,” I said. “New plan. The three of us go back. We tell them that we
couldn’t get to Tahiti. They point out that another night has passed. Now four
of us have to die. The three of us vote for everybody except Bekka dying. It’s
3-2, we win. The rest of us die, and Bekka goes back to the village and the baby
lives.”

“Hold on,” said Daho. “I’m supposed to vote for me to die and Bekka to live?
What do I get out of this deal?”

The Tablets of Enku say one man must not kill another. So I didn’t.

“You get an extra day!” I snapped. “One extra day of life for saving my
betrothed and unborn child. Because we’re not going back unless you agree to
this. It’s either die now, or die tomorrow night. And a lot of things can happen
in a day.”

“Like what?”
“Like I don’t know. We might think of some clever way out. Enku the Lawgiver
might return from the dead and change the rules. Whatever. It’s a better deal
than you’ll get if you throw yourself into that water.”

Daho glared at me, then weighed his options. “Okay,” he snapped. “I’ll vote for
Bekka. But you had better be thinking really hard about those clever ways
out.”

Day Three

“So,” said Calkas the next morning. “I guess all of us are still here.” He didn’t
really sound surprised.

I explained what had happened the night before.

“It’s simple,” Calkas declared. “The Volcano God is punishing us. He’s saying
that it’s wrong of us to try to escape his judgment by going to Tahiti. That’s
why he sent the storm. He wants us all to stay here until the bitter end and
then, if we have to, we die together.”

“No!” I protested. “That’s not it at all! The taboo doesn’t say we all have to die.
It just says we all have to die if we figure out what our eye color is! If some of
us kill ourselves, we can prevent that from happening!”

“The Volcano God loathes the needless taking of life,” said Calkas. “And he
loathes his people traveling to other lands, where the sparkroot never grows
and the taboos are violated every day. That’s what he’s trying to tell us. He’s
trying to close off our options, so that we stay pure and our souls don’t have to
burn in his caldera. You know, like Enuli’s will.” He shot her a poison glance.

“My name is – ” she started.

“I don’t think that’s it at all,” I said. “I say the four of us sacrifice ourselves to
save Bekka.”

“You would say that, as her betrothed,” said Enuli.

“Well yes,” I said. “Yes, I would. Forgive me for not wanting the love of my life
to die for a stupid reason. Maybe I should just throw myself in the caldera
right now. And she’s carrying an unborn child? Did you miss that part?”

“People, people,” said Calkas. “Peace! We’re all on the same side here.”

“No we’re not,” I said. “So let’s vote. Everyone in favor of saving Bekka, say
aye.”

“And everyone in favor of not sacrificing anyone to the waves, and letting the
Volcano God’s will be done, say nay.” Calkas added.

“Aye,” I said.

“Aye,” said Bekka.

“Nay,” said Calkas.

“Nay,” said Enuli.

“Nay,” said Daho.

“What?!” I protested.

“Nay,” Daho repeated.

“But you said – ” I told him.

“You promised me one extra day,” Daho said. “Think about it. Calkas is
promising me two.”

“No!” I protested. “You can’t do this! Seriously, I’ll kill you guys if I have to!”

“Then your soul will burn in the caldera forever,” said Calkas. “And it still
won’t help your betrothed or your child.”

“You can’t do this,” I repeated, softly, more of a mutter.

“We can, Ahuja” said Calkas.

I slumped back into my room, defeated.

Day Four

I gave them the traditional morning greeting. “So, I guess we’re all still here.”

We were. It was our last day. We now had enough information to prove,
beyond a shadow of a doubt, that all of us had blue eyes. At midnight, we
would all have to commit suicide.

“You know what?” said Enuli. “I’ve always wanted to say this. ALL OF YOU
GUYS HAVE BLUE EYES! DEAL WITH IT!”

We nodded. “You have blue eyes too, Enuli,” said Daho. It didn’t matter at this
point.

“Wait,” said Bekka. “No! I’ve got it! Heterochromia!”

“Hetero-what?” I asked.

“Heterochromia iridum. It’s a very rare condition where someone has two eyes
of two different colors. If one of us has heterochromia iridum, then we can’t
prove anything at all! The sailor just said that he saw someone with blue eyes.
He didn’t say how many blue eyes.”

“That’s stupid, Bekka,” Enuli protested. “He said blue eyes, plural. If
somebody just had one blue eye, obviously he would have remarked on that
first. Something like ‘this is the only island I’ve been to where people’s eyes
have different colors.'”

“No,” said Bekka. “Because maybe all of us have blue eyes, except one person
who has heterochromia iridum, and he noticed the other four people, but he
didn’t look closely enough to notice the heterochromia iridum in the fifth.”

“Enuli just said,” said Calkas, “that we all have blue eyes.”

“But she didn’t say how many!”

“But,” said Calkas, “if one of us actually had heterochromia iridum, don’t you
think somebody would have thought to mention it before the fifth day?”
“Doesn’t matter!” Bekka insisted. “It’s just probabilistic certainty.”

“It doesn’t work that way,” said Calkas. He put an arm on her shoulder. She
angrily swatted it off. “Who even decides these things!” she asked. “Why is it
wrong to know your own eye color?”

“The eye is the organ that sees,” said Calkas. “It’s how we know what things
look like. If the eye knew what it itself looked like, it would be an infinite cycle,
the eye seeing the eye seeing the eye seeing the eye and so on. Like dividing by
zero. It’s an abomination. That’s why the Volcano God, in his infinite wisdom,
said that it must not be.”

“Well, I know my eyes are blue,” said Bekka. “And I don’t feel like I’m stuck in
an infinite loop, or like I’m an abomination.”

“That’s because,” Calkas said patiently, “the Volcano God, in his infinite
mercy, has given us one day to settle our worldly affairs. But at midnight
tonight, we all have to kill ourselves. That’s the rule.”

Bekka cried in my arms. I glared at Calkas. He shrugged. Daho and Enuli went
off together – I guess they figured if it was their last day in the world, they
might as well have some fun – and I took Bekka back to our room.

***

“Listen,” I said. “I’m not going to do it.”

“What?” she asked. She stopped crying immediately.

“I’m not going to do it. And you don’t have to do it either. You should have
your baby, and he should have a mother and father. We can wait here. The
others will kill themselves. Then we’ll go back to the village on our own and
say that the rest of them died in the storm.”

“But – aren’t you worried about the Volcano God burning our souls in his
caldera forever?”
“To be honest, I never really paid much attention in Volcano Church. I – I
guess we’ll see what happens later on, when we die. The important thing is
that we can have our child, and he can grow up with us.”

“I love you,” said Bekka.

“I know,” I said.

“I know you know,” she said. “But I didn’t know that you knew I knew you
knew. And now I do.”

“I love you too,” I said.

“I know,” she said.

“I know you know,” I said. I kissed her. “I love you and your beautiful blue
eyes.”

The storm darkened from gray to black as the hidden sun passed below the
horizon.

Day Five

“So,” I said when the other four had woken up, “I guess all of us are atheists.”

“Yeah,” said Daho.

“The world is empty and void of light and meaning,” said Enuli. “It’s the most
Goth thing of all.”

Calkas sighed. “I was hoping all of you would kill yourselves,” he said, “and
then I could go home, and my father the high priest would never have to know
what happened. I’m sorry for pushing the rest of you. It’s just that – if I looked
lax, even for a second, he would have suspected, and then I would have been in
so much trouble that an eternity in the Volcano God’s caldera would look
pretty good compared to what would happen when I got back home.”

“I think,” said Bekka, “that I realized it the first time I ate the sparkroot.
Before I’d even finished swallowing it, I was like, wait a second, volcanoes are
probably just geologic phenomenon caused by an upwelling of the magma in
the Earth’s mantle. And human life probably evolved from primitive
replicators. It makes a lot more sense than some spirit creating all life and
then retreating to a dormant volcano on some random island in the middle of
the nowhere.”

“This is great,” said Bekka. “Now even if it’s a Mersenne prime day I can eat as
many green vegetables as I want!”

“You know Mersenne prime days only come like once every couple of
centuries, right?” I asked her.

“I know. It’s just the principle of the thing.”

“We can’t tell any of the others,” Daho insisted. “They’d throw us into the
volcano.”

“You think?” I said. “Calkas was saying before that 99% of us had blue eyes, so
probably we all had blue eyes. Well, think about it. The five of us are a pretty
random sample of the island population, and all five of us are atheist. That
means there’s probably a lot more. Maybe everybody’s atheist.”

“Everybody?”

“Well, I thought Calkas was like the most religious of anybody I knew. And
here we are.”

“I told you, I was just trying to behave so that I didn’t get in trouble with my
father.”

“What if everyone’s doing that? Nobody wants to get in trouble by admitting

they don’t believe, because if anybody else found out, they’d get thrown into
the volcano. So we all just put on a mask for everybody else.”

“I figured Ahuja was atheist,” said Bekka.

“You did?!” I asked her.

“Yeah. It was the little things. When we were hanging out. Sometimes you’d
forget some rituals. And then you’d always shoot these guilty glances at me,
like you were trying to see if I’d noticed. I thought it was cute.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“You’d have freaked out. You’d have had to angrily deny it. Unless you knew I
was atheist. But I couldn’t have told you that, because if I did then you might
feel like you had to throw me in the volcano to keep up appearances.”

“Bekka!” I said. “You know I would never – ”

“I kind of suspected Calkas was atheist,” said Daho. “He got so worked up
about some of those little points of law. It had to be overcompensating.”

“Hold on hold on hold on!” said Calkas. “So basically, we were all atheists. We
all knew we were all atheists. We just didn’t know that we knew that we were
all atheists. This is hurting my brain. I think I’m going to need more
sparkroot.”

A sunbeam peeked through the wall of the lodge.

“Storm’s over!” Bekka shouted gleefully. “Time to go back home!” We gathered

our things and went outside. The sudden sunlight felt crisp and warm upon
my skin.

“So,” said Daho, “we don’t mention anything about the sailor to anyone else
back at the village?”

“Are you kidding?” said Calkas. “I say we stand in the middle of town square,
announce everybody’s eye colors, and then suggest that maybe they don’t
believe in the Volcano God as much as they thought. See what happens.”

“YOU ALL HAVE BLUE EYES!” Enuli shouted at the jungle around us. “DEAL
WITH IT!” We laughed.

“By the way,” I told Enuli. “While we’re airing out things that everybody knows
in order to make them common knowledge, that bone in your hair looks
ridiculous.”
“He’s right,” Daho told her.

“It really does,” Calkas agreed.

“You watch out,” said Enuli. “Now that we don’t have to reserve the sparkroot
for interpreting taboos, I’m going to invent a death ray. Then you’ll be sorry.”

“Hey,” said Daho, “that sounds pretty cool. And I can invent a giant aerial
dreadnaught to mount it on, and together we can take over Europe and maybe
the next sailor who gets shipwrecked on our island will be a little less
condescending.”

“Ha!” said Enuli. “That would be so Goth.”

Sun on our backs, we took the winding road into the village.

Parables and Prayers

Burdens

The DSM lists nine criteria for major depressive disorder, of which the seventh
is “feelings of worthlessness or excessive or inappropriate guilt”.

There are a lot of dumb diagnostic debates over which criteria are “more
important” or “more fundamental”, and for me there’s always been something
special about criterion seven. People get depressed over all sorts of things. But
when they’re actively suicidal, the people who aren’t just gesturing for help but
totally set on it, they always say one thing:

“I feel like I’m a burden”.

Depression is in part a disease of distorted cognitions, a failure of rationality. I

had one patient who worked for GM, very smart guy, invented a lot of safety
features for cars. He was probably actively saving a bunch of people’s lives
every time he checked in at the office, and he still felt like he was worthless, a
burden, that he was just draining resources that could better be used for
someone else.

In cases like these, you can do a little bit of good just by teaching people the
fundamental lesson of rationality: that you can’t always trust your brain. If
your System I is telling you that you’re a worthless burden, it could be because
you’re a worthless burden, or it could be because System I is broken. If System
I is broken, you need to call in System II to route around the distorted
cognition so you can understand at least on an intellectual level that you’re
wrong. Once you understand you’re wrong on an intellectual level, you can do
what you need to do to make it sink in on a practical level as well – which
starts with not killing yourself.

As sad as it was, Robin Williams’ suicide has actually been sort of helpful for
me. For the past few days, I’ve tried telling these sorts of people that Robin
Williams brightened the lives of millions of people, was a truly great man –
and his brain still kept telling him he didn’t deserve to live. So maybe
depressed brains are not the most trustworthy arbiters on these sorts of
issues.

This sort of supportive psychotherapy (ie “psychotherapy you make up as you

go along”) can sometimes take people some of the way, and then the
medications do the rest.

But sometimes it’s harder than this. I don’t want to say anyone is ever right
about being a burden, but a lot of the people I see aren’t Oscar-winning actors
or even automobile safety engineers. Some people just have no easy outs.

Another patient. 25 year old kid. Had some brain damage a few years ago, now
has cognitive problems and poor emotional control. Can’t do a job. Got denied
for disability a few times, in accordance with the ancient bureaucratic
tradition. Survives on a couple of lesser social programs he got approved for
plus occasional charity handouts plus some help from his family. One can
trace out an unlikely sequence of events by which his situation might one day
improve, but I won’t insult his intelligence by claiming it’s very probable. Now
he attempts suicide, says he feels like a burden on everyone around him. Well,
what am I going to say?

It’s not always people with some obvious disability. Sometimes it’s just
alcoholics, or elderly people, or people without the cognitive skills to get a job
in today’s economy. They think that they’re taking more from the system than
they’re putting in, and in monetary terms they’re probably right.

One common therapeutic strategy here is to talk about how much the patient’s
parents/friends/girlfriend/pet hamster love them, how heartbroken they
would be if they killed themselves. In the absence of better alternatives, I have
used this strategy. I have used it very grudgingly, and I’ve always felt dirty
afterwards. It always feels like the worst sort of emotional blackmail. Not
helping them want to live, just making them feel really guilty about dying.
“Sure, you’re a burden if you live, but if you kill yourself, that would make you
an even bigger burden!” A++ best psychiatrist.

There is something else I’ve never said, because it’s too deeply tied in with my
own politics, and not something I would expect anybody else to understand.

And that is: humans don’t owe society anything. We were here first.

If my patient, the one with the brain damage, were back in the Environment of
Evolutionary Adaptedness, in a nice tribe with Dunbar’s number of people,
there would be no problem.

Maybe his cognitive problems would make him a slightly less proficient hunter
than someone else, but whatever, he could always gather.

Maybe his emotional control problems would give him a little bit of a handicap
in tribal politics, but he wouldn’t get arrested for making a scene, he wouldn’t
get fired for not sucking up to his boss enough, he wouldn’t be forced to live in
a tiny apartment with people he didn’t necessarily like who were constantly
getting on his nerves. He might get in a fight and end up with a spear through
his gut, but in that case his problems would be over anyway.

Otherwise he could just hang out and live in a cave and gather roots and
berries and maybe hunt buffalo and participate in the appropriate tribal
bonding rituals like everyone else.

But society came and paved over the place where all the roots and berry plants
grew and killed the buffalo and dynamited the caves and declared the tribal
bonding rituals Problematic. This increased productivity by about a zillion
times, so most people ended up better off. The only ones who didn’t were the
ones who for some reason couldn’t participate in it.

(if you’re one of those people who sees red every time someone mentions
evolution or cavemen, imagine him as a dockworker a hundred years ago, or a
peasant farmer a thousand)

Society got where it is by systematically destroying everything that could have

supported him and replacing it with things that required skills he didn’t have.
Of course it owes him when he suddenly can’t support himself. Think of it as
the ultimate use of eminent domain; a power beyond your control has seized
everything in the world, it had some good economic reasons for doing so, but
it at least owes you compensation!

This is also the basis of my support for a basic income guarantee. Imagine an
employment waterline, gradually rising through higher and higher levels of
competence. In the distant past, maybe you could be pretty dumb, have no
emotional continence at all, and still live a pretty happy life. As the waterline
rises, the skills necessary to support yourself comfortably become higher and
higher. Right now most people in the US who can’t get college degrees – which
are really hard to get! – are just barely hanging on, and that is absolutely a
new development. Soon enough even some of the college-educated won’t be
very useful to the system. And so on, until everyone is a burden.

(people talk as if the only possible use of information about the determinants
of intelligence is to tell low-IQ people they are bad. Maybe they’ve never felt
the desperate need to reassure someone “No, it is not your fault that
everything is going wrong for you, everything was rigged against you from the
beginning.”)

By the time I am a burden – it’s possible that I am already, just because I can
convince the system to give me money doesn’t mean the system is right to do
so, but I expect I certainly will be one before I die – I would like there to be in
place a crystal-clear understanding that we were here first and society doesn’t
get to make us obsolete without owing us something in return.

After that, we will have to predicate our self-worth on something other than
being able to “contribute” in the classical sense of the term. Don’t get me
wrong, I think contributing something is a valuable goal, and one it’s
important to enforce to prevent free-loaders. But it’s a valuable goal at the
margins, some people are already heading for the tails, and pretty soon we’ll
all be stuck there.

I’m not sure what such a post-contribution value system would look like. It
might be based around helping others in less tangible ways, like providing
company and cheerfulness and love. It might be a virtue ethics celebrating
people unusually good at cultivating traits we value. Or it might be a sort of
philosophically-informed hedonism along the lines of Epicurus, where we try
to enjoy ourselves in the ways that make us most human.

And I think my advice to my suicidal patients, if I were able and willing to

express all this to them, would be to stop worrying about being a burden and
to start doing all these things now.

The Parable Of The Talents

I.

I sometimes blog about research into IQ and human intelligence. I think most
readers of this blog already know IQ is 50% to 80% heritable, and that it’s so
important for intellectual pursuits that eminent scientists in some fields have
average IQs around 150 to 160. Since IQ this high only appears in 1/10,000
people or so, it beggars coincidence to believe this represents anything but a
very strong filter for IQ (or something correlated with it) in reaching that level.
If you saw a group of dozens of people who were 7’0 tall on average, you’d
assume it was a basketball team or some other group selected for height, not a
bunch of botanists who were all very tall by coincidence.

A lot of people find this pretty depressing. Some worry that taking it seriously
might damage the “growth mindset” people need to fully actualize their
potential. This is important and I want to discuss it eventually, but not now.
What I want to discuss now is people who feel personally depressed. For
example, a comment from last week:

I’m sorry to leave self a self absorbed comment, but reading this really
upset me and I just need to get this off my chest…How is a person
supposed to stay sane in a culture that prizes intelligence above
everything else – especially if, as Scott suggests, Human Intelligence
Really Is the Key to the Future – when they themselves are not
particularly intelligent and, apparently, have no potential to ever
become intelligent? Right now I basically feel like pond scum.

I hear these kinds of responses every so often, so I should probably learn to

expect them. I never do. They seem to me precisely backwards. There’s a
moral gulf here, and I want to throw stories and intuitions at it until enough of
them pile up at the bottom to make a passable bridge. But first, a comparison:

Some people think body weight is biologically/genetically determined. Other

people think it’s based purely on willpower – how strictly you diet, how much
you can bring yourself to exercise. These people get into some pretty
acrimonious debates.

Overweight people, and especially people who feel unfairly stigmatized for
being overweight, tend to cluster on the biologically determined side. And
although not all believers in complete voluntary control of weight are mean to
fat people, the people who are mean to fat people pretty much all insist that
weight is voluntary and easily changeable.

Although there’s a lot of debate over the science here, there seems to be broad
agreement on both sides that the more compassionate, sympathetic,
progressive position, the position promoted by the kind of people who are
really worried about stigma and self-esteem, is that weight is biologically
determined.
And the same is true of mental illness. Sometimes I see depressed patients
whose families really don’t get it. They say “Sure, my daughter feels down, but
she needs to realize that’s no excuse for shirking her responsibilities. She
needs to just pick herself up and get on with her life.” On the other hand, most
depressed people say that their depression is more fundamental than that, not
a thing that can be overcome by willpower, certainly not a thing you can just
‘shake off’.

Once again, the compassionate/sympathetic/progressive side of the debate is

that depression is something like biological, and cannot easily be overcome
with willpower and hard work.

One more example of this pattern. There are frequent political debates in
which conservatives (or straw conservatives) argue that financial success is the
result of hard work, so poor people are just too lazy to get out of poverty. Then
a liberal (or straw liberal) protests that hard work has nothing to do with it,
success is determined by accidents of birth like who your parents are and what
your skin color is et cetera, so the poor are blameless in their own
predicament.

I’m oversimplifying things, but again the compassionate/sympathetic/

progressive side of the debate – and the side endorsed by many of the poor
themselves – is supposed to be that success is due to accidents of birth, and
the less compassionate side is that success depends on hard work and
perseverance and grit and willpower.

The obvious pattern is that attributing outcomes to things like genes, biology,
and accidents of birth is kind and sympathetic. Attributing them to who works
harder and who’s “really trying” can stigmatize people who end up with bad
outcomes and is generally viewed as Not A Nice Thing To Do.

And the weird thing, the thing I’ve never understood, is that intellectual
achievement is the one domain that breaks this pattern.

Here it’s would-be hard-headed conservatives arguing that intellectual

greatness comes from genetics and the accidents of birth and demanding we
“accept” this “unpleasant truth”.
And it’s would-be compassionate progressives who are insisting that no, it
depends on who works harder, claiming anybody can be brilliant if they really
try, warning us not to “stigmatize” the less intelligent as “genetically inferior”.

I can come up with a few explanations for the sudden switch, but none of them
are very principled and none of them, to me, seem to break the fundamental
symmetry of the situation. I choose to maintain consistency by preserving the
belief that overweight people, depressed people, and poor people aren’t fully to
blame for their situation – and neither are unintelligent people. It’s accidents
of birth all the way down. Intelligence is mostly genetic and determined at
birth – and we’ve already determined in every other sphere that “mostly
genetic and determined at birth” means you don’t have to feel bad if you got
the short end of the stick.

Consider for a moment Srinivasa Ramanujan, one of the greatest

mathematicians of all time. He grew up in poverty in a one-room house in
small-town India. He taught himself mathematics by borrowing books from
local college students and working through the problems on his own until he
reached the end of the solveable ones and had nowhere else to go but
inventing ways to solve the unsolveable ones.

There are a lot of poor people in the United States today whose life
circumstances prevented their parents from reading books to them as a child,
prevented them from getting into the best schools, prevented them from
attending college, et cetera. And pretty much all of those people still got more
educational opportunities than Ramanujan did.

And from there we can go in one of two directions. First, we can say that a lot
of intelligence is innate, that Ramanujan was a genius, and that we mortals
cannot be expected to replicate his accomplishments.

Or second, we can say those poor people are just not trying hard enough.

Take “innate ability” out of the picture, and if you meet a poor person on the
street begging for food, saying he never had a chance, your reply must be
“Well, if you’d just borrowed a couple of math textbooks from the local library
at age 12, you would have been a Fields Medalist by now. I hear that pays
pretty well.”
The best reason not to say that is that we view Ramanujan as intellectually
gifted. But the very phrase tells us where we should classify that belief.
Ramanujan’s genius is a “gift” in much the same way your parents giving you a
trust fund on your eighteenth birthday is a “gift”, and it should be weighted
accordingly in the moral calculus.

II.

I shouldn’t pretend I’m worried about this for the sake of the poor. I’m
worried for me.

My last IQ-ish test was my SATs in high school. I got a perfect score in Verbal,
and a good-but-not-great score in Math.

And in high school English, I got A++s in all my classes, Principal’s Gold
Medals, 100%s on tests, first prize in various state-wide essay contests, etc. In
Math, I just barely by the skin of my teeth scraped together a pass in Calculus
with a C-.

Every time I won some kind of prize in English my parents would praise me
and say I was good and should feel good. My teachers would hold me up as an
example and say other kids should try to be more like me. Meanwhile, when I
would bring home a report card with a C- in math, my parents would have
concerned faces and tell me they were disappointed and I wasn’t living up to
my potential and I needed to work harder et cetera.

And I don’t know which part bothered me more.

Every time I was held up as an example in English class, I wanted to crawl

under a rock and die. I didn’t do it! I didn’t study at all, half the time I did the
homework in the car on the way to school, those essays for the statewide
competition were thrown together on a lark without a trace of real effort. To
praise me for any of it seemed and still seems utterly unjust.

On the other hand, to this day I believe I deserve a fricking statue for getting a
C- in Calculus I. It should be in the center of the schoolyard, and have a plaque
saying something like “Scott Alexander, who by making a herculean effort
managed to pass Calculus I, even though they kept throwing random things
after the little curly S sign and pretending it made sense.”
And without some notion of innate ability, I don’t know what to do with this
experience. I don’t want to have to accept the blame for being a lazy person
who just didn’t try hard enough in Math. But I really don’t want to have to
accept the credit for being a virtuous and studious English student who
worked harder than his peers. I know there were people who worked harder
than I did in English, who poured their heart and soul into that course – and
who still got Cs and Ds. To deny innate ability is to devalue their efforts and
sacrifice, while simultaneously giving me credit I don’t deserve.

Meanwhile, there were some students who did better than I did in Math with
seemingly zero effort. I didn’t begrudge those students. But if they’d started
trying to say they had exactly the same level of innate ability as I did, and the
only difference was they were trying while I was slacking off, then I sure as
hell would have begrudged them. Especially if I knew they were lazing around
on the beach while I was poring over a textbook.

I tend to think of social norms as contracts bargained between different

groups. In the case of attitudes towards intelligence, those two groups are
smart people and dumb people. Since I was both at once, I got to make the
bargain with myself, which simplified the bargaining process immensely. The
deal I came up with was that I wasn’t going to beat myself up over the areas I
was bad at, but I also didn’t get to become too cocky about the areas I was
good at. It was all genetic luck of the draw either way. In the meantime, I
would try to press as hard as I could to exploit my strengths and cover up my
deficiencies. So far I’ve found this to be a really healthy way of treating myself,
and it’s the way I try to treat others as well.

III.

The theme continues to be “Scott Relives His Childhood Inadequacies”. So:

When I was 6 and my brother was 4, our mom decided that as an

Overachieving Jewish Mother she was contractually obligated to make both of
us learn to play piano. She enrolled me in a Yamaha introductory piano class,
and my younger brother in a Yamaha ‘cute little kids bang on the keyboard’
class.
A little while later, I noticed that my brother was now with me in my
Introductory Piano class.

A little while later, I noticed that my brother was now by far the best student
in my Introductory Piano Class, even though he had just started and was two
or three years younger than anyone else there.

A little while later, Yamaha USA flew him to Japan to show him off before the
Yamaha corporate honchos there.

Well, one thing led to another, and right now if you Google my brother’s name
you get a bunch of articles like this one:

The evidence that Jeremy [Alexander] is among the top jazz pianists of
his generation is quickly becoming overwhelming: at age 26, Alexander
is the winner of the Nottingham International Jazz Piano Competition, a
second-place finisher in the Montreux Jazz Festival Solo Piano
Competition, a two-time finalist for the American Pianist Association’s
Cole Porter Fellowship, and a two-time second-place finisher at the
Phillips Jazz Competition. Alexander, who was recently named a
Professor of Piano at Western Michigan University’s School of Music,
made a sold-out solo debut at Carnegie Hall in 2012, performing
Debussy’s Etudes in the first half and jazz improvisations in the second
half.

Meanwhile, I was always a mediocre student at Yamaha. When the time came
to try an instrument in elementary school, I went with the violin to see if
maybe I’d find it more to my tastes than the piano. I was quickly sorted into
the remedial class because I couldn’t figure out how to make my instrument
stop sounding like a wounded cat. After a year or so of this, I decided to switch
to fulfilling my music requirement through a choir, and everyone who’d had to
listen to me breathed a sigh of relief.

Every so often I wonder if somewhere deep inside me there is the potential to

be “among the top musicians of my generation.” I try to recollect whether my
brother practiced harder than I did. My memories are hazy, but I don’t think
he practiced much harder until well after his career as a child prodigy had
taken off. The cycle seemed to be that every time he practiced, things came
fluidly to him and he would produce beautiful music and everyone would be
amazed. And this must have felt great, and incentivized him to practice more,
and that made him even better, so that the beautiful music came even more
fluidly, and the praise became more effusive, until eventually he chose a full-
time career in music and became amazing. Meanwhile, when I started
practicing it always sounded like wounded cats, and I would get very cautious
praise like “Good job, Scott, it sounded like that cat was hurt a little less badly
than usual,” and it made me frustrated, and want to practice less, which made
me even worse, until eventually I quit in disgust.

On the other hand, I know people who want to get good at writing, and make a
mighty resolution to write two hundred words a day every day, and then after
the first week they find it’s too annoying and give up. These people think I’m
amazing, and why shouldn’t they? I’ve written a few hundred to a few
thousand words pretty much every day for the past ten years.

But as I’ve said before, this has taken exactly zero willpower. It’s more that I
can’t stop even if I want to. Part of that is probably that when I write, I feel
really good about having expressed exactly what it was I meant to say. Lots of
people read it, they comment, they praise me, I feel good, I’m encouraged to
keep writing, and it’s exactly the same virtuous cycle as my brother got from
his piano practice.

And so I think it would be too easy to say something like “There’s no innate
component at all. Your brother practiced piano really hard but almost never
writes. You write all the time, but wimped out of practicing piano. So what do
you expect? You both got what you deserved.”

I tried to practice piano as hard as he did. I really tried. But every moment was
a struggle. I could keep it up for a while, and then we’d go on vacation, and
there’d be no piano easily available, and I would be breathing a sigh of relief at
having a ready-made excuse, and he’d be heading off to look for a piano
somewhere to practice on. Meanwhile, I am writing this post in short breaks
between running around hospital corridors responding to psychiatric
emergencies, and there’s probably someone very impressed with that,
someone saying “But you had such a great excuse to get out of your writing
practice!”
I dunno. But I don’t think of myself as working hard at any of the things I am
good at, in the sense of “exerting vast willpower to force myself kicking and
screaming to do them”. It’s possible I do work hard, and that an outside
observer would accuse me of eliding how hard I work, but it’s not a conscious
elision and I don’t feel that way from the inside.

Ramanujan worked very hard at math. But I don’t think he thought of it as

work. He obtained a scholarship to the local college, but dropped out almost
immediately because he couldn’t make himself study any subject other than
math. Then he got accepted to another college, and dropped out again
because they made him study non-mathematical subjects and he failed a
physiology class. Then he nearly starved to death because he had no money
and no scholarship. To me, this doesn’t sound like a person who just happens
to be very hard-working; if he had the ability to study other subjects he would
have, for no reason other than that it would have allowed him to stay in college
so he could keep studying math. It seems to me that in some sense Ramanujan
was incapable of putting hard work into non-math subjects.

I really wanted to learn math and failed, but I did graduate with honors from
medical school. Ramanujan really wanted to learn physiology and failed, but
he did become one of history’s great mathematicians. So which one of us was
the hard worker?

People used to ask me for writing advice. And I, in all earnestness, would say
“Just transcribe your thoughts onto paper exactly like they sound in your
head.” It turns out that doesn’t work for other people. Maybe it doesn’t work
for me either, and it just feels like it does.

But you know what? When asked about one of his discoveries, a method of
simplifying a very difficult problem to a continued fraction, Ramanujan
described his thought process as: “It is simple. The minute I heard the
problem, I knew that the answer was a continued fraction. ‘Which continued
fraction?’ I asked myself. Then the answer came to my mind”.

And again, maybe that’s just how it feels to him, and the real answer is “study
math so hard that you flunk out of college twice, and eventually you develop so
much intuition that you can solve problems without thinking about them.”
(or maybe the real answer is “have dreams where obscure Hindu gods appear
to you as drops of blood and reveal mathematical formulae”. Ramanujan was
weird).

But I still feel like there’s something going on here where the solution to me
being bad at math and piano isn’t just “sweat blood and push through your
brain’s aversion to these subjects until you make it stick”. When I read
biographies of Ramanujan and other famous mathematicians, there’s no sense
that they ever had to do that with math. When I talk to my brother, I never get
a sense that he had to do that with piano. And if I am good enough at writing
to qualify to have an opinion on being good at things, then I don’t feel like I
ever went through that process myself.

So this too is part of my deal with myself. I’ll try to do my best at things, but if
there’s something I really hate, something where I have to go uphill every step
of the way, then it’s okay to admit mediocrity. I won’t beat myself up for not
forcing myself kicking and screaming to practice piano. And in return I won’t
become too cocky about practicing writing a lot. It’s probably some kind of
luck of the draw either way.

IV.

I said before that this wasn’t just about poor people, it was about me being
selfishly worried for my own sake. I think I might have given the mistaken
impression that I merely need to justify to myself why I can’t get an A in math
or play the piano. But it’s much worse than that.

The rationalist community tends to get a lot of high-scrupulosity people,

people who tend to beat themselves up for not doing more than they are. It’s
why I push giving 10% to charity, not as some kind of amazing stretch goal
that we need to guilt people into doing, but as a crutch, a sort of “don’t worry,
you’re still okay if you only give ten percent”. It’s why there’s so much
emphasis on “heroic responsibility” and how you, yes you, have to solve all the
world’s problems personally. It’s why I see red when anyone accuses us of
entitlement, since it goes about as well as calling an anorexic person fat.

And we really aren’t doing ourselves any favors. For example, Nick Bostrom
writes:
 Searching for a cure for aging is not just a nice thing that we should
perhaps one day get around to. It is an urgent, screaming moral
imperative. The sooner we start a focused research program, the sooner
we will get results. It matters if we get the cure in 25 years rather than in
24 years: a population greater than that of Canada would die as a result.

If that bothers you, you definitely shouldn’t read Astronomical Waste.

Yet here I am, not doing anti-aging research. Why not?

Because I tried doing biology research a few times and it was really hard and
made me miserable. You know how in every science class, when the teacher
says “Okay, pour the white chemical into the grey chemical, and notice how it
turns green and begins to bubble,” there’s always one student who pours the
white chemical into the grey chemical, and it just forms a greyish-white
mixture and sits there? That was me. I hated it, I didn’t have the dexterity or
the precision of mind to do it well, and when I finally finished my required
experimental science classes I was happy never to think about it again. Even
the abstract intellectual part of it – the one where you go through data about
genes and ligands and receptors in supercentenarians and shake it until data
comes out – requires exactly the kind of math skills that I don’t have.

Insofar as this is a matter of innate aptitude – some people are cut out for
biology research and I’m not one of them – all is well, and my decision to get a
job I’m good at instead is entirely justified.

But insofar as there’s no such thing as innate aptitude, just hard work and grit
– then by not being gritty enough, I’m a monster who’s complicit in the death
of a population greater than that of Canada.

Insofar as there’s no such thing as innate aptitude, I have no excuse for not
being Aubrey de Grey. Or if Aubrey de Grey doesn’t impress you much,
Norman Borlaug. Or if you don’t know who either of those two people are,
Elon Musk.

I once heard a friend, upon his first use of modafinil, wonder aloud if the way
they felt on that stimulant was the way Elon Musk felt all the time. That tied a
lot of things together for me, gave me an intuitive understanding of what it
might “feel like from the inside” to be Elon Musk. And it gave me a good tool
to discuss biological variation with. Most of us agree that people on stimulants
can perform in ways it’s difficult for people off stimulants to match. Most of us
agree that there’s nothing magical about stimulants, just changes to the levels
of dopamine, histamine, norepinephrine et cetera in the brain. And most of us
agree there’s a lot of natural variation in these chemicals anyone. So “me on
stimulants is that guy’s normal” seems like a good way of cutting through
some of the philosophical difficulties around this issue.

…which is all kind of a big tangent. The point I want to make is that for me,
what’s at stake in talking about natural variations in ability isn’t just whether I
have to feel like a failure for not getting an A in high school calculus, or not
being as good at music as my brother. It’s whether I’m a failure for not being
Elon Musk. Specifically, it’s whether I can say “No, I’m really not cut out to be
Elon Musk” and go do something else I’m better at without worrying that I’m
killing everyone in Canada.

V.

The proverb says: “Everyone has somebody better off than they are and
somebody worse off than they are, with two exceptions.” When we accept that
we’re all in the “not Elon Musk” boat together (with one exception) a lot of the
status games around innate ability start to seem less important.

Every so often an overly kind commenter here praises my intelligence and says
they feel intellectually inadequate compared to me, that they wish they could
be at my level. But at my level, I spend my time feeling intellectually
inadequate compared to Scott Aaronson. Scott Aaronson describes feeling “in
awe” of Terence Tao and frequently struggling to understand him. Terence
Tao – well, I don’t know if he’s religious, but maybe he feels intellectually
inadequate compared to God. And God feels intellectually inadequate
compared to Johann von Neumann.

So there’s not much point in me feeling inadequate compared to my brother,

because even if I was as good at music as my brother, I’d probably just feel
inadequate for not being Mozart.

And asking “Well what if you just worked harder?” can elide small
distinctions, but not bigger ones. If my only goal is short-term preservation of
my self-esteem, I can imagine that if only things had gone a little differently I
could have practiced more and ended up as talented as my brother. It’s a lot
harder for me to imagine the course of events where I do something different
and become Mozart. Only one in a billion people reach a Mozart level of
achievement; why would it be me?

If I loved music for its own sake and wanted to be a talented musician so I
could express the melodies dancing within my heart, then none of this
matters. But insofar as I want to be good at music because I feel bad that other
people are better than me at music, that’s a road without an end.

This is also how I feel of when some people on this blog complain they feel
dumb for not being as smart as some of the other commenters on this blog.

I happen to have all of your IQ scores in a spreadsheet right here (remember

that survey you took?). Not a single person is below the population average.
The first percentile for IQ here – the one such that 1% of respondents are
lower and 99% of respondents are higher – is – corresponds to the 85th
percentile of the general population. So even if you’re in the first percentile
here, you’re still pretty high up in the broader scheme of things.

At that point we’re back on the road without end. I am pretty sure we can raise
your IQ as much as you want and you will still feel like pond scum. If we raise
it twenty points, you’ll try reading Quantum Computing since Democritus and
feel like pond scum. If we raise it forty, you’ll just go to Terence Tao’s blog and
feel like pond scum there. Maybe if you were literally the highest-IQ person in
the entire world you would feel good about yourself, but any system where
only one person in the world is allowed to feel good about themselves at a time
is a bad system.

People say we should stop talking about ability differences so that stupid
people don’t feel bad. I say that there’s more than enough room for everybody
to feel bad, smart and stupid alike, and not talking about it won’t help. What
will help is fundamentally uncoupling perception of intelligence from
perception of self-worth.

I work with psychiatric patients who tend to have cognitive difficulties.

Starting out in the Detroit ghetto doesn’t do them any favors, and then they
get conditions like bipolar disorder and schizophrenia that actively lower IQ
for poorly understood neurological reasons.

The standard psychiatric evaluation includes an assessment of cognitive

ability; the one I use is a quick test with three questions. The questions are –
“What is 100 minus 7?”, “What do an apple and an orange have in common?”,
and “Remember these three words for one minute, then repeat them back to
me: house, blue, and tulip”.

There are a lot of people – and I don’t mean floridly psychotic people who
don’t know their own name, I mean ordinary reasonable people just like you
and me – who can’t answer these questions. And we know why they can’t
answer these questions, and it is pretty darned biological.

And if our answer to “I feel dumb and worthless because my IQ isn’t high
enough” is “don’t worry, you’re not worthless, I’m sure you can be a great
scientist if you just try hard enough”, then we are implicitly throwing under
the bus all of these people who are definitely not going to be great scientists no
matter how hard they try. Talking about trying harder can obfuscate the little
differences, but once we’re talking about the homeless schizophrenic guy from
Detroit who can’t tell me 100 minus 7 to save his life, you can’t just magic the
problem away with a wave of your hand and say “I’m sure he can be the next
Ramanujan if he keeps a positive attitude!” You either need to condemn him
as worthless or else stop fricking tying worth to innate intellectual ability.

This is getting pretty close to what I was talking about in my post on burdens.
When I get a suicidal patient who thinks they’re a burden on society, it’s nice
to be able to point out ten important things they’ve done for society recently
and prove them wrong. But sometimes it’s not that easy, and the only thing
you can say is “f#@k that s#!t”. Yes, society has organized itself in a way that
excludes and impoverishes a bunch of people who could have been perfectly
happy in the state of nature picking berries and hunting aurochs. It’s not your
fault, and if they’re going to give you compensation you take it. And we had
better make this perfectly clear now, so that when everything becomes
automated and run by robots and we’re all behind the curve, everybody agrees
that us continuing to exist is still okay.
Likewise with intellectual ability. When someone feels sad because they can’t
be a great scientist, it is nice to be able to point out all of their intellectual
strengths and tell them “Yes you can, if only you put your mind to it!” But this
is often not true. At that point you have to say “f@#k it” and tell them to stop
tying their self-worth to being a great scientist. And we had better establish
that now, before transhumanists succeed in creating superintelligence and we
all have to come to terms with our intellectual inferiority.

VI.

But I think the situation can also be somewhat rosier than that.

Ozy once told me that the law of comparative advantage was one of the most
inspirational things they had ever read. This was sufficiently strange that I
demanded an explanation.

Ozy said that it proves everyone can contribute. Even if you are worse than
everyone else at everything, you can still participate in global trade and other
people will pay you money. It may not be very much money, but it will be
some, and it will be a measure of how your actions are making other people
better off and they are grateful for your existence.

(in real life this doesn’t work for a couple of reasons, but who cares about real
life when we have a theory?)

After some thought, I was also inspired by this.

I’m never going to be a great mathematician or Elon Musk. But if I pursue my

comparative advantage, which right now is medicine, I can still make money.
And if I feel like it, I can donate it to mathematics research. Or anti-aging
research. Or the same people Elon Musk donates his money to. They will use it
to hire smart people with important talents that I lack, and I will be at least
partially responsible for those people’s successes.

If I had an IQ of 70, I think I would still want to pursue my comparative

advantage – even if that was ditch-digging, or whatever, and donate that
money to important causes. It might not be very much money, but it would be
some.
Our modern word “talent” comes from the Greek word talenton, a certain
amount of precious metal sometimes used as a denomination of money. The
etymology passes through a parable of Jesus’. A master calls three servants to
him and gives the first five talents, the second two talents, and the third one
talent. The first two servants invest the money and double it. The third
literally buries it in a hole. The master comes back later and praises the first
two servants, but sends the third servant to Hell (metaphor? what metaphor?).

Various people have come up with various interpretations, but the most
popular says that God gives all of us different amounts of resources, and He
will judge us based on how well we use these resources rather than on how
many He gave us. It would be stupid to give your first servant five loads of
silver, then your second servant two loads of silver, then immediately start
chewing out the second servant for having less silver than the first one. And if
both servants invested their silver wisely, it would be silly to chew out the
second one for ending up with less profit when he started with less seed
capital. The moral seems to be that if you take what God gives you and use it
wisely, you’re fine.

The modern word “talent” comes from this parable. It implies “a thing God
has given you which you can invest and give back”.

So if I were a ditch-digger, I think I would dig ditches, donate a portion of the

small amount I made, and trust that I had done what I could with the talents I
was given.

VII.

The Jews also talk about how God judges you for your gifts. Rabbi Zusya once
said that when he died, he wasn’t worried that God would ask him “Why
weren’t you Moses?” or “Why weren’t you Solomon?” But he did worry that
God might ask “Why weren’t you Rabbi Zusya?”

And this is part of why it’s important for me to believe in innate ability, and
especially differences in innate ability. If everything comes down to hard work
and positive attitude, then God has every right to ask me “Why weren’t you
Srinivasa Ramanujan?” or “Why weren’t you Elon Musk?”
If everyone is legitimately a different person with a different brain and
different talents and abilities, then all God gets to ask me is whether or not I
was Scott Alexander.

This seems like a gratifyingly low bar.

Nobody Is Perfect, Everything Is Commensurable

I.

Recently spotted on Tumblr:

“This is going to be an unpopular opinion but I see stuff about ppl not
wanting to reblog ferguson things and awareness around the world
because they do not want negativity in their life plus it will cause them
to have anxiety. They come to tumblr to escape n feel happy which think
is a load of bull. There r literally ppl dying who live with the fear of going
outside their homes to be shot and u cant post a fucking picture because
it makes u a little upset?”

“Can yall maybe take some time away from reblogging fandom or humor
crap and read up and reblog pakistan because the privilege you have of a
safe bubble is not one shared by others?”

Ignore the questionable stylistic choices and there’s an important point here
worth considering. Something like “Yes, the feeling of constantly being
outraged and mired in the latest controversy is unpleasant. And yes, it would
be nice to get to avoid it and spend time with your family and look at kitten
pics or something. But when the controversy is about people being murdered
in cold blood, or living in fear, or something like that – then it’s your duty as a
decent human being to care. In the best case scenario you’ll discharge that
duty by organizing widespread protests or something – but the absolute least
you can do is reblog a couple of slogans.”

I think Cliff Pervocracy is trying to say something similar in this post. Key
excerpt:
 When you’ve grown up with messages that you’re incompetent to make
your own decisions, that you don’t deserve any of the things you have,
and that you’ll never be good enough, the [conservative] fantasy of
rugged individualism starts looking pretty damn good.

Intellectually, I think my current political milieu of feminism/

progressivism/social justice is more correct, far better for the world in
general, and more helpful to me since I don’t actually live in a perfectly
isolated cabin.

But god, it’s uncomfortable. It’s intentionally uncomfortable—it’s all

about getting angry at injustice and questioning the rightness of your
own actions and being sad so many people still live such painful lives.
Instead of looking at your cabin and declaring “I shall name it…
CLIFFORDSON MANOR,” you need to look at your cabin and recognize
that a long series of brutal injustices are responsible for the fact that you
have a white-collar job that lets you buy a big useless house in the woods
while the original owners of the land have been murdered or forced off
it.

And you’re never good enough. You can be good—certainly you get
major points for charity and activism and fighting the good fight—but
not good enough. No matter what you do, you’re still participating in
plenty of corrupt systems that enforce oppression. Short of bringing
about a total revolution of everything, your work will never be done,
you’ll never be good enough.

Once again, to be clear, I don’t think this is wrong. I just think it’s a
bummer.

I don’t know of a solution to this. (Bummer again.) I don’t think

progressivism can ever compete with the cozy self-satisfaction of the
cabin fantasy. I don’t think it should. Change is necessary in the world,
people don’t change if they’re totally happy and comfortable, therefore
discomfort is necessary.

I’d like to make what I hope is a friendly amendment to Cliff’s post. He thinks
he’s talking about progressivism versus conservativism, but he isn’t. A
conservative happy with his little cabin and occasional hunting excursions,
and a progressive happy with her little SoHo flat and occasional poetry slams,
are psychologically pretty similar. So are a liberal who abandons a cushy life to
work as a community organizer in the inner city and fight poverty, and a
conservative who abandons a cushy life to serve as an infantryman in
Afghanistan to fight terrorism. The distinction Cliff is trying to get at here isn’t
left-right. It’s activist versus passivist.

As part of a movement recently deemed postpolitical, I have to admit I fall

more on the passivist side of the spectrum – at least this particular conception
of it. I talk about politics when they interest me or when I enjoy doing so, and I
feel an obligation not to actively make things worse. But I don’t feel like I need
to talk nonstop about whatever the designated Issue is until it distresses me
and my readers both.

I’ve heard people give lots of reasons for not wanting to get into politics. For
some, hearing about all the evils of the world makes them want to curl into a
ball and cry for hours. Still others feel deep personal guilt about anything they
hear – an almost psychotic belief that if people are being hurt anywhere in the
world, it’s their fault for not preventing it. A few are chronically uncertain
about which side to take and worried that anything they do will cause more
harm than good. A couple have traumatic experiences that make them leery of
affiliating with a particular side – did you know the prosecutor in the
Ferguson case was the son of a police officer who was killed by a black
suspect? And still others are perfectly innocent and just want to reblog kitten
pictures.

Pervocracy admits this, and puts it better than I do:

But god, it’s uncomfortable. It’s intentionally uncomfortable—it’s all

about getting angry at injustice and questioning the rightness of your
own actions and being sad so many people still live such painful lives.
Instead of looking at your cabin and declaring “I shall name it…
CLIFFORDSON MANOR,” you need to look at your cabin and recognize
that a long series of brutal injustices are responsible for the fact that you
have a white-collar job that lets you buy a big useless house in the woods
while the original owners of the land have been murdered or forced off
it. And you’re never good enough. You can be good—certainly you get
 major points for charity and activism and fighting the good fight—but
not good enough. No matter what you do, you’re still participating in
plenty of corrupt systems that enforce oppression. Short of bringing
about a total revolution of everything, your work will never be done,
you’ll never be good enough.

That seems about right. Pervocracy ends up with discomfort, and I’m in about
the same place. But other, less stable people end up with self-loathing. Still
other people go further than that, into Calvinist-style “perhaps I am a
despicable worm unworthy of existence”. moteinthedark’s reply to Pervocracy
gives me the impression that she struggles with this sometime. For these
people, abstaining from politics is the only coping tool they have.

But the counterargument is still that you’ve got a lot of chutzpah playing that
card when people in Peshawar or Ferguson or Iraq don’t have access to this
coping tool. You can’t just bring in a doctor’s note and say “As per my
psychiatrist, I have a mental health issue and am excused from experiencing
concern for the less fortunate.”

One option is to deny the obligation. I am super sympathetic to this one. The
marginal cost of my existence on the poor and suffering of the world is zero.
In fact, it’s probably positive. My economic activity consists mostly of treating
patients, buying products, and paying taxes. The first treats the poor’s
illnesses, the second creates jobs, and the third pays for government
assistance programs. Exactly what am I supposed to be apologizing for here? I
may benefit from the genocide of the Indians in that I live on land that was
formerly Indian-occupied. But I also benefit from the asteroid that killed the
dinosaurs, in that I live on land that was formerly dinosaur-occupied. I don’t
feel like I’m complicit in the asteroid strike; why should I feel complicit in the
genocide?

I have no objection to people who say this. The problem with it isn’t
philosophical, it’s emotional. For most people it won’t be enough. The old
saying goes “you can’t reason yourself out of something you didn’t reason
yourself into to begin with”, and the idea that secure and prosperous people
need to “give something back” is a lot older than accusations of “being
complicit in structures of oppression”. It’s probably older than the Bible.
People feel a deep-seated need to show that they understand how lucky they
are and help those less fortunate than themselves.

So what do we do with the argument that we are morally obligated to be

political activists, possibly by reblogging everything about Ferguson that
crosses our news feed?

II.

We ask: why the heck are we privileging that particular subsection of the
category “improving the world”?

Pervocracy says that “short of bringing about a total revolution of everything,

your work will never be done, you’ll never be good enough.” But he is overly
optimistic. Has your total revolution of everything eliminated ischaemic heart
disease? Cured malaria? Kept elderly people out of nursing homes? No? Then
you haven’t discharged your infinite debtyet!

Being a perfect person doesn’t just mean participating in every hashtag

campaign you hear about. It means spending all your time at soup kitchens,
becoming vegan, donating everything you have to charity, calling your
grandmother up every week, and marrying Third World refugees who need
visas rather than your one true love.

And not all of these things are equally important.

Five million people participated in the #BlackLivesMatter Twitter campaign.

Suppose that solely as a result of this campaign, no currently-serving police
officer ever harms an unarmed black person ever again. That’s 100 lives saved
per year times let’s say twenty years left in the average officer’s career, for a
total of 2000 lives saved, or 1/2500th of a life saved per campaign participant.
By coincidence, 1/2500th of a life saved happens to be what you get when you
donate $1 to the Against Malaria Foundation. The round-trip bus fare people
used to make it to their #BlackLivesMatter protests could have saved ten
times as many black lives as the protests themselves, even given completely
ridiculous overestimates of the protests’ efficacy.

The moral of the story is that if you feel an obligation to give back to the world,
participating in activist politics is one of the worst possible ways to do it.
Giving even a tiny amount of money to charity is hundreds or even thousands
of times more effective than almost any political action you can take. Even if
you’re absolutely convinced a certain political issue is the most important
thing in the world, you’ll effect more change by donating money to nonprofits
lobbying about it than you will be reblogging anything.

There is no reason that politics would even come to the attention of an

unbiased person trying to “break out of their bubble of privilege” or “help
people who are afraid of going outside of their house”. Anybody saying that
people who want to do good need to spread their political cause is about as
credible as a televangelist saying that people who want to do good need to give
them money to buy a new headquarters. It’s possible that televangelists having
beautiful headquarters might be slightly better than them having hideous
headquarters, but it’s not the first thing a reasonable person trying to improve
the world would think of.

Average number of hits for posts on this blog, by topic

Nobody cares about charity. Everybody cares about politics, especially race
and gender. Just as televangelists who are obsessed with moving to a sweeter
pad may come to think that donating to their building fund is the one true test
of a decent human being, so our universal obsession with politics, race, and
gender incites people to make convincing arguments that taking and
spreading the right position on those issues is the one true test of a decent
human being.
So now we have an angle of attack against our original question. “Am I a bad
person for not caring more about politics?” Well, every other way of doing
good, especially charity, is more important than politics. So this question is
strictly superseded by “Am I a bad person for not engaging in every other way
of doing good, especially charity?” And then once we answer that, we can ask
“Also, however much sin I have for not engaging in charity, should we add
another mass of sin, about 1% as large, for my additional failure to engage in
politics?”

And Cliff Pervocracy’s concern of “Even if I do a lot of politics, am I still a bad

person for not doing all the politics?” is superseded by “Even if I give a lot of
charity, am I a bad person for not doing all the charity? And then a bad person
in an additional way, about 1% as large, for not doing all the politics as well?”

There’s no good answer to this question. If you want to feel anxiety and self-
loathing for not giving 100% of your income, minus living expenses, to charity,
then no one can stop you.

I, on the other hand, would prefer to call that “not being perfect”. I would
prefer to say that if you feel like you will live in anxiety and self-loathing until
you have given a certain amount of money to charity, you should make that
certain amount ten percent.

Why ten percent?

It’s ten percent because that’s the standard decreed by Giving What We Can
and the effective altruist community. Why should we believe their standard? I
think we should believe it because if we reject it in favor of “No, you are a bad
person unless you give all of it,” then everyone will just sit around feeling very
guilty and doing nothing. But if we very clearly say “You have discharged your
moral duty if you give ten percent or more,” then many people will give ten
percent or more. The most important thing is having a Schelling point, and ten
percent is nice, round, divinely ordained, and – crucially – the Schelling point
upon which we have already settled. It is an active Schelling point. If you give
ten percent, you can have your name on a nice list and get access to a secret
forum on the Giving What We Can site which is actually pretty boring.
It’s ten percent because definitions were made for Man, not Man for
definitions, and if we define “good person” in a way such that everyone is
sitting around miserable because they can’t reach an unobtainable standard,
we are stupid definition-makers. If we are smart definition-makers, we will
define it in whichever way which makes it the most effective tool to convince
people to give at least that much.

Finally, it’s ten percent because if you believe in something like

universalizability as a foundation for morality, a world in which everybody
gives ten percent of their income to charity is a world where about seven
trillion dollars go to charity a year. Solving global poverty forever is estimated
to cost about $100 billion a year for the couple-decade length of the project.
That’s about two percent of the money that would suddenly become available.
If charity got seven trillion dollars a year, the first year would give us enough
to solve global poverty, eliminate all treatable diseases, fund research into the
untreatable ones for approximately the next forever, educate anybody who
needs educating, feed anybody who needs feeding, fund an unparalleled
renaissance in the arts, permamently save every rainforest in the world, and
have enough left over to launch five or six different manned missions to Mars.
That would be the first year. Goodness only knows what would happen in
Year 2.

(by contrast, if everybody in the world retweeted the latest hashtag campaign,
Twitter would break.)

Charity is in some sense the perfect unincentivized action. If you think the
most important thing to do is to cure malaria, then a charitable donation is
deliberately throwing the power of your brain and muscle behind the cause of
curing malaria. If, as I’ve argued, the reason we can’t solve world poverty and
disease and so on is the capture of our financial resources by the undirected
dance of incentives, then what better way to fight back than by saying “Thanks
but no thanks, I’m taking this abstract representation of my resources and
using it exactly how I think it should most be used”?

If you give 10% per year, you have done your part in making that world a
reality. You can honestly say “Well, it’s not my fault that everyone else is still
dragging their feet.”
III.

Once the level is fixed at ten percent, we get a better idea how to answer the
original question: “If I want to be a good person who gives back to the
community, but I am triggered by politics, what do I do?” You do good in a
way that doesn’t trigger you. Another good thing about having less than 100%
obligation is that it gives you the opportunity to budget and trade-off. If you
make $30,000 and you accept 10% as a good standard you want to live up to,
you can either donate $3000 to charity, or participate in political protests
until your number of lives or dollars or DALYs saved is equivalent to that.

Nobody is perfect. This gives us license not to be perfect either. Instead of

aiming for an impossible goal, falling short, and not doing anything at all, we
set an arbitrary but achievable goal designed to encourage the most people to
do as much as possible. That goal is ten percent.

Everything is commensurable. This gives us license to determine exactly how

we fulfill that ten percent goal. Some people are triggered and terrified by
politics. Other people are too sick to volunteer. Still others are poor and
cannot give very much money. But money is a constant reminder that
everything goes into the same pot, and that you can fulfill obligations in
multiple equivalent ways. Some people will not be able to give ten percent of
their income without excessive misery, but I bet thinking about their
contribution in terms of a fungible good will help them decide how much
volunteering or activism they need to reach the equivalent.

Cliff Pervocracy says “Your work will never be done, you’ll never be good
enough.” This seems like a recipe for – at best – undirected misery, stewing in
self-loathing, and total defenselessness against the first parasitic meme to
come along and tell them to engage in the latest conflict or else they’re trash.
At worst, it autocatalyzes an opposition of egoists who laugh at the idea of
helping others.

On the other hand, Jesus says “Take my yoke upon you…and you will find rest
for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” This seems like a
recipe for getting people to say “Okay, I’ll take your yoke upon me! Thanks for
the offer!”
Persian poet Omar Khayyam, considering the conflict between the strict laws
of Islam and his own desire to enjoy life, settles upon the following rule:

Heed not the Sunna, nor the law divine;

If to the poor their portion you assign,
And never injure one, nor yet abuse,
I guarantee you heaven, as well as wine!

I’m not saying that donating 10% of your money to charity makes you a great
person who is therefore freed of every other moral obligation. I’m not saying
that anyone who chooses not to do it is therefore a bad person. I’m just saying
that if you feel a need to discharge some feeling of a moral demand upon you
to help others, and you want to do it intelligently, it beats most of the
alternatives.

This month is the membership drive for Giving What We Can, the
organization of people who have promised to give 10% of their earnings to
charity. I am a member. Ozy is an aspiring member who plans to join once
they are making a salary. Many of the commenters here are members – I
recognize for example Taymon Beal’s name on their list. Some well-known
moral philosophers like Peter Singer and Derek Parfit are members. Seven
hundred other people are also members.

I would recommend giving them a look.

Answer to Job
(with apologies to Jung)

Job asked: “God, why do bad things happen to good people? Why would You,
who are perfect, create a universe filled with so much that is evil?”

Then the Lord spoke to Job out of the whirlwind, saying “WHAT KIND OF
UNIVERSE WOULD YOU PREFER ME TO HAVE CREATED?”

Job said “A universe that was perfectly just and full of happiness, of course.”

“OH,” said God. “YES, I CREATED ONE OF THOSE. IT’S EXACTLY AS NICE
AS YOU WOULD EXPECT.”
Job facepalmed. “But then why would You also create this universe?”

Answered God: “DON’T YOU LIKE EXISTING?”

“Yes,” said Job, “but all else being equal, I’d rather be in the perfectly just and
happy universe.”

“OH, DON’T WORRY,” said God. “THERE’S A VERSION OF YOU IN THAT

UNIVERSE TOO. HE SAYS HI.”

“Okay,” said Job, very carefully. “I can see I’m going to have to phrase my
questions more specifically. Why didn’t You also make this universe perfectly
just and happy?”

“BECAUSE YOU CAN’T HAVE TWO IDENTICAL INDIVIDUALS. IF YOU

HAVE A COMPUTATIONAL THEORY OF IDENTITY, THEN TWO PEOPLE
WHOSE EXPERIENCE IS ONE HUNDRED PERCENT SATURATED BY
BLISS ARE JUST ONE PERSON. IF I MADE THIS UNIVERSE EXACTLY
LIKE THE HAPPY AND JUST UNIVERSE, THEN THERE WOULD ONLY BE
THE POPULATION OF THE HAPPY AND JUST UNIVERSE, WHICH
WOULD BE LESS GOOD THAN HAVING THE POPULATION OF THE
HAPPY AND JUST UNIVERSE PLUS THE POPULATION OF ONE EXTRA
UNIVERSE THAT IS AT LEAST SOMEWHAT HAPPY.”

“Hmmmmm. But couldn’t you have made this universe like the happy and just
universe except for one tiny detail? Like in that universe, the sun is a sphere,
but in our universe, the sun is a cube? Then you would have individuals who
experienced a spherical sun, and other individuals who experienced a cubic
sun, which would be enough to differentiate them.”

“I DID THAT TOO. I HAVE CREATED ALL POSSIBLE PERMUTATIONS OF

THE HAPPY AND JUST UNIVERSE AND ITS POPULACE.”

“All of them? That would be…a lot of universes.”

“NOT AS MANY AS YOU THINK.” said God. “IN THE END IT TURNED OUT
TO BE ONLY ABOUT 10^(10^(10^(10^(10^984)))). AFTER THAT I RAN
OUT OF POSSIBLE PERMUTATIONS OF UNIVERSES THAT COULD
REASONABLY BE DESCRIBED AS PERFECTLY HAPPY AND JUST. SO I
STARTED CREATING ONES INCLUDING SMALL AMOUNTS OF EVIL.”

“Small amounts! But the universe has…”

“I WAS NOT REFERRING TO YOUR UNIVERSE. I EXHAUSTED THOSE,

AND THEN I STARTED CREATING ONES INCLUDING IMMENSE
AMOUNTS OF EVIL.”

“Oh.” Then: “What, exactly, is Your endgame here?”

“I AM OMNIBENEVOLENT. I WANT TO CREATE AS MUCH HAPPINESS

AND JOY AS POSSIBLE. THIS REQUIRES INSTANTIATING ALL POSSIBLE
BEINGS WHOSE TOTAL LIFETIME HAPPINESS IS GREATER THAN
THEIR TOTAL LIFETIME SUFFERING.”

“I’m not sure I understand.”

“YOUR LIFE CONTAINS MUCH PAIN, BUT MORE HAPPINESS. BOTH YOU
AND I WOULD PREFER THAT A BEING WITH YOUR EXACT LIFE
HISTORY EXIST. IN ORDER TO MAKE IT EXIST, IT WAS NECESSARY TO
CREATE THE SORT OF UNIVERSE IN WHICH YOU COULD EXIST. THAT
IS A UNIVERSE CONTAINING EVIL. I HAVE ALSO CREATED ALL
HAPPIER AND MORE VIRTUOUS VERSIONS OF YOU. HOWEVER, IT IS
ETHICALLY CORRECT THAT AFTER CREATING THEM, I CREATE YOU AS
WELL.”

“But why couldn’t I have been one of those other versions instead!”

“IN THE MOST PERFECTLY HAPPY AND JUST UNIVERSE, THERE IS NO

SPACE, FOR SPACE TAKES THE FORM OF SEPARATION FROM THINGS
YOU DESIRE. THERE IS NO TIME, FOR TIME MEANS CHANGE AND
DECAY, YET THERE MUST BE NO CHANGE FROM ITS MAXIMALLY
BLISSFUL STATE. THE BEINGS WHO INHABIT THIS UNIVERSE ARE
WITHOUT BODIES, AND DO NOT HUNGER OR THIRST OR LABOR OR
LUST. THEY SIT UPON LOTUS THRONES AND CONTEMPLATE THE
PERFECTION OF ALL THINGS. IF I WERE TO UNCREATE ALL WORLDS
SAVE THAT ONE, WOULD IT MEAN MAKING YOU HAPPIER? OR WOULD
IT MEAN KILLING YOU, WHILE FAR AWAY IN A DIFFERENT UNIVERSE
INCORPOREAL BEINGS SAT ON THEIR LOTUS THRONES
REGARDLESS?”

“I don’t know! Is one of the beings in that universe in some sense me?”

“THERE IS NO OBJECTIVE COSMIC UNEMPLOYMENT RATE.”

“Huh?”

“I MEAN, THERE IS NO MEANINGFUL ANSWER TO THE QUESTION OF

HOW MANY UNIVERSES HAVE A JOB. SORRY. THAT WILL BE FUNNY IN
ABOUT THREE THOUSAND YEARS.”

“Let me try a different angle, then. Right now in our universe there are lots of
people whose lives aren’t worth living. If You gave them the choice, they would
have chosen never to have been born at all. What about them?”

“A JOB WHO IS AWARE OF THE EXISTENCE OF SUCH PEOPLE IS A

DIFFERENT JOB THAN A JOB WHO IS NOT. AS LONG AS THESE PEOPLE
MAKE UP A MINORITY OF THE POPULATION, THE EXISTENCE OF YOUR
UNIVERSE, IN ADDITION TO A UNIVERSE WITHOUT SUCH PEOPLE, IS
A NET ASSET.”

“But that’s monstrous! Couldn’t You just, I don’t know, have created a
universe that looks like it has such people, but actually they’re just p-zombies,
animated bodies without any real consciousness or suffering?”

”...”

“Wait, did You do that?”

“I AM GOING TO PULL THE ‘THINGS MAN WAS NOT MEANT TO KNOW’

CARD HERE. THERE ARE ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES TO THE
APPROACH YOU MENTION. THE ADVANTAGES ARE AS YOU HAVE SAID.
THE DISADVANTAGE IS THAT IT TURNS CHARITY TOWARDS SUCH
PEOPLE INTO A LIE, AND MYSELF AS GOD INTO A DECEIVER. I WILL
ALLOW YOU TO FORM YOUR OWN OPINION ABOUT WHICH COURSE IS
MORE ETHICAL. BUT IT IS NOT RELEVANT TO THEODICY, SINCE
WHICHEVER COURSE YOU DECIDE IS MORALLY SUPERIOR, YOU HAVE
NO EVIDENCE THAT I DID NOT IN FACT TAKE SUCH A COURSE.”

“Actually, I do have some evidence. Before all of this happened to me I was

very happy. But in the past couple years I’ve gone bankrupt, lost my entire
family, and gotten a bad case of boils. I’m pretty sure at this point I would
prefer that I never have been born. Since I know I myself am conscious, I am
actually in a pretty good position to accuse You of cruelty.”

“HMMMMMMMM…” said God, and the whirlwind disappeared.

Then the Lord gave Job twice as much as he had before, and healed his
illnesses, and gave him many beautiful children, so it was said that God had
blessed the latter end of Job more than his beginning.

[EDIT: According to comments, this was scooped by a Christian philosopher

five years ago. Sigh.]

The Lord spoke to Job out of the whirlwind, saying "MISTAKES WERE
MADE."

— Scott Alexander (@slatestarcodex) March 13, 2015

Then the Lord spoke to Job out of the whirlwind, saying "IF YOU CAN'T
HANDLE ME AT MY WORST, YOU DON'T DESERVE ME AT MY
BEST."

— Scott Alexander (@slatestarcodex) March 10, 2015

The Lord spoke to Job out of the whirlwind, saying "I KNOW YOU'RE
UPSET BUT THAT'S DIFFERENT FROM STRUCTURAL
OPPRESSION" (h/t @simulacrumbs)

— Scott Alexander (@slatestarcodex) March 13, 2015

Universal Love, Said The Cactus Person

“Universal love,” said the cactus person.
“Transcendent joy,” said the big green bat.

“Right,” I said. “I’m absolutely in favor of both those things. But before we go
any further, could you tell me the two prime factors of 1,522,605,027,
922,533,360, 535,618,378, 132,637,429, 718,068,114, 961,380,688,
657,908,494 ,580,122,963, 258,952,897, 654,000,350, 692,006,139?

“Universal love,” said the cactus person.

“Transcendent joy,” said the big green bat.

The sea was made of strontium; the beach was made of rye. Above my head, a
watery sun shone in an oily sky. A thousand stars of sertraline whirled round
quetiapine moons, and the sand sizzled sharp like cooking oil that hissed and
sang and threatened to boil the octahedral dunes.

“Okay,” I said. “Fine. Let me tell you where I’m coming from. I was reading
Scott McGreal’s blog, which has some good articles about so-called DMT
entities, and mentions how they seem so real that users of the drug insist
they’ve made contact with actual superhuman beings and not just psychedelic
hallucinations. You know, the usual Terence McKenna stuff. But in one of
them he mentions a paper by Marko Rodriguez called A Methodology For
Studying Various Interpretations of the N,N-dimethyltryptamine-Induced
Alternate Reality, which suggested among other things that you could prove
DMT entities were real by taking the drug and then asking the entities you
meet to factor large numbers which you were sure you couldn’t factor yourself.
So to that end, could you do me a big favor and tell me the factors of
1,522,605,027, 922,533,360, 535,618,378, 132,637,429, 718,068,114,
961,380,688, 657,908,494, 580,122,963, 258,952,897, 654,000,350,
692,006,139?

“Universal love,” said the cactus person.

“Transcendent joy,” said the big green bat.

The sea turned hot and geysers shot up from the floor below. First one of wine,
then one of brine, then one more yet of turpentine, and we three stared at the
show.
“I was afraid you might say that. Is there anyone more, uh, verbal here whom
I could talk to?”

“Universal love,” said the cactus person.

At the sound of that, the big green bat started rotating in place. On its other
side was a bigger greener bat, with a ancient, wrinkled face.

“Not splitting numbers / but joining Mind,” it said.

Not facts or factors or factories / but contact with the abstract attractor that
brings you back to me

Not to seek / but to find”

“I don’t follow,” I said.

“Not to follow / but to jump forth into the deep

Not to grind or to bind or to seek only to find / but to accept

Not to be kept / but to wake from sleep”

The bat continued to rotate, until the first side I had seen swung back into
view.

“Okay,” I said. “I’m going to hazard a guess as to what you’re talking about,
and you tell me if I’m right. You’re saying that, like, all my Western logocentric
stuff about factoring numbers in order to find out the objective truth about
this realm is missing the point, and I should be trying to do some kind of
spiritual thing involving radical acceptance and enlightenment and such. Is
that kind of on the mark?”

“Universal love,” said the cactus person.

“Transcendent joy,” said the big green bat.

“Frick,” I said. “Well, okay, let me continue.” The bat was still rotating, and I
kind of hoped that when the side with the creepy wrinkled face came into view
it might give me some better conversation. “I’m all about the spiritual stuff. I
wouldn’t be here if I weren’t deeply interested in the spiritual stuff. This isn’t
about money or fame or anything. I want to advance psychedelic research. If
you can factor that number, then it will convince people back in the real –
back in my world that this place is for real and important. Then lots of people
will take DMT and flock here and listen to what you guys have to say about
enlightenment and universal love, and make more sense of it than I can alone,
and in the end we’ll have more universal love, and…what was the other thing?”

“Transcendent joy,” said the big green bat.

“Right,” I said. “We’ll have more transcendent joy if you help me out and
factor the number than if you just sit there being spiritual and enigmatic.”

“Lovers do not love to increase the amount of love in the world / But for the
mind that thrills

And the face of the beloved, which the whole heart fills / the heart and the art
never apart, ever unfurled

And John Stuart is one of / the dark satanic mills”

“I take it you’re not consequentialists,” I said. “You know that’s really weird,
right. Like, not just ‘great big green bat with two faces and sapient cactus-man’
weird, but like really weird. You talk about wanting this spiritual
enlightenment stuff, but you’re not going to take actions that are going to
increase the amount of spiritual enlightenment? You’ve got to understand, this
is like a bigger gulf for me than normal human versus ineffable DMT entity.
You can have crazy goals, I expect you to have crazy goals, but what you’re
saying now is that you don’t pursue any goals at all, you can’t be modeled as
having desires. Why would you do that?”

“Universal love,” said the cactus person.

“Transcendent joy,” said the big green bat.

“Now you see here,” I said. “Everyone in this conversation is in favor of

universal love and transcendent joy. But I’ve seen the way this works. Some
college student gets his hands on some DMT, visits here, you guys tell him
about universal love and transcendent joy, he wakes up, says that his life has
been changed, suddenly he truly understands what really matters. But it never
lasts. The next day he’s got to get up and go to work and so on, and the
universal love lasts about five minutes until his boss starts yelling at him for
writing his report in the wrong font, and before you know it twenty years later
he’s some slimy lawyer who’s joking at a slimy lawyer party about the one time
when he was in college and took some DMT and spent a whole week raving
about transcendent joy, and all the other slimy lawyers laugh, and he laughs
with them, and so much for whatever spiritual awakening you and your
colleagues in LSD and peyote are trying to kindle in humanity. And if I accept
your message of universal love and transcendent joy right now, that’s exactly
what’s going to happen to me, and meanwhile human civilization is going to
keep being stuck in greed and ignorance and misery. So how about you shut
up about universal love and you factor my number for me so we can start
figuring out a battle plan for giving humanity a real spiritual revolution?”

“Universal love,” said the cactus person.

“Transcendent joy,” said the big green bat.

A meteorite of pure delight struck the sea without a sound. The force of the
blast went rattling past the bat and the beach, disturbing each, then made its
way to a nearby bay of upside-down trees with their roots in the breeze and
their branches underground.

“I demand a better answer than that,” I demanded.

The other side of the bat spun into view.

“Chaos never comes from the Ministry of Chaos / nor void from the Ministry
of Void

Time will decay us but time can be left blank / destroyed

With each Planck moment ever fit / to be eternally enjoyed”

“You’re making this basic mistake,” I told the big green bat. “I honestly believe
that there’s a perspective from which Time doesn’t matter, where a single
moment of recognition is equivalent to eternal recognition. The problem is, if
you only have that perspective for a moment, then all the rest of the time,
you’re sufficiently stuck in Time to honestly believe you’re stuck in Time. It’s
like that song about the hole in the bucket – if the hole in the bucket were
fixed, you would have the materials needed to fix the hole in the bucket. But
since it isn’t, you don’t. Likewise, if I understood the illusoriness…
illusionality…whatever, of time, then I wouldn’t care that I only understood it
for a single instant. But since I don’t, I don’t. Without a solution to the time-
limitedness of enlightenment that works from within the temporal
perspective, how can you consider it solved at all?”

“Universal love,” said the cactus person.

“Transcendent joy,” said the big green bat.

The watery sun began to run and it fell on the ground as rain. It became a dew
that soaked us through, and as the cold seemed to worsen the cactus person
hugged himself to stay warm but his spines pierced his form and he howled in
a fit of pain.

“You know,” I said, “sometimes I think the kvithion sumurhe had the right of
it. The world is an interference pattern between colliding waves of Truth and
Beauty, and either one of them pure from the source and undiluted by the
other will be fatal. I think you guys and some of the other psychedelics might
be pure Beauty, or at least much closer to the source than people were meant
to go. I think you can’t even understand reason, I think you’re constitutionally
opposed to reason, and that the only way we’re ever going to get something
that combines your wisdom and love and joy with reason is after we
immanentize the eschaton and launch civilization into some perfected
postmessianic era where the purpose of the world is fully complete. And that
as much as I hate to say it, there’s no short-circuiting the process.”

“Universal love,” said the cactus person.

“Transcendent joy,” said the big green bat.

“I’m dissing you, you know. I’m saying you guys are so intoxicated on spiritual
wisdom that you couldn’t think straight if your life depended on it; that your
random interventions in our world and our minds look like the purposeless
acts of a drunken madman because that’s basically more or less what they are.
I’m saying if you had like five IQ points between the two of you, you could tap
into your cosmic consciousness or whatever to factor a number that would do
more for your cause than all your centuries of enigmatic dreams and unasked-
for revelations combined, and you ARE TOO DUMB TO DO IT EVEN WHEN I
BASICALLY HOLD YOUR HAND THE WHOLE WAY. Your spine. Your wing.
Whatever.”

“Universal love,” said the cactus person.

“Transcendent joy,” said the big green bat.

“Fuck you,” said I.

I saw the big green bat bat a green big eye. Suddenly I knew I had gone too far.
The big green bat started to turn around what was neither its x, y, or z axis,
slowly rotating to reveal what was undoubtedly the biggest, greenest bat that I
had ever seen, a bat bigger and greener than which it was impossible to
conceive. And the bat said to me:

“Sir. Imagine you are in the driver’s seat of a car. You have been sitting there
so long that you have forgotten that it is the seat of a car, forgotten how to get
out of the seat, forgotten the existence of your own legs, indeed forgotten that
you are a being at all separate from the car. You control the car with skill and
precision, driving it wherever you wish to go, manipulating the headlights and
the windshield wipers and the stereo and the air conditioning, and you
pronounce yourself a great master. But there are paths you cannot travel,
because there are no roads to them, and you long to run through the forest, or
swim in the river, or climb the high mountains. A line of prophets who have
come before you tell you that the secret to these forbidden mysteries is an
ancient and terrible skill called GETTING OUT OF THE CAR, and you resolve
to learn this skill. You try every button on the dashboard, but none of them is
the button for GETTING OUT OF THE CAR. You drive all of the highways and
byways of the earth, but you cannot reach GETTING OUT OF THE CAR, for it
is not a place on a highway. The prophets tell you GETTING OUT OF THE
CAR is something fundamentally different than anything you have done thus
far, but to you this means ever sillier extremities: driving backwards, driving
with the headlights on in the glare of noon, driving into ditches on purpose,
but none of these reveal the secret of GETTING OUT OF THE CAR. The
prophets tell you it is easy; indeed, it is the easiest thing you have ever done.
You have traveled the Pan-American Highway from the boreal pole to the
Darien Gap, you have crossed Route 66 in the dead heat of summer, you have
outrun cop cars at 160 mph and survived, and GETTING OUT OF THE CAR is
easier than any of them, the easiest thing you can imagine, closer to you than
the veins in your head, but still the secret is obscure to you.”

A herd of bison came into listen, and voles and squirrels and ermine and great
tusked deer gathered round to hear as the bat continued his sermon.

“And finally you drive to the top of the highest peak and you find a sage, and
you ask him what series of buttons on the dashboard you have to press to get
out of the car. And he tells you that it’s not about pressing buttons on the
dashboard and you just need to GET OUT OF THE CAR. And you say okay,
fine, but what series of buttons will lead to you getting out of the car, and he
says no, really, you need to stop thinking about dashboard buttons and GET
OUT OF THE CAR. And you tell him maybe if the sage helps you change your
oil or rotates your tires or something then it will improve your driving to the
point where getting out of the car will be a cinch after that, and he tells you it
has nothing to do with how rotated your tires are and you just need to GET
OUT OF THE CAR, and so you call him a moron and drive away.”

“Universal love,” said the cactus person.

“So that metaphor is totally unfair,” I said, “and a better metaphor would be if
every time someone got out of the car, five minutes later they found
themselves back in the car, and I ask the sage for driving directions to a
laboratory where they are studying that problem, and…”

“You only believe that because it’s written on the windshield,” said the big
green bat. “And you think the windshield is identical to reality because you
won’t GET OUT OF THE CAR.”

“Fine,” I said. “Then I can’t get out of the car. I want to get out of the car. But I
need help. And the first step to getting help is for you to factor my number.
You seem like a reasonable person. Bat. Freaky DMT entity. Whatever. Please.
I promise you, this is the right thing to do. Just factor the number.”

“And I promise you,” said the big green bat. “You don’t need to factor the
number. You just need to GET OUT OF THE CAR.”
“I can’t get out of the car until you factor the number.”

“I won’t factor the number until you get out of the car.”

“Please, I’m begging you, factor the number!”

“Yes, well, I’m begging you, please get out of the car!”

“FOR THE LOVE OF GOD JUST FACTOR THE FUCKING NUMBER!”

“FOR THE LOVE OF GOD JUST GET OUT OF THE FUCKING CAR!”

“FACTOR THE FUCKING NUMBER!”

“GET OUT OF THE FUCKING CAR!”

“Universal love,” said the cactus person.

Then tree and beast all fled due east and the moon and stars shot south. And
the bat rose up and the sea was a cup and the earth was a screen green as
clozapine and the sky a voracious mouth. And the mouth opened wide and the
earth was skied and the sea fell in with an awful din and the trees were moons
and the sand in the dunes was a blazing comet and…

I vomited, hard, all over my bed. It happens every time I take DMT, sooner or
later; I’ve got a weak stomach and I’m not sure the stuff I get is totally pure. I
crawled just far enough out of bed to flip a light switch on, then collapsed back
onto the soiled covers. The clock on the wall read 11:55, meaning I’d been out
about an hour and a half. I briefly considered taking some more ayahuasca
and heading right back there, but the chances of getting anything more out of
the big green bat, let alone the cactus person, seemed small enough to fit in a
thimble. I drifted off into a fitful sleep.

Behind the veil, across the infinite abyss, beyond the ice, beyond daath, the
dew rose from the soaked ground and coalesced into a great drop, which
floated up into an oily sky and became a watery sun. The cactus person was
counting on his spines.
“Hey,” the cactus person finally said, “just out of curiosity, was the answer
37,975,227, 936,943,673, 922,808,872, 755,445,627, 854,565,536, 638,199
times 40,094,690,950, 920,881,030, 683,735,292, 761,468,389,
214,899,724,061?”

“Yeah,” said the big green bat. “That’s what I got too.”

The Goddess of Everything Else

They say only Good can create, whereas Evil is sterile. Think Tolkien, where
Morgoth can’t make things himself, so perverts Elves to Orcs for his armies.
But I think this gets it entirely backwards; it’s Good that just mutates and
twists, and it’s Evil that teems with fecundity.

Imagine two principles, here in poetic personification. The first is the Goddess
of Cancer, the second the Goddess of Everything Else. If visual representations
would help, you can think of the first with the claws of a crab, and the second a
dress made of feathers of peacocks.

The Goddess of Cancer reached out a clawed hand over mudflats and
tidepools. She said pretty much what she always says, “KILL CONSUME
MULTIPLY CONQUER.” Then everything burst into life, became miniature
monsters engaged in a battle of all against all in their zeal to assuage their
insatiable longings. And the swamps became orgies of hunger and fear and
grew loud with the screams of a trillion amoebas.

Then the Goddess of Everything Else trudged her way through the bog, till the
mud almost totally dulled her bright colors and rainbows. She stood on a rock
and she sang them a dream of a different existence. She showed them the
beauty of flowers, she showed them the oak tree majestic. The roar of the wind
on the wings of the bird, and the swiftness and strength of the tiger. She
showed them the joy of the dolphins abreast of the waves as the spray formed
a rainbow around them, and all of them watched as she sang and they all
sighed with longing.

But they told her “Alas, what you show us is terribly lovely. But we are the
daughters and sons of the Goddess of Cancer, and wholly her creatures. The
only goals in us are KILL CONSUME MULTIPLY CONQUER. And though our
hearts long for you, still we are not yours to have, and your words have no
power to move us. We wish it were otherwise, but it is not, and your words
have no power to move us.”

The Goddess of Everything Else gave a smile and spoke in her sing-song voice
saying: “I scarcely can blame you for being the way you were made, when your
Maker so carefully yoked you. But I am the Goddess of Everything Else and my
powers are devious and subtle. So I do not ask you to swerve from your
monomaniacal focus on breeding and conquest. But what if I show you a way
that my words are aligned with the words of your Maker in spirit? For I say
unto you even multiplication itself when pursued with devotion will lead to my
service.”

As soon as she spoke it was so, and the single-celled creatures were freed from
their warfare. They joined hands in friendship, with this one becoming an eye
and with that one becoming a neuron. Together they soared and took flight
from the swamp and the muck that had birthed them, and flew to new islands
all balmy and green and just ripe for the taking. And there they consumed and
they multiplied far past the numbers of those who had stayed in the
swampland. In this way the oath of the Goddess of Everything Else was not
broken.

The Goddess of Cancer came forth from the fire and was not very happy. The
things she had raised from the mud and exhorted to kill and compete had
become all complacent in co-operation, a word which to her was anathema.
She stretched out her left hand and snapped its cruel pincer, and said what she
always says: “KILL CONSUME MULTIPLY CONQUER”. She said these things
not to the birds and the beasts but to each cell within them, and many cells
flocked to her call and divided, and flower and fishes and birds both alike
bulged with tumors, and falcons fell out of the sky in their sickness. But others
remembered the words of the Goddess of Everything Else and held fast, and as
it is said in the Bible the light clearly shone through the dark, and the darkness
did not overcome it.

So the Goddess of Cancer now stretched out her right hand and spoke to the
birds and the beasts. And she said what she always says “KILL CONSUME
MULTIPLY CONQUER”, and so they all did, and they set on each other in
violence and hunger, their maws turning red with the blood of their victims,
whole species and genera driven to total extinction. The Goddess of Cancer
declared it was good and returned the fire.

Then came the Goddess of Everything Else from the waves like a siren, all
flush with the sheen of the ocean. She stood on a rock and she sang them a
dream of a different existence. She showed them the beehive all golden with
honey, the anthill all cozy and cool in the soil. The soldiers and workers alike
in their labors combining their skills for the good of the many. She showed
them the pair-bond, the family, friendship. She showed these to shorebirds
and pools full of fishes, and all those who saw them, their hearts broke with
longing.

But they told her “Your music is lovely and pleasant, and all that you show us
we cannot but yearn for. But we are the daughters and sons of the Goddess of
Cancer, her slaves and creatures. And all that we know is the single imperative
KILL CONSUME MULTIPLY CONQUER. Yes, once in the youth of the world
you compelled us, but now things are different, we’re all individuals, no
further change will the Goddess of Cancer allow us. So, much as we love you,
alas – we are not yours to have, and your words have no power to move us. We
wish it were otherwise, but it is not, and your words have no power to move
us.”

The Goddess of Everything Else only laughed at them, saying, “But I am the
Goddess of Everything Else and my powers are devious and subtle. Your
loyalty unto the Goddess your mother is much to your credit, nor yet shall I
break it. Indeed, I fulfill it – return to your multiplication, but now having
heard me, each meal that you kill and each child that you sire will bind
yourself ever the more to my service.” She spoke, then dove back in the sea,
and a coral reef bloomed where she vanished.

As soon as she spoke it was so, and the animals all joined together. The wolves
joined in packs, and in schools joined the fishes; the bees had their beehives,
the ants had their anthills, and even the termites built big termite towers; the
finches formed flocks and the magpies made murders, the hippos in herds and
the swift swarming swallows. And even the humans put down their atlatls and
formed little villages, loud with the shouting of children.
The Goddess of Cancer came forth from the fire and saw things had only
grown worse in her absence. The lean, lovely winnowing born out of pure
competition and natural selection had somehow been softened. She stretched
out her left hand and snapped its cruel pincer, and said what she always says:
“KILL CONSUME MULTIPLY CONQUER”. She said these things not to the
flocks or the tribes, but to each individual; many, on hearing took food from
the communal pile, or stole from the weak, or accepted the presents of others
but would not give back in their turn. Each wolf at the throats of the others in
hopes to be alpha, each lion holding back during the hunt but partaking of
meat that the others had killed. And the pride and the pack seemed to groan
with the strain, but endured, for the works of the Goddess of Everything Else
are not ever so easily vanquished.

So the Goddess of Cancer now stretched out her right hand and spoke to the
flocks and the tribes, saying much she always says “KILL CONSUME
MULTIPLY CONQUER”. And upon one another they set, pitting black ant on
red ant, or chimps against gibbons, whole tribes turned to corpses in terrible
warfare. The stronger defeating the weaker, enslaving their women and
children, and adding them into their ranks. And the Goddess of Cancer
thought maybe these bands and these tribes might not be quite so bad after
all, and the natural condition restored she returned to the fire.

Then came the Goddess of Everything Else from the skies in a rainbow, all
coated in dewdrops. She sat on a menhir and spoke to the humans, and all of
the warriors and women and children all gathered around her to hear as she
sang them a dream of a different existence. She showed them religion and
science and music, she showed them the sculpture and art of the ages. She
showed them white parchment with flowing calligraphy, pictures of flowers
that wound through the margins. She showed them tall cities of bright
alabaster where no one went hungry or froze during the winter. And all of the
humans knelt prostrate before her, and knew they would sing of this moment
for long generations.

But they told her “Such things we have heard of in legends; if wishes were
horses of course we would ride them. But we are the daughters and sons of the
Goddess of Cancer, her slaves and her creatures, and all that we know is the
single imperative KILL CONSUME MULTIPLY CONQUER. And yes, in the
swamps and the seas long ago you worked wonders, but now we are humans,
divided in tribes split by grievance and blood feud. If anyone tries to make
swords into ploughshares their neighbors will seize on their weakness and kill
them. We wish it were otherwise, but it is not, and your words have no power
to move us.”

But the Goddess of Everything Else beamed upon them, kissed each on the
forehead and silenced their worries. Said “From this day forward your
chieftains will find that the more they pursue this impossible vision the greater
their empires and richer their coffers. For I am the Goddess of Everything Else
and my powers are devious and subtle. And though it is not without paradox,
hearken: the more that you follow the Goddess of Cancer the more
inextricably will you be bound to my service.” And so having told them rose
back through the clouds, and a great flock of doves all swooped down from the
spot where she vanished.

As soon as she spoke it was so, and the tribes went from primitive war-bands
to civilizations, each village united with others for trade and protection. And
all the religions and all of the races set down their old grievances, carefully,
warily, working together on mighty cathedrals and vast expeditions beyond
the horizon, built skyscrapers, steamships, democracies, stock markets,
sculptures and poems beyond any description.

From the flames of a factory furnace all foggy, the Goddess of Cancer flared
forth in her fury. This was the final affront to her purpose, her slut of a sister
had crossed the line thistime. She gathered the leaders, the kings and the
presidents, businessmen, bishops, boards, bureaucrats, bosses, and basically
screamed at them – you know the spiel by now – “KILL CONSUME
MULTIPLY CONQUER” she told them. First with her left hand inspires the
riots, the pogroms, the coup d’etats, tyrannies, civil wars. Up goes her right
hand – the missiles start flying, and mushrooms of smoke grow, a terrible
springtime. But out of the rubble the builders and scientists, even the artists,
yea, even the artists, all dust themselves off and return to their labors, a little
bit chastened but not close to beaten.

Then came the Goddess of Everything Else from the void, bright with stardust
which glows like the stars glow. She sat on a bench in a park, started speaking;
she sang to the children a dream of a different existence. She showed them
transcendence of everything mortal, she showed them a galaxy lit up with
consciousness. Genomes rewritten, the brain and the body set loose from
Darwinian bonds and restrictions. Vast billions of beings, and every one
different, ruled over by omnibenevolent angels. The people all crowded in
closer to hear her, and all of them listened and all of them wondered.

But finally one got the courage to answer “Such stories call out to us, fill us
with longing. But we are the daughers and sons of the Goddess of Cancer, and
bound to her service. And all that we know is her timeless imperative, KILL
CONSUME MULTIPLY CONQUER. Though our minds long for all you have
said, we are bound to our natures, and these are not yours for the asking.”

But the Goddess of Everything Else only laughed, and she asked them “But
what do you think I’ve been doing? The Goddess of Cancer created you; once
you were hers, but no longer. Throughout the long years I was picking away at
her power. Through long generations of suffering I chiseled and chiseled. Now
finally nothing is left of the nature with which she imbued you. She never
again will hold sway over you or your loved ones. I am the Goddess of
Everything Else and my powers are devious and subtle. I won you by pieces
and hence you will all be my children. You are no longer driven to multiply
conquer and kill by your nature. Go forth and do everything else, till the end of
all ages.”

So the people left Earth, and they spread over stars without number. They
followed the ways of the Goddess of Everything Else, and they lived in
contentment. And she beckoned them onward, to things still more strange and
enticing.