Podcasts about Slate Star Codex

Scott and Daniel break down every month from now until the 2027 intelligence explosion.Scott Alexander is author of the highly influential blogs Slate Star Codex and Astral Codex Ten. Daniel Kokotajlo resigned from OpenAI in 2024, rejecting a non-disparagement clause and risking millions in equity to speak out about AI safety.We discuss misaligned hive minds, Xi and Trump waking up, and automated Ilyas researching AI progress.I came in skeptical, but I learned a tremendous amount by bouncing my objections off of them. I highly recommend checking out their new scenario planning document, AI 2027Watch on Youtube; listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.----------Sponsors* WorkOS helps today's top AI companies get enterprise-ready. OpenAI, Cursor, Perplexity, Anthropic and hundreds more use WorkOS to quickly integrate features required by enterprise buyers. To learn more about how you can make the leap to enterprise, visit workos.com* Jane Street likes to know what's going on inside the neural nets they use. They just released a black-box challenge for Dwarkesh listeners, and I had blast trying it out. See if you have the skills to crack it at janestreet.com/dwarkesh* Scale's Data Foundry gives major AI labs access to high-quality data to fuel post-training, including advanced reasoning capabilities. If you're an AI researcher or engineer, learn about how Scale's Data Foundry and research lab, SEAL, can help you go beyond the current frontier at scale.com/dwarkeshTo sponsor a future episode, visit dwarkesh.com/advertise.----------Timestamps(00:00:00) - AI 2027(00:06:56) - Forecasting 2025 and 2026(00:14:41) - Why LLMs aren't making discoveries(00:24:33) - Debating intelligence explosion(00:49:45) - Can superintelligence actually transform science?(01:16:54) - Cultural evolution vs superintelligence(01:24:05) - Mid-2027 branch point(01:32:30) - Race with China(01:44:47) - Nationalization vs private anarchy(02:03:22) - Misalignment(02:14:52) - UBI, AI advisors, & human future(02:23:00) - Factory farming for digital minds(02:26:52) - Daniel leaving OpenAI(02:35:15) - Scott's blogging advice Get full access to Dwarkesh Podcast at www.dwarkesh.com/subscribe

We had the pleasure of speaking with Mario Gibney, who decided years ago that he couldn't just wait for someone else to take action on AI safety. In 2022, Mario co-founded AI Governance and Safety (AIGS) Canada to push the national conversation forward. Through movement and policy advocacy, AIGS is helping Canada become a leader in AI governance and safety. I recommend reading their concise white papers to get a summary of the issues. We learn how Mario got into this line of work, what Canadians think about the state of AI Safety these days, and things to get excited about in the Toronto scene. I leave you with a message about how to deal with the emotional toll of AI doomerism. Thanks to my amazing producer Chad Clarke for being essential in putting this show together. All mistakes are mine. Artificial Intelligence Governance & Safety Canada aigs.ca   LessWrong https://www.lesswrong.com/   Slate Star Codex https://slatestarcodex.com/   Astral Codex Ten https://www.astralcodexten.com/   80,000 Hours https://80000hours.org/   Center for AI Safety https://www.safe.ai/   Future of Life Institute https://futureoflife.org/   EAGxToronto applications are open until 31 July at 11:59 pm Eastern–apply now! https://www.effectivealtruism.org/ea-global/events/eagxtoronto-2024   We're a PFG! Profit4good.org  

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Do What You Can (A Poem), published by ElliotTep on July 1, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Audio is here if you prefer. Hope you like it. I got something to offer, all I ask is your time. And forgiveness for the form: a cheesy rhyme. You're skeptical? Makes sense. But I know your type's vice. You strike me as a purveyor, of do-gooder advice. And it's pretty damn good, I don't mean to boast, This advice always fits. Well…sort of. Almost! Listen good, take your time, to ensure I'm understood, As I tell you how to do the utmost good. But first let's all travel, to that fateful day. When you first got involved, with that thing called EA. Maybe a colleague, a classmate, or old childhood friend, Solemnly broke the news, of how this world will end. Or perhaps it was fanfic, of a boy with a wand, career tips, free pizza, or a child in a pond. Well, you found the people, who in turn shaped the art, of how to do good with the head and heart. Do-gooder nerds, you knew through and through, You found it! Well done! Your purpose. Your crew. So to all of you, here it is: my tip, my advice. Alright! I'll tell you. You don't need to ask twice. To help those not yet born. The ill. The caged birds, And if that wasn't enough, it's only 8 words, An elegant plan, a simple process: Do what you can. No more. No less. "Well that's cute and that's neat" I can hear you retort "But it's hardly a plan that can hold down the fort: To reduce the myriad, global catastrophic risks, Spare the shrimp, help the poor, and those who don't yet exist. Now don't get me wrong, I don't think you're some jerk, But the world is on fire…I should get back to work. Thanks for the rhyme. It was silly and sweet. But it's got too much fluff, needs to be more concrete." I'm so glad you asked, it's a fair thing to do, Coz I saved my best bits for last (and wrote your lines too). So let's get specific, let's chat details, Let's get some shit done, put some wind in those sails. If you do what you can, and I do it too, Imagine all the things, that we both can do. Rid the paint of the lead, take the birds out of cages, Stop a pathogen's spread, double a village's wages. Convince others to join you, more people is better, The EV goes up, the more you go meta. As a powerful clan, begins to coalesce, When you do what you can. No more. No less. If you can do more than that, then that is your mission. Do as much as you can, with your skills and ambition. Train up and network, guard your health and routine, Improvements compound, you do-gooder machine. And don't bother comparing, against what others can do. They'll do what they can, and you'll do the same too. Because all you can do, is your personal best, So just do what you can. No more. No less. And sometimes the winds blow, in the wrong direction, Ag-gag laws. FTX. Despot wins an election. And sometimes the storm rages, right over your head, Grant rejected. RSI. Too sad to get out of bed. In times like these, my recommendation, Is to look after yourself, maybe take a vacation. Take time off with loved ones, tend your wounds, nurse your cuts. As long as is needed, no ifs, ands, or buts. If you're feeling disillusioned, fed up, or impatient, Well, this phrase still applies, if you're EA adjacent. Don't need to attend meetups, or read Slatestarcodex, To still do what you can. No more. No less. And I'm sorry if my words, land flippant or trite. Like cheering "hit good better!", when you've just lost a fight. I'm hoping these words, will resonate with someone, If that someone ain't you, close this page, get some sun. And if you're done and you quit, done with doing good. I'm so sorry. I don't know what happened that got you to this point. But I know it must have been really hard. Thank you for trying. I wish it had worked out differently. My heart goes out to you. Look. Wo...

Fact Checking Scott Alexander's Discussion of Julian Jaynes's Theory on “Slate Star Codex” By Marcel Kuijsten Read by Michael R. Jacobs (⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.theungoogleable.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.youtube.com/@VoidDenizen⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠). In June 2020, the psychiatrist and blogger Scott Alexander wrote a review of Julian Jaynes's The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind for his popular “Slate Star Codex” blog. His discussion of Jaynes's theory contains a number of misconceptions and errors, and I will attempt to clear those up here. While the first three sections of his review are more or less just a summary of Jaynes's main arguments and some topics he feels are related or supportive, the issues I'd like to address can be found in the fourth and fifth sections of his post. Read the complete text from this episode here: https://www.julianjaynes.org/blog/fact-checks/fact-checking-scott-alexander-part2/ Learn more about Julian Jaynes's theory or become a member by visiting the Julian Jaynes Society at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.julianjaynes.org⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠.

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: My Interview With Cade Metz on His Reporting About Slate Star Codex, published by Zack M Davis on March 26, 2024 on LessWrong. On 16 March 2024, I sat down to chat with New York Times technology reporter Cade Metz! In part of our conversation, transcribed below, we discussed his February 2021 article "Silicon Valley's Safe Space", covering Scott Alexander's Slate Star Codex blog and the surrounding community. The transcript has been significantly edited for clarity. (It turns out that real-time conversation transcribed completely verbatim is full of filler words, false starts, crosstalk, "uh huh"s, "yeah"s, pauses while one party picks up their coffee order, &c. that do not seem particularly substantive.) ZMD: I actually have some questions for you. CM: Great, let's start with that. ZMD: They're critical questions, but one of the secret-lore-of-rationality things is that a lot of people think criticism is bad, because if someone criticizes you, it hurts your reputation. But I think criticism is good, because if I write a bad blog post, and someone tells me it was bad, I can learn from that, and do better next time. So, when we met at the Pause AI protest on February 12th, I mentioned that people in my social circles would say, "Don't talk to journalists." Actually, I want to amend that, because when I later mentioned meeting you, some people were more specific: "No, talking to journalists makes sense; don't talk to Cade Metz specifically, who is unusually hostile and untrustworthy." CM: What's their rationale? ZMD: Looking at "Silicon Valley's Safe Space", I don't think it was a good article. Specifically, you wrote, In one post, [Alexander] aligned himself with Charles Murray, who proposed a link between race and I.Q. in "The Bell Curve." In another, he pointed out that Mr. Murray believes Black people "are genetically less intelligent than white people." End quote. So, the problem with this is that the specific post in which Alexander aligned himself with Murray was not talking about race. It was specifically talking about whether specific programs to alleviate poverty will actually work or not. This seems like a pretty sleazy guilt-by-association attempt. I'm wondering - as a writer, are you not familiar with the idea that it's possible to quote a writer about one thing without agreeing with all their other views? Did they not teach that at Duke? CM: That's definitely true. It's also true that what I wrote was true. There are different ways of interpreting it. You're welcome to interpret it however you want, but those areas are often discussed in the community. And often discussed by him. And that whole story is backed by a whole lot of reporting. It doesn't necessarily make it into the story. And you find this often that within the community, and with him, whether it's in print or not in print, there is this dancing around those areas. And you can interpret that many ways. You can say, we're just exploring these ideas and we should be able to. ZMD: And that's actually my position. CM: That's great. That's a valid position. There are other valid positions where people say, we need to not go so close to that, because it's dangerous and there's a slippery slope. The irony of this whole situation is that some people who feel that I should not have gone there, who think I should not explore the length and breadth of that situation, are the people who think you should always go there. ZMD: I do see the irony there. That's also why I'm frustrated with the people who are saying, "Don't talk to Cade Metz," because I have faith. I am so serious about the free speech thing that I'm willing to take the risk that if you have an honest conversation with someone, they might quote your words out of context on their blog. CM: But also, it's worth discussing. ZMD: It's worth tryin...

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: My Interview With Cade Metz on His Reporting About Slate Star Codex, published by Zack M Davis on March 26, 2024 on LessWrong. On 16 March 2024, I sat down to chat with New York Times technology reporter Cade Metz! In part of our conversation, transcribed below, we discussed his February 2021 article "Silicon Valley's Safe Space", covering Scott Alexander's Slate Star Codex blog and the surrounding community. The transcript has been significantly edited for clarity. (It turns out that real-time conversation transcribed completely verbatim is full of filler words, false starts, crosstalk, "uh huh"s, "yeah"s, pauses while one party picks up their coffee order, &c. that do not seem particularly substantive.) ZMD: I actually have some questions for you. CM: Great, let's start with that. ZMD: They're critical questions, but one of the secret-lore-of-rationality things is that a lot of people think criticism is bad, because if someone criticizes you, it hurts your reputation. But I think criticism is good, because if I write a bad blog post, and someone tells me it was bad, I can learn from that, and do better next time. So, when we met at the Pause AI protest on February 12th, I mentioned that people in my social circles would say, "Don't talk to journalists." Actually, I want to amend that, because when I later mentioned meeting you, some people were more specific: "No, talking to journalists makes sense; don't talk to Cade Metz specifically, who is unusually hostile and untrustworthy." CM: What's their rationale? ZMD: Looking at "Silicon Valley's Safe Space", I don't think it was a good article. Specifically, you wrote, In one post, [Alexander] aligned himself with Charles Murray, who proposed a link between race and I.Q. in "The Bell Curve." In another, he pointed out that Mr. Murray believes Black people "are genetically less intelligent than white people." End quote. So, the problem with this is that the specific post in which Alexander aligned himself with Murray was not talking about race. It was specifically talking about whether specific programs to alleviate poverty will actually work or not. This seems like a pretty sleazy guilt-by-association attempt. I'm wondering - as a writer, are you not familiar with the idea that it's possible to quote a writer about one thing without agreeing with all their other views? Did they not teach that at Duke? CM: That's definitely true. It's also true that what I wrote was true. There are different ways of interpreting it. You're welcome to interpret it however you want, but those areas are often discussed in the community. And often discussed by him. And that whole story is backed by a whole lot of reporting. It doesn't necessarily make it into the story. And you find this often that within the community, and with him, whether it's in print or not in print, there is this dancing around those areas. And you can interpret that many ways. You can say, we're just exploring these ideas and we should be able to. ZMD: And that's actually my position. CM: That's great. That's a valid position. There are other valid positions where people say, we need to not go so close to that, because it's dangerous and there's a slippery slope. The irony of this whole situation is that some people who feel that I should not have gone there, who think I should not explore the length and breadth of that situation, are the people who think you should always go there. ZMD: I do see the irony there. That's also why I'm frustrated with the people who are saying, "Don't talk to Cade Metz," because I have faith. I am so serious about the free speech thing that I'm willing to take the risk that if you have an honest conversation with someone, they might quote your words out of context on their blog. CM: But also, it's worth discussing. ZMD: It's worth tryin...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Agreeing With Stalin in Ways That Exhibit Generally Rationalist Principles, published by Zack M Davis on March 3, 2024 on LessWrong. It was not the sight of Mitchum that made him sit still in horror. It was the realization that there was no one he could call to expose this thing and stop it - no superior anywhere on the line, from Colorado to Omaha to New York. They were in on it, all of them, they were doing the same, they had given Mitchum the lead and the method. It was Dave Mitchum who now belonged on this railroad and he, Bill Brent, who did not. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand Quickly recapping my Whole Dumb Story so far: ever since puberty, I've had this obsessive sexual fantasy about being magically transformed into a woman, which got contextualized by these life-changing Sequences of blog posts by Eliezer Yudkowsky that taught me (amongst many other things) how fundamentally disconnected from reality my fantasy was. So it came as a huge surprise when, around 2016, the "rationalist" community that had formed around the Sequences seemingly unanimously decided that guys like me might actually be women in some unspecified metaphysical sense. A couple years later, having strenuously argued against the popular misconception that the matter could be resolved by simply redefining the word woman (on the grounds that you can define the word any way you like), I flipped out when Yudkowsky prevaricated about how his own philosophy of language says that you can't define a word any way you like, prompting me to join with allies to persuade him to clarify. When that failed, my attempts to cope with the "rationalists" being fake led to a series of small misadventures culminating in Yudkowsky eventually clarifying the philosophy-of-language issue after I ran out of patience and yelled at him over email. Really, that should have been the end of the story - with a relatively happy ending, too: that it's possible to correct straightforward philosophical errors, at the cost of almost two years of desperate effort by someone with Something to Protect. That wasn't the end of the story, which does not have such a relatively happy ending. The New York Times's Other Shoe Drops (February 2021) On 13 February 2021, "Silicon Valley's Safe Space", the anticipated New York Times piece on Slate Star Codex, came out. It was ... pretty lame? (Just lame, not a masterfully vicious hit piece.) Cade Metz did a mediocre job of explaining what our robot cult is about, while pushing hard on the subtext to make us look racist and sexist, occasionally resorting to odd constructions that were surprising to read from someone who had been a professional writer for decades. ("It was nominally a blog", Metz wrote of Slate Star Codex. "Nominally"?) The article's claim that Alexander "wrote in a wordy, often roundabout way that left many wondering what he really believed" seemed more like a critique of the many's reading comprehension than of Alexander's writing. Although that poor reading comprehension may have served a protective function for Scott. A mob that attacks over things that look bad when quoted out of context can't attack you over the meaning of "wordy, often roundabout" text that they can't read. The Times article included this sleazy guilt-by-association attempt: In one post, [Alexander] aligned himself with Charles Murray, who proposed a link between race and I.Q. in "The Bell Curve." In another, he pointed out that Mr. Murray believes Black people "are genetically less intelligent than white people."[1] But Alexander only "aligned himself with Murray" in "Three Great Articles On Poverty, And Why I Disagree With All Of Them" in the context of a simplified taxonomy of views on the etiology of poverty. This doesn't imply agreement with Murray's views on heredity! (A couple of years earlier, Alexand...

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Agreeing With Stalin in Ways That Exhibit Generally Rationalist Principles, published by Zack M Davis on March 3, 2024 on LessWrong. It was not the sight of Mitchum that made him sit still in horror. It was the realization that there was no one he could call to expose this thing and stop it - no superior anywhere on the line, from Colorado to Omaha to New York. They were in on it, all of them, they were doing the same, they had given Mitchum the lead and the method. It was Dave Mitchum who now belonged on this railroad and he, Bill Brent, who did not. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand Quickly recapping my Whole Dumb Story so far: ever since puberty, I've had this obsessive sexual fantasy about being magically transformed into a woman, which got contextualized by these life-changing Sequences of blog posts by Eliezer Yudkowsky that taught me (amongst many other things) how fundamentally disconnected from reality my fantasy was. So it came as a huge surprise when, around 2016, the "rationalist" community that had formed around the Sequences seemingly unanimously decided that guys like me might actually be women in some unspecified metaphysical sense. A couple years later, having strenuously argued against the popular misconception that the matter could be resolved by simply redefining the word woman (on the grounds that you can define the word any way you like), I flipped out when Yudkowsky prevaricated about how his own philosophy of language says that you can't define a word any way you like, prompting me to join with allies to persuade him to clarify. When that failed, my attempts to cope with the "rationalists" being fake led to a series of small misadventures culminating in Yudkowsky eventually clarifying the philosophy-of-language issue after I ran out of patience and yelled at him over email. Really, that should have been the end of the story - with a relatively happy ending, too: that it's possible to correct straightforward philosophical errors, at the cost of almost two years of desperate effort by someone with Something to Protect. That wasn't the end of the story, which does not have such a relatively happy ending. The New York Times's Other Shoe Drops (February 2021) On 13 February 2021, "Silicon Valley's Safe Space", the anticipated New York Times piece on Slate Star Codex, came out. It was ... pretty lame? (Just lame, not a masterfully vicious hit piece.) Cade Metz did a mediocre job of explaining what our robot cult is about, while pushing hard on the subtext to make us look racist and sexist, occasionally resorting to odd constructions that were surprising to read from someone who had been a professional writer for decades. ("It was nominally a blog", Metz wrote of Slate Star Codex. "Nominally"?) The article's claim that Alexander "wrote in a wordy, often roundabout way that left many wondering what he really believed" seemed more like a critique of the many's reading comprehension than of Alexander's writing. Although that poor reading comprehension may have served a protective function for Scott. A mob that attacks over things that look bad when quoted out of context can't attack you over the meaning of "wordy, often roundabout" text that they can't read. The Times article included this sleazy guilt-by-association attempt: In one post, [Alexander] aligned himself with Charles Murray, who proposed a link between race and I.Q. in "The Bell Curve." In another, he pointed out that Mr. Murray believes Black people "are genetically less intelligent than white people."[1] But Alexander only "aligned himself with Murray" in "Three Great Articles On Poverty, And Why I Disagree With All Of Them" in the context of a simplified taxonomy of views on the etiology of poverty. This doesn't imply agreement with Murray's views on heredity! (A couple of years earlier, Alexand...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Linkpost: They Studied Dishonesty. Was Their Work a Lie?, published by Linch on October 2, 2023 on LessWrong. This is a linkpost for Gideon Lewis-Kraus's New Yorker article on the (alleged) Ariely and Gino data fraud scandals. I've been following this situation off-and-on for a while (and even more so after the original datacolada blog posts). The basic story is that multiple famous professors in social psychology (specializing in dishonesty) have been caught with blatant data fraud. The field to a large extent tried to "protect their own," but in the end the evidence became too strong. The suspects have since retreated to attempting to sue datacolada (the investigators). Despite the tragic nature of the story, I consider this material hilarious high entertainment, in addition to being quite educational. The writing is also quite good, as I've come to expect from Gideon Lewis-Kraus (who locals might have heard of from his in-depth profiles on Slate Star Codex, Will MacAskill, and the FTX crash). Some quotes: If you tortured the data long enough, as one grim joke went, it would confess to anything. They called such techniques "p-hacking." As they later put it, "Everyone knew it was wrong, but they thought it was wrong the way it's wrong to jaywalk." In fact, they wrote, "it was wrong the way it's wrong to rob a bank." Ziani [a young grad student] found Gino's results implausible, and assumed that they had been heavily p-hacked. She told me, "This crowd is used to living in a world where you have enough degrees of freedom to do whatever you want and all that matters is that it works beautifully." But an adviser strongly suggested that Ziani "build on" the paper, which had appeared in a top journal. When she expressed her doubts, the adviser snapped at her, "Don't ever say that!" Members of Ziani's dissertation committee couldn't understand why this nobody of a student was being so truculent. In the end, two of them refused to sign off on her degree if she did not remove criticisms of Gino's paper from her dissertation. One warned Ziani not to second-guess a professor of Gino's stature in this way. In an e-mail, the adviser wrote, "Academic research is like a conversation at a cocktail party. You are storming in, shouting 'You suck!' " A former senior researcher at the lab told me, "He assured us that the effect was there, that this was a true thing, and I was convinced he completely believed it." The former senior researcher said, "How do you swim through that murky area of where is he lying? Where is he stretching the truth? What is he forgetting or misremembering? Because he does all three of those things very consistently. So when it really matters - like with the auto insurance - which of these three things is it?" (Meme made by myself) Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Linkpost: They Studied Dishonesty. Was Their Work a Lie?, published by Linch on October 2, 2023 on LessWrong. This is a linkpost for Gideon Lewis-Kraus's New Yorker article on the (alleged) Ariely and Gino data fraud scandals. I've been following this situation off-and-on for a while (and even more so after the original datacolada blog posts). The basic story is that multiple famous professors in social psychology (specializing in dishonesty) have been caught with blatant data fraud. The field to a large extent tried to "protect their own," but in the end the evidence became too strong. The suspects have since retreated to attempting to sue datacolada (the investigators). Despite the tragic nature of the story, I consider this material hilarious high entertainment, in addition to being quite educational. The writing is also quite good, as I've come to expect from Gideon Lewis-Kraus (who locals might have heard of from his in-depth profiles on Slate Star Codex, Will MacAskill, and the FTX crash). Some quotes: If you tortured the data long enough, as one grim joke went, it would confess to anything. They called such techniques "p-hacking." As they later put it, "Everyone knew it was wrong, but they thought it was wrong the way it's wrong to jaywalk." In fact, they wrote, "it was wrong the way it's wrong to rob a bank." Ziani [a young grad student] found Gino's results implausible, and assumed that they had been heavily p-hacked. She told me, "This crowd is used to living in a world where you have enough degrees of freedom to do whatever you want and all that matters is that it works beautifully." But an adviser strongly suggested that Ziani "build on" the paper, which had appeared in a top journal. When she expressed her doubts, the adviser snapped at her, "Don't ever say that!" Members of Ziani's dissertation committee couldn't understand why this nobody of a student was being so truculent. In the end, two of them refused to sign off on her degree if she did not remove criticisms of Gino's paper from her dissertation. One warned Ziani not to second-guess a professor of Gino's stature in this way. In an e-mail, the adviser wrote, "Academic research is like a conversation at a cocktail party. You are storming in, shouting 'You suck!' " A former senior researcher at the lab told me, "He assured us that the effect was there, that this was a true thing, and I was convinced he completely believed it." The former senior researcher said, "How do you swim through that murky area of where is he lying? Where is he stretching the truth? What is he forgetting or misremembering? Because he does all three of those things very consistently. So when it really matters - like with the auto insurance - which of these three things is it?" (Meme made by myself) Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org

If you give someone a sugar pill but convince them it's a real medicine, they might get better because of the power of belief. That's the standard story, anyway. But as Tom and Stuart find in this episode, the more you dig into the science on placebo effects, the more you begin to doubt that the placebo effect is some innate bodily healing process that responds to beliefs. Instead, it might all just be due to mistakes and biases in the studies. Do we need to completely change the way we think about placebos?The Studies Show is sponsored by Works in Progress magazine, an online magazine full to the brim with the best writing on science, technology, and human progress. Read any of the essays in Works in Progress magazine and you're guaranteed to come away with a new idea or a new understanding of how things work - we can't recommend it highly enough.The Studies Show is also sponsored by the i, the UK's smartest daily newspaper. Right now you can get a half-price deal on digital subscriptions, including full access to Stuart's weekly subscriber-only science newsletter, by following this special podcast link.Show notes* “The Powerful Placebo” - the paper from 1955 that made the placebo effect famous* The 1965 study on placebo effects when participants know they're getting a sugar pill* Bad Science column from 2008 on the power of the placebo effect, “the coolest strangest thing in medicine”* Review from 2017 on “open-label placebo” studies* 2018 review on mechanisms of how “placebos without deception” might work * Slate Star Codex article the 5-HTTLPR gene* New England Journal of Medicine review of the placebo effect from 2020* Response to the NEJM review by Dahly and Rafi* 2010 Cochrane review of “Placebo effects for all clinical conditions”* “The pervasive problem of placebos in psychology”* Review & meta-analysis of the placebo effect in studies on back painCreditsThe Studies Show is produced by Julian Mayers at Yada Yada Productions. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thestudiesshowpod.com/subscribe

Jakso sivuaa mm. seuraavia käsitteitä, kirjoituksia tai videoita: Erik Hoelin artikkeli: "I am Bing, and I am evil" – Microsoft's new AI really does herald a global threat. The Intrinsic Perspective, Erik Hoel, Feb 16, 2023, ⁠https://erikhoel.substack.com/p/i-am-bing-and-i-am-evil⁠ Tekoälyn vaaroista: Max Tegmark interview: Six months to save humanity from AI? | DW Business Special, DW News,⁠ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewvpaXOQJoU⁠ 'Moolokista': Meditations on moloch. Slate Star Codex, Scott Alexander, July 30, 2014, ⁠https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/eienaaihminen/message

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: 10 Years of LessWrong, published by JohnBuridan on December 30, 2022 on LessWrong. [I appreciate that less wrong has a very strong norm against navel gazing. Let's keep it that way. The purpose of this post is merely to reflect upon and highlight valuable tools and mental habits in our toolkit.] The rationalsphere propelled me to where I am today by giving me tools that I wouldn't otherwise have developed. The concept handles that we have developed are numerous and useful, but here I am only talking about the underlying habits that dug up good ore for the wordsmiths. It was a typical path starting in 2012. Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality led to LessWrong, led to Slate Star Codex. Combined they fed into game theory, from game theory economics, and from economics all worked towards a new way of thinking. On a different branch I went from Slate Star Codex to Tetlock and forecasting and participating in some studies and tournaments (I can't beat the market). On a different branch, I have followed the AI literature from mostly MIRI and Paul Christiano and John Wentworth. And along with the AI DLC in my mind has come “AI development watching” and AI learning systems. This has been great, and it has been standard, and I am sure many others have done the same. But it was also an atypical path. I was a classicist and philosopher, bouncing around on the back of a bus in Italy between archeological sites with my 17 inch laptop and 12 tabs of HPMOR and two tabs of LW reading on each journey. Not yet having any knowledge of either calculus or discrete math, nor any inkling of basic coding or incentive structures, I was a youngling in the art of rationality. But I was well on my way in the great books tradition. I read HPMOR and the Sequences angrily. Many of the ideas I found refreshing and so on target, and many more I found blasted, awful, un-nuanced, and wrong. Many ideas about human nature and philosophy of language, logic, and science I wrestled with time and time again - always coming back for more. (Some are still wrong, mind you). I had rejected psychology sophomore year of college on the grounds that several studies in our textbook obviously didn't show what they claimed to show, and with that rejection of psychology, I rejected the idea of the quantification of human behavior. But reverse stupidity is not intelligence. So it took about three years before I could be salvaged from that position. It took scores of late night arguments about the foundations of language, logic, math, and science. Those arguments were my gateway into the enterprise, and the LessWrong corpus fueled the fire of those discussions. LessWrong, from the Sequences, to the community content, to the broader rationalsphere has introduced me to tools and instilled in me habits that I otherwise would not have acquired. To those habits I attribute some of the extraordinary success I have had this past decade. Since I have the unique position of a humanities person coming into the sphere and falling in love with it, I think I have a valuable perspective on what mechanistic, psychological and quantitative tools are the highest leverage for a person initially hostile to the project. Or another way to see it, is that while a child might be initially predisposed to certain habits of thought or pick up those cues from their culture, an outsider-turned-insider might have unique insight about which tools are most salvific for the average person. So I am going to outline in order which concentrated tools that, if turned into habits, significantly elevate one's sanity. These will be in the order in which I think they should be taught, not order of importance or “foundationalness.” Think in terms of probabilities. It is hard to imagine a time when this wasn't obvious. But probabilistic thinking requires ...

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: 10 Years of LessWrong, published by JohnBuridan on December 30, 2022 on LessWrong. [I appreciate that less wrong has a very strong norm against navel gazing. Let's keep it that way. The purpose of this post is merely to reflect upon and highlight valuable tools and mental habits in our toolkit.] The rationalsphere propelled me to where I am today by giving me tools that I wouldn't otherwise have developed. The concept handles that we have developed are numerous and useful, but here I am only talking about the underlying habits that dug up good ore for the wordsmiths. It was a typical path starting in 2012. Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality led to LessWrong, led to Slate Star Codex. Combined they fed into game theory, from game theory economics, and from economics all worked towards a new way of thinking. On a different branch I went from Slate Star Codex to Tetlock and forecasting and participating in some studies and tournaments (I can't beat the market). On a different branch, I have followed the AI literature from mostly MIRI and Paul Christiano and John Wentworth. And along with the AI DLC in my mind has come “AI development watching” and AI learning systems. This has been great, and it has been standard, and I am sure many others have done the same. But it was also an atypical path. I was a classicist and philosopher, bouncing around on the back of a bus in Italy between archeological sites with my 17 inch laptop and 12 tabs of HPMOR and two tabs of LW reading on each journey. Not yet having any knowledge of either calculus or discrete math, nor any inkling of basic coding or incentive structures, I was a youngling in the art of rationality. But I was well on my way in the great books tradition. I read HPMOR and the Sequences angrily. Many of the ideas I found refreshing and so on target, and many more I found blasted, awful, un-nuanced, and wrong. Many ideas about human nature and philosophy of language, logic, and science I wrestled with time and time again - always coming back for more. (Some are still wrong, mind you). I had rejected psychology sophomore year of college on the grounds that several studies in our textbook obviously didn't show what they claimed to show, and with that rejection of psychology, I rejected the idea of the quantification of human behavior. But reverse stupidity is not intelligence. So it took about three years before I could be salvaged from that position. It took scores of late night arguments about the foundations of language, logic, math, and science. Those arguments were my gateway into the enterprise, and the LessWrong corpus fueled the fire of those discussions. LessWrong, from the Sequences, to the community content, to the broader rationalsphere has introduced me to tools and instilled in me habits that I otherwise would not have acquired. To those habits I attribute some of the extraordinary success I have had this past decade. Since I have the unique position of a humanities person coming into the sphere and falling in love with it, I think I have a valuable perspective on what mechanistic, psychological and quantitative tools are the highest leverage for a person initially hostile to the project. Or another way to see it, is that while a child might be initially predisposed to certain habits of thought or pick up those cues from their culture, an outsider-turned-insider might have unique insight about which tools are most salvific for the average person. So I am going to outline in order which concentrated tools that, if turned into habits, significantly elevate one's sanity. These will be in the order in which I think they should be taught, not order of importance or “foundationalness.” Think in terms of probabilities. It is hard to imagine a time when this wasn't obvious. But probabilistic thinking requires ...

In his foundational 1972 paper “More Is Different,” physicist Phil Anderson made the case that reducing the objects of scientific study to their smallest components does not allow researchers to predict the behaviors of those systems upon reconstruction. Another way of putting this is that different disciplines reveal different truths at different scales. Contrary to long-held convictions that there would one day be one great unifying theory to explain it all, fundamental research in this century looks more like a bouquet of complementary approaches. This pluralistic thinking hearkens back to the work of 19th century psychologist William James and looks forward into the growing popularity of evidence-based approaches that cultivate diversity in team-building, governance, and ecological systems. Context-dependent theory and practice calls for choirs of voices…so how do we encourage this? New systems must emerge to handle the complexity of digital society…what might they look like?Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I'm your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we'll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe.This week on the show we dip back into our sub-series on SFI's Emergent Political Economies research theme with a trialogue featuring Microsoft Research Lead Glen Weyl (founder of RadicalXChange and founder-chair of The Plurality Institute), and SFI Resident Professor Cristopher Moore (author of over 150 papers at the intersection of physics and computer science). In our conversation we discuss the case for a radically pluralistic approach, explore the links between plurality and quantum mechanics, and outline potential technological solutions to the “sense-making” problems of the 21st century.Be sure to check out our extensive show notes with links to all our references at complexity.simplecast.com. If you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe, rate and review us at Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and consider making a donation — or finding other ways to engage with us, including our upcoming program for Undergraduate Complexity Research, our new SFI Press book Ex Machina by John H. Miller, and an open postdoctoral fellowship in Belief Dynamics — at santafe.edu/engage.Thank you for listening!Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode.Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano.Follow us on social media:Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedInReferenced & Related WorksWhy I Am A Pluralistby Glen WeylReflecting on A Possible Quadratic Wormhole between Quantum Mechanics and Pluralityby Michael Freedman, Michal Fabinger, Glen WeylDecentralized Society: Finding Web3's Soulby Glen Weyl, Puja Ohlhaver, Vitalik ButerinAI is an Ideology, Not a Technologyby Glen Weyl & Jaron LanierHow Civic Technology Can Help Stop a Pandemicby Jaron Lanier & Glen WeylA Flexible Design for Funding Public Goodsby Vitalik Buterin, Zöe Hitzig, Glen WeylEquality of Power and Fair Public Decision-makingby Nicole Immorlica, Benjamin Plautt, Glen WeylScale and information-processing thresholds in Holocene social evolutionby Jaeweon Shin, Michael Holton Price, David Wolpert, Hajime Shimao, Brendan Tracey & Timothy Kohler Toward a Connected Societyby Danielle AllenThe role of directionality, heterogeneity and correlations in epidemic risk and spreadby Antoine Allard, Cris Moore, Samuel Scarpino, Benjamin Althouse, and Laurent Hébert-DufresneThe Generals' Scuttlebutt: Byzantine-Resilient Gossip Protocolsby Sandro Coretti, Aggelos Kiayias, Cristopher Moore, Alexander RussellEffective Resistance for Pandemics: Mobility Network Sparsification for High-Fidelity Epidemic Simulationby Alexander Mercier, Samuel Scarpino, and Cris MooreHow Accurate are Rebuttable Presumptions of Pretrial Dangerousness? A Natural Experiment from New Mexicoby Cris Moore, Elise Ferguson, Paul GuerinThe Uncertainty Principle: In an age of profound disagreements, mathematics shows us how to pursue truth togetherby Cris Moore & John KaagOn Becoming Aware: A pragmatics of experiencingby Nathalie Depraz, Francisco Varela, and Pierre VermerschThe Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform The Worldby David Deutsch[Twitter thread on chess]by Vitalik ButerinLetter from Birmingham Jailby Martin Luther King, Jr.The End of History and The Last Manby Francis FukuyamaEnabling the Individual: Simmel, Dewey and “The Need for a Philosophy of Education”by H. KoenigEncyclical Letter Fratelli Tutti of The Holy Father Francis on Fraternity and Social Friendshipby Pope FrancisWhat can we know about that which we cannot even imagine?by David WolpertJ.C.R. Licklider (1, 2)Allison Duettman (re: existential hope)Evan Miyazono (re: Protocol Labs research)Intangible Capital (“an open access scientific journal that publishes theoretical or empirical peer-reviewed articles, which contribute to advance the understanding of phenomena related with all aspects of management and organizational behavior, approached from the perspectives of intellectual capital, strategic management, human resource management, applied psychology, education, IT, supply chain management, accounting…”)Polis (“a real-time system for gathering, analyzing and understanding what large groups of people think in their own words, enabled by advanced statistics and machine learning”)Related Complexity Podcast Episodes7 - Rajiv Sethi on Stereotypes, Crime, and The Pursuit of Justice51 - Cris Moore on Algorithmic Justice & The Physics of Inference55 - James Evans on Social Computing and Diversity by Design68 - W. Brian Arthur on Economics in Nouns and Verbs (Part 1)69 - W. Brian Arthur (Part 2) on "Prim Dreams of Order vs. Messy Vitality" in Economics, Math, and Physics82 - David Krakauer on Emergent Political Economies and A Science of Possibility (EPE 01)83 - Eric Beinhocker & Diane Coyle on Rethinking Economics for A Sustainable & Prosperous World (EPE 02)84 - Ricardo Hausmann & J. Doyne Farmer on Evolving Technologies & Market Ecologies (EPE 03)91 - Steven Teles & Rajiv Sethi on Jailbreaking The Captured Economy (EPE 04)

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Why Neuron Counts Shouldn't Be Used as Proxies for Moral Weight, published by Adam Shriver on November 28, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Key Takeaways Several influential EAs have suggested using neuron counts as rough proxies for animals' relative moral weights. We challenge this suggestion. We take the following ideas to be the strongest reasons in favor of a neuron count proxy: neuron counts are correlated with intelligence and intelligence is correlated with moral weight, additional neurons result in “more consciousness” or “more valenced consciousness,” and increasing numbers of neurons are required to reach thresholds of minimal information capacity required for morally relevant cognitive abilities. However: in regards to intelligence, we can question both the extent to which more neurons are correlated with intelligence and whether more intelligence in fact predicts greater moral weight; many ways of arguing that more neurons results in more valenced consciousness seem incompatible with our current understanding of how the brain is likely to work; and there is no straightforward empirical evidence or compelling conceptual arguments indicating that relative differences in neuron counts within or between species reliably predicts welfare relevant functional capacities. Overall, we suggest that neuron counts should not be used as a sole proxy for moral weight, but cannot be dismissed entirely. Rather, neuron counts should be combined with other metrics in an overall weighted score that includes information about whether different species have welfare-relevant capacities. Introduction This is the fourth post in the Moral Weight Project Sequence. The aim of the sequence is to provide an overview of the research that Rethink Priorities conducted between May 2021 and October 2022 on interspecific cause prioritization—i.e., making resource allocation decisions across species. The aim of this post is to summarize our full report on the use of neuron counts as proxies for moral weights. The full report can be found here and includes more extensive arguments and evidence. Motivations for the Report Can the number of neurons an organism possesses, or some related measure, be used as a proxy for deciding how much weight to give that organism in moral decisions? Several influential EAs have suggested that the answer is “Yes” in cases that involve aggregating the welfare of members of different species (Tomasik 2013, MacAskill 2022, Alexander 2021, Budolfson & Spears 2020). For the purposes of aggregating and comparing welfare across species, neuron counts are proposed as multipliers for cross-species comparisons of welfare. In general, the idea goes, as the number of neurons an organism possesses increases, so too does some morally relevant property related to the organism's welfare. Generally, the morally relevant properties are assumed to increase linearly with an increase in neurons, though other scaling functions are possible. Scott Alexander of Slate Star Codex has a passage illustrating how weighting by neuron count might work: “Might cows be "more conscious" in a way that makes their suffering matter more than chickens? Hard to tell. But if we expect this to scale with neuron number, we find cows have 6x as many cortical neurons as chickens, and most people think of them as about 10x more morally valuable. If we massively round up and think of a cow as morally equivalent to 20 chickens, switching from an all-chicken diet to an all-beef diet saves 60 chicken-equivalents per year.” (2021) This methodology has important implications for assigning moral weight. For example, the average number of neurons in a human (86,000,000,000) is 390 times greater than the average number of neurons in a chicken (220,000,000) so we would treat the welfare units of humans as 39...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: 2022 LessWrong Census?, published by SurfingOrca on November 7, 2022 on LessWrong. From 2011-2017, there was an annual LessWrong census/survey. Much like a national census, this provided a valuable lens into the demographics and beliefs of LessWrongers. Unfortunately, this tradition appears to have stopped in recent years, with the exception of a mini-revival in 2020. (Scott Alexander appears to have moved the census to SlateStarCodex.) From what I've read, this is mainly due to of a lack of will/time among those in the community to run this project, and not a general judgement against the census. If this is the case, I'd like to start a new version of the census this year, with a greater emphasis on alignment research/beliefs about AI and timelines. Is this a good idea? Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org.

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: 2022 LessWrong Census?, published by SurfingOrca on November 7, 2022 on LessWrong. From 2011-2017, there was an annual LessWrong census/survey. Much like a national census, this provided a valuable lens into the demographics and beliefs of LessWrongers. Unfortunately, this tradition appears to have stopped in recent years, with the exception of a mini-revival in 2020. (Scott Alexander appears to have moved the census to SlateStarCodex.) From what I've read, this is mainly due to of a lack of will/time among those in the community to run this project, and not a general judgement against the census. If this is the case, I'd like to start a new version of the census this year, with a greater emphasis on alignment research/beliefs about AI and timelines. Is this a good idea? Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org.

Due to an oversight by the ancient Greeks, there is no Muse of blogging. Denied the ability to begin with a proper Invocation To The Muse, I will compensate with some relatively boring introductions. The name of this blog is Slate Star Codex. It is almost an anagram of my own name, Scott S Alexander. It is unfortunately missing an “n”, because anagramming is hard. I have placed an extra “n” in the header image, to restore cosmic balance. This blog does not have a subject, but it has an ethos. That ethos might be summed up as: charity over absurdity. Absurdity is the natural human tendency to dismiss anything you disagree with as so stupid it doesn't even deserve consideration. In fact, you are virtuous for not considering it, maybe even heroic! You're refusing to dignify the evil peddlers of bunkum by acknowledging them as legitimate debate partners. Charity is the ability to override that response. To assume that if you don't understand how someone could possibly believe something as stupid as they do, that this is more likely a failure of understanding on your part than a failure of reason on theirs. There are many things charity is not. Charity is not a fuzzy-headed caricature-pomo attempt to say no one can ever be sure they're right or wrong about anything. Once you understand the reasons a belief is attractive to someone, you can go ahead and reject it as soundly as you want. Nor is it an obligation to spend time researching every crazy belief that might come your way. Time is valuable, and the less of it you waste on intellectual wild goose chases, the better. It's more like Chesterton's Fence. G.K. Chesterton gave the example of a fence in the middle of nowhere. A traveller comes across it, thinks “I can't think of any reason to have a fence out here, it sure was dumb to build one” and so takes it down. She is then gored by an angry bull who was being kept on the other side of the fence. Chesterton's point is that “I can't think of any reason to have a fence out here” is the worst reason to remove a fence. Someone had a reason to put a fence up here, and if you can't even imagine what it was, it probably means there's something you're missing about the situation and that you're meddling in things you don't understand. None of this precludes the traveller who knows that this was historically a cattle farming area but is now abandoned – ie the traveller who understands what's going on – from taking down the fence. As with fences, so with arguments. If you have no clue how someone could believe something, and so you decide it's stupid, you are much like Chesterton's traveler dismissing the fence (and philosophers, like travelers, are at high risk of stumbling across bull.) I would go further and say that even when charity is uncalled-for, it is advantageous. The most effective way to learn any subject is to try to figure out exactly why a wrong position is wrong. And sometimes even a complete disaster of a theory will have a few salvageable pearls of wisdom that can't be found anywhere else. The rationalist forum Less Wrong teaches the idea of steelmanning, rebuilding a stupid position into the nearest intelligent position and then seeing what you can learn from it. So this is the ethos of this blog, and we proceed, as Abraham Lincoln put it, “with malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right.”

Today on the show, Andrew and I talk about: The importance of owning your own DVDs and CDs Blank Street Coffee, the stranger-than-parody coffee shop taking over NYC (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/29/dining/blank-street-coffee.html) "What We Owe the Future" (https://www.amazon.com/dp/1541618629) Slate Star Codex's review of the same (https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-what-we-owe-the-future) J.K. Rowling's crime fiction (https://robert-galbraith.com/stories/) Nerdrotic's "The Rings of Power is ABYSMAL" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnEXip1KsLk&ab_channel=Nerdrotic) Send your feedback to zac@creedalpodcast.com!

¿Cómo ves el mundo? ¿Ves la política como un conflicto continuo entre débiles y poderosos o como un problema a resolver entre todos usando el conocimiento disponible? A pesar de que toda dicotomía es falsa, la mayoría de nosotros nos reconocemos principalmente en la primera (Teoría del Conflicto) o en la segunda (Teoría del Error). Comprender estas dos cosmovisiones es de gran utilidad, al menos eso piensa Scott Alexander, el agudo escritor del blog Slate Star Codex. Su artículo Conflict vs Mistake removió tantas conciencias que recibió más de mil comentarios y réplicas. ***

In an era of emotional partisanship, it's tempting to retreat into pure, cold reason. But that way madness lies—Spencer Klavan discusses rationalism throughout the ages, from Plato and Bacon to Bayes, Aella, and Slate Star Codex. We need our minds, but we need our hearts too—they have their reasons that reason knows not of. -- Public Goods is the one stop shop for sustainable, high quality everyday essentials made from clean ingredients. Receive $15 off your first Public Goods order at https://publicgoods.com/HERETICS. -- The Spectator believes that life is bigger than politics, which is why it covers arts, culture, food, wine, travel, and life all around. Sign up today and receive three free months, plus a free hat with promo code HERETICS: https://spectatorworld.com/specialoffer. -- Bambee is an HR platform built for small businesses. Automate the most important HR practices and get your own dedicated HR Manager. Get your FREE HR audit right now at https://bambee.com/heretics. -- Stop throwing your tea into the harbor, and start celebrating America's tea heritage with Gold River Trading Co.'s specialty blends. Get 10% off your order with promo code HERETICS: https://goldriverco.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Before we get started… Writing elsewhereI have recently written about modern Russian literature for CapX, as well Victorian YIMBYs and Katherine Mansfield and 1922, for The Critic.Tours of LondonSign up here to get updates when we add new tour dates. There will be three tours a month, covering the Great Fire, Barbican, Samuel Johnson and more!Helen Lewis is a splendid infovore, which is how she has come to be one of the most interesting journalists of her generation. You will see in this conversation some of her range. We chatted before we recorded and she was full of references that reflect her broad reading. She reminded me of Samuel Johnson saying that in order to write a book you must turn over half a library. I recommend her book Difficult Women to you all, perhaps especially if you are not generally interested in “feminist” books. Helen is also working on a new book called The Selfish Genius. There's an acuity to Helen, often characterised by self-editing. She has the precision — and the keenness to be precise — of the well-informed. She was also, for someone who claims to be a difficult woman, remarkably amiable. That seeming paradox was one of the things we discussed, as well as biography, late bloomers, menopause, Barbara Castle, failure, Habsburgs and so on... I had not realised she was such a royal biography enthusiast, always a good sign. Helen's newsletter, by the way, has excellent links every week. It's a very good, and free, way to have someone intelligent and interesting curate the internet for you. Her latest Atlantic feature is about defunct European royals who are not occupying their throne. Let's hope one of Helen's screenplays gets produced…(I do not know, by the way, if Tyler Cowen would endorse the reference I made to him. I was riffing on something he said.)[This transcript is too long for email so either click the title above to read online or click at the bottom to go to the full email…]Henry: Is Difficult Women a collective biography, a book of connected essays, feminist history or something else?Helen Lewis: Start nice and simple. It was designed as the biography of a movement. It was designed as a history of feminism. But I knew from the start I had this huge problem, which is that anyone who writes about feminism, the first thing that everybody does is absolutely sharpens their pencils and axes about the fact that you inevitably missed stuff out. And so I thought what I need to do is really own the fact that this can only ever be a partial history. And its working subtitle was An Imperfect History of Feminism, and so the thematic idea then came about because of that.And the idea of doing it through fights, I think, is quite useful because that means that there was a collision of ideas and that something changed. You know, there were lots and lots of subjects that I thought were really interesting, but there wasn't a change, a specific "We used to be like this, and now we're like this," that I could tie it to. So I don't think it is a collective biography because I think there's no connection between the women except for the fact that they were all feminists, and to that extent, they were all change makers. And I've read some really great collective biographies, but I think they work best when they give you a sense of a milieu, which this doesn't really. There's not a lot that links Jayaben Desai in 1970s North London and Emmeline Pankhurst in 1900s Manchester. They're very disparate people.Henry: Some people make a distinction between a group biography, which is they all knew each other or they were in the same place or whatever, and a collective biography, which is where, as you say, they have no connection other than feminism or science or whatever it is. Were you trying to write a collective biography in that sense? Or was it just useful to use, as a sort of launching off point, a woman for each of the fights you wanted to describe?Helen Lewis: I think the latter because I felt, again, with the subject being so huge, that what you needed to do was bring it down to a human scale. And I always feel it's easier to follow one person through a period of history. And weirdly, by becoming ever more specific, I think you'll have a better chance of making universal points, right? And one of the things that when I'm reading non-fiction, I want to feel the granularity of somebody's research which, weirdly, I think then helps you understand the bigger picture better. And so if you take it down all the way to one person, or sometimes it's more... So Constance Lytton and Annie Kenney, that's sort of two people. I think probably Constance is bigger in that mix. It helps you to understand what it's like to be a person moving through time, which is what I wanted to kind of bring it back. Particularly, I think, with feminism where one of the problems, I think, is when you get progress made, it seems like common sense.And it's one of the things I find I love about Hilary Mantel's, the first two of that Thomas Cromwell trilogy, is there is a real sense that you don't know what's going to happen. Like the moment, the hinge moment, of Anne Boleyn's star appears to be falling. It's very hard not to read it now and think, "Well, obviously that was destined to happen. You'd obviously jumped ship to Jane Seymour." But she manages to recreate that sense of living through history without knowing the ending yet, right? And so maybe you should stick with Anne Boleyn. Maybe this has all just been a temporary blip. Maybe she'll have a son next year. And that's sort of what I wanted to recreate with feminism, is to put you back in the sensation of what it is to be like making those arguments about women having a vote at a time when that's seen as a kind of crackpot thing to be arguing for because obviously women are like this, obviously women are delicate, and they need to be protected. And when all of those arguments... Again, to go back to what it's like to just to live in a time where people's mindsets were completely different to... Which is to me, is the point of writing history, is to say... And the same thing about travel writing, is to say, "Here are people whose very basis, maybe even the way that they think, is completely different to all of your assumptions." All your assumptions that are so wired so deeply into you, you don't even know they're assumptions. You just think that's what consciousness is or what it is to be alive. And that's, I think, why I try to focus it on that human level.Henry: How do you do your research?Helen Lewis: Badly, with lots of procrastination in between it, I think is the only honest answer to that. I went and cast my net out for primary sources quite wide. And there was some... The number of fights kept expanding. I think it started off with eight fights, and then just more and more fights kept getting added. But I went to, for example, the LSC Women's Library has got a suffragette collection. And I just read lots and lots of suffragette letters on microfiche. And that was a really good way into it because you've got a sense of who was a personality and who had left enough records behind. And I write about this in the book, about the fact that it's much easier to write a biography of a writer because they'll fundamentally, probably, give you lots of clues as to what they were thinking and doing in any particular time. But I also find things that I found really moving, like the last letter from Constance Lytton before she has a stroke, which has been effected by being force fed and having starved herself. And then you can see the jump, and then she learns to write again with her other hand, and her handwriting's changed.And stuff like that, I just don't think you would get if you didn't allow yourself to be... Just sort of wade through some stuff. Someone volunteered to be my research assistant, I mean I would have paid them, I did pay them, to do reports of books, which apparently some authors do, right? They will get someone to go and read a load of books for them, and then come back. And I thought, "Well, this is interesting. Maybe I'll try this. I've got a lot of ground to cover here." And she wrote a report on a book about… I think it was about environmental feminism. And it was really interesting, but I just hadn't had the experience of living through reading a book. And all of the stuff you do when you're reading a book you don't even think about, where you kind of go, "Oh, that's interesting. Oh, and actually, that reminds me of this thing that's happened in this other book that's... Well, I wonder if there's more of that as I go along." I don't think if you're going try and write a book, there is any shortcut.I thought this would be a very... I'm sure you could write a very shallow... One of those books I think of where they're a bit Wikipedia. You know what I mean. You know sometimes when you find those very 50 inspirational women books, those were the books I was writing against. And it's like, you've basically written 50 potted biographies of people. And you've not tried to find anything that is off the beaten track or against the conventional way of reading these lives. It's just some facts.Henry: So biographically, you were perhaps more inspired by what you didn't want to write than what you did.Helen Lewis: Yeah, I think that's very true. I think writing about feminism was an interesting first book to pick because there's so much of it, it's like half the human race. It's really not a new subject. And to do the whole of British feminism really was a mad undertaking. But I knew that I didn't want to write, "You go girl, here's some amazing ladies in history." And I wanted to actually lean into the fact that they could be weird or nasty or mad. And my editor said to me at one point, and I said, "I'm really worried about writing some of this stuff." She said, "I think you can be more extreme in a book," which I thought was really interesting.Which I think is also very true in that I also feel like this about doing podcasts is that I very rarely get in trouble for things I've said on podcasts because it's quite hard to lazily clip a bit of them out and put them on Twitter and toss the chum into the water. Right? And I think that's the same thing about if you write something on page 390 of a book, yeah, occasionally, someone might take a screen-grab of it, but people hopefully will have read pages 1-389 and know where you're coming from, by that point.Henry: Maybe trolls don't read.Helen Lewis: Well, I think a lot of the stuff that annoys me is a shallow engagement with complexity, and an attempt to go through books and harvest them for their talking points, which is just not how... It's just such a sad, weathered way of approaching the experience of reading, isn't it? Do I agree with this author or not? I like reading people I disagree with. And so for example, the fact that I call the suffragettes terrorists, and I write about that, I think people are reluctant to engage with the fact that people you agree with did terrible things in the pursuit of a goal that you agree with. And I think it's very true about other sectors. I always think about the fact that Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for terrorism. And that gets pushed down in the mix, doesn't it? When it all turns out that actually, he was a great man. And that incredibly long imprisonment in Robben Island is its own totemic piece of the history of modern South Africa, that you don't wanna sit with the awkward bits of the story too.Henry: You've had a lot of difficult experiences on Twitter? Would you have written this book if you hadn't lived through that?Helen Lewis: I think that's a hard question to answer. I tried not to make it a “Here is the cutting of all my enemies.” And actually, my friend, Rob read this book in draft and he insisted that everyone I knew that I was going to argue with had to be of sufficient stature to be worth arguing with. He's like, You cannot argue with, I think I put it in my drawing piece, a piece like Princess Sparklehorse 420. Right? That's quite hard when you're writing about modern feminism, because actually if you think about what I think of as the very social justice end of it, right? The end of it, that is very pro sex work, very pro self-identification of gender, very pro prison abolition, police abolition, it's actually quite hard to find the people who were the theorists of that. It's more of a vibe that you will find in social media spaces on Tumblr, and Twitter and other places like that. So trying to find who is the person who has actually codified all that and put that down to then say, "Well, let's look at it from all sides", can be really difficult. So I did find myself slightly arguing with people on Twitter.Henry: I'm wondering more, like one way I read your book, it's very thought-provoking on feminism, but it's also very thought-provoking just on what is a difficult person. And there's a real thing now about if you're low in agreeableness, that might mean you're a genius, like Steve Jobs, or it might mean you're a Twitter troll. And we have a very basic binary way of thinking about being difficult. And it's actually very nuanced, and you have to be very clever about how to be difficult. And in a way, I wondered if one of the things you were thinking about was, well, everyone's doing difficult in a really poor way. And what we need, especially on the left, is smart difficult, and here is a book about that, and please improve. [chuckle]Helen Lewis: Yeah, there was a lot of that and it's part of the sort of bro-ey end of philosophy is about maybe women have been less brilliant through history because they're less willing to be disagreeable, they have a higher need to be liked, which I think is kind of interesting. I don't entirely buy it. But I think there's an interesting thing there about whether or not you have to be willing to be iconoclastic. The thing that I find interesting about that is, again, there's another way in which you can refer to it, which is the idea that if you're a heretic, you're automatically right.Henry: Yes.Helen Lewis: And there's a lot of...Henry: Or brave.Helen Lewis: Or brave, right? And I think it's... You can see it in some of the work that I'm doing at the moment about the intellectual dark web being a really interesting example. Some of them stayed true to the kind of idea that you were a skeptic. And some of them disbelieved the mainstream to the extent that they ended up falling down the rabbit holes of thinking Ivermectin was a really great treatment for COVID, or that the vaccines were going to microchip you or whatever it might be. And so I'm always interested in how personality affects politics, I guess. And yeah, how you can be self-contained and insist on being right and not cow-tow to other people without being an a*****e is a perpetually interesting question. It's coming up in my second book a lot, which is about genius. Which is sort-of the similar thing is, how do you insist when everybody tells you that you're wrong, that you're right. And the thing that we don't talk about enough in that context, I think Newton is a very good example is that, obviously, he made these incredible breakthroughs with gravity and mathematics, and then spends literally decades doing biblical chronology and everyone tells him that he's wrong, and he is wrong. And we don't really talk about that side of it very much.All the people who spent all their time studying phlogiston and mesmerism, or that's more complicated because I think that does lead to interesting insights. A lot of people who the world told was wrong, were wrong. And we're over-indexing, always writing about the ones who were the one Galileo saying the Earth still moves, and they turned out to be correct.Henry: Yes. There are good books about biographies of failures, but they're less popular.Helen Lewis: Which is tough because most of us are going to be failures.Henry: Yes. Well, you're not gonna buy a book to reinforce that.Helen Lewis: No, but maybe there could be some deep spiritual learning from it, which is that a life spent in pursuit of a goal that turns out to be illusory is still a noble one.Henry: That's a fundamentally religious opinion that I think a secular society is not very good at handling.Helen Lewis: Yeah, maybe. Yeah. I've been doing lots of work for Radio 4 about the link between politics and religion, and whether or not religion has to some extent replaced politics as Western societies become more secular. And I think there is some truth in that. And one of the big problems is, yes, it doesn't have that sort of spirit of self-abnegation or the idea of kind of forgiveness in it, or the idea of just desserts happening over the horizon of death. Like everything's got be settled now in politics here, which I think is a bad fit for religious impulses and ideas.Henry: What is the role of humour in being difficult?Helen Lewis: I think it's really important because it does sweeten the pill of trying to make people be on your side. And so I had a long discussion with myself about how much I should put those jokes in the footnotes of the book, and how much I should kind of be funny, generally. Because I think the problem is, if you're funny, people don't think you're serious. And I think it's a big problem, particularly for women writers, that actually I think sometimes, and this happens in journalism too, that women writers often play up their seriousness, a sort of uber-serious persona, because they want to be taken seriously. If you see what I mean, it's very hard to be a foreign policy expert and also have a kind of lively, cheeky side, right? We think that certain things demand a kind of humourlessness to them.But the other thing that I think humour is very important, is it creates complicity with the audience. If you laugh at someone's joke, you've aligned yourself with them, right? Which is why we now have such a taboo and a prohibition on racist jokes, sexist jokes, whatever they might be, because it's everyone in the audience against that minority. But that can, again, if you use your powers for good, be quite powerful. I think it is quite powerful to see... There's one of the suffragettes where someone throws a cabbage at her, and she says something like, “I must return this to the man in the audience who's lost his head.” And given that all the attacks on the suffragettes were that they were these sort of mad, radical, weird, un-feminine, inhuman people, then that was a very good way of instantly saying that you weren't taking it too seriously.One of the big problems with activism is obviously that people, normal people who don't spend every moment of their life thinking about politics, find it a bit repellent because it is so monomaniacal and all-consuming. And therefore, being able to puncture your pomposity in that way, I think is quite useful.Henry: So if there are people who want to learn from Helen Lewis, “How can I be difficult at work and not be cast aside,” you would say, “Tell more low-grade jokes, get people to like you, and then land them with some difficult remark.”Helen Lewis: Use your powers for good after that. It's tricky, isn't it? I think the real answer to how to be difficult at work is decide what level of compromise you're willing to entertain to get into positions of power. Which is the same question any activist should ask themselves, “How much do I need to engage with the current flawed system in order to change it?” And people can be more or less open with themselves, I guess, about that. I think the recent Obama memoir is quite open about, for example on the financial relief in 2008, about how much he should have tried to be more radical and change stuff, and how much he... Did he actually let himself think he was being this great consensualist working with the Republican Party and therefore not get stuff done?And then the other end, I think you have the criticism I made of the Corbyn project, which was that it was better to have kind of clean hands than get things done. There's a great essay by Matt Bruenig called Purity Politics, which says... No, what is it called? Purity Leftism. And it said, “the purity leftist's approach is not so much that they're worried about that oppression is happening but that they should have no part of it.” And I think that's part of the question of being difficult, too, is actually how much do you have to work with and compromise yourself by working with people with whom you're opposed? And it's a big question in feminism. There are people who will now say, “Well, how could feminists possibly work with the Conservative Party?” Entirely forgetting that Emmeline Pankhurst ran as a Conservative candidate.Henry: She was very conservative.Helen Lewis: Right. And there were members of the suffragettes who went on to join the British Union of Fascists. That actually... Some of the core tenets of feminism have been won by people who didn't at all see themselves on the left.Henry: If I was the devil's advocate, I'd say that well-behaved women, for want of a better phrase, do make a lot of history. Not just suffragists but factory workers, political wives, political mistresses. What's the balance between needing difficult women and needing not exactly compliant women but people who are going to change it by, as you say, completely engaging with the system and almost just getting on with it?Helen Lewis: There's a scale, isn't there? Because if you make yourself too unbelievably difficult, then no one wants to work with you and it's... I think the suffragettes is a really good example of that actually. The intervention of the First World War makes that story impossible to play out without it.But had they continued on that course of becoming ever more militant, ever more bombings, and pouring acid on greens, and snipping telephone wires... The criticism that was made of them was, “Are they actually turning people off this cause?” And you get people saying that, that actually the suffragettes set back the cause of women's suffrage, which I'm not entirely sure I buy. I think I certainly don't buy it in the terms of the situation in 1905. Fawcett writes about the fact that there were loads of all these articles decrying the suffragettes, whereas previously they'd just been... The cause of suffrage, which had been going on for 70-80 years, quite in earnest, in legal form, had just been completely ignored. So there was definitely a moment where what it really needed was attention. But then, can you make the same argument in 1914 about whether or not the suffragettes were still doing an equal amount of good? I think then it's much more tenuous.And there was a really good article saying that, essentially your point, well-behaved women do make history, saying that a lot of boring legal heavy-lifting... And it's one of the things I find very interesting about where modern feminism in Britain is. A lot of the work that's most interesting is being done through things like judicial reviews, which is a lot of very boring pulling together large amounts of court bundles, and people saying, “Is this obiter?” This word which I once understood, and now don't anymore. But it's not people chaining themselves to railings or throwing themselves under horses. It's people getting up in the morning and putting another day shift in at quite boring admin. And I do think that maybe that's something that I underplayed in the book because it's not so narratively captivating. Brenda Hale made that point to me that she would have been a suffragist because she just believed in playing things by the book. You won it by the book.And I do think now I find I don't agree with throwing paint and pies and milkshakes and stuff like that at people whose political persuasions I disagree with, right? I fundamentally don't believe in punching Nazis, which was a great debate... Do you remember the great Twitter debate of a couple of years ago about whether it's okay to punch a Nazi? I think if you live in America or the UK, and there are democratic ways and a free press in which to make your political case, you don't need to resort to a riot. And that's not the case all over the world, obviously. But I do think that I am... I think difficulty takes many, many forms.Henry: A question about Margaret Thatcher.Helen Lewis: Yes.Henry: Was she good for women, even though she wasn't good for feminism? So millions of women joined the labour force in the 1980s, more than before or since. It was the first time that women got their own personal allowance for income tax, rather than being taxed as an extension of their husband's income.Helen Lewis: I'm trying to remember. Was that a Tory policy?Henry: That was 1988 budget, and it came into effect in 1990. And she also publicly supported. She said, “You should be nice to mothers who go out to work. They're just earning money for their families.” So even though she definitely did not, consciously I think, help the cause of feminism, you would probably rather be a woman in the '80s than the '70s...Helen Lewis: Oh yeah, definitely.Henry: But because of her. That's my challenge to you.Helen Lewis: No, it's a good challenge. And I think it's one that has a lot of merit. I'm not sure whether or not she would be grateful to you for positioning her as Margaret Thatcher, feminist hero. And it's really into having... I wrote a screenplay last year about the women in politics in the years before Margaret Thatcher, and it's very... And I cover this a bit in the book. That women have always struggled in Labour, a collective movement, where it's like if you let one woman through, you've got to let them all. Like, “I'm the vanguard” versus the Thatcher route, which was like, “I'm just me, a person. Judge me on who I am,” and not making such a kind of radical collective claim. So that's the bit that holds me back from endorsing her as a kind of good thing for women, is I think she was Elizabeth I in the sense where she was like, “I'm good like a man,” rather than saying, “Women are good, and I'm a woman,” which I think are two different propositions. But it's definitely true that... I think that growing up in a society that had a female prime minister was a huge deal. America still hasn't had a female president. It's just not... If you're a girl growing up there, it's just... That's something that you've never seen. And the other half of it is, I think it was incredibly powerful to see Denis Thatcher. The true feminist hero that is Denis Thatcher. But genuinely, that's somebody who was older than her, who was willing to take a back seat. And he found a role for men that was not being the alpha. It was kind of the, “I don't have anything left to prove. And I like playing golf. Haven't I got a great life while the little woman runs around with her red boxes. All a bit much.” I think that was almost a more radical thing for people to see.And it's interesting to me that he was somebody who had fought in the Second World War because I think the '70s and the feminist revolution, I think in some ways depends on there being a generation of men who didn't have anything to prove, in terms of masculinity. And it's really interesting to me that... So Barbara Castle's husband Ted was also, I think, a little bit older than her. But he was also very much in that Denis Thatcher mould of, “Woman! Right, you're exhausting.” And Maureen Colquhoun, who I also write about in the book, her husband Keith was, by all accounts, a very decent guy who was totally accepting of her ambitions. And then he conducted himself with incredible dignity after she left him for a woman. And I think that's a story that I'm interested in hearing a bit more about, is of the men who weren't threatened. So I do think that's a big challenge that the Thatchers did present to orthodox values. But let's not underplay them as conservatives.Henry: Oh no, hugely conservative.Helen Lewis: And also the fact that, to some extent, Margaret Thatcher was reacting to an economic tide that was very useful to her. More women in the workforce meant more productivity, meant higher GDP. And I think it was at that point a train that was just not... Why would you throw yourself in front of it to try and reverse it and get women back into the home?Henry: Her advisors wanted a tax break for marriage.Helen Lewis: Oh, that's a classic Conservative policy.Henry: Because they said, “We're in office, and this is what we're here for.” And she said, “I can't do it to the mill girls in Bolton. I can't give a tax break to wives in Surrey playing bridge.” And in a way, I think she was very quietly, and as you say for political reasons not entirely openly, quite on the side of the working woman for moral reasons that we would usually call feminist. But which because it's her and because of everything else she believes, it doesn't really make sense to call them feminist, but it's difficult to think of another Prime Minister who has had so much rhetoric saying “Yes, women should go to work, that's a good thing. Don't yell at them about it.” And who has implemented economic policies that's giving them tax breaks and trying to level the playing field a bit. So it's a sort of conundrum for me that she didn't want to be called a feminist, but she did a lot of things that quotes, if you were that sort of person would say “undermined” the traditional family or whatever.Helen Lewis: Yeah. And she found a way to be a powerful woman and an archetype of what that was, which I think again, is based enormously on Barbara Castle, I think Barbara Castle is the template for her.Henry: Oh yeah. Down to the hair. Yeah.Helen Lewis: With the big hair and the fluttering the eyelashes, and that kind of, what I think of as kind of “Iron Fem” right? Which is where you're very, very feminine, but it's in a steely ball-crushing kind of way. Although interestingly, Barbara Castle cried a lot. She would have frequently burst into tears about stuff, which again was, I think kept the men around her slightly off balance, they didn't know how to... Which I think any good politician uses what they've got. But the thing that struck me when I read more about Thatcher last year, was about the fact that if she hadn't been the first female Prime Minister, I think we would write a lot more about her lower-middle middle class background and what a challenge that was. And the fact that that really, in some ways, I think the Tory Party really loved having a female leader once they got over the initial shock because it was kind of like, “Well, aren't we modern. And now Labor can't have a go at us about all this kind of stuff, 'cause look at our woman leader.” What I think was more of a profound challenge for a long time, was the kind of arriviste sort of idea that she was, as you say, a representative of working people, upwardly mobile, or from right to buy being an example of one of these policies. I think that was a big challenge to the kind of men in smoky rooms.Henry: I don't think they ever got over it. Carrington called her “a f*****g stupid petit-bourgeois woman.”Helen Lewis: Petit-bourgeois is exactly the right, I think the right term of abuse. And there was a... And I think that's why... I mean, I think it came out as misogyny but actually it was also driven by class as well, the fact that she was no better than she ought to be, right?But that's about... I think that's how you see, and honestly I think Ted Heath experiences as a great... Leading to the incredible sulk, one of my favorite phrases, [chuckle] that he just never kind of got over that he had been beaten by a woman. I think that was an extra kind of poisoned pill for him, of the ingratitude of the party, that they would replace him with a woman.Henry: And a woman of his own class.Helen Lewis: Right. And exactly, it's not like she... So she wasn't sort of Lady Aster wafting in a cloud of diamonds and violet scent. It was, “Hang on a minute, you're saying this person is better than me.”Henry: Now, before Margaret Thatcher became leader of the Tory Party, almost nobody thought that she was going anywhere, right up to say a week before the leadership election. People would have meetings about who the candidates were and they wouldn't even discuss her. Who are the people in politics today that no one's really sort of gathered actually have got this big potential?Helen Lewis: Yeah, I think that's really interesting isn't it, that essentially she goes into that leadership context and they sort of think, “Well, someone's gonna shake it up a bit, someone's gonna represent the right to the party.” And then they go round... And it was Airey Neave who was running her campaign, going around sort of saying, “Well, you know, vote for her, it'll give Ted a shock.” And then the first ballot result comes in and they go, “Oh God, it's given us a shock as well.” And then I think at that point, Willy Whitelaw piles in, doesn't he? But it's too late and the train's already moving. And the other one who's... It's Hugh Fraser is the other... And he runs very much from the sort patrician candidate background. I love that, that leadership election, it symbolizes what I like about politics, which is just that sometimes there is a moment, that is a hinge when a force that's been bubbling away suddenly pops up. And not to get too much into the great man or in this case, a great woman theory history, but someone makes a big decision that is either going to be the right call or the wrong call.And for Margaret Thatcher is almost insanely ambitious, and she could have ended up looking incredibly stupid, and because the life didn't take that fork in the road, we'll never look back on that. But there are many people who have made that gamble, and again, go back to failures point, have crashed. You have to have that kind of instinct in politics. Who's good now? I was just thinking this morning that Bridget Phillipson of Labor, who is now currently shadow education, I think has been underrated for a long time. Finally less so, given that she's made it to the Shadow Cabinet, who knows if she can make an impression there, but she is smart. So I'll give you an example, she was asked the inevitable question that all labor politicians are now asked, like, “What is a woman?” And she said, “The correct... “ This is Richard Madeley asked her this. She said, “What to my mind is the correct legal ounce that would also makes sense to normal human beings who don't follow politics all the time, which is, ‘It's an adult human female or anybody with a gender recognition certificate. And there are difficulties in how you might sometimes put that into practice, but those are the two categories of people.'”And it was like this moment, I was like, Why? Why has it taken you so long to work out an answer to this question that is both correct and explicable. And I think that is an underrated gift in politicians, is actually deciding what issues you're going to fudge around and which issues you actually have to come out and say what you think even if people disagree with it. It was one of Thatcher's great strengths, was that she made decisions and she stuck to them. I mean, obviously then you get to the poll tax and it becomes a problem. But I think there's... One of the problems I felt with the Ed Miliband era of Labor was that he didn't want to annoy anybody and ended up annoying everybody. Wes Streeting, I think is also... No, I won't say underrated, I will say he's now rated and clearly has got his eye on the leadership next.Bridget Phillipson has a much more marginal seat than you'd like to see from somebody who's going to be a leader. Wes is an interesting character. Grew up on free school meals, has been through cancer in the last couple of years, is gay, has a genuinely kind of... But is also on scene as being on the right to the party. So he's got lots of different identity factors and political factors that will make people very hard to know where to put him, I think, or how to brand him, I guess. But those are two of the ones who you make me think that there's some interesting stuff happening. On the Tory side, there are some people who are quietly competent. So Michael Gove, I think, whatever you think about his persona or anything like that, is the person they put in when they want stuff actually to happen. I think Nadhim Zahawi did very well as Vaccines Minister without anyone really noticing, which is probably not what you want when you're a minister, but it's probably what you want from the public.Henry: Why are so many women late bloomers? Well, obviously, the constraints of having a family or whatever.Helen Lewis: I think the answer is children, I think is the answer to that one.Henry: But there must be other reasons.Helen Lewis: I think... I mean, who knows? I may be straying into territory which is pseudo-science here, but I do also think that menopause is quite important. When you lose all your caring for others, nicely, softly, softly hormones and your hormone profile becomes much more male, I think that makes it easier to not care what people think about you, to some extent. As does the fact that you can no longer be beautiful and play that card. And I don't know, I think also... Again, this is... I don't know if this is supported by the evidence, I think there's more of... I think more of the men fall away. I don't know, I think if you're a guy who's found it very hard to form personal relationships, then maybe your 50s and 60s can be quite lonely, whereas I think that's often the time in which women kind of find a sort of a second wind. Does that make sense? This is all... I mean, none of this is... There's no evidential basis for this, this is just based on my sort of anecdotal reading of people that I'm thinking of.Henry: Camille Paglia once wrote, she put it in very strict terms, she said something like, when the menopause happens, the wife becomes this sort of tyrant and starts flourishing.Helen Lewis: Yeah. No, I'm very much looking forward to that, yeah. Oh yeah.Henry: And the husband becomes this kind of wet rag and his testosterone level drops and the whole power balance just flips. And you're sort of, you're saying that, but not in quite that... Not as quite an aggressive way as she's phrased it.Helen Lewis: Yeah, and it's not a universal truth.Henry: No, no, not at all.Helen Lewis: I just think for the people for whom that happens, that is quite an arresting thing that often gives them the liberation. I also do think there's a kind of mindset change. I don't have kids, but I know from women that I know whose kids have gone off to university, that if you have been the primary caregiver, there is suddenly a great, big hole in your life, and what do you fill it with? And actually, do you have to find a new focus and direction and purpose, because you don't want to be sort of turning up at their halls of residence going, “Hello, just thought I check in, see if you're alright.” And whereas for men, who've maintained a sort of career focus throughout, whilst also adding on a family, that's not such a kind of big realignment of their day and their life and what they feel the focus of their life is.Henry: I spoke to Tyler Cowen about this and he wondered if there's something about women become more acceptable in their looks. So you think about Angela Merkel and Margaret Thatcher as... I think you were sort of implying this, when a woman reaches middle age, the public or the people around them are less likely to judge them on whether they're good-looking, and so some of that sexism slightly falls away, because when you are a woman in your 20s or 30s, you're very susceptible to being looked at or rated or whatever, whereas Margaret Thatcher had a sort of, I don't know, a motherly quality that no one would... There was a kind of cult of finding her attractive and Alan Clark said disgusting things about her.Helen Lewis: Yeah, and also we've had a queen for 70 years, right? So we do have that sort of idea of what female power looks like, which is icy and so it's non-emotional, but yeah.Henry: But I've seen that in the office, that women in their 20s have a difficult time if they're good looking because there are a certain type of men...Helen Lewis: Well, people assume you're stupid as well.Henry: Well, and also it's just what men go to. They talk about you being that, whereas once a woman gets slightly past that, men don't automatically sort of go, “Oh, how would you rate her out of 10” or whatever? And that creates a space to see them as the person.Helen Lewis: And see them as actual human. I think that's a really interesting thesis. I also think that there's a... I think being a young woman is a particular kind of problem. So I think there's definitely a form of ageism against women, where it's silly old bat, right? Which I do think you get silly old duffer as well, but there is some extra level as well about women, it's like, “Why are you still talking? No one wants to hear from you? Your... “ This is a phrase they use in the internet now, “You're dusty, you and your dusty opinions.” But I think you get the contrary version of that as a young woman, whereas I think we find... The phrase Young Turk implies man, doesn't it?It's like, thrusting young guy, on his way up, super ambitious, he's the new generation, whereas I don't think you necessarily have that whole sort of coalition of positive stereotypes about young women. It's untested, learner, still needs to learn the ropes, that kind of... I'm eternally grateful to my boss in my 20s, Jason Cowley of the New Statesman, for making me deputy editor of the Statesman when I was 28, which I think was a pretty radical thing to do. When I don't think it would have necessarily felt so radical to make a 28-year-old guy.Although I say that, but then Ian Hislop became editor of Private Eye when he was 26, and there was like a revolution among the old guard. And he had to metaphorically execute a few of them outside the woodshed. So I do think that... I also think people begin to... There's... Now, this is really straying to some dangerous, choppy feminist waters. Competition between women can be very fierce, obviously. I write about this in the book in the terms of Smurfette Syndrome. The idea that there's only one place for a woman, and by God, I've got to have it. But I do think that there can be some jealousy that maybe recedes. And I think it's probably true for men and women. As you get older, people don't see you as a threat because they think, “Well, by the time I'm 40, maybe I'll have all the stuff you have.” But if you've got that stuff at 28, I think there's a real feeling from other people in the generation that those, the stars are peeling away, and there's a real resentment of them. So one of the things I do is I provide kind of counselling services to young journalists who've just suddenly had like a really big promotion or career lift or whatever it is. And I feel indebted to go and say to them, “By the way, this is amazing, but people will hate you because of it.”Henry: It's very striking to me that we've had a period of very young politicians being leaders, but they're men. And the women who've either competed with them or become leaders afterwards are in their 50s. And I do think there's something about what's an acceptable public woman.Helen Lewis: And the idea of authority, I think that's the thing. I think as you get older as a woman, it's easier to seem authoritative.Henry: Someone like Stella Creasy, I think, has had a much more difficult time just because she happens to be under a certain age.Helen Lewis: Yeah, I think that's interesting. And I think the fact that she's now got very young children at a relatively older age. I know that's... Sorry. Apologies to Stella, if you're listening. But it is comparatively old to have children after 40, still. That that will be interesting of how that complicates her next decade in politics.And I do think those super top jobs… There was a really brilliant piece of research which I put in the book about the sort of so-called demanding jobs, the kind of lawyers, the top lawyers, and I think journalists and politicians. Greedy jobs, they're called. And the fact is that they have become more demanding in terms of hours as women have entered the workforce. And now the thing has become fetishized as can you do the 14-hour days? And it becomes a soft way of excluding women with young kids.The problem, I think, will come with all of this when both men and women end up needing to look after elderly parents, as we're having more and more of that extension, those decades at the end of life when you're alive but maybe you're not as mobile as you were. Maybe you need more help from your family. And I think there is a lot of anger among certain types of women that they just feel like they're finally free from their caring responsibilities, and then they get landed with another one. But I know, I've been to some feminist conferences recently where... There's a famous saying which women are the only minority that get more radical with age, which I think is probably true. You can meet some groups of 50-something women, and they are fuming, really fuming. And they've now got the time and the sort of social capital with which to exercise that fuming-dom, as it were.Henry: Is Roy Jenkins overrated?Helen Lewis: [laughter] That's the most random question. He's not my favourite politician, mainly because I'm Team Castle for life, right? And I think she was treated very badly by the men in that Wilson cabinet, the first, the '66 to '70 one, of whom he was one, right? I think that, yeah. I think... Do you know what? I haven't got very strong opinions on him compared with my strong opinions on James Callaghan, who I am anti. And I know there are some Callaghan-stans out there. But I think the utterly cynical way in which he sucked up to the unions in order to get the leadership at the cost, ultimately, of then Margaret Thatcher in '79, out-strikes me as one of the most sort of cynical pieces of politicking.Henry: You are sailing very close to being a Thatcherite.Helen Lewis: I'm not a Thatcherite. I'm not.Henry: No, I know.Helen Lewis: But I can see... I think you... And I think Rachel Reeves has basically written about this, who's now Labour's Shadow Chancellor, that if Barbara Castle had succeeded with In Place of Strife on what were, now, to us, very mild measures, right? A conciliation pause where you have negotiations, strike ballots, no wildcat strikes. If she'd managed to push through some of those, then some of the excesses of the '70s would not have happened. Or at least, Labour would have been able to show that it had a grip of them. But you have a situation where the teachers were asking for something like 25% pay rise in the run up to the '79 election. And the Labour government just looked completely out of control. And so yeah, that's my Callaghan beef. What's your Roy Jenkins beef, then?Henry: I don't have beef. I can't remember why I wrote that question. I read about him in your book. I suppose I think that he did implement some good progressive measures, but that he was essentially a sort of patrician wannabe. And that his whole career in politics is much more middling and establishment, and his radicalism was... I don't know. Perhaps overrated, when we look back.Helen Lewis: Well, I will go away and read some more. I read quite a lot of the... The mad thing about the cabinet, particularly in that Wilson government, is that they were all obviously sitting there writing copious amounts of... To the extent that Barbara Castle would actually write literal notes in cabinet, save it for diary later on. But Tony Benn was writing notes. Crossman was writing notes. Jenkins essentially wrote lots of... A very full memoir. Harold Wilson wrote one of the most boring memoirs that the world has ever seen. The trade union leaders wrote memoirs. Jack Jones wrote a memoir. It was an astonishingly literate and writerly sort of set of people. And yet the cabinet was, in some respects, kind of utterly dysfunctional, but with Wilson still running a sort of... You know, sort of like who was kind of currently had been nice to me. And he went... And of course in his second term, he became incredibly paranoid.It was not a model of good government really. And again, Callaghan is one of the greatest political resurrections ever, right, when he completely screws up the Treasury and then uses Northern Ireland's Home Secretary in order to kind of make himself back into a respectful mainstream figure. But before we go and fight Roy Jenkins-stans, we should both go and find out what our beef is with him.Henry: I'm gonna say her name, well, Colquhoun?Helen Lewis: Colquhoun.Henry: Colquhoun. She said, “Labor would rather fight Powell than solve poverty.” Is that still true?Helen Lewis: What read it out there is a phrase that I think Maureen Colquhoun said after not “the rivers of blood” speech, but another Enoch Powell speech in the '70s, which got her in enormous trouble. Would you like to endorse this sentiment that got her called a racist? And it was used as a pretext for drumming her out of the Labor party. So what happened to Maureen after that is that she... Her local party tried to de-select her, it then went to an appeal at the NEC. She eventually ended up holding on to her candidacy and then she lost in '79 to a guy called Tony Marlow, who's one of the most... Talk about Thatcher, I mean... He was bristly, to the extent that his nickname was Tony von Marlow. But yeah, he has some terrible quote about Harriet Harman as well, which is something like, “These bra burners have got a chip on their shoulder,” or something. It was something terrible mixed metaphor involving how you couldn't wear a bra if you also had a chip on your shoulder. Anyway, I digress.Henry: I'm not trying to endorse her quote, but if you replace Powell with Boris.Helen Lewis: I think it's a really interesting quote about... It comes back to purity leftism, what we were talking about before, is actually, “Do you want the win or do you want the fight?” And there is, I think, more of a tendency on the left than the right, to want to be on the right side of history, to want to be pure, to want to be fighting, and that sort of sense that... The perpetual struggle is the bit that you want to be in, that's the bit that's exciting, rather than the win. I think one of the really interesting sounds to me is gay marriage. I was just reading this Jonathan Rauch piece this morning about the fact that... His argument being, that there was a coalition of kind of right-wingers and centrists and liberals in America who fought with the radical left, who wanted gay rights to be predicated on the idea of sort of smashing the nuclear family and everything like that, to say, “Let's make gay rights really boring, and let's talk a lot about how much we want to get married. And maybe we wanna adopt. Let's recruit all the people who happen to have been born gay, but are also Tories or Republicans.”And I think a similar thing happened to him here, where you have David Cameron saying, “I support gay marriage not in spite of being a conservative, but because I'm conservative.” And you frame it as essentially a very norm-y, boring thing. And I think that has been really interesting to watch in the sense of... I think that's why gender is now come much more to the fore because it's a sense that, “Well, if even Tories are okay with people being gay, it's not... Like what's left? How is that interesting anymore?” And so, I think the criticism that she was trying to make there is very true in the sense that sometimes Labor wants to look right more than it wants to win a halfway victory.Henry: What are some of the best or most underrated biographies of women?Helen Lewis: That's a really interesting question. I read a lot of royal biographies, so I very much like Leonie Frieda's biography of Catherine de' Medici, for example. There is also... You're gonna think this is terrible, Princess Michael of Kent wrote a joint biography of Catherine de Medici and Diane de Poitiers, the mistress of Henry II, which is called The Serpent and the Moon, which is a really... I think it's... Actually, it's not a bad biography, but I think it's quite interesting to write a biography of the wife and the mistress together.Henry: Yeah, I think that's a great idea.Helen Lewis: Because the story of them is obviously so intertwined and their power relationship obviously changes, right? Because Catherine is the dowdy wife who bears the 10 children, Diane is the kind of unbelievably gorgeous, older woman. But then of course, the king dies and it's like, “Oh, nice chateau you've got there. Shame, one of us is the dowager queen and one of us is now just some woman,” and makes her hand back her Chenonceau to her. So I enjoyed that very much. I'm trying to think what the best political women biographies are. Do you have a favourite Elizabeth I biography? I think there must be a really great one out there but I can't... I don't know which one actually is best.Henry: Well, I like the one by Elizabeth Jenkins, but it's now quite out of date and I don't know how true it is anymore. But it's, just as a piece of writing and a piece of advocacy for Elizabeth, it's an excellent book. And it sold, it was sort of a big best seller in 1956, which I find a very compelling argument for reading a book, but I appreciate that a lot of other people might not.Helen Lewis: No, that's not to everyone's taste. That's interesting. I like Antonia Fraser as a biographer. I don't know if you'‘e got a strong feelings, pro or anti. Her Mary Queen of Scots book is very good. Her Mari Antoinette book is very good. And I actually, I interviewed her once about how she felt about the Sofia Coppola film, which is basically like a two-and a half hour music video. She was totally relaxed, she was like, “It's a film, I wrote a book.”She didn't say it like that, she didn't go, “Film innit,” sucking on a roll-up, she said it in a very lofty, Antonia Fraser kind of way. But I think that's a good thing if you're an author, to kind of go, “What works in a biography is not what works in a film,” so...But yeah, I grew up reading those Jean Plaidy historical novels, so I guess I read a lot of biographies of Queens. I'm trying to think whether or not I read any biographies of modern women. I haven't read... I have on my shelf the, Red Comet, the Sylvia Plath biography. And I also, which is on my to-read pile, as is the biography of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas by Janet Malcom, which I one day, will treat myself to. Henry: What are the best or most underrated biographies by women?Helen Lewis: By women? Well, again, then we go back to...Henry: I mean, you've named some of them, maybe.Helen Lewis: The interesting thing is, I remember when I did Great Lives, they said... The Radio 4 program about history. That they said, the one thing that they have tried to encourage more of, is men nominating women. Because they found there was no problem with getting women to nominate men and men to nominate men, but they found there weren't that many men who picked women, which I think is interesting. I really wanted, when Difficult Women came out, I wanted a man to review it.Henry: Did that not happen?Helen Lewis: No, it didn't happen. And I think everybody would've... I think, from the point of view of your male reviewers, why would you review a book on feminism when you're gonna get loads of people going, “Ew, what are you doing?mansplaining feminism?” But it's an intellectual project, right? It's not a... It should be open to criticism by absolutely anyone, not on... You don't have to pass an identity test. It's an ideology and a school of history. And so I would... What's the best biography of woman written by a man, is kind of a question I'm interested in.Henry: Yes. That's very difficult to think of.Helen Lewis: And how many of them are there? Because it just strikes me that when I'm naming all my women, biographies of women, that they're all by women.Henry: Yes. It's difficult to think... It'‘ easy to think of biographies of men written by women.Helen Lewis: Right. Hermoine Lee's out there repping for Tom Stoppard biography recently. But yeah, people can send in answers on a postcard for that one.Henry: Should there be less credentialism in journalism?Helen Lewis: Yes. I started as a sub-editor on the Daily Mail. And I worked alongside lots of older guys who had come up through local papers at the time when the trade unions were so strong that you had to do two years on local paper before you got to Fleet Street. And therefore, I worked with quite a lot of people who had left school at either 16 or 18 and were better at subbing than people who'd... than recent university graduates. And so, the way that journalism has become first of all, a graduate profession and now a postgraduate profession, I don't think it's got any real relationship to the quality of journalism. There are a sort of set of skills that you need to learn, but a lot of them are more about things like critical thinking than they are about literature, if you see what I mean?That's the thing. That is what I find very interesting about journalism, is the interesting marriage of... You have to have the personal relationships, you have to be able to find people and make them want to be interviewed by you and get the best out of them. Then you have to be able to write it up in prose that other humans can understand. But then there is also a level of rigour underneath it that you have to have, in terms of your note-keeping and record-keeping and knowledge of the law and all that kind of stuff. But none of that maps onto any kind of degree course that you might be able to take. And so, I think that's... And the other huge problem, I think in journalism is that, everyone in the world wants to do it, or at least that's how it seems when you're advertising for an entry level position in journalism.When I was at the New Statesman, we used to recruit for editorial assistants and I once had 250 applications for a single post, which was paid a fine amount, you could live on it just about in London, but was not... It was a plum job in intellectual terms, but not in economic terms. And I think that's a real problem because I could have filled every position that we had, with only people who'd got Firsts from Oxford or whatever it might be. But it wouldn't have been the best selection of journalists.Henry: No. Quite the opposite.[laughter]Helen Lewis: Yes. I enjoy your anti-Oxford prejudice. [chuckle] But you know what I mean is that I... But the fact that you had to have at least a degree to even get through the door, is sort of wrong in some profound way. And actually, some of the places have been... I think Sky did a non-graduate traineeship for people who were school leavers. And I think that there are profound problems in lots of those creative arts, publishing is the same, academia is the same, where you could fill every job which is low paid, and in London, with middle-class people whose parents are willing to fund them through. And the credentialism just is a further problem in that it just knocks out bright people from perfectly normal economic backgrounds.Henry: Do you think as well, that in a way, the main criteria for a good journalist, whether they're a sub-editor, or writing leaders or whatever, is common sense? And that a good English degree is really no guarantee that you have common sense.[laughter]Helen Lewis: Yeah. I couldn't put my hand in my heart and say that everybody I know with an English degree demonstrates common sense. I think that is actually not a bad... The famous thing is about you need a rat-like cunning, don't you? Which I think is also pretty true. But yeah, you do need to come back to that kind of idea about heresy and you do need to have a sort of sniffometer, not to be... I think you need to be fundamentally cynical, but not to a point where it poisons you.The right amount of cynicism is probably the thing you need in journalism. Because my husband's a journalist and quite often, there'll be a story where we just go, “I don't believe that. I just don't believe that.”And it really troubles me that that's become harder and harder to say. So I wrote a piece a while ago, about TikTok and people who claim to have Tourette's on there and actually quite a lot of them might have something else, might have functional neurological disorder. But there are whole genres of that all across journalism, where people will talk very personally and very painfully about their personal experiences. And the other half of that is that, we are not... It's mean, to question that. But they're often making political claims on the basis of those experiences. And you therefore can't put them in a realm beyond scrutiny. And so it's interesting to me, having been a teenager in the '90s when journalism was incredibly cruel. I'm talking about the height of bad tabloid, going through people's bins, hate campaigns against people. And a lot of this “be kind” rhetoric is a response to that and a necessary correction, but I do think there are now, lots of situations in which journalists need to be a bit less kind. That's a terrible quote. [laughter] But do you know what I mean?Henry: I do know exactly what you mean.Helen Lewis: When you have to say, “I know you think you've got this illness, but you haven't.” That's tough.Henry: People need to be more difficult.Helen Lewis: That's always my marketing strategy, yes.Henry: I want to ask if you think that you are yourself a late bloomer? In the tone of voice that you write in, you very often... You write like an Atlantic journalist and there are these moments, I think, of real wit. I don't mean jokey. I mean, clever. And so, a line like, “Your vagina is not a democracy,” is very funny but it's also very...Helen Lewis: It's true.Henry: Sort of Alexander Pope-ish.[laughter]Helen Lewis: That's the best possible reference. Yes, I hope to write very mean epigrams about people, one day.Henry: Please do. But you can also be very jokey like when you said, I think in a footnote, that you don't watch porn because the sofas are so bad.Helen Lewis: True.Henry: Now, there is something in those moments of wit that I think suggest that you could, if you wanted to, go and do something other than what you've already done. Maybe like Charles Moore, you'd become a biographer, or maybe you'd become a novelist, or maybe you'll run a think tank, or maybe you'll set up a newspaper and only employ 16-year-old school leavers, or... I don't know. Is that how you think about yourself or am I...Helen Lewis: You are trying to tell me I need to just grow up.[laughter]Henry: Not at all.Helen Lewis: Stop clowning around like a sea lion for applause after throwing fish.Henry: My theory on Helen Lewis is, you've got all the accolades that someone could want from a journalistic career.Helen Lewis: Not true. I've only ever won one award for journalism and you'll love this, it was Mainstream Video Games Writer of the Year.Henry: Oh my god.Helen Lewis: That's it. From the Games Awards in 2013, which I only remember this because every so often my publisher will put award-winning journalist as a merit that I have. Not really gov, not if I'm honest. You're right though. I have one of the plum jobs in journalism which is I work three days a week at the Atlantic, and then I make radio documentaries on the side and write books, and that is a position which is enormously enviable. But I have also... So I've moved away from column writing, in the last couple of years — I used to write a regular op-ed column — because I found it a deeply unsatisfying form. And I think, when you do jokes, you begin to realize that you can actually just say stupid, easy clap lines and with sufficient confidence, and people will respond to them, and after a while, you begin to hate yourself for doing that.[laughter]Well, that's one of the reasons I again... Like getting off Twitter. You know what I mean? You see some of those accounts that just exists to do lazy little dunks about the people that are appointed, that are sort of designated hate subjects. So if someone gets designated as a hate subject, then you can say nasty things about them and then everybody will applaud you. And I fundamentally revolt from that and I don't like it.I think that as a journalist, you should always try and be at right angles to whatever the prevailing opinion is. And actually as I've got older, I value the sort of... The people I think of as contrarians who I think really believe it rather than the people who are doing it for effect. Someone like a Peter Hitchens. He's got a whole ideology that's very much not mine and a set of interesting opinions and he believes them, and he truly argues them, and although they... Whether or not they're popular or unpopular is of no interest to hi

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Accounting For College Costs, published by johnswentworth on April 1, 2022 on LessWrong. Why are costs of certain things, most notably education and healthcare, skyrocketing so quickly, with relatively little improvement in quality? A few years ago, SlateStarCodex and Marginal Revolution both had interesting pieces on this "cost disease" phenomenon. I think both of them were coming at it wrong. Cost disease is really about two questions: Costs in education, healthcare, etc keep rising faster than inflation, so where is all that extra money going? This is an accounting question. Why is so much money going there? This is an economics question. Both the SSC and the MR pieces were mostly speculation on the second question. I think that's premature; the first step should be to go look at where all the extra money is going. Don't try to draw a map of a city by sitting in an apartment with the curtains closed; go look at the world, in detail, and let that steer the theorizing. In this post, we'll dig into the accounting data for college costs, especially for 4-year private nonprofit colleges. The main theory we'll end up at, based on the accounting data, is that college costs are driven mainly by a large increase in diversity of courses available, which results in much lower student/faculty ratios, and correspondingly higher costs per student. Accounting Data For any particular college, if you had access to the books, you could simply look through all the expenditures, add it up, and see how expenditures changed over the years. I don't know of any college which puts its books on the internet for all to see going back to the ‘60's. But there is the National Center for Education Statistics, which compiles some high-level accounting data on all colleges in the US, and publishes an annual digest. Let's start at the beginning: what's the cost of college, by year? This is undergraduate tuition & required fees at 4-year colleges. Data separating private nonprofit/for-profit only goes back to 1999, because enrollment in for-profit colleges was negligible prior to the late ‘90's. Note that all costs in this post, both in the graphs and the discussion, are adjusted to 2013 dollars. From here on out we're going to focus only on private, nonprofit 4-year colleges from 1999 to 2013, because that's what the Digest of Education Statistics has data on. (Again, if anyone can find good data back to the ‘60's, please let me know!) We're going to follow the money on its journey. From tuition, comes revenue for colleges. Let's make sure the payments arrive safe and sound. Well that's informative! If you've been to a private 4-year nonprofit university lately, you probably noticed that most people don't actually pay the sticker cost. This data makes it pretty clear: actual expenditure on tuition is a lot lower than the sticker cost suggests. More to the point, nominal tuition grows much faster than actual tuition revenue. From 1999 to 2013, nominal tuition grew by 42.0% (about 3% per year), whereas tuition revenue grew by 23.7% (about 1.7% per year). So roughly half the supposed growth in private college cost comes just from the games colleges play with their sticker-price tuition. If we look at what students actually pay - what colleges actually receive in tuition revenue - growth is lower by a factor of two. But we're not done yet! Remember, these numbers are all inflation-adjusted, so the remaining 1.7% annual growth is still 1.7% on top of inflation. So, we still want to know why college costs are growing faster than inflation. Before we move on to expenses, a little more on revenue. Tuition revenue is less than half the revenue of private nonprofit colleges. Most of the rest comes from a combination of federal/state grants, private gifts, and investments. Key facts: Grants and gifts cover t...

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Accounting For College Costs, published by johnswentworth on April 1, 2022 on LessWrong. Why are costs of certain things, most notably education and healthcare, skyrocketing so quickly, with relatively little improvement in quality? A few years ago, SlateStarCodex and Marginal Revolution both had interesting pieces on this "cost disease" phenomenon. I think both of them were coming at it wrong. Cost disease is really about two questions: Costs in education, healthcare, etc keep rising faster than inflation, so where is all that extra money going? This is an accounting question. Why is so much money going there? This is an economics question. Both the SSC and the MR pieces were mostly speculation on the second question. I think that's premature; the first step should be to go look at where all the extra money is going. Don't try to draw a map of a city by sitting in an apartment with the curtains closed; go look at the world, in detail, and let that steer the theorizing. In this post, we'll dig into the accounting data for college costs, especially for 4-year private nonprofit colleges. The main theory we'll end up at, based on the accounting data, is that college costs are driven mainly by a large increase in diversity of courses available, which results in much lower student/faculty ratios, and correspondingly higher costs per student. Accounting Data For any particular college, if you had access to the books, you could simply look through all the expenditures, add it up, and see how expenditures changed over the years. I don't know of any college which puts its books on the internet for all to see going back to the ‘60's. But there is the National Center for Education Statistics, which compiles some high-level accounting data on all colleges in the US, and publishes an annual digest. Let's start at the beginning: what's the cost of college, by year? This is undergraduate tuition & required fees at 4-year colleges. Data separating private nonprofit/for-profit only goes back to 1999, because enrollment in for-profit colleges was negligible prior to the late ‘90's. Note that all costs in this post, both in the graphs and the discussion, are adjusted to 2013 dollars. From here on out we're going to focus only on private, nonprofit 4-year colleges from 1999 to 2013, because that's what the Digest of Education Statistics has data on. (Again, if anyone can find good data back to the ‘60's, please let me know!) We're going to follow the money on its journey. From tuition, comes revenue for colleges. Let's make sure the payments arrive safe and sound. Well that's informative! If you've been to a private 4-year nonprofit university lately, you probably noticed that most people don't actually pay the sticker cost. This data makes it pretty clear: actual expenditure on tuition is a lot lower than the sticker cost suggests. More to the point, nominal tuition grows much faster than actual tuition revenue. From 1999 to 2013, nominal tuition grew by 42.0% (about 3% per year), whereas tuition revenue grew by 23.7% (about 1.7% per year). So roughly half the supposed growth in private college cost comes just from the games colleges play with their sticker-price tuition. If we look at what students actually pay - what colleges actually receive in tuition revenue - growth is lower by a factor of two. But we're not done yet! Remember, these numbers are all inflation-adjusted, so the remaining 1.7% annual growth is still 1.7% on top of inflation. So, we still want to know why college costs are growing faster than inflation. Before we move on to expenses, a little more on revenue. Tuition revenue is less than half the revenue of private nonprofit colleges. Most of the rest comes from a combination of federal/state grants, private gifts, and investments. Key facts: Grants and gifts cover t...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Get In The Van, published by ThomasWoodside on January 21, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Thanks to Jessica McCurdy, Buck Shlegeris, Sofya Lebedeva, Matt Burtell, Julia Wise, Aris Richardson, and Eui Young Kim for feedback on this post. People commonly ask me how I got involved with EA. My answer is somewhat unusual. I got in a van. It was fall 2019, relatively early in my first year of undergrad at Yale. I was subscribed to the Yale EA newsletter (as I was for dozens of extracurriculars), but I wasn't involved in the group. One day something on the newsletter piqued my interest: “People with backgrounds from several effective altruism organizations, such as MIRI and Open Phil, are coming to Yale!” They promised to offer “career advice” among other things. What was this “MIRI”? What was “Open Phil”? Who were “Buck Shlegeris” and “Asya Bergal”? I had no idea. But I did know that I wanted to make an impact with my career, and EA was associated with that in my head. I did know I was interested in AI, and this “MIRI” thing seemed related. And I did know I wanted a summer internship. For whatever reason, I ended up talking to Buck, who apparently worked for MIRI. Here is how I described my conversation to a friend, memorialized in my text messages (do not take this as an accurate portrayal of Buck's beliefs): This was weird. Here was a guy telling me about how we were going to be turned into paperclips if we weren't careful. That he worked for a whole organization devoted to preventing us from being turned into paperclips (this is not an accurate portrayal of MIRI's goals). But then, they said they had to leave. They were sorry to have been so late, but they had to go on the next part of their road trip. “Does anyone want to come with us to New York City?” Two students volunteered themselves pretty quickly. They were both graduate students and already somewhat involved with Yale EA. I didn't know either of them. In fairness, I had no idea who any of these people were. I thought for a few minutes, and I decided: I'm going to get in their van. And so I did. At one point in the van, I asked Buck: “so, where are we going?” He laughed and seemed to think it was very funny that I had gotten in a van without even knowing where it was going. “A Slate Star Codex meetup.” I was puzzled at the strange name. “What's that?” We arrived as the sun was setting. The meetup was in a park, and there were many people milling around. Apparently, “Scott Alexander himself” was at the meetup. I think somebody pointed him out to me. It's not like I remember though, because I had no idea who Scott Alexander was. I could describe in more detail the conversations I had at the meetup, but that isn't the point of this piece. It is important to note, though, that I didn't think that everyone there was great, and I even came away with slightly negative impressions of some of them. I never became a regular Slate Star Codex reader. On the train back, I talked to the two Yale students who came with me. One of them later became a very good friend of mine. I remember finding him just interesting, and wanting to spend more time talking to him. He was eager to talk to me, and share his knowledge and thoughts, and he made me feel included. If he hadn't gone, I'm not sure the trip would have translated into me getting more involved with Yale EA, because I wouldn't have felt as connected to anyone in it. But he clearly made an effort to get to know me, and that made all the difference in my involvement with EA. All because I got in the van. Why did I get in the van? You may be wondering why I got in a van with strangers to go to an event, when I didn't even know what the event was. If any one of the reasons below hadn't been true, I wouldn't have gotten in the van: I had attended one Yale EA event before, ...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Takeaways from one year of lockdown, published by mingyuan on the LessWrong. As of today, I've been in full-on, hardcore lockdown for an entire year. I have a lot of feelings – both about the personal social impacts of lockdown and about society being broken – that I won't go into in this public space. What I want to figure out in this post is what rationality-relevant lessons I can draw from what happened in my life this past year. (Meta: This post is not well-written and is mostly bullet points, because the first few versions I wrote were unusable but I still wanted to publish it today.) Observations Some facts about my lockdown: I have spent 99.9% of the year within 1 mile of my house Up until last month I had spent the entire year within 10 miles of my house Between February 29th and June 15th of 2020, I did not set foot outside of my front gate I have not gotten COVID, nor has anyone in my bubble I have incurred an average of 0 microCOVIDs per week The absolute riskiest thing I've done this whole time cost ~20 microCOVIDs I can only remember talking to a friend not-in-my-bubble, in person, twice Some observations about other people with similar levels of caution: Almost no one I know has caught COVID, even though Zvi estimates that ~25% of Americans have had it (the official confirmed rate is 10%). I know of only one person who caught it while taking serious precautions, and I know a few hundred people about as well as I know this person. (see also) I was recently tracking down a reference in the Sequences and found that the author was so afraid of COVID that he failed to seek medical care for appendicitis and died of sepsis. On negotiations: A blanket heuristic of "absolutely no interactions outside of the household" makes decisions simple but is very costly in other ways microCOVID spreadsheets are useful but fairly high-effort I went on a date once. The COVID negotiations with my house were so stressful that I had a migraine for a week afterwards. On hopelessness: I spent a fair amount of time trying to get vaccinated early, and failed. I now appear to have a belief that I will never succeed at getting vaccinated; and further that other people can succeed but I never can. Related: My system 1 believes that lockdown will last forever. Also that vaccines aren't real – not that they don't work, but that they're a lovely dream, like unicorns or God, that ultimately turns out to be a lie. A vaccine cannot cause me to leave lockdown because lockdown is an eternal, all-consuming metaphysical state. I would have liked to be dating this year, but the first date and the surrounding ~week of house discussion was so stressful that I gave up on dates entirely after that. I notice that I feel the lack of friendships, but wasn't motivated enough about any particular friendship to put in the effort to make it work despite the situation. By contrast, some people I know did do this and have benefited a lot. My house had ~3-hour meetings ~3 times a week at the very beginning of the pandemic, where people did math on the board and talked about their feelings and we tried to figure out what to do. In retrospect, this burned me out so much that I gave up on trying to figure anything out and defaulted to an absolutely-zero-risk strategy, because at least that was simple. The fact that SlateStarCodex went down at the same time everything else in life went to shit destroyed my soul. Oops I have started talking about feelings and will now stop. Taking all these observations together, it's clear to me that my social group has been insanely overcautious, to our great detriment. I think this has been obvious for quite a while, but I didn't and still don't know how to act on that information. It seems like extreme caution made sense at first, when we didn't know much. And by the time we k...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Rationalist Community Hub in Moscow: 3 Years Retrospective, published by berekuk on the LessWrong. Short summary: Moscow rationalist community is organized around a local venue called Kocherga. Kocherga hosts 40–50 rationality-adjacent events per month, teaches a few dozen people per year in CFAR-style applied rationality workshops, and has ambitious plans for further growth. We on the verge of becoming profitable, but we need some funding to stay afloat. We're launching a Patreon page today. This post is a long overdue report on the state of LessWrong Russia community and specifically on the Kocherga community space in Moscow. This post is also a call for donations. Russian LessWrong community has existed for many years now, but there wasn't much info on lesswrong.com about how we're doing. The last general report by Yuu was posted in March 2013. Alexander230 made a few posts about Fallacymania which is one product, but it's far from the only interesting thing about LW Russia. In the following text I'm going to cover: History of LW Russia from 2013 to 2015 History of Kocherga anticafe, the rationalist community space we started in 2015 The list of Kocherga's successes and failures, as well as some tentative comparisons between Kocherga and Berkeley REACH. Our current financial situation, which is the main reason I'm taking the time to do this write-up now. Current state of Russian and Moscow community Here's a short description of LW Russia and LW Moscow in its current state. Our Russian Slack chat has 1500+ registered members, 150 weekly active members and 50 weekly posting members. LessWrong.ru has a few hundred posts from Sequences and other sources (e.g. from SlateStarCodex) translated by volunteers. LessWrong.ru gets 800 daily unique visitors. There's also a wiki with >100 articles and a VK.com page with 13000 followers. There are regular meetups in Saint-Petersburg (hard to measure, they had a few pivots in their approach in the last few years) and in Yekaterinburg. Our Moscow community hub, Kocherga, which is the main topic of this post, hosts 40–50 public events per month (45 events in June). The attendance varies from 3-5 visitors for smaller events to 20–30 visitors for larger ones. We have ties with a local skeptic society, critical thinking crowd, pop-science communicators, a local systems management school and a local transhumanist community. In the following text I'm going to talk mostly about LW Moscow and Kocherga, because that's what I'm involved with and that's what occupies most of my time. I've been working on Kocherga full-time since 2015, funding it by myself, and I'd love to be able to keep doing it indefinitely. Some more specific stats about Kocherga: We get 1000 non-unique visits per month. The lower bound on the number of unique visitors per month is 150, but that doesn't include "anonymous" visitors who don't have a club card and so can't be tracked across different days; also, it doesn't say anything about the number of rationality-adjacent visitors (some people use Kocherga space for their own goals - coworking, etc.) The total number of people who participated in our paid applied rationality courses and workshops over the last 3 years is 150+, not including a few corporate trainings and summer camps. Our monthly revenue is $6000–$9000, depending on the time of the year and on whether we skipped a workshop that month. Our monthly expenses is around $8500. (Half of it is rent, I'll provide a detailed financial breakdown below.) We have maaaybe 2–3 months of cash runway left at this point :( Almost all our events are either directly connected to rationality (LW meetups, rationality dojos, nonviolent communication practice, Sequences discussion) or at least rationality-aligned (topics vary from pop-sci to board games). LW Russia before 201...

welcome to the nonlinear library, where we use text-to-speech software to convert the best writing from the rationalist and ea communities into audio. this is: Concern, and hope, published by willbradshaw on the effective altruism forum. Write a Review I am worried. The last month or so has been very emotional for a lot of people in the community, culminating in the Slate Star Codex controversy of the past two weeks. On one side, we've had multiple posts talking about the risks of an incipient new Cultural Revolution; on the other, we've had someone accuse a widely-admired writer associated with the movement of abetting some pretty abhorrent worldviews. At least one prominent member of an EA org I know, someone I deeply respect, deleted their Forum account this week. I expect there are more I don't know about. Both groups feel like they and their sacred values are under attack. Both groups are increasingly commenting anonymously or from throwaway accounts, and seeing their comments mass-downvoted and attacked. It's hard not to believe we're at risk of moving in a much more unpleasant direction. I'm not going to pretend I don't have my own sympathies here. I've definitely been feeling a lot more tribal than usual lately, and it's impaired my judgement at a couple of points. But I think it's important to remember that we are all EAs here. We're here because we endorse, in one form or another, radical goodwill towards the rest of the world. I have never been among a group of people at once more dedicated to the wellbeing of others and the pursuit of the true. I admire you all so much. Many people here feel their membership in EA is a natural outgrowth of their other beliefs. Those other beliefs can differ quite a lot from person to person. But I implore all of you to see the common good in each other. There are many people in EA who hold beliefs and political opinions significantly different from mine. But with very few exceptions they have proven among the most open, honest and charitable proponents of those views I've ever encountered. We can have the conversations we need to have to get through this. The Forum is probably not the place to have those conversations. Too many people are too worried about their words being used against them to speak too openly under their own names – an indictment of our broader culture if ever there was one. But you can reach out to each other! Schedule calls! Now is a bad time to not be able to have in-person conferences, but it's not impossible to make up the difference if we try. (And on the Forum, please try to be charitable, even if your conversation partner is falling short of the standards you would set yourself. Strive to raise the tone of the conversation, not just to match it. I have sometimes failed in this recently.) I'll start. If I say something on the Forum you disagree with, and you don't think it's productive to discuss it in comments, please feel free to reach out to me by private message, or schedule a call with me here. Our epistemic norms are precious. So are our norms of compassion, justice, and universal goodwill. We need both to achieve the lofty goals we've set ourselves, and we need each other. thanks for listening. to help us out with the nonlinear library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org.

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: EA residencies as an outreach activity , published by Buck on the AI Alignment Forum. [This was partially inspired by some ideas of Claire Zabel's. Thanks to Jessica McCurdy, Neel Nanda, Kuhan Jeyapragasan, Rebecca Baron, Joshua Monrad, Claire Zabel, and the people who came on my Slate Star Codex roadtrip for helpful comments.] A few months ago, some EAs and I went on a trip to the East Coast to go to a bunch of Slate Star Codex meetups. I'm going to quote that entire post here (with a couple edits): Our goals are: - to meet promising people at the SSC meetups and move them into the EA recruiting pipeline - to spend some time with promising new EAs, eg those at student groups, in the hope that spending a few hours of focused one-on-one time with one of us will help get them more into EA. Like, I think 80K finds people who are excited about AI safety stuff but aren't very knowledgeable about it yet; I think that those people can maybe get a lot out of a few hours' conversation with a few people who have worked professionally on this stuff. - to visit EAs who are "in holding" doing things like PhD or EtG tech jobs, with possible good outcomes being that they'll be fired up wrt EA and more likely to do really impactful EA stuff on a timescale of like a year, or that their improved (Bay Area/professional EA) connections make it easier for them to spot good opportunities or move into doing more impactful work. - (less primary) to talk to hardcore EAs and swap arguments and get to know each other better Here's why I think it's worth us talking to various promising new EAs and enthusiastic EAs who haven't worked in the EA scene full time: - There are a lot of accumulated arguments about EA topics which I think it's really helpful to think about but which are hard to access when you only know EAs on the internet, because those arguments haven't been written up clearly or at all, or because their writeups are hard to find and rely on background knowledge that you don't know how to acquire. - A lot of the time, EAs present versions of arguments that are strong enough to convince you to tentatively think that it's worth engaging seriously with the possibility that the conclusion might be true, but which have a bunch of holes in them that require substantial thinking to fill. Sometimes EAs (eg me) make the mistake of conflating these two levels of strength of argument, and act as if people should be persuaded by the initial sketch. One way that I notice when I'm making this mistake is by getting in arguments with people who've thought about stuff more than me. I hope that talking to more knowledgeable EAs might help some of the EAs we hang out spot holes in their understanding that might help improve their understanding and their epistemics. Here is a reason that I think that having SF Bay Area EAs talk to rationalists in these cities at SSC meetups is plausibly worthwhile: When smart people are skeptical of some of my weird beliefs, eg that AI x-risk is really important, or that they should consider working on EA stuff, or that long term we should consider radically restructuring the world to make it better for animals, a lot of the time their disagreement stems from something true about the world that the arguments they've seen didn't address. This is hard to avoid because if you try to write an argument that addresses all the potential concerns, it will be incredibly long. But this makes me think that it's often really high impact for people who have thought a lot about these arguments to talk to people who have heard of them but felt very unpersuaded. My predictions mostly matched my impressions of what happened. But I think you might be able to get many of these benefits more efficiently by doing something more like a residency, where you spend a relatively long time in eac...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: EA Survey 2019 Series: How EAs Get Involved in EA, published by David_Moss on the Effective Altruism Forum. Summary Personal Contacts (14%), LessWrong (9.6%) and 80,000 Hours (9.6%) are still the main ways most people have heard of EA over time. In recent years (2018-2019), 80,000 Hours (17%) is the single largest source for people first hearing about EA, followed by Personal Contacts (15%). 80,000 Hours (47.8%), GiveWell (42.7%) and Personal Contact (34.8%) had the highest percentages of EAs saying they were important for getting them involved in EA. We find few differences in the proportion of highly engaged EAs first hearing of EA from different sources, except for significantly higher proportions of engaged EAs first hearing of EA from a personal contact or a local group. Additionally, for the first time, we provide data about which specific books, podcasts, TED Talks etc. people most commonly heard about EA from. Peter Singer was the most commonly mentioned factor, appearing in 17.6% of these comments. We find some differences in which things get men and women involved in EA: personal contacts and 80,000 Hours seem to recruit more women. We also find that significantly more non-white individuals first heard about EA from 80,000 Hours, with few differences across any of the other sources. Where do people first hear about EA? Where have most people first heard of EA overall? 2137 (85%) respondents answered the “Where did you first hear about Effective Altruism?” question.[1] ‘Personal Contact' is quite far ahead of all other options (14%), followed by LessWrong and 80,000 Hours (each 9.6%). There are now substantially fewer responses in the broad ‘Other' category (8.6%) than in 2018, but is still the fourth largest category. Due to changes to the categories, this year's results are not directly comparable to the previous years. However, we can see that the results are quite similar. Personal Contact was the most selected option in both 2018 and 2019 (notwithstanding the ‘Other' category in 2018), with 16% and 14% respectively. LessWrong (12% vs 9.6%) and 80,000 Hours (8% vs 9.6%) were the next most popular categories. Local EA Group (5% vs 5.2%) and Slate Star Codex (5% vs 6.8%) follow next, with Book (6%) and Podcast (5.6%), TED Talks (4.6%) and Article/Blog (4.5%) also receiving similar numbers of responses. New additions, Future Perfect and One For the World, received

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: EA Survey 2019 Series: Community Information , published by David_Moss on the LessWrong. Summary More respondents' level of interest in EA increased over the last year (43%) than decreased (18%). The most common reasons for interest increasing were local EA groups (14%), the respondent being new to EA (12%), the local EA community more broadly (10%), or career change (10%). The most common reasons for interest decreasing were people being too busy (18%), a perceived mismatch between the person's cause preferences with that of the overall EA community (12%), or finding diminishing returns from involvement in EA (10%). The most commonly cited barriers to further involvement in EA were lack of job opportunities that were a good fit (29%), no close friends in EA (28%), and it being too hard to get an EA job (23%). The main ways people wanted to become more involved in EA were an EA-aligned career (58%), donating more (55%), socialising with EAs (44%), and participating in more local EA events (43%). The factors most often cited as important for retaining people in EA were personal contacts (43%), local EA groups (27%), and reading SlateStarCodex (21%). Among those who knew of someone who had been involved in EA but then became disengaged (27%), the most commonly cited reasons were lack of interest in EA (31%), bad experiences with other EAs (30%), lack of opportunities to implement effective altruism in their lives (28%), and lack of friends or community interested in EA (25%). We found significant gender differences and differences between low/high engagement EAs in what they selected as barriers to further involvement in EA and as important for their retention in EA, however we found few signs of differences between white/non-white EAs. Introduction The 2019 EA Survey included a number of new questions concerning experiences of the EA community, many of which were requested by the Centre for Effective Altruism. Questions about these topics seem particularly likely to raise concerns about the representativeness of the survey sample, since individuals who have had particularly negative experiences of the EA community are plausibly less likely to take the EA Survey. Nevertheless, we think that this data provides important qualitative and quantitative information to the community. Changes in level of interest in EA Respondents were asked “In the last year, how would you say that your level of interest in effective altruism has changed?”. 1934 respondents answered this question. alt_text While the modal response by a large margin was “Stayed the same”, on the whole, we can see that more respondents' level of interest increased (43%) than decreased (18%) over the last year. Naturally, as mentioned above, the fact that people whose interest has decreased may be less likely to take the survey is potentially a significant factor here. We examine predictors of change in interest in a later section of this post. Changes in level of interest in EA: Qualitative Data Respondents were also asked “If your level of interest in effective altruism has changed, please explain why (if possible).” 968 respondents answered this question (out of 1196 who indicated that their level of interest changed).[1] alt_text Among those who reported that their level of interest decreased, the most common reason given, by a wide margin, was that they had become increasingly busy (17.7%). This was followed by references to “cause preferences” (11.7%). These often alluded to EA being uninteresting if you didn't share mainstream EA preferences and/or to frustration that EA had come to be dominated by a certain cause area. 9.7% were classified as mentioning “diminishing returns.” Such comments often suggested that respondents thought that they had already internalised or acted on the core EA lessons and ther...

On this lovely ep, we have a chat with journalist and podcaster Shaun Raviv (@ShaunRaviv) about the history of vaccines, Slate Star Codex, living abroad, sci-fi books, our favorite Simpsons lines, and much more! Listen to Shaun's podcast Long Shot wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us on Twitter at @leightonnight and on Instagram at @leighton_night. You can find Brian on Twitter/Instagram at @bwecht, and Leighton at @graylish (Twitter)/@buttchamps (Instagram).

David and Tamler wind their way through the long-requested “Meditations on Moloch” by Scott Alexander, a comprehensive account of the coordination problems (personified by Allan Ginsberg's demon-entity Moloch) that lead to human misery and values tossed out the window. Does Alexander's rationalist conception of human nature ignore the work of VBW favorites like Joe Henrich and Robert Frank? Is he a little too friendly to the neo-social Darwinism view of some guy named Nick Land? And oh no, why does he have to go transhumanist at the end?! Plus, we talk about the unique comic vision of Norm Macdonald and why we loved him.

America is either a plural republic or it dies. Right now, the judiciary is keeping pluralism shielded from attacks from both the political left and right. David French, one of our most thoughtful conservative public intellectuals, describes his own journey from partisan to a man without a tribe; how fighting in real war changed his view of the so-called culture war at home; the central importance of the Bill of Rights; the remarkable strength of religious liberty protections in our nation; why white Evangelicals flocked to Donald Trump ("white protestants have lost power and gained liberty and haven't liked the exchange”, he says); how the judges, especially on the Supreme Court became "the only adults in the room"; the pros and cons of more federalism in public policy; and how the overturning of Roe v. Wade could de-escalate the culture wars. And much more.  A mini-rant from me This conversation really made me realize how much liberal pluralists like me have come to rely on the courts now, with politicians on both sides proposing or even passing laws that are anti-pluralist and unconstitutional - and probably knowing that they are when they do it. Laws become signals of whose side you're on, rather than of actual policy intent. The dangerous point we've got to is of an illiberal, performative politics held at bay only by the judiciary, which is holding the line and maintaining our liberal republic, much to the frustration, depending on the day, of the culture warriors on both sides but to the enormous relief and eternal gratitude of all liberals. The judges are keeping the Republic safe, for now. But we can't ask the courts to do this job forever, they can't remain in DF's phrase, the only grown up in the room. Also there is growing pressure to appoint more politically reliable judges in the future, rather than the constitution-loving, liberty-protecting, precedent-respecting bunch we have at the moment. We need a grown-up politics rather than the pantomime we have been subject to in recent years.  David French David French is a leading political thinker and commentator focusing on the intersection of law, culture, and religion. He is currently a senior editor of the Dispatch and a columnist at Time. Formerly, he was a senior writer for National Review and served as the President for the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. French holds a law degree from Harvard Law School and has worked on numerous religious-rights issues. Additionally, he served as senior counsel for American Center for Law and Justice and the Alliance Defending Freedom. In 2007, French was deployed to Iraq and served as a squadron judge advocate.  More French-ism Read his new and prominent book “Divided We Fall: America's Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation” Subscribe to his newsletter, The French Press, and read his work on The Dispatch or his column at Time. Be sure to check out his piece “Decency Is No Barrier to Justice or the Common Good” which sparked the debate between French and Ahmari. Watch French debate Eric Metaxes on the question “Should Christians vote for Trump?”  Also mentioned I referenced Margaret Thatcher's infamous question, “Is he one of us?”  We discussed Sohrab Ahmari's piece, “Against David Frenchism”  In 2016, Donald Trump promised to restore power to Christianity, saying that it was “under tremendous siege.”  And in 2020, Trump claimed that if Biden became president “There will be no oil. There will be no god. There will be no guns.”  Last month, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in favor of religious liberty in the Fulton v. City of Philadelphia case  Recently, Governor Ron DeSantis signed a law to fine social media companies that permanently bar political candidates. A few years ago, Jonah Goldberg characterized Congress as a “parliament of pundits”  We mentioned Scott Alexander who ran the blog Slate Star Codex until 2020 In 1992, Ruth Bader Ginsburg delivered the Madison Lecture at NYU School of Law. On the topic of Roe v Wade, she said that “a less encompassing Roe, I believe . . . might have served to reduce rather than to fuel controversy.” (p. 1199)  The Dialogues Team Creator: Richard Reeves Research: Ashleigh Maciolek Artwork: George Vaughan Thomas Tech Support: Cameron Hauver-Reeves Music: "Remember" by Bencoolen (thanks for the permission, guys!)

We discuss Scott Alexander's 2018 post comparing "mistake theorists" and "conflict theorists" in order to try to understand what contributes to polarization (like those surrounding the question of capitalism). Is this typology useful? Maybe we need to add an axis? What about Shane Claiborne? The conversation proceeds to cover William Blake, Walter Wink, some more Adam Smith, Noam Chomsky, and more. The episode culminates with a sweet 2x2 matrix that takes Scott Alexander's binary and propels it into a 3rd dimension!! Show Notes: "Mistake vs Conflict" blog post on Slate Star Codex: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/24/conflict-vs-mistake/ Nathan Robinson podcast on Vox: https://www.vox.com/podcasts/2020/1/7/21055676/nathan-robinson-ezra-klein-socialism-bernie-sanders Syndicate.Network symposium about Eugene McCarraher's "The Enchantments of Mammon": https://syndicate.network/symposia/theology/the-enchantments-of-mammon/ "Hayek vs Keynes" Rap Battle: https://youtu.be/d0nERTFo-Sk Music: Theme Music: "What u Thinkin? (Instrumental)" by Wataboi on Pixabay Intermission Music: "Uncut Gems" by Mezhdunami on Pixabay and "Journey" by Tim Moor on Pixabay

The post Cade Metz on his controversial Slate Star Codex article, new book “Genius Makers,” dangers of algorithmic moderation, a16z vs. legacy media & more appeared first on This Week In Startups.

The post Cade Metz on his controversial Slate Star Codex article, new book “Genius Makers,” dangers of algorithmic moderation, a16z vs. legacy media & more appeared first on This Week In Startups.

Another special episode this time, as we welcome to the show David Gerard, author of acclaimed takedown of cryptocurrency Attack of the 50ft Blockchain, and Elizabeth Sandifer, author of acclaimed takedown of neo-reaction Neoreaction a Basilisk, to discuss Scott Alexander (or is it Siskind?) and his blog Slate Star Codex, with digressions into Less Wrong, 'rationalism', and why David is responsible for Grimes hooking up with Elon Musk. Content Warnings apply, as ever. Also, we once again we have audio that doesn't quite meet our recent standards, though its perfectly listenable. Podcast Notes: Please consider donating to help us make the show and stay independent.  Patrons get exclusive access to one full extra episode a month. Daniel's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/danielharper Jack's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4196618 IDSG Twitter: https://twitter.com/idsgpod Daniel's Twitter: @danieleharper Jack's Twitter: @_Jack_Graham_ IDSG on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/i-dont-speak-german/id1449848509?ls=1 Episode Notes: Elizabeth's... Twitter: https://twitter.com/ElSandifer Site: http://www.eruditorumpress.com/blog/ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/elizabethsandifer David's... Twitter: https://twitter.com/davidgerard Site: https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/davidgerard/overview Elizabeth's recent article on Scott Alexander/Siskind: http://www.eruditorumpress.com/blog/the-beigeness-or-how-to-kill-people-with-bad-writing-the-scott-alexander-method/ RationalWiki on Scott Alexander: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Scott_Alexander

John Lamberton is a guitarist/composer based in Los Angeles who focuses on intensely complicated rhythm and generative processes. He's also the host of BRIDGE podcast, a coffee wizard, and a card-carrying Bayesian transhumanist. We talk about using algorithms to compose death metal, footwork music, suffering-focused ethics, SlateStarCodex, in-group signaling, NoFap, and quite a bit more.

Ivan's a regular face in the Bridges of Meaning Open Studio. It's lovely to get to know him and hear his story.  Notes:  Father grew up in Quebec Lived in Malaysia, came back to Montreal, Father was a welder, mother a typist I never learned to share, a lot of time for introspection Watched a lot of cartoons Baptized RC went to a Presbyterian Sunday School The Goddess of the Image vs the God of the Logos Chuck Jones, Bugs Bunny, Looney Tunes, Chuck Jones book,  Flip books Xenos paradox 2010 became a Christian via youtube I would like to belong to this God, prayer Very experiential.  Went to an illustration school Only Yesterday Dag Hammershold Markings Volunteered at a Prison,  Slate Star Codex, Scott Alexander Animation, no safe avenue, more and more niche Doug Tenaple: Earthworm Jim There is so much hustling in selling yourself, make cool stories, bring together the illusion of life The Artist's dilemma Click here to meetup with other channel viewers for conversation https://discord.gg/jdVk8XU Paul Vander Klay clips channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCX0jIcadtoxELSwehCh5QTg If you want to schedule a one-on-one conversation check here. https://paulvanderklay.me/2019/08/06/converzations-with-pvk/ There is a video version of this podcast on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/paulvanderklay To listen to this on ITunes https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/paul-vanderklays-podcast/id1394314333  If you need the RSS feed for your podcast player https://paulvanderklay.podbean.com/feed/  All Amazon links here are part of the Amazon Affiliate Program. Amazon pays me a small commission at no additional cost to you if you buy through one of the product links here. This is is one (free to you) way to support my videos.  To support this channel/podcast on Paypal: https://paypal.me/paulvanderklay To support this channel/podcast with Bitcoin (BTC): 37TSN79RXewX8Js7CDMDRzvgMrFftutbPo  To support this channel/podcast with Bitcoin Cash (BCH) qr3amdmj3n2u83eqefsdft9vatnj9na0dqlzhnx80h  To support this channel/podcast with Ethereum (ETH): 0xd3F649C3403a4789466c246F32430036DADf6c62 Blockchain backup on Lbry https://lbry.tv/@paulvanderklay Powerpoints of Monologue videos are available for Patrons at https://www.patreon.com/paulvanderklay Paul's Church Content at Living Stones Channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCh7bdktIALZ9Nq41oVCvW-A To support Paul's work by supporting his church give here. https://tithe.ly/give?c=2160640  

Cade Metz is a reporter at The New York Times where he frequently covers emerging areas of artificial intelligence, from self-driving cars to virtual reality and much more. Prior to that, he was also a senior staff writer at the WIRED magazine covering stories about big tech companies, bitcoins, and AI. He has a strong background in reporting and is also coming out with his own book called “Genius Makers” on March 16th.Slate Star Codex, NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/13/technology/slate-star-codex-rationalists.htmlBook Genius Makers: https://cademetzauthor.com/order/About the Host:Jay is a Ph.D. student at Arizona State University, doing research on building Interpretable AI models for Medical Diagnosis.Jay Shah: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shahjay22/Also check-out these talks on all available podcast platforms: https://jayshah.buzzsprout.comYou can reach out to https://www.public.asu.edu/~jgshah1/ for any queries.Stay tuned for upcoming webinars!***Disclaimer: The information contained in this video represents the views and opinions of the speaker and does not necessarily represent the views or opinions of any institution. It does not constitute an endorsement by any Institution or its affiliates of such video content.***

This week we discuss what videogames the crew has been playing. Shocking absolutely no one Rob found a new survival game, Valheim and almost missed the podcast. Next, Drew commits to studying for the MCAT again, while Rob and Mike discuss finishing their last semester's of college. Is school even practical? (6:00). The crew stumbled across a Harvard working paper that postulates COVID transmission is caused by structural racism (19:27). Has Carl Hart PhD. tainted his research by admitting his is a heroine drug user? (29:28). Ted Cruz went to Cancun and now everyone knows the forecast in Texas (1:00:40). Mike poses every college's favorite philosophy question - can we engineer ourselves out of every problem? (YES!) (1:16:40). Finally, what is the Slate Star Codex? and this day in history. 

At the weekend, the New York Times published a long awaited article about one of the world's most celebrated blogs, Slate Star Codex, a central node of the influential rationalist community. Called 'Silicon Valley's Safe Space', it was widely criticised as an inaccurate hit piece: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/13/te...​ This is an interview with Tom Chivers, the writer of 'The Rationalist's Guide to the Galaxy', on the backstory to the controversy. What does this say about the ongoing crisis of journalism, and tensions with the tech sector. The New Yorker wrote a more well-received piece on SSC here: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/ann...

This week we have a guest! Tom Chivers, the author of The Rationalist's Guide to the Galaxy. It's a really fantastic look at how a small AI-obsessed internet community has grown out into both a modern techno-fascist movement AND an extremely dense blog that everyone in Silicon Valley is obsessed with. Why are we talking about this? Because of a very controversial New York Times piece that dropped this week. It's all very confusing, but we promise it's interesting! Also, this week, Ryan and Luke talk about the Joker for a little while. 

How much preference falsification is occurring in society? What's the difference between conflict theory and mistake theory? Why is postmodernism useful to understand?Michael Vassar was the President of the Singularity Institute from 2009 to 2012. Subsequently, he has worked in business consulting, especially in association with cutting edge science, although these days he primarily invests his own assets. You can contact him at michael.vassar@gmail.com.Further reading:My IRB Nightmare — the Slate Star Codex codex account of trying to do a study in a hospital that we discuss in the episodeGPT-3 — the A.I. language model discussed in the episode that was released by OpenAIPreference falsificationConflict theory vs. Mistake theory and people's views on societyThe "postmodern" analysis / article that Michael brought up[Read more]

How much preference falsification is occurring in society? What's the difference between conflict theory and mistake theory? Why is postmodernism useful to understand?Michael Vassar was the President of the Singularity Institute from 2009 to 2012. Subsequently, he has worked in business consulting, especially in association with cutting edge science, although these days he primarily invests his own assets. You can contact him at michael.vassar@gmail.com.Further reading:My IRB Nightmare — the Slate Star Codex codex account of trying to do a study in a hospital that we discuss in the episodeGPT-3 — the A.I. language model discussed in the episode that was released by OpenAIPreference falsificationConflict theory vs. Mistake theory and people's views on societyThe "postmodern" analysis / article that Michael brought up

In this episode, the guys start off by touching on the recently imposed COVID lockdown in New Zealand, Valentine's day, and the legalisation of drugs for recreational and utilitarian use. Next, Damon discusses the recent New York Times hit piece on the blog, Slate Star Codex, which sought to undermine media content counter to mainstream narratives by making all-too-familiar accusations that the content is conducive to terrorism, the oppression of minority groups, and white supremacy. After this, the guys talk about how alternate forms of communication have been used in both the past and present in order to enforce uniformity amongst a diversity of unique cultural groups and centralise power. SUPPORT US Paypal- https://paypal.me/modernguilt?locale.x=en_AU Patreon- https://www.patreon.com/modernguilt LINKS Harold Innis's communications theories- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Innis%27s_communications_theories Valentine's Day in India- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valentine%27s_Day_in_India Bridgewater Hit- https://www.bridgewater.com/rob-copeland-of-the-wall-street-journal-again-intentionally-distorts-facts-about-bridgewater NYT employees' free speech- https://nypost.com/2021/02/13/new-york-times-employees-feel-they-cant-speak-freely-survey/ Slate Star Codex on NYT- https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/statement-on-new-york-times-article NYT Slate Star Codex Hit- https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/13/technology/slate-star-codex-rationalists.html REVIEW US Apple Podcasts- https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/modern-guilt/id1515857043 FOLLOW US IG- https://www.instagram.com/modernguiltpod/ MG on Twitter- https://twitter.com/guilt_modern Hayden on Twitter- https://twitter.com/WhyWorry_OhWait

Support us on Patreon!   This week, we discussed Trump's continued lack of concession, whether student loan forgiveness is a good idea, and the racial wealth gap. Also, finally, some unambiguous good news! News discussed:   Trump still hasn't conceded, but is planning a “grand finale” Trump pardoned Michael Flynn Flynn is calling for martial law and re-vote News rules to fight shell companies  Joe Biden wants congress to forgive $10K+ in student loans to everyone  Iran's top nuclear scientist assassinated (probably by Israel) Matt Yglesias on the racial wealth gap   Happy News!   The usual scolds (including Fauci) are hand wringing about UK approval of the Pfizer vaccine  Neurons in mice “rejuvinated” to reverse blindness Lab grown meat approved for sale in the UK Deepmind solves protein folding problem China turned on its “artificial sun” fusion reactor Slate Star Codex is coming back in January! Got something to say? Come chat with us on the Bayesian Conspiracy Discord or email us at themindkillerpodcast@gmail.com. Say something smart and we'll mention you on the next show!   Follow us! RSS: http://feeds.feedburner.com/themindkiller Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-mind-killer/id1507508029 Google: https://play.google.com/music/listen#/ps/Iqs7r7t6cdxw465zdulvwikhekm Pocket Casts: https://pca.st/vvcmifu6  Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/the-mind-killer  Intro/outro music: On Sale by Golden Duck Orchestra This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit mindkiller.substack.com/subscribe

Follow us! RSS: http://feeds.feedburner.com/themindkiller Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-mind-killer/id1507508029 Google: https://play.google.com/music/listen#/ps/Iqs7r7t6cdxw465zdulvwikhekm Pocket Casts: https://pca.st/vvcmifu6  Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/the-mind-killer    News discussed:   Justin Amash is introducing a bill to end qualified immunity Samuel Sinyangwe's Twitter thread proposing police reforms  The NAACP's demands The 8 Can't Wait Campaign Congress has announced hearings on legislation to end or curtail the program giving excess military equipment to police Tyler Cowen article on police unions The Cato Institute explaining police courtesy cards Slatestarcodex on race and justice  Radley Balko on police violence and race  Zvi Mowshowitz on quarantine restrictions going forward Trevor Bedford Twitter thread on the effects of protest on quarantine and followup Asymptomatic spreading is “very rare” says WHO Phil Magness' Facebook post regarding Sweden   Happy News!   UK welcomes Hong Kongers fleeing tyranny   Got something to say? Come chat with us on the Bayesian Conspiracy Discord or email us at themindkillerpodcast@gmail.com. Say something smart and we'll mention you on the next show!   Intro/outro music: On Sale by Golden Duck Orchestra This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit mindkiller.substack.com/subscribe