Blaming

One of the most gratifying things to read over the last few weeks was Texan99 starting a post at Grim's noting that she had expected to find X but found Y instead when she went looking at the power outage explanations. More usually, people just blame whatever or whoever they thought was the source of every other problem before. "It's like I always say, Marge, you just can't trust the Democrats on anything." 

The common characterisation used to be that Liberals would say "These are bad/good people" while conservatives would focus on "these are bad/good ideas." That may have been self-serving and relied on cherry-picked data, but I can at least say that this was part of my moving from liberal to conservative in the 80s.  The constant focus on what bad people the conservatives were combined with the self-congratulation of what good people we are grated on me increasingly.  I was told that the religious right was awash in that sentiment, but I only saw some. I did see some, and very annoying, but I saw more of all of us aren't quite good, but we're trying.

Has that changed in the last decade, that generalisation of mine?  I can't tell.  The type of interaction I have with the world has changed since I started moving about the building rather than developing team relationships at work beginning around 2014 and semi-retirement at the beginning of 2017 accentuated that.  Having the last of the children grow up changed things.  I wonder if the election of Obama years ago pushed all sides into bad people/good people mode increasingly, and Trump embraced it rather than rejecting that framing.  It's not a good thing.

Blaming the Usual Bad Ideas isn't quite so damaging, though it can be a closed-mindednesss of its own. Blaming overregulation or deregulation is frequent, as is blaming capitalism or safety net. Everyone is sure they are the scientific ones, wrapping themselves in some things while ignoring others. I even see some of that in the discussions I have been reading about the Rationalist, Gray-Tribe community in all the news about Dr. Scott Siskind and Slate Star Codex (now Astral Codex Ten). Many have science they don't like to see either, or obvious conclusions from the science they want to avoid.  Fortunately, they seem to be getting called out from within their own community - no need for me to ggo over and help, as they are better at it.

What are the other idea categories we like to instantly default to whenever anything goes wrong or goes right?  There used to be a religious/secular knee-jerk split that it had all gone bad since we kicked prayer out of schools versus Puritans always ruining everything by telling others what to do.  That's still there, but I don't think I hear it as often. Judeo-Christian/Western Civ versus multicultural/the Glorious East has been shouting from the balcony in every debate I can remember since college. 

This was prompted by listening to Texans in their crisis, but it's not about Texans.  Whether they are better or worse on these things I don't know.  My prejudices would tell me you can count on California to have more irrational complainers and New Hampshire far fewer, but everyone else I just file under Likely Some of Both.

Trauma, Depression, Anxiety - New Treatments

There will be a few posts because there's a lot of info, but i don't think I will be making this a regular topic here.

I hesitate to bring them along, because I was never an expert, and in the last few years have begun slipping even below the level of talented amateur. I was only pressed into doing therapy a few times, when odd circumstances made it necessary, and it had to be kept quiet, as I was not technically allowed. I gave no signs of being any good at it. But when I was going in full-time I had professionals on my team who thought about these things a lot and read up on developments.  A few were fools, and perhaps even dangerous; many were competent and able to discuss the merits of various approaches; a precious few were brilliant and flexibly minded and their observations on the patient, what the outpatient therapist was doing, the new research in the literature and the various Grand Rounds, and the underlying theories was pure gold. We had little time to discuss each acute emergency every morning, with a deeper dive on one or two a day. The psychiatrists, neurologists, and residents (usually 2nd or 4th-year) would also discuss brain structure, what receptors are being targeted and so forth, which I had no need to know but paid attention, just in case. There was a lot of knowledge in the rooms. Let he who has ears listen, and I knew a bit in those days.

Much of this was new late in my career, or really got untracked for approved use only after I was semi-retired. I therefore only know what I read, but have some ability to detect unfounded claims or outright woo. A lot of what is happening in treatment now looks like woo, but some of it seems to be holding up in clinical practice. For example, I was sure that EMDR was going to turn out to be voodoo, then I thought that maybe there was something to the general idea of storing memories in a different form but rejected the eye-movement part as just decoration.  I now think the eye-movement part is likely to be at least one technique that does aid in storing of memories. 

Not all of the new stuff works, though.  Some of it is revealing itself to be indeed nothing more than cool-sounding alternative medicine stuff that does no lasting good or even harms. From the essay I am about to link

"This is a very pre-replication-crisis book. In these more cynical days, we know that the first few studies on any technique – usually done in an atmosphere of frothy excitement, by the technique’s most fervent early adapters – are always highly positive. And later studies – done in an atmosphere of boredom, by large multi-center consortia – are almost always disappointing."

Scott Alexander of Slate Star Codex, recently revealed (and he has embraced this now) as Dr. Scott Siskind of Astral Codex Ten  has built up a lot of credibility with me over the years on many subjects, and psychiatry is his specialty. Thus I am quite confident in passing along his review of the famous/notorious book The Body Keeps the Score, by the Dutch psychiatrist Bessel Van der Kolk. You won't need to read the book after reading the review. Van der Kolk is important in getting PTSD recognised as a legit diagnosis at all, both the military and child abuse forms. The VA wouldn't even listen to him in 1980, claiming that studying trauma had never shown any benefit to veterans.  The idea was still that you should just tough it out, it would go away in time, it was the weak pre-existing personality of the vet, etc.  But when your nightmares - over which you have no control - are depriving you of hours of sleep for years on end, that has powerful long-term effects.  Just one example.  Many symptoms can be managed by keeping yourself out of certain situations, but that does mean you have to limit your life in some way, and some costs are very high.

So Van der Kolk deserves credit for that, but Siskind doesn't think his work over the last 20 years shines as brightly. Sisking has always needed a friendly editor, but he is thorough and the information is good. 

I posted James Thompson's review of some research about trauma last weekend, with the thought that one's subjective impression of what trauma occurred is a stronger effect than both the extent of the actual trauma and the pre-existing personality of the victim, which have been the two primary foci of research until now. Thompson says "subjective impression" and Siskind says "schema," but I think there is a lot of shared meaning there. So as a first observation, we could say that The Schema Keeps the Score.

By the way I usually apologise for linking to Unz.  It has some very good people, like Thompson and Steve Sailer.  But it also is just chockablock full of antisemites, some of whom are very good at sounding measured and fact-based, but always come to the same conclusion about the Zionists regardless of the data. I would think they would find more welcome on left-wing sites at this point, but they clearly respond to much of the symbolism of the right, and they aren't noted for being flexible in their thinking.  So it likely won't happen, no matter how much they hate the conservatives that just don't see the obvious about the Jews. There are also a lot of Russian apologists, some good , some just crazy. So.  Sorry.

So I will just start with those two for now, before giving my own thoughts.  I will be covering coherence therapy and touch on the somatic therapies in upcoming posts, adding in some things that occurred to me while reading all these.  Plenty to keep you busy for a day or too, and much to think about on your long walks.  Oh, I'm sorry.  that's me, not you.  Lost my head.

Slate Star Codex Is Gone

I first mentioned SSC for his article on how it is that in an online extremist world, reasonable people trying to promote their cause get overwhelmed by nutcases.  I have linked to him and referenced him many times.  I have called that essay "The Toxoplasma of Rage" the best essay of the 21st C.  Steve Sailer called him the greatest public intellectual to emerge in the 2010's. You can find my store of references to him here.

But now Slate Star Codex is dead, because the NYTimes is going to doxx him, to reveal his full name and how to find him, which is always a danger for a public psychiatrist. This includes not only the danger of people trying to get him shamed and fired in cancel culture, but actual physical violence.

More on Slate Star Codex

Apparently even his friends are using his full name, Dr. Scott Alexander Siskind now, and he has a new psychiatry practice in San Francisco, Lorien, and a new blog Astral Codex Ten. Writing in defense of him, Scott Aaronson makes the following comment about the New York Times article. 

The trouble with the NYT piece is not that it makes any false statements, but just that it constantly insinuates nefarious beliefs and motives, via strategic word choices and omission of relevant facts that change the emotional coloration of the facts that it does present. I repeatedly muttered to myself, as I read: “dude, you could make anything sound shady with this exact same rhetorical toolkit!”

Exactly.  The insistence that they are still mostly-respectable reporters even outside of the science, travel, and style sections rests on wordings, innocent looks, and diminished oaths ("By Saint Loi!") that fool no one beyond a high school AP English class unless they want to be fooled or are in on the joke. We learn the tricks of our trade.  I was complimented once on having written a chart note that told any experienced clinician exactly what they needed to know about the patient, even though it could not be said outright.  I was deeply complimented at first, but later wondered if this might be a moral deterioration on my part. I confess I don't know where that line is and I may be excusing my own bad behavior.  Yet I at least know I am not in the same category as modern journalists and their butter-wouldn't-melt disingenuousness.

Quillette also has a good article on this.

Post 7600 - NYT Doxxing Scott Alexander

Steve Sailer over at Unz.com breaks down the NYT hit piece on the shutting down of Star Slate Codex months ago (because they were threatening to doxx him). I wrote about it at the time, and we now have an answer to Donna B's first comment there, don't we? Yes, the Times will publish it anyway.

Sailer does a good job pointing out that many of the accusations against Alexander don't have much to do with him, but with people also in a group he's in, people who have said good things about him, people who might be commenting on his site, and just People Like Him in general.  Some of these people are second-cousins to racists, too. Or at least, what a lot of people reading the NYT think are racists. There is also the odd bit about referring to the psychiatrist as "Mr" Alexander, which seems odd after the kerfuffle over whether Jill Biden's EdD entitled her to always be addressed as "Dr" if she declares for it. He points out the double-standard on doxxing and giving credit, too.

These are quite simply horrible people, and the danger is not the free speech on Slate Star Codex, but that they have powerful microphones to condemn even though they do not display his rigor. It is bad enough when there are bullies, and bad enough when there are teacher's pets.  It is catastrophic when they are the same folks (as in The Silver Chair).

Apparently brilliant and influential Silicon Valley people were regular readers.  I wondered why the level of commenting was so high and how there were always already 200+ (sometimes into the thousands of) comments in place by the time I got over there. These are the people who live online. Small fish like me can say unwoke things and no one much cares. The racial statistics for violent crime are what they are, and there is one large obstacle to the assertion that this somehow must, simply must be the result of cops arresting them for lesser stuff, or the legal system being against them, or whatever. For homicide charges, you need a body.  You can't make one up and you can't make one go away. ("Cause of Death" can be bent a little at the edges to make some homicides look like something else on paper, but that's pretty limited.)

But influential people are especially not allowed to think bad things.

While I was over at Unz I also saw a very interesting essay by the psychologist James Thompson reporting on the long-term followup of those abused as children and what the key factors were in whether they had difficulties as adults. There has been long and contentious debate whether the severity of the events or the personality of the individual were more important.  One can see how this would affect treatment, approach, and certainly culture and politics. Newer studies are showing that people's subjective impression of whether abuse occurred is the strongest factor. That will put the cat among the pigeons in trauma studies, if it is allowed to spread widely. The site is either not letting me comment or comments are under moderation.

Autism Theories

Sometimes I try too hard to give you one-stop shopping on an idea...

 Autism Is Bad by Sebastian Jensen, recommended by Aporia. I dislike the title, but it is clearly in reference to mythbusting the idea that autism is an intellectual advantage that makes geniuses.

Both of these mythical views of autism are wrong: autistic people are not more likely to be right wing and the link between genius and autism is overblown.

I had not heard of "dimensionality" but the concept is discussed in a internal link and took only a little pondering to pick up.  I will not fully define it here in order to encourage you to go on the essay "Autism as a Disorder of Dimensionality," but it has to do with neuronal branching and complexity of brain architecture. And Johnson thinks the intelligence link is quite possible.

Neuronal density is a plausible candidate for the strongest factor underlying both genius and madness: it both drastically reduces canalization (normalcy), allowing the brain to be wired in strange ways and pointed in odd directions, and offers many more parameters — the raw stuff of achievement. This can lead to madness, genius, or both.

Also included is a chart of where various diagnoses are associated along the political spectrum. Spoiler alert: Most cluster around the center on both the social and economic axes. Both essays go into controversial territory, particularly the one at Opentheory.net. Some of it rather took my breath away. "Are you sure you want to go there?" Sometimes I get the feeling that they just don't like autists, and are trying to get back at someone. OTOH, sometimes they seem to defend them too much. All of this in a package of neurological research and solid grounding. 

This links in turn to  'Just Emil Kirkegaard Things ' A theory of Ashkenazi genius: intelligence and mental illness.

Perhaps I should have started with something more reliable: Autism And Intelligence: Much More Than You Wanted To Know by Scott Alexander at ACX (then Star Slate Codex).  I am surprised I have not linked this before.  At least, I can't find it at present. Plenty of theories there as well.

These numbers should be taken with very many grains of salt. First, IQ tests don’t do a great job of measuring autistic people. Their intelligence tends to be more imbalanced than neurotypicals’, so IQ tests (which rely on an assumption that most forms of intelligence are correlated) are less applicable. Second, even if the test itself is good, autistic people may be bad at test-taking for other reasons – for example, they don’t understand the directions, or they’re anxious about the social interaction required to answer an examiner’s quetsions. Third, and most important, there is a strong selection bias in the samples of autistic people. Many definitions of autism center around forms of poor functioning which are correlated with low intelligence. Even if the definition is good, people who function poorly are more likely to seek out (or be coerced into) psychiatric treatment, and so are more likely to be identified.

New Atheists

I recommend the recent article at Slate Star Codex New Atheism: The Godlessness That Failed.  (The title is meant to echo The God That Failed , a post WWII book in which six communist writers describe their disillusionment with and abandonment of that faith.) Scott Alexander is an atheist, and has been deeply involved with the online discussions between atheists/humanists and Christians/theists for  over two decades. He has noticed a dropoff in the discussions, a lack of traffic and interest at the atheist sites, and a split in the group in the last few years. Bethany over at Graph Paper Diaries offers the suggestion  that people became part of the New Atheist movement and online discussions from two broad categories, those who believed that religion was unscientific and unreasonable, and those who believed it was pernicious and dangerous.  I believe it was likely the latter group who converted to a Social Justice liberalism and gradually just left.  If liberalism is a religion, SJW's are the fundies. Alexander is usually very fair-minded.  He read a good deal of C S Lewis and found him “almost convincing,” and could see how someone might embrace a Christian faith in that way.

Two caveats:  Categorising subgroups is always inexact and might even be useless. I reprinted Michael Novak’s types of atheist from No One Sees God a decade ago, and it included seven versions. (The links are all shot now.  So much for the eternity of the internet versus the deterioration of books, eh?)  My own atheist and agnostic readers here looked over the list and didn’t find themselves described very exactly by any of the types. This should be cautionary for all of us drawing conclusions about motivations – and that includes the atheist arguers themselves, who seem to use the word “we,” more than is justified.  Alexander’s discussion is specifically about the online New Atheist intense discussion types, not about the larger population of nonbelievers in general. I suspect those are very different groups, start to finish.

Secondly. I may have been drifting into using the term “Social Justice Warrior” unfairly.  I have been using a definition that is convenient for criticism of them.  If, for example someone actually does act in a racist or sexist way I just think of that as criminal or immoral.  I don’t think of people who call that out as extremists worthy of being mocked. I reserve that for the people I feel are being ridiculous, of over-interpreting the terms and straining at gnats while swallowing camels. Rather circular on my part, and I will try and be more precise going forward. Social justice in the abstract is a very good thing. Excess is not normative, and abuse is not use.

Alexander’s discussion is already too long and doesn’t need me to expand upon it, but I did notice in the graphs on polarization that the engaged Republicans 1994 and 2014 look very similar (the 2004 Republicans had moved a bit to the middle), while the Democrats moved steadily left from 1994-2014.  That isn’t any evidence for who is correct, only of who is moving, but I thought it interesting. It accords with what many observers have written over the last few years, that the left are becoming more so.

A Philosopher Walks Into A Coffee Shop

A lot of the references to philosophers (then economists) went over my head over at Slate Star Codex, but I warmed up to it and laughed out loud once we got to William of Occam.  The site itself is quite excellent.  If any of you caught the research about women being less welcome in those disciplines which are perceived to need that spark of genius, he does an efficient takedown here.

Chatbot Propaganda

Astral Codex Ten has, as if often the case, a calm and rational take on this: Mostly Skeptical thoughts on the Chatbot Propaganda Apocalypse. For example

4: Propagandabots Spreading Disinformation Is Probably The Opposite Of What You Should Worry About

News articles about this problem always start with the same scenario: what if someone made a propagandabot to spread COVID disinformation, ie the most unpopular topic in the world, which every government and social media corporation and AI corporation is itching to censor?

Here’s a crazy thought: maybe the side that has 10x more people on it and 100x more support from the relevant actors is the one that will win the race to use this technology. You can already get an off-the-shelf chatbot that mouths liberal pieties; I’m not sure there are any that are much good at disinformation production. The liberal-piety-bots will be on version 10.0 before the first jailbroken disinformation-bot comes out.

He looks at various scenarios where chatbots could do Very Bad Things on social media. He also quickly realises the steps we take to prevent Very Bad Things might ultimately be worse than the VBT's themselves. To take a recent example, government efforts to censor some types of Covid information created a backlash in which some people stopped believing the government when they said the sky is blue. None of these things is static. The interaction of people's voluntary actions plus their response to government* recommendations plus their response to (various) expert advising plus their response to government mandates plus their response to other people's responses to everything above is so fluid that it defies easy measure. Plus, social scientists and government agencies were maybe not the people you wanted to have in charge of that anyway. 

Plus I recommend reading what he says about getting spam from Nancy Pelosi, that just won't go away.

Covid is only the beginning, of course.  It gets more complicated every year. Except...is disinformation more of a problem than in Pick a Country/Pick a Century/Pick a Topic? Maybe.  Maybe finally yes, after all the times we have previously invoked the nothing-new-under-the-sun argument. 

I keep recalling from a prepper thread over a decade ago a person from South America who had been through an actual societal breakdown while being on the wrong side of an insane government. He stated in the strongest terms that what is key in those situations, much more than your weapons, alarm systems, and canned food is a network of people you have great certainty you can rely on. It does not fix everything, witness the Ukrainian Famine of 1932-33, but a stash of rifles, gold fragments, and water filters wasn't getting you through that either. So too with whatever imagined apocalypse you see from AI and swollen government and nefarious actors. If you have a network of people you can trust, you can, in the direst emergency, at least decide that the older children and young parents will get the food and have people you love around you as you go. Lots of humanity never had those choices.

And most likely, the biggest problem of your next decade will be something medical that happens to us or a near relative. Wine will still gladden the heart. Young people will still fall in love. Music will continue to inspire, chatbots be damned.

*And it very much matters what level of "government" we are talking about.  Not only local, county, state, federal, but school district/ WHO.

For Joe and Kyle

I cut and pasted this from Astral Codex Ten, Scott Alexander's site.  Alexander is a San Francisco psychiatrist and every conservative's favorite liberal.  He comes out of the early 2000s online humanist/New Atheist groups and catalogued its descent into simple angry wokeness over a very few years. He is an atheist who quotes GK Chesterton and says that CS Lewis "almost persuaded" him. I thought you would find it fun.

******** 

I linked FWLAB’s criticism of David Hume’s argument against ever believing miracles. Joe James argues that FWLAB, myself, and other critics are misunderstanding Hume’s argument. FWLAB says no he isn’t. They continue the “discussion” in the comments, but both sides kind of embarrass themselves and don’t get anywhere. I am unfortunately still confused - there are many cases where something that never happened before happens for the first time. For example, nobody had ever seen a grizzly-polar bear hybrid until recently, so “the universal testimony of mankind” was that this didn’t happen. But when a reliable person did see it, we had little trouble imagining that we were wrong and it was simply very rare, or a new thing happening now because of climate change. If nobody has ever seen a sea part before, but then many people say they saw Moses part the Red Sea, what is different about this such that “the universal testimony of mankind” suddenly becomes a disqualifier? Hume seems to be trying to make this same distinction in his eight days of darkness example, but there it seems like he is only saying he will accept non-religious anomalies, but rule out religious ones, because religious people often lie. But then what happened to the “universal testimony of mankind” argument? I kind of get the impression that he’s groping towards Bayes’ Theorem, but hard-coding in a belief that the prior probability of lots of religious people lying is higher than the probability of a miracle. If that’s his belief, then fair enough, but I guess I expected the much-vaunted Hume’s Argument Against Miracles to be something more than this. 

The Claude Bliss Attractor

Astral Codex Ten discusses the fascinating topic of when AI characters are recursive, so that slight, even invisible biases get magnified and cause us to wonder what is under the hood.  Recursion is an excellent strategy for testing bias. In typical fashion for him, Alexander goes through every possible explanation for why this is happening, saving me the trouble of working it out for myself. It's interesting enough stuff in its entirety that I won't comment much and won't link to a particular section.

The concept that other, seemingly unrelated traits get carried along under recursion reminded me of The silver fox domestication experiment carried out over decades. Also, the effect of the gravitation of the shooter of a billiard ball on the speed and angles nine collisions out is crazy large, as NNT described in The Black Swan. 

Ordinarily this would just be a curiosity of the more extreme effects of recursion.  But as AI's speak to themselves and each other more and more, without supervision, so to speak, this is increasingly the world we live in.

Cost Disease, With Update

Update: As per my comment section, there are excellent comments on SSC at this post as well.  In fact, there are over a thousand comments, so I just don't read them.  The indefatigable Alexander does read his comments, however, and published the highlights in a subsequent post, including one from Megan McArdle. Taking the two posts together would be just about worth an entire semester of economics. They might contain just about everything you need to know.

****

Dr. Scott Alexander over at Slate Star Codex has a post Considerations on Cost Disease riffing off a piece by Tyler Cowan. Alexander is usually lengthy, but it is because he's thorough.  He actually saves you from reading half-a-dozen other articles. He tries to give many sides a fair shot at explaining the phenomenon.  He does his research, provides intriguing examples, and frames thing in ways I hadn't quite thought of. Do you think today's student would prefer the college education they are getting today, or the essentially similar one their parents got in 1980, plus $72,000? (Pretty obvious answer) Then he goes on to discuss exactly why that choice is not available - that no matter how much we look to the market to solve our problems, plenty of things simply elude market forces.  Not always government, either.

More than once I would read a paragraph and think "Oh, but he's neglecting the competitive forces that in play here but not there," only to find two paragraphs later that he has indeed considered exactly that, plus a few other things I hadn't thought of. He wonders why there are diminishing returns, why other countries pay for health care or education much at a fraction of our costs, and whether there is much we can do about it. He has a remarkable ability to question his own assumptions. A sample:

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.

And also, because it's just a good quote: 

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.

Oh, and SSC often has brilliant commenters, but this particular thread starts out with some people whose ability to do anything but recite cliches is suspect, so just don't.  JUST DON'T.

Four Saved Links

These were saved consecutively in September 2017 and all involve the same topic: IQ, including Richard Feynman's supposedly only above-average score. I just wrote about spatial intelligence, which is not formally tested as often or as well at school, and it may be that Feynman hit a ceiling on that but did not top out on other subtests, depressing his overall score a bit. That would also make my scores look better than they should. That makes sense to me, as I always felt they were a little higher than what my personal experience would suggest.  My numbers suggest I should almost never encounter people significantly smarter than myself, but I meet them all the time. I do look for them, but still.

You can get a deep dive on the subject of IQ here, especially if you follow the links.

Feynman, Schwinger, and Psychometrics. This is from Steve Hsu's Information Processing site, when he was still teaching physics at Oregon.  He is now at Michigan State as an administrator of (checks DuckDuckGo) of research and graduate studies.

Scott Alexander trying to get people to calm down. Slate Star Codex usually does first-class work. Quote: "So I want to clarify: IQ is very useful and powerful for research purposes. It’s not nearly as interesting for you personally." Amen and amen.

A Polymath Physicist on Richard Feynman's "Low" IQ and Finding Another Einstein. Steve Hsu again. Some of the same information, but mostly different.

Flynn Flips:  IQ Tests Do Matter. The "Flynn Effect" has been an uncomfortable array of data over the years for those who see genetics as the dominant driver of intelligence, as I do.  It does go against conclusions we might draw from other research, but it must be accounted for if we want to understand what is really happening.  Steve Sailer partly reconciled the two viewpoints over a decade ago. I probably should look around and see if there are any major changes over the last decade or so.  I do know that BGI (that's Steve Hsu again) has begun to uncover specific SNPs associated with increased IQ - about 50, last I heard - and as predicted, they each seem to have a tiny effect.  There is no collection of "you're really smart" genes out there.  Last I heard.

Making Yourself More Stupid

I am researching a topic as part of a discussion with an old friend. At bsking's suggestion I have been reading from old Slate Star Codex discussions by Dr. Scott Alexander, who I greatly admire. I have found that I am wrong about at least one thing. 

In the midst of this he puts a marvelous quote, expressing an idea I have attempted to get across, but more fully and elegantly than I have

One who wishes to believe says, “Does the evidence permit me to believe?” One who wishes to disbelieve asks, “Does the evidence force me to believe?” Beware lest you place huge burdens of proof only on propositions you dislike, and then defend yourself by saying: “But it is good to be skeptical.” If you attend only to favorable evidence, picking and choosing from your gathered data, then the more data you gather, the less you know. If you are selective about which arguments you inspect for flaws, or how hard you inspect for flaws, then every flaw you learn how to detect makes you that much stupider.

It is from a longer essay by Eliezer Yudkowsky, who I had not head of writing for Rationality. It is good to remember that while sometimes we are just wrong, little harm comes of it, and life goes on - but at other times if we persist in what we call research while favoring an outcome whether it is true or not, we make ourselves more stupid the more information we obtain. Much of learning is unlearning, which is no fun. The language of the essay is a little woo, but I don't think it is inappropriately so, given the state of mind he is hoping we will attain.

The Mississippi Miracle

A few South Central states - Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Alabama - have all seen recent gains in measured school testing.  They have been among the worst for years and are now average or better. I am suspicious of any education miracles, because they tend not to scale up, or persist, or measure what they say they do.  OTOH, even small well-distributed improvement is much to be desire. 

Here is some of the debate, courtesy of Astral Star Codex

Kelsey Piper stresses that it is literacy and continuing education for teachers focused on curriculum.

Freddie deBoer reminds us that there are no education miracles. (And he's got a list, which probably includes your favorite solution that you are just sure would work)

Derek Deek thinks there might be a little something to it, but not much. 

Natalie Wexler insists that phonics only gets you so far She likes the better teacher training, though.

Kelsey Piper shares some of the critics' doubts but still defends the strategies 

So many good observations and arguments were made that I don't want to muddy the waters much. I will note the following:

Some of the data is over more than a decade of (slower but sustained) improvement.  Some of it is flashy but only a few testing seasons.

Improvement was concentrated among but not confined to the worst students. 

Teacher training has included untraining - stressing that some popular things have been shown to be ineffective.  Note that these are not necessarily damaging, as critics sometimes accuse, but simply ineffective. 

Introducing Plan A

Scott Alexander at Astral Codex Ten Introducing Plan A, a proposal for AI safety built on agreements that recognise the principals do not trust each other. It is offered as an overall plan, but also as a stand-up comparison model 

... it’s supposed to be a floor. When some politician proposes a data center ban, or says that we have to gut safety regulation to compete with China, or promises a job retraining program, think to yourself: does this person have a vision for where all of this ends up? If so, is it as good as Plan A? If not, consider demanding that they do better. 

The full plan comes from AI Futures, which had an uncannily good prediction in 2021 of what would happen from then to now. It includes a link to the actual Plan A. The ACX essay linked above is Scott's sales pitch for it. 

I don't know enough to have a credible opinion beyond the observation that these people are much smarter than I am, have good credentials that they are well-meaning, and have spent a lot of time on what could go wrong and how we prevent/fix that. 

The Precision of Sensory Evidence

A general post on many newer therapies from Scott Siskind at Astral Codex Ten: The Precision of Sensory Evidence.

One of the first things that occurred to me about the sensory input in depression and trauma was manics wearing sunglasses indoors. Many an argument I had with psychodynamic therapists early in my career trying to convince me that this was because of their narcissism and/or desire to feel protected from being seen by others.  It is one advantage of having worked on the units at the beginning of my career, where you could see these guys wince when they had to come out into brighter areas or they had to take the glasses off for some reason.  I was pretty sure it was a largely physical, not psychological response. So now there is evidence that depressed people actually do see things less brightly.  They are grayer.

1.  It looks at first like it could veer into blaming the victim - "Are you sure you didn't just make most of this up and are a touch overdramatic, honey?" Yet I think if you follow it out it actually bypasses it. What actually happened turns out not to matter as much as the schema that was installed. We seldom have contemporary records, video, credible witnesses anyway.  We are never going to know exactly what happened. We only know what we have now.  And really, we don't need to know.  The victim can sometimes get obsessed with knowing, and with proving to the important others that yes they were too abused, and too much of the older intervention focused on this too, as if everyone had to know all the details before anyone could go forward. It might feel that way, but that feeling might itself be a symptom.  Therapy should focus on resolving the now.  Once that is completed the patient may or may not wish to go back and explore.  Yet almost always not. They decide it doesn't much matter.

1A.  So it's not quite the Body that keeps the score, it's the Schema that keeps the score. The body is an imperfect report card.

 

2. This also nicely gets around all the discussions of whether emotional abuse is worse than physical or sexual worse than all.  The question might matter someday to the patient, but it doesn't have to matter now, and in fact shouldn't matter now.  This is because it gets into all the side questions of what other people think of them, of how much they should trust their own thoughts and feelings, and how they are going to describe all this to others.  Yet we know from the get-go that these are things that are likely impaired in the patient - that's why they have pain and make bad decisions (or are unable to make decisions).  That's what they came into the office to find a solution for. All of those unanswerable side questions should be the student, not the teacher in this classroom.

 

This is similar to some other treatments.  I had many an addict who wanted to put a lot of time into understanding why they drank. But You won't have any idea why you drink until after you have been sober a while.  You will think you know and will have guesses, but you will be wrong.  And it is a waste of your time, probably an evasion of the pain of facing you.  You won't know why you feel depressed, or anxious, or insecure or whatever until those are largely gone.  And then you might say "Y'know?  I think it was mostly just genetic/food-based/that one incident/my mother's chronic pain/those first school years at the commune." 

 

My further points are still to come (Points 3 & 4) about the connection to Christian understandings and whether the value of these practices as treatments implies anything about every day use. 

 

AI and Compositionality

Siskind over at Astral Codex Ten made a bet that AI would be able to complete specific directions within 3 years, in defiance of some of his commenters who declared that compositionality is still a bridge too far.  It just happened in three months. It probably could have been done by Imagen even as he was making the bet, but it has taken this long to get the permissions to try. 

The artwork is fun to contemplate, illustrating what the various AI systems got wrong.

ACX Review - God Emperor of Dune

I remember loving the original Dune but disliking the Dune series more with each new entry as it came out, and God-Emperor most of all. If I think about them at all, it is only the first one.

But I'm a sucker for the intellectual adventurousness of the group over at Astral Codex Ten, so when someone reviewed the final episode I read it anyway.  He rereads it in the light of being suspicious of AI and its human/subhuman/superhuman mixture, which was not something I had considered.

Along the way, he throws in this line, which is a great summation of two other late and fairly irritating books in the series.

For the record, Heretics of Dune and Chapterhouse Dune are about sexing uppity women into submission and discovering a literal secret clan of space Jews, respectively. They are not necessarily required Dune reading, but if you are specifically looking for late-career-author-weirdness, they are excellent.

True

Moral Views

Astral Codex Ten is doing its yearly survey of who its readers are.  One of the questions is a multiple choice of what type of moral approach we favored. I have never seen such a question on a reader survey and was impressed for that alone. The choices were

Consequentialism 

 Deontology

Virtue Ethics 

Natural Law

Contractualism

I like them all myself, just being happy these days if anyone has anything going, and seeing some advantage in each approach.  I was surprised that utilitarianism was not on the list, but I think it might be out of intellectual favor these days. I like to keep it in the mix even though I think it has serious problems, largely because I think it is what most of us use as a shortcut 90% of the time for everyday use if a question doesn't catch our attention as difficult, even if we say we subscribe to one of the others.