User:Havanakatanoisi/sandbox

Draft of "Content" section for Slate Star Codex article.

Content
The New Yorker notes that the sheer volume of content that Alexander has written on Slate Star Codex makes the corpus difficult to summarize, with an ebook collating his posts running to around nine thousand pages. Many of Slate Star Codex posts are detailed reviews of books (typically on a subject in social sciences or medicine) or extensive reviews of scientific literature on a specific topic. Blog post “Face masks: much more than you wanted to know” that appeared in March of 2020 analyzed available medical literature and came to the conclusion that, despite the early guidance by the CDC to the contrary, masks were likely an effective protection measure against covid-19 for the general public. The blog emphasizes unbiased empirical analysis and each post is prefaced with “epistemic status”, by which the author rates his own confidence in the opinions to follow.

Effective Altruism
Alexander expressed strong support for the Effective altruism movement and the pledge to give 10% of one’s income to charity. Slate Star Codex, along with LessWrong, played an important role in spreading information about the movement and attracting new members. The blog contains discussion of moral questions and dilemmas relevant to Effective Altruism, such as moral offsets, ethical treatment of animals and tradeoffs of pursuing systemic change for charities.

Artificial Intelligence
Alexander regularly wrote about advances in Artificial Intelligence and emphasized the importance of AI safety research. In a long essay "Meditations on Moloch" he considered game-theoretic scenarios of cooperation failure like the prisoner's dilemma paradox and the tragedy of the commons that underline many of humanity's problems and argued that AI risks should be considered in this context.

Ascending economy: https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/05/28/book-review-age-of-em/, https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/05/30/ascended-economy/,

An automated economy could purposelessly exist even without humans, like the Ascending Economy described by (Alexander 2016). Such a scenario could be an example of bad distributed (and non-agential) superintelligence created by market forces, which does not need humans for its existence. Such a superintelligence could gradually push humans out of existence. 

Toxoplasma of rage
In the blog post "The Toxoplasma of Rage" Alexander discussed how controversies spread in media and social networks. According to Alexander, memes that generate a lot of disagreement spread further, in part because they present an opportunity to members of different groups to send a strong signal of commitment to their cause. For example, the blog post argues that PETA with its controversial campaigns is better known than other animal rights organizations like Vegan Outreach because of this dynamic. Alexander suggests that activists face a dilemma: messages that will reach greater audience are also the ones that are more likely to generate backlash.

A blog post "Toxoplasma of rage" analyzed how controversial and divisive memes spread in media and social networks. In a short story "Sort by controversial" Alexander elaborated on the same theme. There he introduced a term "Shiri's scissor" to describe a statement that has great destructive power, because it generates wildly divergent interpretations that fuel conflict and tear people apart. The term has been used to describe controversial topics widely discussed in social media.

Scissor statements: https://www.amazon.ca/Ways-Knowing-Cities-Laura-Kurgan/dp/1941332587 https://www.arch.columbia.edu/books/reader/483-ways-of-knowing-cities

More on Sort by controversial: Mockingbird https://mbird.com/2020/08/running-with-scissors-on-polarization-and-gods-love-for-sinners/

https://fourcommunications.com/what-i-learned-2/

Anti-Reactionary FAQ
The 2013 post "The Anti-Reactionary FAQ" repudiates the work and worldview of the neoreactionary movement, countering in particular the work of Curtis Yarvin. This worldview as of 2013 made claims about natural racial hierarchies and desired the restoration of feudalism. Out of a belief in the superiority of debate over outright bans, Alexander allowed neoreactionary individuals to continue commenting on posts and in "culture war" threads, as well as engaged through extended dialogues such as the thirty-thousand word FAQ. Alexander's essays on neoreaction have been highlighted by Slate and Vox.

Neuroscience, psychiatry and psychology
On UBI: https://mcguirefinancial.ca/downloads/05-lmr-may-2018.pdf (Lara Murphy report; good source?)

The control group is out of control:

Discussion of Friston's free energy and perception control theory. 

Growth mindset 

Mental illness Debate with Bryan Caplan on mental illness reference to econlib. org (doesn't work for some reason?)

genetics of depression, reference to Scott's "pointed review"  Reference to pointed review: "For example, there are around 450 papers built on the now disproved link between an unusualversion of the serotonin transporter gene 5-HTTLPR and depression" ,  More discussion in Behavioralscientist.org

Quote from the last paper on Google Scholar: "It isn't just experimental psychology that has these problems – studies attempting to link psychological traits and disorders to genetic and/or neurobiological variables are, if anything, subject to greater challenges. A striking example comes from a meta-analysis of links between the serotonin transporter gene, 5-HTTPLR, and depression. This postulated association has attracted huge research interest over the past 20 years, and the meta-analysis included 450 studies. Contrary to expectation, it concluded that there was no evidence of association. In a blogpost summarising findings, Alexander (2019) wrote: ".. what bothers me isn’t just that people said 5-HTTLPR mattered and it didn’t. It’s that we built whole imaginary edifices, whole castles in the air on top of this idea of 5-HTTLPR mattering. We 'figured out' how 5-HTTLPR exerted its effects, what parts of the brain it was active in, what sorts of things it interacted with, how its effects were enhanced or suppressed by the effects of other imaginary depression genes. This isn’t just an explorer coming back from the Orient and claiming there are unicorns there. It’s the explorer describing the life cycle of unicorns, what unicorns eat, all the different subspecies of unicorn, which cuts of unicorn meat are tastiest, and a blow-by-blow account of a wrestling match between unicorns and Bigfoot." "

More references: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=17137994374796305565&as_sdt=2005&sciodt=0,5&hl=en

Free speech, in favor of niceness
https://psyarxiv.com/ytzvq/ Eftedal, Nikolai H., and Lotte Thomsen. “Motivated Moral Judgments About Freedom of Speech Are Constrained by a Need to Appear Consistent.” PsyArXiv, 8 June 2020. Web.

My IRB nightmare.
Indeed, by setting aside ethics as a separate issue and submitting it to an ‘administrative logic’ (procedural, formalistic approach), scholarly research has fallen prey to a form of ethics creep, a process whereby the regulatory system expands and intensifies at the expense of genuine ethical reflection (Haggerty 2004). Scott (2017) 

Statistics
We are not the first to consider the possibility that some estimates may be biased by respondent mischief. Science blogger, Scott Alexander, of the popular blog Slate Star Codex, made a similar argument about “actively malicious” respondents, offering the example of those who replied “Martian” when asked their nationality.12 He sums it up by advising “never attribute to stupidity what can be adequately explained by malice. . . sometimes it’s not some abstruse subtle bias. . . Sometimes people might just be actively working to corrupt your data.”