Slate Star Scratchpad

I feel really dumb admitting this, but I’ve never read any of these people’s books, except a little bit of David Friedman.

I don’t read a lot of political books, and the ones I do read you’ve probably already seen reviews of on SSC.

I was actually thinking of the thing I posted just the other day, https://slatestarscratchpad.tumblr.com/post/158708701851/i-hate-the-needless-moralism-with-incest-on-this

You probably shouldn’t forget the whole list, but I think you should keep your options more open than you expect. Probably number one most obvious thing on my list would have been “must be a girl”, but then I met @ozymandias271 and we had a pretty great relationship anyway.

The WBW post seems good as far as it goes, but kind of limited to ways to not shoot yourself in the foot. I agree you shouldn’t do that.

I would say Mormonism, because it doesn’t count if it’s not in a community, and Utah seems nicer than Dearborn Heights.

Also, a couple of rationalists legitimately converted to Mormonism and it went exactly as well as they hoped, so that’s a proof-of-concept that I haven’t seen with Islamic conversion.

Also, realistically there’s like a 5% chance it’s going to stick, and I understand Muslims get kind of angry when you deconvert.

I don’t usually. But I hang out with some people who do, and sometimes I do it by osmosis, and sometimes I do it because of OCD-related freaking out over violating taboos I don’t even believe in, which is probably the real reason for like half the superficially religious stuff I do.

A few times I’ve done it on purpose because I feel like it’s a useful way to distinguish between silly secular contexts like “Oh my God, that’s crazy”, versus actually having some semblance of religious awe; “G-d” seems like a real and awe-inspiring being in a way that the overused term “God” doesn’t. But overall it’s completely unprincipled and I feel kind of stupid about it.

I would like an 8 hour workday. But the studies keep showing that longer workdays don’t increase medical errors, so my argument would have to boil down to “Pleeeease? I have a lot of things I want to blog about!”

I’m not sure what exactly you’re expecting in a talk from me. I would do it for free (if I were in the area), but you’d probably still be getting ripped off.

I sincerely like making them. I hate having to read them, just like everyone else.

There’s a link between depression and not really liking/being up for anything, including relationships. And there’s a link between SSRIs and low libido - I don’t know to what degree this is purely sexual versus involves romantic feelings as well, but given that the hunger center in the hypothalamus can affect very high-level cognitive beliefs about food it wouldn’t surprise me.

I’m sorry to hear about your issues and I hope you’re able to sort them out.

I just get the impression that a lot of the weird violent fundamentalism stuff is Sunni-only, and most of the Shia seem to be hanging around creating nice communities and successful economies. Maybe this is just my bias. I guess Dubai and Qatar are the best economies in the Middle East, and they’re Sunni.

I know everyone always makes fun of people who say “if you’re not doing anything wrong you have nothing to hide”, but since I’m not doing anything wrong it’s at least hard for me to become really worked up about this.

I think it’s sort of that…emotions and pragmatism and fear should at least by guiding my judgment here? And since I don’t have any emotional or pragmatic issues I don’t know what to think. Like I assume the NSA reads all my emails right now. And if there’s some bill to make the NSA and the CIA read all my emails, is that a horrible assault on freedom and we should all die nobly fighting for our liberty? Or does it just mean two computer programs will be auto-scanning my emails for the phrase “Allahu akbar” instead of one, and even Edward Snowden wouldn’t really get worked up about it? I dunno.

I wouldn’t frame it in terms of “mental health” - I think it’s on an axis skew to anxiety/depression/etc - but yeah, I find it pretty scary. I’m reading “The Hungry Brain” now which argues that obesity is because modern food is a superstimulus (well, it’s more complicated than that, I’ll review it eventually). In other areas, though, I’m surprised at how well we’re doing. Tumblr is probably a superstimulus for community or something, but not really in a bad way. It just means we’re getting more community. Netflix and erotica and so on seem to be making a lot of people very happy with unclear side effects (I know some people think porn has weird mental health issues, but my barrier for evidence here is high because Puritans gonna Puritan).

I expect at some point someone will come up with something horrible and then we’ll have to really confront this. If nothing else, the Amish will inherit the earth and we can start over from there.

Also, when did “superstimulus” become “hyperstimulus”. Stimulus inflation?

I don’t know much about this, but I’m very suspicious of anybody who connects anything more complicated than Parkinson’s disease to a simple imbalance in a single neurotransmitter.

It sounds like they should stop talking about religion and start talking about deeper issues of epistemology.

This sounds so stress-inducing.

I’m not an expert on Buddhism and I will punt this question, except that I’m not sure they’re trying to be “the happiest people in the world”.

My impression is that at least Theravada monks are trying to get beyond emotion in some meaningful sense and being the happiest person in the world would be as much of a failure as being the saddest. I’m not sure about Mahayana. I think that certain forms of meditation and enlightenment are supposed to produce “bliss” as a side effect, but I think this is very different from ordinary happiness.

I think the ego-illusion thing is somewhere in between. I think the sense of self is actively generated by the brain and you can make the brain stop generating it. I think there is something going on involving cutting the brain’s reward circuitry out of the loop (”an end to desire”, “an end to craving”). But this is all just wild speculation.

Yes, I would like to get married and have kids. I’m not sure how many yet.

Yes, I have an idea of what I’m looking for. I’ve been told that the proper procedure is to make a list of everything you want in a partner and then marry the first person who makes you forget the list, and I mostly agree with that.

But  it would be nice (though not necessary) if it were somebody excited about staying home to help raise/home-school the children, since I’m not excited about this, and having people who naturally want different things sounds better than having to divide the labor in a way where somebody loses out.

It would also be nice (though not necessary) if they were Jewish, which would make the older and more traditional members of my family very happy. I don’t think they are expecting very much from me but it is always nice to exceed expectations.

And at the risk of seeming like a horrible person, I’ve seen so many tragedies related to mental illness that I would be really reluctant to marry someone with a history of eg schizophrenia in their family (even if they’re coping well, I wouldn’t want to inflict the genes on my kids).

My timeline is “as soon as possible”, but I’ve seen too many marriage-related disasters to marry someone without at least a year or two of dating first. (If you’re starting to get the impression that practicing psychiatry isn’t great for your ability to make life decisions in a non-paranoid way, I’m not going to argue.)

Yes, mysteriously helpful anon, I would like to be introduced. My current partners are all wonderful, but they seem to be either dating other people more seriously than they’re dating me, not interested in having kids, or both. If anyone has any advice for me, let me know.

I am very happy there is some research being done into what charities are most effective. I’m not sure how valuable the marginal dollar / hour-of-smart-person’s time is to determining charity effectiveness right now.

My guess is that insofar as it’s valuable, it’s valuable in a centralized/coordinated way. That is, if I look into charities, and you look into charities, and twenty other people look into charities on their own, we’re partly duplicating each other’s work and coming up with non-intercomparable estimates. I would rather just fund GiveWell and OpenPhil really hard than come up with some sort of distributed charity-evaluating community thing (though probably we need a *few* independents to act as gadflies and make sure the centralized people don’t become too complacent)

If by “the EA funds” you mean the funds where everyone pools their money and then one person is randomly selected to work hard to figure out what’s the best thing to do with it, I’m not too clear on why that’s better than giving to GiveWell, who are already working hard to figure out the best thing to do with money.

The strongest argument against EA is that politics is so much more effective than everything else that everything else shouldn’t even register. A 1% chance of making Congress do something slightly different on foreign aid might matter more than all the bed nets in Zanzibar.

(this is ignoring complicated moral arguments that kind of reduce to Pascal’s Wager and get so confusing that “just be nice to your family and try not to think about morality more than that or else bad things will happen” is a reasonable alternative)

I see a lot of people trying this, and I never see anything solid coming out of it. One day someone will put a hundred depressed people in an fMRI and say they’ve separated depression into four endophenotypes.The next day someone else will put a hundred depressed people in a PET scanner and say they’ve separated it into six endophenotypes. If anyone has come to a consensus on how many endophenotypes depression has yet, I haven’t heard about it.

How would it reduce those wars? If we had a specific number to enter into the calculator to represent asexual privilege, and everyone agrees with that number, then it sounds like the war has been concluded. Insofar as the war isn’t concluded, people would fight over what that number should be.

I’m not sure if you’re referring to the stuff in https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/12/14/ssc-journal-club-mental-disorders-as-networks/ or reinventing it.

I think it’s really unlikely that we could identify a personalized network in anything other than a very informal way (ie “I think I become depressed if I don’t sleep enough”). I think we might already be sort of accidentally halfway doing this. If you mean something informal, keep in mind the average person only has a handful of depressive episodes in their lifetime, so I’m not sure how you would get a good sample size.

Also, keep in mind psychiatrist appointments are 15 minutes if you’re lucky, so this might have to be a kind of therapy.

…I mean, if you really want. The difference between SSRIs is so minimal that it hardly seems worth it.

What do you mean by “interview”? You’re asking me questions right now. I’m answering them.

If you want me on a podcast, or (G-d forbid) TV, dream on.

I think the level of polarization is high enough that unless you’re really well-calibrated friendly mockery is going to be interpreted as unfriendly mockery.

See http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/10/21/the-heart-has-its-reasons-that-reason-knows-not-of/

Read the first half of http://lesswrong.com/lw/dr/generalizing_from_one_example/

Asexual.

So that was *kind of* joking, and I don’t know anything about foreign policy, and this is probably the worst idea ever, but here goes:

Iran is a (partial) democracy with much more liberal values than Saudi Arabia, which is a horrifying authoritarian hellhole. Iran has some level of women’s rights, some level of free speech, and a real free-ish economy that produces things other than oil. If they weren’t a theocracy, it would be hard to tell them apart from an average European state.

In the whole religious war thing, the Iranians are allied with the Shia and the Saudis with the Sunni. Most of our enemies in the Middle East are Sunni. Saddam was Sunni. Al Qaeda is Sunni. ISIS is Sunni. Our Iraqi puppet government is Shia, which is awkward because even though they’re supposed to be our puppet government they like Iran more than us. Bashar al-Assad is Shia, which is awkward because as horrible as he is he kept the country at peace, plus whenever we give people weapons to overthrow him they turn out to have been Al Qaeda in disguise.

Telling the Saudis to fuck off and allying with Iran would end this awkward problem where our friends are allies with our enemies but hate our other friends. I think it would go something like this:

- We, Russia, and Iran all cooperate to end the Syrian civil war quickly in favor of Assad, then tell Assad to be less of a jerk (which he’ll listen to, since being a jerk got him into this mess)

- Iraq’s puppet government doesn’t have to keep vacillating between being a puppet of us and being a puppet of Iran. They can just be a full-time puppet of the US-Iranian alliance. Us, Iran, Iraq, and Syria all ally to take out ISIS.

- We give Iran something they want (like maybe not propping up Saudi Arabia) in exchange for them promising to harass Israel through legal means rather than violence. Iran either feels less need to develop nuclear weapons, or else maybe they have nuclear weapons but they’re on our side now so it’s okay.

- The Saudi king was visibly shaken and dropped his copy of Kitab al-Tawhid. The Arabs applauded and accepted Zoroaster as their lord and savior. A simurgh named “Neo-Achaemenid Empire” flew into the room and perched atop the Iranian flag. The Behistun Inscription was read several times, and Saoshyant himself showed up and enacted the Charter of Cyrus across the region. The al-Saud family lost their crown and were exiled the next day. They were taken out by Mossad and tossed into the pit of Angra Mainyu for all eternity.

PS: Marg bar shaytân-e bozorg

Thanks.

I had never heard of this before.

I’m looking it up on Wikipedia and it says that “Identified patient is a term used in a clinical setting to describe the person in a dysfunctional family who has been unconsciously selected to act out the family’s inner conflicts as a diversion.” Then it says it was part of the theories of RD Laing and Gregory Bateson.

Here is your one-paragraph summary of Laing:

In the mid-1960s, British activists gravitated to Laing’s ideas, arguing that schizophrenia was more “properly human”, in a world of hydrogen bombs, than conventional definitions of sanity…Laing argued that schizophrenia was not a breakdown but a breakthrough. By the 1970s, Laing took the position of Huxley’s The Doors of Perception, that schizophrenia was a form of sanity, not insanity. Laing’s position increasingly became a political attack on Western society, and then morphed once again, rejecting the idea of schizophrenia by declaring it as hypersanity. Eventually Laing’s celebrity led him to India and drug abuse, and he became a shell of his former self.

And long after everyone else had good evidence that schizophrenia was genetic and biological, Gregory Bateson went full-blank-slatist and led a reaction arguing that it was caused by your mother talking to you the wrong way as a kid (the sad part is that he was the son of a famous geneticist, and named after Gregor Mendel, and so should have known better - probably some interesting family dynamics going on there). Eventually he became so disconnected from reality that he was made one of the Regents of the University of California.

These people are both widely considered quacks and make me very suspicious that the IP term is quackery as well.

My impression is that they’re not, in fact, as good as the conventional ones. I can’t remember why I think that, but I’m like 75% confident it was somewhere credible. But they’re still pretty good.

I don’t know if you’re American, but you may not have heard of them because they’re not FDA-approved and so not legal in this country. One of them is legal in Canada and has been used there safely for years.

I’m actually really uncertain! I know a couple of psychiatrists who have used it and gotten good results. I’ve never gotten to see it used myself and the few studies I’ve read on it don’t really convince me one way or the other. Definitely something I should look into more.

That one time I compared some feminists to Voldemort as a joke in the middle of an extended analogy, and now the Usual Suspects have just given me the epithet of “Scott, that person who thinks all feminists are Voldemort” and made sure that is the only part of my million-plus-word blog anybody knows about.

I’m remembering that story about that Scottish guy who says “I eat eggs every day, and nobody calls me Angus The Egg-Eater. I have three beautiful children, and nobody calls me Angus The Child-Raiser. I’ve grown barley every year, and nobody calls me Angus The Barley-Grower. But you fuck one goat…”

It’s kind of like that.

The LW wiki is helpful, but there’s no substitute for reading the Sequences. Once or twice I’ve thought about creating some kind of “short” readable glossary/101 kind of thing, but it always gets bogged down both in questions of what to include.

Ironically, I don’t understand how you’re using “upstream”. Maybe I need to take a remedial Local Memespace Jargon course.

(Also, this concludes my latest backlog of asks, so I’ve reopened the ask box.)

I think last survey the average LWer thought there was about a 5-10% chance that the average cryopreserved person would be revived in the future. Without knowing much about the situation myself, it sounds reasonable to me.

I have much less emotional response to death than some people and can’t really bring myself to worry about it in any more than an intellectual way. This seems to be an axis where people just naturally differ - see Survey: Suffering Vs. Oblivion (which actually seems pretty relevant to my last ask, now that I think about it). I’m sorry I can’t be of more help to you.

I think most liberal is just a general feeling that poverty is really, really not okay, and if that means giving UBI or free food/housing/health care to every poor person, then that’s what we’ve got to do.

And most conservative is - well, I’m reluctant to say this openly, but I guess you asked - kind of the mirror image of that. Poverty is really, really not okay, and it bothers me to see deeply ill abusive drug-addicted parents have five or ten kids who there’s no way are ever going to be anything but poor and miserable, and then best case scenario we’re morally obligated to give them UBI and free food/housing/health care, and worse case scenario we don’t do that, and they’re miserable their whole life and the cycle repeats itself forever. So I think my most conservative view is something like being in favor of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Prevention , although obviously this isn’t “conservative” in the “I bet Paul Ryan approves of this” sort of way.

It sounds plausible. The numbers aren’t that different, and all else equal I think I’d rather be poor than have a serious mental illness. I haven’t read the full argument so I don’t know if he addresses happiness set points, and I’m not sure which side of the argument those would favor.