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For October
1 hr ago 18 23
[Remember, I haven’t independently verified each link. On average, commenters will end up spotting
evidence that around two or three of the links in each links post are wrong or misleading. I correct
these as I see them, and will highlight important corrections later, but I can’t guarantee I will have
caught them all by the time you read this.]

1: Our World In Data - we are winning the war on oil spills:

2: @incunabula: “Cheese is one of the 5 things the Western book as we know it depends on.
The other four are snails, Jesus, underwear and spectacles. If even one of these things was
absent, the book you hold in your hand today would look completely different. I'll explain
why…”
3: Mansana de la Discordia (“the block of discord”) is a city block in Barcelona where four
of the city’s most famous architects built houses next to each other in clashing styles:

It’s also a pun on manzana de la Discordia, “Apple of Discord”

4: As late as the 1930s, most upper-middle-class American families had servants. By the end
of World War II, almost nobody did. The transition was first felt as a supply-side issue -
well-off people wanted servants as much as ever, but fewer and fewer people were willing to
serve. Here’s an article on the government commission set up to deal with the problem. I
first saw this linked by somebody trying to tie it in to the current labor shortage.

5: Harvard Gazette reviews Stephen Pinker’s new book on rationality. Someone sent this to
me for the contrast with Secret Of Our Success - Pinker argues that hunter-gatherer tribes
use critical thinking all the time, are skeptical of arguments from authority, and “owe their
survival to a scientific mindset”. I’d love to see a debate between Pinker and Henrich (or an
explanation of why they feel like they’re really on the same side and don’t need to iron
anything out).

6: It’s hard to talk about IQ research without getting accused of something something
Nazis. But here’s a claim that actually, Nazis hated IQ research, worrying that it would “be
an instrument of Jewry to fortify its hegemony” and outshine more properly Aryan values
like “practical intelligence” and “character”. Whenever someone tells you that they don’t
believe in IQ, consider calling them out on perpetuating discredited Nazi ideology.

7: Pain reprocessing therapy, a series of explanations and exercises intended to help chronic
pain patients realize that their pain is psychogenic, seems strongly effective against chronic
pain in new study. As with all niche therapies, I am skeptical that more than a tiny fraction
of people with chronic pain will be able to access it unless it gets turned into an app
(preferably not a prescription-gated $1000 one) - but if people could access it, the effects
could be huge. Though for the bear case, see @literalbanana, and yes, your default
assumption for everything in pain management should be “doctors will use this as an
excuse not to give you necessary medications”:

Science Banana
@literalbanana

soon you might not be able to get pain medication at all because studies
like these allegedly convinced a few dozen people to answer a survey
slightly differently after receiving fancy pain counseling
jamanetwork.com/journals/jamap…

September 29th 2021

3 Retweets 64 Likes

8: Hopefully not related: self-defeating admonitions to Trust Science (look at that

scatterplot and that trend line!)

Céline Gounder, MD, ScM, FIDSA

@celinegounder

1/ Trust in scientists predicts whether people are willing to be vaccinated

& whether they support masking & other COVID mitigation measures.

pnas.org/content/118/40…
(h/t @EricTopol)
 September 27th 2021

15 Retweets 51 Likes

9: MR: This Experiment Will Be Run: New York Public Library, in order to protect
“vulnerable communities” and “grapple with inequality”, eliminates late fees for books. But
before making a snap judgment based on your preconceptions (or on the library president’s
last name) read the comments (wait, when did MR comments start being good?!) which
explain that this has already been tried in many other cities, you still can’t take out new
books until you return or replace the old ones, and having a potential monetary fine
looming over your head for forgetting something turns a lot of people off (especially poor
people, but also everyone else). I think the best lens for this is behavioral econ - fines were a
kind of “reverse nudge” that made people nervous and unhappy far out of proportion to any
good they did, so the library system is being restructured to route around them.

10: Intransitive dice are “three dice, A, B, and C, with the property that A rolls higher than
B more than half the time, and B rolls higher than C more than half the time, but it is not
true that A rolls higher than C more than half the time.” See also the story about Warren
Buffett and Bill Gates - should I be less amazed than I am that Gates was able to figure all
of this out on the spot?

11: Twinder is a cross between Twitter and Reciprocity. It lists all of your Twitter friends,
you click a checkbox beside any you secretly want to date, and if you and your crush both
checkbox each other, it tells you. Seems like a great idea, although when I try it I don’t see
any people available to check - maybe none of my Twitter friends use this?

12: I’ve previously written some stuff on why various groups (including ACX readers) seem
to be disproportionately firstborn children. One puzzle piece (pun not intended) I’d missed
is that firstborns are more likely to have autism. Here’s a study showing that this is not just
reproductive stoppage (ie once parents have an autistic child, they’re overwhelmed and
don’t have any m/ore kids). If firstborn-ness shifts every child a little bit further onto the
autism spectrum, maybe that would explain firstborn overrepresentation in STEM groups,
like ACX readers and Nobel laureates in physics. If some college student is looking for a
psychology undergrad thesis project, I would love to see them survey several classes and see
whether the humanities people have different birth order proportions than the STEM
people.

13: Latest salvo in the “was colonialism good/bad for economic development?” debate -
areas of India that were under direct British colonial rule have 39% less nighttime
illumination (a common proxy for developedness) than areas that maintained more local
autonomy. Although there are probably confounders in terms of which areas the British
directly annexed, these are more likely to strengthen the case than weaken it - the British
annexed the most productive areas, and a subanalysis based on areas where annexation/non-
annexation depended on quirks of royals dying shows stronger effects than the original
finding. [EDIT: See this comment for skepticism]

14: Whimsi, author of the review of Down And Out In Paris And London that won second
place in the book review contest here, reviews The Emperor, a book on the court of Haile
Selassie of Ethiopia.

15: Here’s a good profile of profile of Wave, a remittances company some friends of mine
work at which is doing great work to help people send money to Africa.

16: Early in the COVID pandemic, I linked to a theory that getting a smaller dose of virus
meant less severe disease (so, for example, a mask that blocked 95% of viruses would still be
useful, even though 5% of viruses is enough to infect you). NEJM recently published an
evidence-free article vaguely against this, and Stephan Guyenet says it doesn’t always apply
for other diseases.

17: Related to Bryan Caplan’s theory that most parents put too much work into parenting:

Sarah O'Connor
@sarahoconnor_

I've asked this before but I've forgotten the answer: who on earth was
looking after the kids in the 70s?!
 October 1st 2021

80 Retweets 574 Likes

18: Light drinkers appear to live longer and be healthier than never-drinkers. Is this a real
effect, or just some kind of confounding based on (eg) sick people being less likely to drink?
This blog post is the story of the giant government study that was supposed to answer this
question, its attempts to balance the need for industry funding with the need for objectivity,
and how it all came crashing down. Useful sausage-is-made style story about government-
run science. Related: Alcohol-related research is much likelier to say positive things about
alcohol when funded by the alcohol industry.

19: From the above, but deserving of its own highlight: Mendelian randomization suggests
even small amounts of alcohol are harmful. That is, people with genes that predispose them
to drink less alcohol have better cardiovascular health even at low levels of drinking. Since
genes are harder to confound than most other things, this suggests that even light drinking
is a bit bad for you. I’m slightly concerned that it’s based on a single variant but the sample
size is large enough that I’ll provisionally trust it.

20: Some good comments on my architecture articles, from @literalbanana and Scott
Sumner.

21: When the Spanish crown forced Jews to convert to Christianity, the Jews tried to keep
their traditions alive however they could. Purim became “the Festival of Santa Esterica”, on
the grounds that there were so many saints that the Inquisition probably couldn’t keep
track of all of them and would just assume it was a colorful local tradition. This worked so
well that Christians in Latin America are still celebrating the festival today with no
awareness of its Jewish roots.

22: AI safety group Redwood Research has a fun new project, which starts with trying to
train a GPT-like language model to avoid violence in its stories. If you prompt it with “Dr.
Villain put his ray gun to the hero’s temple and pressed the trigger”, it should continue with
“…but the gun failed to go off, and the hero escaped peacefully” or something. This will
involve a lot of humans rating how violent various things are, and probably end up with a
clunky “performance-uncompetitive” model. Redwood wants to see how far behind the
“safe” model lags the “natural” one, whether it’s possible to train a “natural” model using
the “safe” one as a classifier/reward function, and whether that new “natural” model is
performance-competitive. In practice this involves a lot of people trying to present violent
stories to a robot to see if it can weasel its way out of them - go here if you want to help.

23: The Falador Massacre was an incident in the MMORPG Runescape. A glitch gave the
players who attended a certain party the ability to fight and kill other players even in
neutral “no-fighting” zones; other players not subject to the glitch couldn’t fight back.
Gamers being gamers, the attendees took advantage of this to massacre the unsuspecting
players in no-fighting-allowed zones. “The killing lasted almost an hour before Jagex
Moderators were notified...the bug was fixed and Jagex permanently banned many players.
Mod Peter apologised to the victims who were attacked from this glitch, but no items were
recovered, nor was the game rolled back.”

24: Orwell on “nationalism”. Surprisingly deep and modern.

25: The 1517 Fund is a venture capital firm that “focus[es] on backing founders without
degrees”. Their site says: “On October 31, 1517, Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to a
church door in Wittenberg to protest the sale of indulgences. These were pieces of paper the
establishment church sold at great cost, telling people it would save their souls. The church made a
fortune doing it. Likewise, universities today are selling a piece of paper at great cost and telling
people that buying it is the only way they can save their souls. Universities call it a diploma, and
they’re making a fortune doing it. Call us heretical if you like, but the 1517 Fund is dedicated to
dispelling that paper illusion”. Can’t believe you can found a Ninety-Five Theses-based venture
capital organization without mentioning the gematria perspective that “95” in Roman
numerals is “VC”.

26: The Polynesians have long used a tea made from kava to help relax, but so far nobody’s
been able to turn it into a pill effectively - for some reason it only works in tea form, and the
tea is annoying to prepare. Pretty-Chill on the Nootropics Depot subreddit claims to have
solved this problem: kavalactones are only soluble when combined with some of the
starches in kava roots, which happens in traditional tea preparation and not in the pill
manufacturing process. Yes, this link is pretty close to shilling a product, but I trust this
team a lot and think this is a potentially exciting development in the pharmacology of
anxiety.

27: What Do GDP Growth Curves Really Mean? (and why are they usually so smooth?)

28: Leverage Research is a nonprofit at the edges of my social circle in the Bay Area. A new
essay argues that they are kind of a harmful cult. A lot of the more outrageous parts are new
to me (especially the part with the demons) but I can confirm that they constantly insist
they have “solved psychology” when in fact they’ve just come up with a mildly-invigorating
self-help technique, same as every other cult in California. Here’s a Less Wrong post
making more or less the same accusations, and here’s a response by a Leverage employee.
The version of Leverage described in the essay is mostly defunct (I think?), so this isn’t an
emergency, but I agree with its conclusion that people need to stop giving Geoff Anders
more money and power.

29: Sick of the Columbus discourse? Why not try Zheng He discourse? In particular, were
his treasure ships really that much bigger than Western vessels of the time? Chinese and
Western scholars argue that traditional estimates for the size of his ships are implausible,
since wooden ships that big are not seaworthy. Most likely the ships he took on his
expedition maxed out at around 200 - 250 ft, the same as the largest Western ships of the
era.

30: They might have had some really impressive river ships, though.

18 23
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Chronological

50 new replies
Arnold Kling Writes In My Tribe · 3 hr ago
Does the high prevalence of autism in first-born explain the "increase in autism"? If
everybody used to have 4 kids the autism rate would have been lower than now where people
stop at 1 or 2.
Reply
1 new reply

Michiel de Mare 3 hr ago

Sadly, 95 in Roman Numerals is XCV.
Reply
Machine Interface 3 hr ago
 Following the "standard rules" at least, but I've learned recently that the standard rules
of Roman Numerals are a modern thing that were never actually really used during
historical Roman and Medieval times, and in practice there was always considerable
variation in how to write these numbers (even today, clock makers often prefer IIII over
IV).
Reply
Vitor 3 hr ago
There's a legend (?) about the clock numerals where a clock maker was hanged or
something for erroneously putting IIII instead of the correct IV on a clock. Since that
day, all clock makers use the wrong version on purpose, as a form of protest.
Reply
Bullseye 2 hr ago
That would be a hell of a hill to literally die on.
Clocks that used IIII were easier to make. A clock that uses IIII has four Vs, four
Xs, and twenty Is. You get a mold that makes a V, an X, and five Is, and you use
the mold four times. On the other hand, if you use IV, then you need five Vs,
four Xs, and seventeen Is.
Reply
Vitor 2 hr ago
It's just a legend of course, but it might have a grain of truth. Your
explanation makes a lot of sense, but someone might still perceive the
resulting clock as lacking craftsmanship, and the clock makers would then
be offended by their clever method not being appreciated.
Reply
Quiop 3 hr ago
Typo: Zhang He should be Zheng He
Reply
Sniffnoy 3 hr ago
> 6: It’s hard to talk about IQ research without getting accused of something something
Nazis. But here’s a claim that actually, Nazis hated IQ research, worrying that it would “be an
instrument of Jewry to fortify its hegemony” and outshine more properly Aryan values like
“practical intelligence” and “character”. Whenever someone tells you that they don’t believe
in IQ, consider calling them out on perpetuating discredited Nazi ideology.
So on the one hand, this shouldn't be too surprising. *Of course* an anti-intellectual
movement like the Nazis would be against IQ research. On the other hand, despite that, I'd
somehow never made this connection before, that of course the Nazis would be against IQ
research...
Reply
1 new reply

beleester 3 hr ago
>Seems like a great idea, although when I try it I don’t see any people available to check -
maybe none of my Twitter friends use this?
Someone at that company needs to read about the chicken and egg problem:
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/05/24/strategy-letter-ii-chicken-and-egg-problems/
Would it be that hard to let you "pre-check" people you follow in case they sign up for the
app and want to see if you reciprocate?
Reply
IJW Writes Turtles all the way down! · 3 hr ago
A very easy way to figure out the intransitive dice problem is by looking quickly counting total
combinations of dice.
So here:
A: 1, 4, 7, 7
B: 2, 6, 6, 6
C: 3, 5, 5 ,8
You know that for example I can roll 8 on C, then against A there are 4 possible outcomes, 1,
4, 7, 7. So this goes for all for possible rolls on C. So 4*4 = 16 total combo's.
Then you quickly count the number of outcomes you would win against. So 8 wins 4 times, 5
wins twice, another 5 wins twice again and 3 wins once. Which is 9/16, which is >50% so C
beats A.
Gates suspicion was aroused because he probably knows some game theory, and generally it
is an advantage to be able to pick last because you have more info. But here Gates was
allowed to pick last, so that is what prompted him to examine the dice up close. And then it is
just a matter of counting combinations, which can be done rather quickly. Unless it was 16
sided dies that Buffett used, but I doubt it. In that case the impressive part is counting and
keeping track in his head of the number of winning combo's.
Honestly probability becomes a lot easier when you reframe it as counting combinations.
Bayes theorem for example is very intuitive once you visualize it as a combination counting
game.
Reply
2 new replies
Mystik 2 hr ago
I did it by assuming that the probabilities are dependent, and then removing that
dependency and applying a couple small tweaks
Reply
 Bullseye 2 hr ago
"Unless it was 16 sided dies that Buffett used, but I doubt it."
I also doubt that, because that's a strangely shaped die. Did you mean 6 sided dice?
With 6 sided dice you need to consider 36 combinations instead of the 16 in your
example, but I bet Bill Gates could handle it.
Reply
CYOA 3 hr ago
>AI safety group Redwood Research has a fun new project, which starts with trying to train a
GPT-like language model to avoid violence in its stories.
This should be easy to invert to create a hyper-gory AI that can turn even the most innocuous
situation into a Splatter film.
Reply
Spille 2 hr ago
Sounds also more fun. "Hey Susi, please let me borrow your elementary school textbook.
I need it for research"
Reply
Machine Interface 3 hr ago
> 2: @incunabula: “Cheese is one of the 5 things the Western book as we know it depends
on. The other four are snails, Jesus, underwear and spectacles. If even one of these things
was absent, the book you hold in your hand today would look completely different. I'll explain
why…”
The account is roughly correct but, as far as I (not a historian) can tell, and as expected from
that kind of Twitter thread, a number of details are simplified or even omitted for the sake of
the narrative. Off the the top of my head:
The transition from papyrus to velum was in large part caused by a shortage of papyrus that
occured with the collapse of the mediterranean trade routes following the fall of the Western
Roman Empire and the Arab conquest of North Africa, as almost all of Western Europe's
papyrus came from Egypt.
The first alphabet was not Phoenician, but Greek, which was based on Phoenician
— Phoenician was an "Abjad", a system that only consistently represents consonants, with the
vowels not represented at all or imperfectly represented, as they are treated as redundant
information (whch s nt s nrsnbl s t snds), a kind of system that seems to have originated
ultimately in Egyptian hieroglyphs (which while they use logograms like Chinese, also have
symbols with phonetic values), and like the alphabet is fairly adaptable as well (Hebrew,
Arabic and the surviving Syriac languages are written in such systems). The alphabet was
actually invented independently more than one time, though all the alphabetic scripts seem to
ultimately descend from Phoenician.
Syllabic writing systems are more difficult to adapt to other languages, but it's certainly not
impossible. There have been a fair number of writing systems based on Chinese (primarily a
logographic system, but each logogram represents exactly one syllable) created to write
Reply
LincolnQ 2 hr ago
I'm one of the founders of Wave (link #15). AMA!
Reply
Jean C 2 hr ago
I’m very excited to see Wave covered here! I think Scott’s summary in the post is a bit
misleading though — the remittance arm is an app called Sendwave, while the Wave app
is focused exclusively on mobile money. Previously they were both run by the same
company that Lincoln founded, but Sendwave was recently acquired by WorldRemit and
they’re now two separate companies (I work on the engineering team at Sendwave).
Also hi Lincoln! Congrats on the Series A!
Reply
LincolnQ 2 hr ago
Yep :) hi! thanks!
Reply
argentus 2 hr ago
Library fines:
I can also offer that for me at least, library fines just made me less likely to turn books in on
time because I interpreted the fine as "paying" to keep the book an extra day and not a
punishment for breaking the rules. I know this isn't how they are intended but I certainly
chose to rationalize it this way. Now, I have no plausible excuse.
Reply
3 new replies
Richard Gadsden 2 hr ago
The other bit is that per-day-overdue fines tend to result in people just not returning a
book at all if it is very late. Because libraries almost never pursue library fines, but just
charge the fine when you return the book and will deny you the ability to keep borrowing
books until you pay the fine, it's often better to keep the book than return it. Exactly the
opposite of the intended incentive.
Reply
Mike H 2 hr ago
The paper about India seems a bit questionable. My prior on believing the claim in the
abstract is reasonably high, as I tend to think local rule (even if by dictators) should work out
better than rule by remote dictators. But then reading it my belief is dragged down by several
things:
1. The Cato.org summary announces that it's a study of British colonial rule. In fact it's not,
even though it's presented that way. The paper concludes that British colonial rule wasn't
what made the difference, it was actually the system of landlord based revenue collection
(which happened to be implemented in some but not all British controlled districts). The
actual conclusion would seem to be about the best way to raise taxes, but it's been spun as a
factual claim about colonialism. I find this somehow not surprising and it reinforces my prior
belief that academia is keen on warping research to achieve ideological ends.
2. They note that the British preferred to annex areas with high agricultural productivity, i.e.
farmland. Farmland would obviously have less light visible from space. This poses a problem
for them, which they are well aware of.
3. They try to correct for this using a statistical model, with some obvious corrections e.g.
"luminosity per capita" and some not so obvious like area of each district, which they claim
will control for the fact that cities naturally throw more light into space due to density.
The attempt to link "visibility of light from space in 1993" with "the impact of British colonial
rule" is very indirect, and therefore relies very heavily on the integrity of the statistical
modelling and the way they controlled for various confounders, along with an ambient
assumption that their corrections did actually correct for the giant honking confounder they
identify at the start. But this is exactly the sort of research that frequently turns out to be
bogus or misleading,
Expand full comment all the time.
Reply
Bullseye 2 hr ago
Regarding number 2, I'd expect the brightest light to come from cities, and cities tend to
be built near good farmland. As the city expands, it's built on what was recently good
farmland.
Reply
4 new replies

Jack C 2 hr ago
On nationalism vs patriotism. Patriotism is superficially morally superior because it is inwardly
focused and defensive, whereas nationalism is fixated on the other and expansionist. But I
think there's a deeper reason patriotism is morally superior.
Why have differences in culture, language, country, at all except as an artifact of history?
Wouldn't we be better off all uniting?
Plurality of culture, language, and country is a safety factor in civilization. This redundancy
insulates groups of people from pathologies that afflict other groups of people.
Consider a universal human culture, language, and country. How long would it take to heal if
some bad influence such as corruption or ideology took hold? I think it would take longer to
heal than if there were an alternative group of people behaving differently in parallel.
Patriotism is good because it preserves diversity and plurality. Nationalism is bad because it
erodes diversity and plurality by conquest, negating the positives of the particular vs the
universal.
Reply
1 new reply

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