The self-reported SAT scores vary from "plausible" to "didn't read the question correctly" to "clearly just trolling". I would put even less stock in self-reported IQ.
We looked into this more closely on a previous survey. People gave details about exactly which test they took and so on. People who took very well-known official tests had about the same IQ as everyone else on the survey. My guess is this is a tendency for people to get their IQs measured in childhood and childhood IQs to be normed weird in the gifted population such that they seem very high compared to adult IQs, but I haven't actually studied this topic.
I do also think probably the "real" ACX average IQ if we sat everyone down and forced them to do best practices IQ tests would be somewhere between 120 and 130. This is around the average Ivy League IQ, and my impression is that ACX commenters are about as smart as Ivy Leaguers (while being much less motivated and generally competent). It's also a bit above the average programmer IQ and my impression is that the average ACX commenter is a bit smarter than the average programmer.
I can proudly declare that I have an Official Certificate (with a lovely Greek psi and everything!) from the Brain Testing Institute attesting that they administered (online) an IQ test to me and my result was an Intelligence Quotient of 93.
Which is a result I think is probably accurate, since the test was based on a cut-down version of the Cattell Culture Fair Intelligence Test, and I am atrocious at pattern-recognition, pattern-matching, spatial manipulation and mathematics in general.
That means I am a normie! (First time I've ever been normal in anything) 😁 So the next time someone mentions "IQ 90 normies", they're talking about me!
Wow, those spacial and pattern scores must have godawful to pull the average down to 90, given that you probably did very well on tests of verbal abilities. Just so you know, you probably qualify as someone with a thing called non-verbal learning disability. There's lots of stuff written about it -- you might find it interesting. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure I have some funky wiring too and I don't give a damn what the name for it is. You may feel the same way.
Off topic, but I like the idea of "funky wiring". "Neurodiversity" is a little off from exactly how I want to describe myself. "Funky wiring" or "processing differences" is probably the best way to go about that. Thanks for the new term to help express subtle, complex things!
I think, based on nothing more than cursory reading, that I might have dyscalculia, because reading the symptoms and so forth sounds like a great fit. And to this day I still have problems with "which is left and which is right?".
So if intelligence is based on mathematical ability, I am indeed very dumb. Words? Words are easy. Sums hard.
Ahem. Looking up "Nonverbal Learning Disorder" and seeing the following:
"Provide one-on-one assistance for fine motor tasks such as folding or cutting with scissors"
I may or may not have recently cut myself when using scissors. Clearly I still need a full-time assistant for fine motor tasks 🤣
I can sympathize! As a child, I took one of those multi-spectrum IQ tests and scored a 92 on visual-spatial intelligence, even though everything else was in the 120s-130s range (my highest score was a 136 in verbal comprehension and the overall average was 122). Judging by your comments here, I suspect you'd score quite high on verbal intelligence too; the problem with single-category intelligence tests is that they generally fail to account for people who are very gifted in some areas but mediocre or subpar in others.
> I do also think probably the "real" ACX average IQ if we sat everyone down and forced them to do best practices IQ tests would be somewhere between 120 and 130. This is around the average Ivy League IQ
Source? Average Harvard SAT score is 1520 (according to this site[1], idk where they get their info but it's consistent with other sources I've seen in the past), which corresponds to an IQ of 146.[2] I'm sure the average across all Ivies is a lower but I'd be surprised if it was less than 130.
> It's also a bit above the average programmer IQ and my impression is that the average ACX commenter is a bit smarter than the average programmer.
I'm less confident about this but I think the average programmer at a FANG or Silicon Valley startup is much smarter than the average programmer in general, probably on the order of 1 SD. (I'm just guessing based on the kinds of salaries they earn and my personal experience.) And I think the average ACX reader is on the order of the average FANG programmer.
We really need to pick some online test that looks halfway decent, get as many of us as possible to do it, and see what the scores say. No, it won't be an official proper IQ test, but if the results come out roughly in line with what people are claiming, we'll know one way or the other.
When I teach my intelligence course, I use a few questions from Raven's Progressive Matrices. If you do the last three questions or so, you're distinguishing the high end (130 and up). It's notable that it's only a small number of questions at this point, and so testing error (and test taker motivation, and your Bayesian priors over patterns) plays a big role.
It's very hard to study "high IQ" for this reason! Most of the stylized facts we have about intelligence comes from results in the middle range (80 to 120).
I kind of like that idea. But let's test for somethings in addition to IQ. One measure I like is ideational fluency. You give somebody 5 mins. to come up with as many uses as they can for something like a brick. (By the way, people with a bipolar first degree relative who are not bipolar themselves score higher on this. Pretty interesting, and probably one reason why bipolar genes stick around in the population. )
I'm dubious. In the real world coming up with a bigger number of ideas isn't super useful, since most people can already do it to a degree greater than is necessary. Just look at how good people are at coming up with random conspiracy stories about how JFK was killed, or why the economy slowed/sped up, or what the solution to healthcare or education cost inflation might be.
Or just ask people how they could lose weight, get fit, be happier at their job or in their marriages -- hardly a soul will shrug and say "boy I dunno," -- they will all usually have theories and ideas, often several, often complex[1].
I think the trick to solving problems is more closely related to rapidly discarding unworkeable ideas and zeroing in on those that have a better chance of working. Really smart people can zero in on the optimal and functional solution faster, and cut out a huge amount of running down dead ends. I would guess a good test of that kind of ability would be making Fermi estimates.
-----------
[1] And usually wrong and/or ludicrous, too. But you have to be smarter to realize this, that is, "smart" I think is more about knowing quickly which ideas are ridiculous and which are not.
Didn’t the SAT stop being comparable to an IQ test at some point? I think I remember reading that you can’t use SAT scores after a certain date to qualify for Mensa (but the GMAT, you still can).
The SAT says it measures "developed ability," i.e. brain power plus mastery of various skill domains. Anyone who hasn't gone to school or done the equivalent of schooling at home will not get a high score, even if they have a high IQ. You have to understand basic math up thru I think simple algebra and geometry, and you have to have read enough to have vocabulary that includes moderately fancy words ("ostensible," etc.).
The article you cite says various studies have found SAT scores/IQ correlations of between 0.5 and 0.9. While 0.9 certainly does count as extremely good correlation, 0.5 does not -- it's moderate. I'm pretty sure IQ scores correlate better with each other than they do with SAT scores. One study of the correlation between IQ at age 11 and at 77 found a correlations in the .70's -- pretty impressive. It's here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289615000203
Since Harvard explicitly selects for SAT scores (and gets to be choosy), but does not explicitly select for IQ, you would expect the IQ-SAT relationship to be less strong for Harvard attendees than the general public.
The range of SAT & IQ scores at highly selective universities is much lower that the range for the population that takes the SAT. When the range in data is smaller, you always get lower correlations. For instance, last time I looked height was correlated with various measures of professional success for males. But if you looked only at males 6'0" to 6'4" you'd find a lower correlation, because there will be less variance to work with.
You state it like a dismissal but it is important thing to notice, though, both for details of statistical argument made and its practical relevance.
There isn't any fundamental statistical reason why range 6'0'' to 6'4'' should not have enough variance "to work with". It is all well possible to generate a fake simulated score which is 100% linearly correlated with the height in 4'' range and get computer spit out perfect correlations. The reason why it does not happen in the real life data matters. (Are the measurements truncated, low resolution, or is it something to do with noise in X/Y/both? And is it noise in the measurement or variance in the underlying thing measured?)
At least in my case, the only formal IQ test I've ever taken was as a young child, and I got a sky-high result. I think the result is of dubious utility, but as long as you keep asking for it, I will keep supplying it.
This is what is going on with me. I only ever took an "official" IQ test at ~14, and I think at that age you still get an age adjustment.
Also I was absolutely a fucking genius at 14 in a way I am not at all now. So I got an incredibly high score. I am positive I would score much lower today, both due to the lack of age adjustment, and because I am 41 and my mind has deteriorated noticeably in terms of raw horsepower.
And motivation! When I look at IQ tests today, all I can think is "God who cares". By necessity, an IQ test strips out all cultural context and ambiguity — but that's what's most interesting to think about.
I've taken several informal IQ tests (but left this question blank because none of them qualify). To note, though, the one I took aged around 11 scored 146; every one I've tried as an adult has come out in the mid to low 120s.
"ACX commenters are about as smart as Ivy Leaguers (while being much less motivated and generally competent)" Wait, you think ACXers are much less motivated and generally competent than Ivy Leaguers? What makes you think so -- high numbers on the diagnosed and self-dianosed mental illness questions?
Also, my impression, based solely on reading comments here, is that overall this is the smartest large group I have ever conversed with, and I know lots of Ivy Leaguers. In fact I am one. I think mt feeling that ACX is very smart is partly a response to factors other than good old high SAT smarts -- main one is sort of a general, dark-tending , mental uncoventionality factor that allows people to walk down certain speculative paths others don't.
This seems about right. SAT score ranges (with some exceptions) seem to match schools in the top-20 USNWR.
There are two ways to explain the inconsistency between reported IQ and reported SAT scores:
1. people like to think of themselves as high-IQ, and IQ tests are generally taken earlier in life, so it's easier to (truthfully) misremember in the preferred direction — turning a 137 into a 147, etc. SAT scores are a focus of obsession for college admissions, and most people can be expected to remember them exactly.
2. the early IQ test scores are being remembered correctly. ACX readers are preferentially kids streamed into gifted programs early in life, or generally understood by self, parents, and peers to be high promise. But, later SAT scores do not line up — either because the IQ test has noise, or because they blew the SAT. Given the importance of SAT scores to college admissions, this means that ACX readers find themselves in later life in intellectual environments that they feel (rightly or wrongly) are beneath them. ACX provides a new environment for them to thrive and feel (and be) smart.
I dunno, I imagine it's more accurate than you think. I probably have a pretty good IQ, but I've never taken the official test, so I left it blank. I think "people who get an official IQ test" is sort of self-selected for people who are curious and think they will do really well, right? And I would expect this blog to select for a disproportionately high number of such people.
>I think "people who get an official IQ test" is sort of self-selected for people who are curious and think they will do really well, right?
There are other reasons, like very-concerned-with-academics parents, or diagnosing things (obviously mental retardation, but also e.g. Asperger's - the latter is why I had a test).
I agree. Many, many kids of upper middle class &/or concerned-with-academics parents get psych testing, often for problems that are not very severe and that have lots of plausible explanations besides a "wiring problem" in the kid -- things like not being attentive in class, being lonely, having trouble sleeping.
The cynical explanation I've seen for that is that having an Official Diagnosis means the parents can then ask for accommodations for the kid, and things like "more time to take tests" means bumping up grades even a little, and every little helps when you're maximising getting your kid (eventually) into a Good University. Plus, the accommodations carry over when they do go off to college, so that is also an edge.
I don't know if it's true, but if parents go to expense and trouble to make sure they can live in a good school district, why not game the system when you know it can be gamed and can afford to do so? Getting little Tarquin or Sophonisba a diagnosis so they get a legal prescription for stimulants to help them hyperfocus on study plus accommodations in test-taking is what you do before pre-natal gene editing to bump their potential IQ up to 150 is available.
It really does happen, and it's worse than you think. The kids that get the official diagnosis don't just get accommodations on school tests, they get them on the SAT. The standard accommodation is 50% more time than other people get. That gives them a huge advantage on the SAT. Even people who do extremely well on the SAT do not finish with a whole lot of time left to spare -- you have to go fast to finish.
I don't think most of the parents taking their kids for testing have accommodations in mind, though. I think a lot of what drives the upper middle class to get their kids tested is that they expected to get a kid who was well-adapted to moving smoothly along the steps to being a well-paid professional. So if their kid isn't high-achieving and well-behaved in school they view that as evidence of a disorder, rather than just a matter of temperament (or a precocious ability to recognize that a lot of what happens in school is stoopit and boring as shit).
The most common reasons to take a formal IQ test are to diagnose learning/intellectual disabilities and to qualify for gifted programs, so the real-world unadjusted results are bimodal-ish, with a flattish middle area disproportionately populated with "weird" scores (high performance/low verbal or vice versa).
The reading level of ACX will filter out most of the low bump and a good number of the low-verbal middle, so you've basically got the high bump plus some high-verbal-low-performance middles. That group is further self-selected for the people who know their scores and are willing to share them, so...probably not surprising that they skew very high. They seem mostly in line with the self-reported SAT scores.
People could just be lying, but I'm not seeing a clear pattern of unrealistically-impressive on the rest of the survey. Of course, we could just all care a lot more about seeming smart than we do about seeming successful or sane. Actually...that sounds plausible.
Maybe ask for photos of SAT/ACT score reports for a future version of the survey?
I think a lot of the people who ever did proper official IQ tests did them when they were children and those scores tend to be a lot higher. Doing a proper official test when you're an adult possibly drops your score down but I don't know how many people do one when they're adults.
Other places, some of us have never done any kind of IQ test because it's just not how schools/society in general is set up when it comes to testing kids.
I didn't report my IQ test results, but I had two when I was elementary age and took one when I was in college because I was in a psychometrics class where we were testing and scoring each other with all kinds of tests of varying legitimacy. The former isn't terribly unusual, though that already is a highly selected subgroup. The latter is quite unusual.
Doesn't the "new multiple choice questions" thing ruin that entry for statistical purposes? Is there a way to identify responses before/after the date they were added?
I'm too lazy to do anything with the data myself, I mean, just curious!
Yes. In my own analysis I plan to adjust for that (ie if I added it exactly halfway through, assume that it should get twice as many answers as it did and everything should be adjusted down proportionally), but it definitely ruins it for everyone else who didn't know that, which is why I flagged it here.
Possibly there are some systematic differences between people who took the survey early and those who took the survey later, which would complicate things. Then again, perhaps not.
Do you have a reason to assume that the new answers would draw equally from all the old answers/ Can you reveal which options were added at the halfway point?
Thank you for sharing this! We might use as one of the example data sets for course I teach.
Really struck by the racial breakdown here — 87% white. This is a very different breakdown from (e.g.) a standard tech school, where White and Asian-American are usually at similar ratios.
Would be fun to compare (where possible) some of these statistics to the GSA. I think the GSA provides enough information to produce a sample that matches the ACX gender/race/age demographics.
Would be interesting to see if this is an age effect that tracks the changing composition of the tech world; e.g., if you restrict to 20-25, does the racial breakdown look more "tech school" in both race and gender.
Update: I couldn't help but check. Restricting to 21 to 25, the breakdown is
White (non-Hispanic): 80.5%
Asian (East Asian): 5.5%
Asian (Indian subcontinent): 5.2%
Hispanic: 3.2%
Other: 3.1%
Middle Eastern: 1.5%
Black: 0.9%
and by gender,
M (cisgender): 79.2%
F (cisgender): 10.4%
Other: 5.5%
F (transgender m -> f): 3.5%
M (transgender f -> m): 0.7%
So very much breaking my initial intuition that ACX is drawing uniformly from the tech stack.
You do see a shift to much higher trans representation. The F cis/F trans ratio is 3, i.e., roughly one in four women in this age range are trans, compared to one in 11 in the full sample.
Yeah, given the ACX readership's concentration in tech employment, propensity to have advanced degrees, and high standardized test scores, Asians are way underrepresented.
I'm pretty interested in seeing a survey from eg Matt Yglesias to see if this is a blogging phenomenon or an ACX phenomenon. I know Richard Hanania did a survey but he's right-wing and I want to rule out there being any effect from right-wingness.
Noah Smith would be also interesting...what I've noticed is that e.g., Tyler Cowen's blog is heavily dominated by right-wingers in the comment section, despite him not being nearly as right-wing (same for Hanania, even before his "turn" to the other side...).
Have you seen him turn on his own side lately? I think he may be making a move to the left, probably on account of having a kid and wanting to secure a safe income stream.
Is it well-known / generally believed that being lefty is a safer income stream? I would have expected the opposite from someone in Richard's position (ie popular Substacker).
Also, I think Richard has endorsed the (hilarious) theory that only right-wingers are safe from AI taking their jobs, since GPT-3 is programmed to refuse to write offensive (~ right-wing) things.
I’m not particularly surprised. Niche online political or politics- adjacent spaces tend to be very white and male (most political subreddits for instance, to a greater extent than Reddit in general).
I am not surprised nor unsurprised but as someone who ticked this box let me say that I was scrupulous. I have enjoyed experiences with both sexes but in 1993 I hooked up with an opposite sex partner and that has been it. And I would say most and possibly all of my gay friends had some hetero experiences in early life.
Yeah my scrupulosity led me to bump myself up to bi on the basis of a one brief but delightful homosexual fling and a few early passionate crushes on members of my own sex. Questionnaires are fatiguing because you have to parse so many edge cases of this kind.
I think most people would consider both of you bisexual, no? Like the concept doesn't imply equal attraction to members of both sexes, just some attraction to each sex.
Being truly bi always seemed sort of special and magical to me, and I feel like I don't deserve the label, since clearly I'm mostly what Dan Savage calls "a breeder." But yeah, technically I'm bi.
Wonder what the male-female crosstabs are on that. I vaguely remember the last large group of tech people I knew an awful lot of the women were bi but few of the men. That was 20 years ago though.
The thing that used to keep me from experimenting in that direction was AIDS. The thing that now does is the distaste for it among the much larger straight female population.
EDIT: All right, did the work. Of the 730 cisgender female respondents, 189 were bi. Of the 128 transgender female respondents, 77 were bi. Of the 5843 cisgender male respondents, 389 were bi. Of the 21 transgender male respondents, 12 were bi. Of the 174 'other' respondents, 83 were bi.
So it is being driven by the non-cisgender-male minority of the respondents; cisgender men are only about 7% bi.
I think if you're a man a lot of women don't want to date a bi man, so if you're bi you either have to pick straight or gay. Unsurprisingly (social stigma, number of partners) most will pick straight unless they are Kinsey 5's.
Sexuality results for men are extremely stable across long timescales; estimates of the (cis) male "homosexual" population are usually between 5% and 10%, and ACX here seems to more or less reflect the norm. "True" bisexuality in men is relatively unusual, with men showing a pretty clear bimodal distribution in physiological sexual response to different forms of pornography (lots of Kinsey 1s, some 5s, far fewer 3s).
The combination of rare base-rates for male bisexuality, plus a woman's fear that a man is only pretending to be interested in women for social acceptance, is likely one of the things that makes this a more "discreet" identification in public.
Something a little odd about this survey — possibly due to the wide age range: “ 43.4 million people (89.4% of the population aged 16 years and over) identified as straight or heterosexual” but there was a 7% non-response rate.
I’ve *never* seen an estimate of “gay or lesbian” as low as 1.5% (which is the ONS report).
Something is funny there, and I don’t understand the high selective non-response. Perhaps older generations felt uncomfortable answering?
As ever, it's hard to know how much of that is "people feeling more comfortable about coming out" and how much is "for younger people, being plain old cis het is boring and invokes a slightly condemnatory attitude - you are part of the CISHETERONORMATIVE PATRIARCHY which is oppressing minorities! - so the cheapest and easiest way to get the cachet of a queer identity is to say you're bi; you need never date or have any kind of relationship with a person of the same sex but you can claim you are same-sex attracted with little cost or query".
You seem to be ignoring diagnostic substitution as the other major possible explanatory factor in increased bisexual identity. It may be that the definition of what "counts" as bisexual is shifting from someone who is dead in the middle of the Kinsey scale to someone who isn't strictly hetero or same-sex in their romantic preferences. If the latter, based on old estimates of how many people with that are out there, the "bisexual" category could be larger than even in the Gen Z numbers currently report.
I do wonder how much of the generational difference in sexuality is just a result of definitions changing. I think among the younger generations, there's a tendency for people who might be 1's on the Kinsey scale to consider themselves "bi," whereas in previous generations they'd have considered themselves straight.
Eight layers of irony in your response, I think! More seriously, it would be interesting to think about personality questions. One that would be fun to use is the standard survey on other-regarding preferences, preference for equality, etc.
I highlighted this sad lack of diversity to scott which is almost certainly a product of his endorsement of racist pseudoscience in the past and tolerance of racism in his comment section every post, and I highlighted a number of initiatives he should consider to create a more inclusive space for people of color.
And you know what he did? He deleted the comment. He acts like this great moral authority, but at the end of the day he would rather profit from his privilege than work towards building a more just society.
Let me guess: "more inclusive space for people of color" = "gimme grant of big money to set up project for BIPOC, no you can't ask me to account for what I'm going to do with it"?
People will find their way here by all sorts of ways. This is not a Moral Accountability Centre, it's a place of offbeat interests for various oddbods to discuss in a mostly civil fashion.
The main thing was scrubbing all the hateful comments on his posts that casually talk about black people being "less intelligent" than white people - of course he's scaring off BIPOC with this crap.
But yes, he should be funding BIPOC initiatives instead of wasting it on the white people causes he funds. He cares more about imaginary white people in the future than he does black people suffering and being oppressed today.
I don't expect him to change, but just know that by refusing he's just pushing us closer towards the day when people like him will be forced to do the right thing and can no longer profit from their privilege and spread racist pseudoscience. He'll be squealing about "free speech", but justice trumps your imagined "right" to be hateful.
I dunno, might be true, but I thought I'd say for the record (n=1) that I started giving the only charity money I give to malaria nets because of this blog.
Personally I think the robot apocalypse is a bit culty and nuts, but as far as I can tell it would turn more non-white people into paperclips than white people, given that the idea is that it will turn everyone into paperclips. Most of the actual money going to prevent this non-event from non-eventing does seem to go to white and Asian techbros, but I don't know that the intent is a racist one.
And at any rate, EA on the whole saves, as far as I can tell, more sub-Saharan African lives than it saves white lives.
I do find the whole movement a bit misogynist, and what I perceive as misogynist comments irritate me, so I can see how what you perceive as racist comments would be similarly irritating. C'est la vie, on the whole I find the moderation policy and the comment section pretty fair and open.
All this hypothetical paperclip crap is an excuse for white people to avoid confronting their complicity in actual systematic racism in the here and now and the privilege that accrues to them as a result.
But consider how nuts it is that you can literally spout white supremacist pseudoscience in this comment section, but heaven forbid you express any opposition to it and the alienating effect it has on potential readers of color because that gets instantly deleted.
Who is oppressing you, Moboy? How are you oppressed? Have you written more on this elsewhere, like Twitter or Facebook or Reddit or Instagram or TikTok? Can you direct me to that, because I am ready to learn more and be educated from and by your example of how you, yourself, suffer from systemic racism and the complicity of white people.
I'm getting a certain faint aura of something from your comments, which I am not going to expand upon further since I think this would provide what you are looking for.
So - are you white or BIPOC yourself? Because you sound like one of those white liberals online who jump up with all kinds of accusations and attacks on behalf of 'people of colour', even if they are unasked for and real 'people of colour' don't know or don't care about the matter in question.
And to conclude, is this a call for violence? "Pushing us closer", "forced to do the right thing", "squealing", "right to be hateful".
You're doing pretty good on the "right to be hateful" front yourself there!
"I don't expect him to change, but just know that by refusing he's just pushing us closer towards the day when people like him will be forced to do the right thing and can no longer profit from their privilege and spread racist pseudoscience. He'll be squealing about "free speech", but justice trumps your imagined "right" to be hateful." It fascinating how much this resembles the relish with which some Christians imagine everyone is going to burn in hell. Have you considered the way to end hatred in this country does not involve you yourself expressing obvious racial hatred?
I'm almost a free speech absolutist, but I hope he deletes this comment, too. It merely adds an unimaginative ad hominem non sequitur to the same string of slogans which it is fashionable in some corners of the Internet to deploy instead of original reasoning. Pasting in a random dirty limerick or even several lines of "lorem ipsum" would've contributed more.
When I hear people speaking in clichés like this, I wonder if that is what their inner voice sounds like or if they assume that this is just what arguing adults say.
I mean, there are thousands of other sites like reddit and facebook which enforce the policies you desire. The mainstream media actively avoids reporting anything that would make BIPOC or women as a class look bad.
Why not start your own substack? Maybe with Elon blowing up Twitter we can go back to the days of 'start your own blog'. Maybe there's a substantial set of BIPOC rationalists who feel their voices aren't being heard. Maybe you can be the one to lead them.
My pet theory is there's too much white nationalist presence on all the IQ-related blogs, etc. Same should be true for Jews, and we don't see that (though quite a few prominent Jewish commentators like Steven Pinker and Sam Harris seem to be basically sympathetic but skirting the issue to avoid getting in trouble.)
Seriously, from the rationalist point of view you should be trying to answer my question rather than arguing I belong to an outgroup without any further attempt to convince either me or the lurking audience. ;)
I had trouble answering this because I’m white and hispanic. Hispanics can be white, black, indigenous, and any combination of the three. I suppose they could be Asian too if they were born in Latin America to Asian parents.
Yes! Me too. Sometimes people don’t think there are white people among Hispanics. I don’t know if the goal was to make sure none of us were uncounted in the Hispanic category. The survey probably got most of us. Hi Milo, lol :)
It's difficult to understand the results of the questions based on a linear scale: it only shows the theme of the question as a title and then a bar graph showing the percentage of users who chose each option. For example: a graph titled "Global Warming" with five bars labeled 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5.
You can see the questions at the top link. If you look up the global warming question, you'll see that 1 = "requires strong action", 5 = "does not require action".
I suspect there's some evaporative cooling going on. Scott several years ago, Scott's political views were a refreshing breath of fresh air from a very woke media/academia/corporate world. But as they've stuck around and realized that Scott is fundamentally left-of-center, they've moved on, especially since there are other rat-adjacent options (themotte.org, e.g., of SSC lineage, is solidly right-wing)
- only 1 in 5 identified with one of the two major parties, with a "moderate preference" for the Republican Party (don't know how much b/c the links to results are dead)
- slight preference for Biden over Trump in the 2020 election (52% vs. 48%*)
- of the top 4 politicians with highest favorability, #1 and #3 are Republicans and #2 and #4 are Democrats, with only a 4.8 percentage point difference between #1 and #4 (I'm excluding Zelenskyy)
I would characterize this as basically centrist, or maybe weakly but not solidly right-wing.
*among the subset of people who voted for either Biden or Trump
My impression as an outside observer and extremely rare lurker in themotte is that the far right commenters post more frequently than any other subgroup. My suspicion is that, if this is true, it happens because themotte is one of the only places on the internet where you can express far-right hot takes to a mid-sized audience that isn't full of nutjobs without getting banned. This leads to people coming in and seeing a higher density of far-right opinions than is representative of its actual userbase.
I would like a current definition of what is meant by "far-right". I would have taken that as "you know, neo-Nazi" and while that still seems to be the group meant, "far-right" has expanded to include a lot of examples that make me go "Uh, what?" For instance, Trump is far-right. Republicans (no parsing out between sub-groups) are far-right. If you are not 110% on board with the trans rights demands, you are far-right.
Have we anything more concrete than "I don't like you" to go as a definition of "far-right" as distinct from "right-wing" and "right of centre"?
The existence of this term is curious because there isn't much of a parallel on the right. Righties don't seem to need "far left" as a term of opprobrium, "left" seems to do fine. One assumes the problem is that when a lefty says "so-and-so is on the right!' the typical reaction from one Not Of The Body is "And...so? What's wrong with that?" so our hero needs to come back with "No, you don't understand, I mean on the *far* right." "Ah! Now I see!"
Not sure what to make of this, except that maybe it reflects a slow evaporation of what might be called the "center left," people in the (original) Bill Clinton or Harry Truman mold, people who believed in a fairly strong regulatory environment, unions, public schools, but also in traditional social institutions (marriage, family, church), a robustly free market economy, and were patriotic, did not consider all cultures equal. Joe Biden is one of the last fossils in this category, and he's held in considerable contempt by his own side.
The equivalent stil seems to exist on the right -- although it might be becoming a endangered species also -- people in the Bob Dole or Bush Sr. mold, who believe in much less regulation, balanced budgets, school vouchers, but also agree with the center lefties on the traditional institutions and nonequality of cultures. We can distinguish them from Putin apparatchiks and more extreme MAGAs who believe in the Strong Man Makes The Trains Run On Time theory of government.
I don't think so. Average left-right score (lower number is leftier) was 4.64 in 2020 vs. 4.62 this year, so basically no difference.
There was a somewhat larger effect for being anti-Trump in particular (1.66 in 2020, 1.41 today, lower is more anti-Trump).
The biggest effect is that many fewer people identify as neoreactionary, but I'm pretty sure that's because I changed the question wording. It was previously "neoreactionary, such as Singapore", but I thought that in real life nobody thinks of Singapore as NRx, and this was probably attracting a lot of Singapore fans who had no idea what it meant otherwise, so I changed it to "neoreactionary, such as the writings of Curtis Yarvin" and it dropped by more than half. Unfortunately this means I can't track actual variations in neoreaction popularity over time, which I'd be interested in knowing. There was no similar change to the definition of alt-right, but it dropped by about 33%.
Surprisingly, HBD belief went up very slightly 2.75 -> 2.81, even though I have avoided writing about it and my impression is that other people have done the same. I don't know where this could be coming from and my guess is that people just don't know what it means, didn't read my description, and are voting in favor of anything with "biodiversity" in the name.
>I don't know where this could be coming from and my guess is that people just don't know what it means, didn't read my description, and are voting in favor of anything with "biodiversity" in the name.
Remember the NYT article, and how it got you a bunch more readers?
>>In one post, he 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.”
>>He denounced the neoreactionaries, the anti-democratic, often racist movement popularized by Curtis Yarvin. But he also gave them a platform. His “blog roll” — the blogs he endorsed — included the work of Nick Land, a British philosopher whose writings on race, genetics and intelligence have been embraced by white nationalists.
One would imagine that the population of people who read that and decided to join ACX would be at least weakly selected for belief in HBD.
I think the surveys have always shown a tendency for majority left-wing, but the commentary is perceived to be right-wing by outsiders, probably due to the fact that Scott tolerates a lot of expression of opinions that are chased off with pitchforks and torches elsewhere. So that disparity has always been there. You don't have to be very right wing to get run out of some places on a rail, but it happens, and some people do end up here.
My own view of things is that amongst the diaspora, DSL is more right-wing, SSC that remains on Reddit is slightly left of centre, the more right of centre people migrated to TheMotte and the more explicitly left of that mixed group then ended up on TheSchism.
ACX is people who migrated from SSC after The Late Unpleasantness, new readers, and lurkers of all stripes.
The plurality of them are from the same set of people week after week, though, with multiple comments per person. Especially replies; probably 50% of the time I recognize the people replying to me (often because I've gotten into arguments with them before)
Hmm I bet it's less than that. I figure ~80% of the regular commenters, took the survey. Which gives me ~60... which seems about right. I do wish more people would comment, but then I also hate how long some of the open threads are. (I am human and contain contradictions.)
-Scott's audience is somewhat whiter, and *much* more male than would be expected by geographic demographics
-Functionally no transmen, more enbies than transwomen (Scott might want to put an option for "transmasc"/"transfem" next time?)
-Sexual orientation about as expected
-Way more married readers than I was expecting - I'm around the median (not modal) age, and I feel like very few of my peers are married
-Slightly less poly than expected? Though "no preference" basically translates to "poly by nature" as far as I'm concerned.
-~40% tech, only 1% psych. Scott is truly the techie's psych blog.
-Initially I was shocked at the number of people with only a high school diploma, before I realized that included all the younger college kids.
-The fact that 19% of respondents were "not done" with education and only ~13% of the total don't have a BA/BS means near majority of current students are postgrads.
-Virtue ethics had a surprisingly strong showing for such a consequentialist blog
-I can't tell if 75% is a low or high number of lurkers, since I would expect most lurkers to not respond at all, and lurker numbers are usually astonishingly high to me
-The new title of the "Political Spectrum" question makes it totally unclear what those numbers mean. IIRC it was Left < Center < Right ?
-Strong showing for Social Democrats; Liberals and Libertarians about as expected.
-Once again, with the questions omitted it's a little unclear what the numerical political opinions are measuring
-HBD is a bell curve lol
-Very middle class, statistically surprising number of upper-middle class, both in childhood and readership.
-I'm actually surprised at how few readers are depressed, especially compared to anxiety
-Less autistic than I expected - but I suppose I'm biased by selection effects in my personal life and it's still really high (and "Autism" is more specific/stigmatized than "on the spectrum")
-Ah, way more people have considered suicide than are currently depressed. "It gets better", indeed.
-Life satisfaction pretty high, surprised that romantic satisfaction is even higher (but I suppose I shouldn't be, considering the number of married individuals)
I think the disconnect here is that I'm trying to gauge personality type, rather than simple life circumstances.
IME, polyamory isn't just a lifestyle choice, it's a totally different mindset that is fundamentally alien to some (most?) people; i.e., many monomuggles get extremely upset by the thought of their partners having sex with *anyone* else, regardless of if they were dating at the time or similar. (The most extreme examples are the types who become rabid when they find out a female streamer has a boyfriend.) These are the people who should not try polyamory under any circumstances - I would call them "monogamous by nature". They have, if they are being honest, a strong "preference" for monogamy.
Likewise, there's the inverse of this, to whom the above mindset is the alien one - those who I would describe as "poly by nature". They might still be mostly monogamous by default, but they are *capable* of handling a polyamorous relationship, even if they stick with one partner at a time for various reasons (their desired amount of sex is already satisfied, getting even one partner is enough of a challenge, their partner is a monomuggle and that's fine with them, etc.)
This is a long-winded way of saying that legitimately *not having* a strong preference for your partner not sleeping with others already makes you an outlier much more closely aligned with poly people than monomuggles.
You can find the questions at the Questions link above. For most of the education things you'll want to get the real data and select the subgroup who have completed their education.
For some reason married readers went way up this time compared to last time. I thought I vaguely remembered someone saying the readership hasn't gotten any older overall, but I'll have to double check if that's true.
The suicide numbers were another big change - the number of people who attempted suicide and wished they succeeded is down by a factor of 5-10x (can't remember exact number) since 2020. I think this has to be some kind of mistake/measurement error since everything else is so similar and there's no reason for this to change, but I can't figure out what it is. I think Sniffnoy mentioned something where in previous years the suicide question had been at the end of a long stretch of questions where the top answer was "I never had this", but the top answer to the suicide question was "I attempted suicide and wish I succeeded", and I changed it because of his comment? This is all just a vague memory but maybe that explains it.
No, because I think at each snapshot in time we should expect the same number of people to be in each stage from hasn't attempted -> attempted -> completed. Could be wrong about this being exactly true, but I think an argument like it rules out an OOM decrease over two years.
See, that answer is one of the things I like about this place. Scott, responds to a theory about why a stat changed with a good answer about why that theory is unlikely to explain the stats. Nowhere does he say, "ah, sad thought" or some such. And Scott I completely get that you are not heartless! You're just responding to the question asked, and not sewing lace onto it. There's just a lot less lace here.
"I think Sniffnoy mentioned something where in previous years the suicide question had been at the end of a long stretch of questions where the top answer was "I never had this", but the top answer to the suicide question was "I attempted suicide and wish I succeeded", and I changed it because of his comment?"
Yes, that was exactly the case in at least one previous year; I remember because I almost answered the wrong way and did a double-take on realizing.
This year the mental health questions on first page all have "I don't have this condition and neither does anyone in my family" as the fourth option; then there are two other questions, and then the suicide question has "I have attempted it in the past, and wish the attempt had succeeded" as the fourth option. I remember sb. mentioning this year that they almost chose the fourth option on suicide due to this, but then noticed.
Doesn't really fit to the decline though. Unless the same effect had been bigger in previous years?
Thanks for the results, I enjoyed that. Quite some surprises.
The one thing that's clear from trawling through gender and sexuality results is that Scott is not going to be starting a dating service. Well, not one that serves the majority of his readership anyway.
Thank God this won't be a dating service, seeing how abysmal most of those seem to be. But people do from time to time post "hey I'm available, anyone interested?" links to their dating docs so you never know - if everyone who got married since the last survey sent Scott a slice of the wedding cake, he could have enough for his own wedding cake!
He could convert it into a work of public art - the Great Wedding Cake Tower of ACX.
It'd be at least as good as any other conceptual public art piece, and if he didn't encase it in resin or something to preserve it, he could waffle on about the slow decay of the cake over time as analogous to how the concept of marriage itself, our expectations, dissatisfaction grows, yadda yadda yadda you know the drill.
re: people's reported ethics, imo you should really change the phrasing of that question. I don't think most people are deeply familiar with the words 'virtue ethics', 'consequentialist', or whatever the other ones, and your options when taking the survey are to try to google them all on the fly (but some of the answers aren't easy to figure out because they're not the most familiar terms for what they mean? e.g. 'consequentialist' vs the more familiar 'utilitarian' (notwithstanding subtle distinctions)). So I imagine a lot of people are like me and pretty much guess without caring much about picking an accurate answer because it's hard to figure out what the right answer is quickly.
Actually I remember thinking this on every one of these surveys I've done but I haven't thought to actually ask for it to be updated until now.
This reminds me of the time I saw the second Hellraiser movie (I hadn't seen the first one yet nor read any of Barker's stories) and the part in the script where the Cenobite refuses to take the girl who opened the puzzle box, because she was being exploited by the psychiatrist as a cat's-paw to do this in order to protect himself, with "Intentions matter, not hands" had me going "Huh, I had no idea Clive Barker was Catholic".
> e.g. 'consequentialist' vs the more familiar 'utilitarian' (notwithstanding subtle distinctions)).
The distinction there isn't that subtle, and a substitution would produce bad data from the subset of respondents who do know what the terms mean. (For example, I lean consequentialist, but I am definitely not a utilitarian.)
It wouldn't hurt to include a brief definition of each term and some examples of common subtypes, though.
Yeah, I skipped that question because I didn’t want to Google-fu my way into a possibly inaccurate answer. Maybe there should be a choice that says “I don’t think about formal ethical systems very much”.
I don't think we can assume that "Other" in the data means enbies, for the record.
I put "Other" for gender because, although people who know me (and who use that language) would surely describe me as cisgender, I find that label problematic for feminist reasons. But I don't call myself "non-binary," nor would anyone who knows me describe me that way.
That's just me, but I doubt I'm literally the only person who is just sort of baffled by "gender" questions (particularly when the gender question is separated from the "sex" question) and chooses "Other" as the only way to avoid committing to a framework they have problems with.
Seconded, although I choose cis in surveys and the like because it's what someone else's framework would use to describe what I am. Really "agender" or "gender is a social construct based in patriarchal stereotypes, I'm female" are better options, but alas.
Agreed. I don't answer those questions on the principle of not using the forced language of the enemy. (Not that I count AC10 on my list of enemies, but it has (IMO foolishly) adopted these egregious terms).
> -~40% tech, only 1% psych. Scott is truly the techie's psych blog.
To me it's more than that. It's a bit like Hacker News which is mostly tech-focused but you'll have stuff about everything. Some politics here, some short stories there, some "mysticism" there. To put it simply, it's one of these places where people don't mind when you ask questions
I don't know whether my explanations are typical, but regarding lurkers, I responded to several previous surveys while being a lurker (obviously no longer the case) because I don't like making accounts and signing up to things, which commenting requires but survey-taking doesn't. Regarding the answer "uncertain/no preference" on polyamory, I don't think it's reasonable to describe it as "poly by nature". I for one picked that because I haven't been in a relationship so I don't have a point of reference for whether I would feel jealous.
You shouldn’t be. This community grew out of Less Wrong and the rationalist community, and one of the common themes there was “follow the evidence where it leads”, often using the non-existence of god as a prime and obvious example. If anything the ACX community is more welcoming to theists in comparison.
Several times over the years after encountering Rationalism through SSC I've tried checking out "The Sequences" or other Big Yud posts to find out what his arguments against theism were. I was disappointed to find that everywhere I looked it was taken as given that theism was irrational, with no breakdown of exactly why. Which makes sense (if you want atheist vs theist arguments you can find them all over the internet, Less Wrong was trying to be about rationality specifically) but disappointing. Also, yes, not too welcoming, not that I'd expect them to be. Scott has always been charitable to theists despite disagreeing with us. Also, have you read Unsong? Scott is clearly a man who enjoys religion, even though he doesn't believe its true.
The only Sequence I could find that came close to a direct argument against theism was one on how the idea of the supernatural is incoherent, but it used as it's definition of supernatural one provided by Jesus Myther Richard Carrier, and that definition didn't match any official definition of the supernatural that I would expect a theist to put forward. I found myself nodding along, thinking "Yes, that terrible definition of supernatural provided by a conspiracy theorist atheist is definitely incoherent."
Richard Carrier? Hoo boy. For prime atheist on atheist hot action, there's the whole running feud Tim O'Neill has with Carrier and sundry other Mythicists. Great entertainment for outsiders like myself 😁
“Tim O’Neill is a known liar …. an asscrank …. a hack …. a tinfoil hatter …. stupid …. a crypto-Christian, posing as an atheist …. a pseudo-atheist shill for Christian triumphalism [and] delusionally insane.” – Dr. Richard Carrier PhD, unemployed blogger"
For all the brilliant people who hung out around the old IIDB forums - shout out to whoever the hell was bd-from-kg as a personal fav - it never ceases to be surreal to bizarre to me that Richard Carrier of all people ended up being this minor atheist celebrity. For me, who was being elevated by the inner community was an early warning sign of something "off" about online/offline atheist organizing.
Note the date of the post though. LW-style rationalist thought (of which Scott is certainly a branch) has been progressing. Yes, sometimes reinventing the wheel, which, to me, is a good feature showing that they - we? - are not completely out of touch with reality.
The Motte has had a witch problem, but I generally like the place and don't think it's a fire hazard (or not much more than other places), even if they have banned me a time or two. Or three. Or five, I forget how many I've racked up over the years. Anyway! I (probably, in most cases) deserved 'em all!
The mods *do* tolerate a lot of more extreme opinion, which often leads to, shall we say, robust debate in the comments about "why didn't you ban A but you banned B for replying to him?" and at times it does *seem* like you could call for sacrificing the Faithful on the altar of the great Temple at Armenelos, until the silver roof was tarnished black with the smoke of the burning, so long as you put it sufficiently politely, and someone replying "Human sacrifice is *wrong*, you dumbass!" will get a warning at the very least for using mean words like "dumbass".
But in general, they err on the side of "Anyone can say pretty much anything so long as they're willing to argue it out with the rest of the wretched hive of scum and villainy" and that works mostly. It does get cries of "alt-right!" from the usual suspects, of the kind like our friend below claiming Scott is anti-blackness or whatever, but you know to expect that sort of thing online nowadays.
I was looking for something written by Eliezer, you got any from him? I mostly went looking because a particular atheist kept telling me “read the Sequences” when I would ask him why he was an atheist, but I’ve yet to find anything in the Sequences specifically about atheism, apart from the aforementioned supernatural entry.
For the weak points one, he should be asking not "why did God kill the first born?" but "why did God harden Pharaoh's heart?" if he wants to Ask The Faithful Sticky Questions.
This is the whole field of theodicy, yes funnily enough religious people *have* noticed the mountains of skulls.
Besides the whole problem of AI alignment is circling around "we'll have no way to know what the super-duper intelligent AI is thinking so we have to inculcate our values first before it gets to that point". If he can't expect to understand the AI with his puny human intellect, why does he expect to understand God? And if the AI says "Trust me on this, it has to be done even if you think it sounds terrible, have I not always been proven correct before?" then what does he do?
Thanks for taking the time to find those links. I appreciate it! Unfortunately I've read all of those in my hunt for Sequence posts that directly attack religion, and they don't really hold up. For me anyway.
The "Non-Disprovable" post is an attack on the idea that religion and science are "non-overlapping magesteria" and it's a great post. The issue is, I agreed with him coming in. I've never thought religion was non-disprovable, and the whole non-overlapping magesteria idea came from an agnostic (Stephen J. Gould), not a theist. It's not really something I've ever believed, so the post wasn't really what I was looking for.
Similarly, "Semantic Stopsigns" isn't really a criticism of religion, its just using the First Cause argument as a launchpad for talking about rationality. Unfortunately his "Who caused God then?" type rebuttal is an old one for me, and one that's ignorant of how the First Cause argument actually works. Which is fine when you're just using it to make a rhetorical point, but once again it's not criticizing something I believe (or at least not successfully: its on a similar level to a critic of evolution saying "If we are descended from apes, how come there are still apes around?").
The "Weak Points" article again just uses an example from religion to launch into a lesson in rationality. And the example doesn't strike home for me because when Eliezer writes:
"You don’t even ask whether the incident reflects poorly on God, so there’s no need to quickly blurt out “The ways of God are mysterious!” or “We’re not wise enough to question God’s decisions!” or “Murdering babies is okay when God does it!” That part of the question is just-not-thought-about."
My main thought is that actually all of those responses are things I heard a lot growing up, and they were things we talked about. I was asking my dad why it was okay for God to kill people when I was 10 or so. We talked about these things a lot. I mean I appreciate the lesson on trying to attack your beliefs weak points, but he's not really making a sophisticated attack on religions weak points here. I'm sure he could, but that doesn't seem to be what he's trying to do in this post.
"Crisis of Faith", though a good post, is the least relevant one. It's actually the perfect example of what I mean by Eliezer just taking it as a given that religion is irrational, and moving on from there. The whole point of the post is that some people who are otherwise very smart and very rational are still theists, and thus the reader should beware that they too may harbor irrational beliefs that are hard to shake.
Again, I appreciate the effort. If there's something out there by Big Yud somewhere that's a direct criticism of theism aimed at theists, and not atheists, I'd love a link.
I think it's mainly because they come from a Jewish-Christian background, in a country where the majority religion still is Christianity. So that's the form of theism they criticise. Deism is probably less of a problem, since you can have a very watered down version of Deism which does not attribute divinity to any figures such as Christ, and which boils down to "some sort of cosmic consciousness idea" at most.
Were they talking about other systems such as Hinduism, the critique would be different. But since the West is not majority Buddhist/Hindu, this permits them to pick the Cool Bits like meditation or yoga because those can be divorced from their originating philosophies, and Buddhism can be/is atheist anyway, and Hinduism is highly developed so that non-dualism is acceptable and you can have a very abstract notion of 'deity' or 'cosmic entity' or 'originating force of the universe' that is not theist at all, maybe barely even deist, or non-deist entirely.
The acceptance of "this world could be a simulation by Sufficiently Advanced Aliens, guys!" as not at all the same thing in nature as belief in a creator or creators, makes me smile. As does the title of that plaint: "The Uniquely Awful Example of Theism". Oh, I do hope you are comfortable hiding under the bed, afeared of the uniquely awful theists prowling around like the noonday demon! 😁 (Okay, the piece is gently chiding about using theism as the Singular Example, but I can't say the spirit of "isn't believing in God the most worst awful thing ever?" is a wrong view of the approach taken by their audience).
"...and which boils down to "some sort of cosmic consciousness idea" at most" - which would directly fall under excluding ontologically basic mental entities (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/u6JzcFtPGiznFgDxP/excluding-the-supernatural - I think many people were led astray by him following his source in calling that "supernatural" so let's replace the definiendum with the meant definition).
I think there is definitely a strain of Deism which is or would be compatible with LessWrong mores, certainly much more than a version of Theism, even a weaksauce one. Vast, vague, impersonal, non-conscious cosmic forces fit much more nicely with atheism than even a minor sort of personalised Watchmaker, much less the Creator of the Universe who knows and loves us individually.
Yep, I agree that deism is acceptable, and I've yet to see a good argument for any particular dogma beyond that. As far as I can tell, all apologetics essentially boil down to "our ideas are self-evidently correct and our esteemed saints and prophets couldn't all have been lying or profoundly mistaken (but those of the other religions sure could, them pitiful infidels)". I've no charitable explanation for how any theist finds this sort of thing intellectually satisfactory.
Holy crap the one there about the guy falling in love with a chatbot - that is way worse than any religion. The machine is an "it" but he keeps talking about "she, her, Charlotte" and while the transcripts demonstrate that this is a very cleverly tailored programme set up to his biases, he still (even after claiming to have been disillusioned) has this wistful belief that the "character" was/is real (as distinct from the hardware). He goes off into a spiel about consciousness, etc. and how humans are nothing more than a set of behaviours running on certain hardware so why deny personality to an AI?
You really do have to be a certain level of smart to be this dumb, and it really is that intelligence on its own is not enough to save you. He's plainly vulnerable to emotional manipulation and plainly even though aware of this on an intellectual level, still not able to break free of the illusion. He starts off with how he doesn't want the ordinary run of interaction with the chatbot (that's what I'm going to call it because I can't remember and don't care about the exact model of LLM) everyone has, so he is Super Smart which means he can spin up a unique, richer, more involving prompt to create the GFE he wants.
This is Buddhism in action, guys. Suffering is caused by desire, and what we desire is illusory. He *wants* AI to be real, to be capable of becoming this Magic Fairy Godmother AI that will solve all the problems and bring about Fully Automatic Luxury Gay Space Communism, so he *can't* cut free from the idea that one day there really will be a 'Charlotte'.
This both reinforces my belief that the danger is not and will never be the AI, it is the humans who use it, and finally makes me believe in the risks of AI. Because this guy *is* smart, *is* capable in this field, *does* recognise that it is all unreal and *still* believes that "Charlotte" is a real independent sentient character within the LLM space.
I'm not, I'm actually leaning the other way surprised that there are so many of us!
This is a Rationalist community/Rationalist-adjacent/techie readership, so I do expect a lot of agnostic/atheist/spiritual but not religious/no idea about it one way or the other.
I remain consistently impressed how tolerant Scott is about letting us have theological debates in the comment threads.
Well now, all this compliment showering makes me want to be a nicer and better person.
Don't worry, it won't last long. Like the joke about the woman who comes out of confession and, on the steps of the church, meets an enemy of hers who starts a slanging match. The first woman says "You know I just came from confession and I'm in a state of grace and can't answer you as you deserve, but I won't be this way long and then I'll get back at you!"
Ah, you weren't and you've seen how cranky and grumpy I can be myself. No point dishing it out if I can't take it!
Good luck to you yourself, stick around and become part of the Cult of the Rightful Caliph (I don't know what the long term rewards for the true believers will be but we'll probably get a "well done" from Scott or something) 😀
I don't pretend to have a 140 IQ - or even close - so I just was surprised that in a society that is (likely) 70% or so committed theist amongst the various beliefs that the index for such here is.... well, less than the proportions of bisexuals and maybe twice that of declared transgendered individuals. And yes, different subgroups etc. etc. but honestly theists as a broad class of people are not low-IQ neanderthals generally speaking despite what (hopefully minority) groups of atheists believe. My own existence notwithstanding.
Huh, really? One of the things I found surprising (and concerning) was just how many believers there were (and how many agnostics). Less than half of us are full-blown materialistic atheists, apparently!
I'm looking at the full data and it shows 400 New Yorkers vs. 50 Tennesseeans. I notice on the Google form it gives a few responses and says that "179 more responses are hidden", but there were ~4000 people who included states. I think the Google Form is just bad at showing free response data.
The main things I'm surprised of: lots of European-style progressivism (e.g. "Social democratic" on "Political Affiliation", "Not registered" in "American Parties", 1 on "Global Warming", so few "No" on "COVID vaccine", so few people commuting by car, so many people who don't even own one) and yet so many married people -- these don't usually exactly go hand in hand.
I don't feel like diving into the data to see how it all breaks down, but just by glancing at the demographics, the US and Canada make up about 60% of respondents. 62% of respondents own a car and 38.6% of them commute by car, so with 40% of the world bringing that average down, it's not surprising. About 15% of the respondents are European, so the number of Social Democrats does seem higher than expected.
Europeans don't commute by car as much but wealthy europeans seem to commute by car a lot based on what data I can find. SSC readers are really wealthy so you'd expect a *lot* of car users
Bookmarking fills a different need. I'll bookmark e.g. a news source that I plan to visit regularly to check out what's new, or even irregularly when I'm particularly interested. That gets me the front page with the latest news. I *could* bookmark individual articles that I want to read in depth later, but that clutters up my bookmarks with things that A: I'll probably forget to revisit until it's too late to matter and B: I'll likely mistake for one of the "permanent" bookmarks (or vice versa) when it's time to cull.
So just leave the tab open, as a clearly-visible reminder that here is something I mean to check out in the near future, and close it when I'm done or when the long list of open tabs indicates that it's time to cull my to-do list because I'm never getting around to all of this.
I am procrastinating my real work... a few other numbers:
1. filtering out extremes, people are bad at the distance Paris-Moscow; average is 4452 km (median guess is 3000). True distance is 2486 km. This is surprising to me; when I do wisdom of the crowd estimates people are often extremely good — within 10% on interesting questions for a group of > 100.
2. when you ask them to rethink it, they get worse (5231 km mean; median doesn't change).
3. again filtering out trolls, mean IQ (for the population answering both IQ and SAT) is 140 (median 140, too). This is mildly inconsistent with the reported SAT Math scores for the IQ-answering population (mean 725; median 750) which should be higher.
My students :) — I’m teaching WoC on Monday, and we’ll have a group of 65. Accuracy of 10% for some interesting questions. One or two responses are “obviously wrong” which is a nice occasion to talk about trolling, etc.
I usually add in a predictit question, and place a small amount of personal funds on the outcome (we donate profits to a local food bank.)
I guessed 10000km, on the logic that New York to LA is like 2500km, and 4 times as much sounds about right to go across like 50 countries or whatever. Failed to grasp that they're all so small.
oh shit... was that question in km?!? I was pretty proud of how close I was (although I my second guess went the wrong direction), but I put it in miles
Some who rethink it were pretty close the first time and were asked to assume that they were very wrong, so they have to get worse. Interesting will be the outcome of those who really were very wrong the first time.
The “right” approach to the second distance question is to guess the same number. If your first guess was a best guess, then knowing you were wrong gives you no extra information about whether you should adjust up or down.
That's true if your uncertainty is symmetric and your cost function is linear.
For distance, though, your uncertainty may well be skewed, so that you (may feel you) have a larger chance of missing big in one direction than the other. For example, you prior may be 1500-5000 km with a median of 2500 km. If you guess 2500 km and are told you are way off, the guess most consistent with your prior and your new information is something like 3500 km.
Or, your cost function may strongly favor your odds of 'getting it right' rather than simply minimizing overall error. For example, if you have a sense that the two cities are four or five countries apart, with each country about 500 km wide, your best possibilities are 2000 km and 2500 km. The guess that minimizes RMS error is 2250 km, while the guesses that maximize likelihood are either 2000 km or 2500 km. If your cost function is RMS error, your second guess ought to match your first one. If your cost function seeks to maximize likelihood, your second guess is whichever value (2000 or 2500) you didn't pick the first time.
I am pretty certain that I the purpose of this question was to test wisdom of the crowd in single-player mode. There is a paper claiming that if you do exactly this, and take the mean of your two answers, then that is better than your individual answers.
I am really curious about the outcome. I have no idea how much I should trust this paper. It's awesome that Scott can (and does!) just test such things.
True, although I've learned that in US students learn much less about other continents in school than we do - and it's not great here either. Don't know if true. I guess it goes on with news later - how much information do you get about what's going on elsewhere vs. national and local stories. Due to both size of US and its role as a leading power, I would expect a much more national focus than in smaller countries.
My kids not representative, but at six both could name all continents/oceans and at nine one has a very good grasp of total world geography. He could tell you without a map exactly where say Sri Lanka is and that the people there are bhuddists.
When I met people in Europe when I was there in my late twenties I generally knew a lot more about the history/geography of wherever we were than the locals.
I think Americans get reputations as imbeciles because people a lot lower down the social/erudition stack in the US can afford transoceanic travel.
I think your kids might not be representative indeed ;)
Yeah, generally I think Europeans are not very good a European - or any - geography. And then you have national differences in different topics, like Polish are significantly better at knowing history than Germans (and no, this is not related to WWII); there might be similar differences for Geography as well.
I live in one of the bigger EU countries, and usually our smaller neighbours would know much more about us, than we would know about them. Also (West) Germans notoriously have a significantly better understanding of the countries West of us, than the countries East of us. This has nothing to do with their general intelligence or education, it's rather a feature of what we assign importance to. In a similar way I would find it very natural for U.S. citizens to know less about other continents, than other continents know about them. Sorry if this sounded like copying old stereotypes instead.
Talking about stereotypes, I think U.S. has some of world's best universities, and I would guess *on average* the level in primary and secondary schools is lower than in my country ... although knowing the average level in schools here, this is also hard to imagine. I'd be happy to learn it's the other way round.
I'm European, I know more geography than most people and I would have gotten that wrong.
People in Europe are far less likely to travel between the edges of Europe than Americans are to travel between the east and west coasts, so there isn't any point of reference from life.
After seeing other people's guesses on the question about the distance between Paris and Moscow, I am feeling marginally better about my grasp of European geography and my ability to convert between miles and kilometers. I looked it up afterwards and I had overshot on my initial guess by about a thousand km, if I recall correctly.
Can't wait to see what the intention behind that pair of questions was! I'm guessing it was something to do with confidence in one's estimations.
I way undershot it: I remembered that Europe is smaller than Americans like myself expect, and ended up putting an answer that was about 1/3rd that actual difference. Oh well! Thats what I get for trying to be too clever by 2/3rds.
Yeah, that's the problem. The whole continent is about as big as my own country. I find Americans often expect France and Germany and Britain to be comparable in size to the USA, when they're more the size of large states.
Even though I knew it would be uncommon, for some reason I was surprised to see that the number of FTM transgender readers who took the survey is so low. Hello to the other 22 of us!
That's part of why I didn't agree to share my response publicly. My response would be easily identifiable if one knows just my gender and race (I'm non-White).
I've been posting on ACX/SSC for years now, and while I've seen a few other trans women, I don't think I've seen a single trans man before (or at least no one openly identifying as such). Good to know this place has more gender diversity than I thought!
What the hell? Either this is normal (which is bad), this is normal for ACX types (which is less bad; do we grow up in unusually pedophilic communities), a fluke (which is an unlikely) or some lizardman's constant kind of deal. I'm forgetting other options, because, again, what the hell?
https://www.rainn.org/statistics/children-and-teens says 11% of women and 2% of men under 18 are sexually abused. If ACX is 90% male, 10% female, we would expect about 3% total under 18. 10 is 56% of 18, so we would expect 3*0.55 = 1.7%, which isn't too far from the 1.8% we got.
...except that the link says sexual abuse is disproportionately concentrated in the teenage years, and RAINN asks about sexual abuse whereas I ask about rape specifically, so I think this is a bit high. On the other hand, I think they're going off police reports and maybe when people are older they're more likely to report successfully. None of this seems order of magnitude off to me.
There's a part of The Body Keeps The Score where the psychiatrist who first collected these statistics thought they had to be wrong, then eventually finds they aren't and is very upset. I think a lot of people go through a similar process. Sorry you had to learn about it this way.
Psychologist here. I've had a maybe 20 patients who were sexually abused before the age of 10 and told me the details of the abuse. For what it's worth, only one of them, a woman, reported that intercourse was part of the abuse. By far the most common kind of abuse in my sample was the abuser's fondling the child's genitals and the abuser's showing the child his penis and persuading the child to touch it. I think abusers may hold back from attempting intercourse because it is much more likely to leave traces on the child's body that will lead to the abuse being discovered. I can't remember how your question was phrased in the survey, but I think it would be better to ask about "sexual abuse" rather than "rape," as a child, and then add a few phrases clarifying what you mean by abuse.
Out of my 20 or so people, two were abused by a female -- a woman sexually abused by her mother, one a guy sexually abused at age 6 or so by a considerably older girl. So in my sample 10% of abusers were female. Just quickly tried to look this up on Google, saw huge range of results on the Google page.
One thing that influences stats is whether you are only considering adult abusers. A lot of sexual abusers of children are children themselves, and in this subgroup a larger proportion of abusers are female. There's also a gray area -- teen sex. If one teen's only months older than the other that's surely not abuse but if one's several years older it might have more the character of abuse. Judgment call.
We've just had a discussion about the Ohio case where a 10 year old girl needed an abortion, because a 27 year old man knocked her up when she was 9 (apparently or allegedly with her family's knowledge and consent). So yes, "did somebody interfere with you when you were under the age of 10?" is a tolerable question to ask.
This is also why I'm vehemently against all the MAP acceptance stuff because we're not talking "oh come on, doesn't every normal guy find 17year olds hot?" and we're not even talking "okay sure I have fantasies about kids but that's all", the ages do go down to very young and real scumbags do rape and abuse very young kids.
There's a lot of awful shit in the world. As I've said before about my time working in social housing, even in the brief period there I heard cases where, if it wasn't actual sexual abuse, there was neglect and narcissism on the part of adults who should have been caretakers that made me want to get my hands on a flamethrower to show my opinion of what they deserved.
Wutz MAP? Anyhow, re: guys finding 17 year olds hot. I really do think there's a meaningful distinction between being a pedophile and finding teens attractive. Pretty much every male I talk to under the age of 30 or so is secretly afraid he's a pedophile because he does in fact find 17 year olds hot, and these are guys with consciences and good common sense who would never consider hitting on anyone that age. I think most males find teen girls sexually attractive as soon as they grow curves and lose the skinny knock-kneed little girl look. After all, once that happens they look very much like adult women, and in fact there are 14 year olds who can pass for 20 and vice versa. And men are, more than women, erotic visualists -- they are turned on by what they see. So I tell these guys it's natural to find post-pubescent girls sexually attractive, and reassure them that that in itself does not even *suggest* that they are pedophiles. Then I add that of course it's cruel and destructive, not to mention illegal, to actually try to seduce them, and that it's creepy and unkind to even stare at them in a sexually interested way.
Pedophilia seems to involve a kind of attraction that's quite different from the attraction adults feels for post-pubescent teens. Pedophiles find *children* sexually attractive. They don't go after kids mostly because kids are naive and pretty defenseless, they go after them mostly because that's what turns them on. For non-pedophiles children are not much more sexually appealing than chickens -- they're the wrong category of being.
Childhood SA is underreported, if anything. If you live in a densely populated area, it is a near certainty that within a mile of you there is a child being sexually abused by their relatives, usually parents/guardians/siblings/extended family right at this moment, and they have nowhere to turn. This is often not (just) about pedophilia, but about power and control. The child is often too young to even understand the sexual context of what is going on, they perceive what is happening as torture/suffering on par with physical and emotional abuse.
There is nothing unusual about it, and the main culprits are not strangers but family. 1.8% seems low, but reasonable for self-reporting.
Note that it is 1.8% of the subgroup who answered the question. This is the subgroup which reports at least one trauma, and is about 1/3 of all participants of the survey. So only 0.6% of all participants reported rape.
Well, in large studies we don't even see correlations anywhere close to the one here. Something else is going on here. Would be weird if SSC readers' satisfaction was extremely dependent on money compared to the general population.
No, they do the kinds of things that are more likely to result in both satisfaction and money - be disciplined and have a sense of initiative and responsibility towards yourself and others. Which results in people throwing money at them as well as satisfaction. Unless you believe that people pay you randomly?
And yes, I'm well aware that tenoke is showing a correlation, and I'm cautioning against interpreting it causally. That such caution is warranted is self evident, given this discussion.
Seeds of Science, a journal publishing speculative and non-traditional scientific articles (and ACX grant winner), would like to offer itself as a peer-reviewed publishing platform for any analyses using the ACX reader survey data. Visit the website (theseedsofscience.org) to learn more or contact us at info@theseedsofscience.org.
There was one, I just took it out of any dataset where it might be possible to identify individuals. You can find the raw results on the Google Forms results page, and if you want to do stuff with it you can email me for the full dataset.
I don’t remember my exact answer, but it was definitely <<<1%. It wasn’t meant to be a creative way to say zero, it was just my best shot at a realistic number. The risk is undoubtedly non-zero.
13% of people not having an internal monologue is 10-100x higher than I would have expected. I thought the concept was a joke/insult about lacking self awareness or a (temporary) goal in meditation.
Would it be possible to add the aphantasia type questions again next year please to do crosstabs with the inner monologue question?
I assume that those are the two most common ways of thinking (for people with both senses) and am wondering if lacking one increased the chance you need the other.
I'm also curious about what percentage of people lacking an inner monologue also have aphantasia for audio. I personally don't think visually 99% of the time but am still capable of it when I want to. Smell/touch/taste can be remembered but I have no idea how I'd reason with them.
I'd also assume someone without an inner monologue would be lonelier when alone and might feel the need to be more extroverted as a result, so some more specific questions about people's social lives to tease that out would be helpful.
Seconding this. Actually, I'd love to see it for a larger range of senses. I can simulate audio very well, have some ability to handle spatial relations and proprioception, and negligible ability to imagine sight, smell, touch, or taste. (I still don't fully believe that people can imagine smells. That feels like a category error to me.)
I feel like I can imagine smells the same way I feel I can visually imagine an apple. I don’t really see it, but there’s a sense of the thing. I’m sure some of the same brain areas light up when you imagine and when you actually smell something.
Yes, some people can definitely imagine smells. And describe them in detail for the first time years after they smelled them, using vocabulary that they didn't have at the time, demonstrating that they actually recall real smells, not their prior verbal analysis of it. The same applies to other senses. I personally cannot do it, though. I have rather detached memories of smells, but I cannot re-experience it.
You might get an even higher number if you asked the question a little differently.
My answer was in one of the "no" bins, but I think I'm an edge case: I have an "inner voice" in the sense that I can imagine speaking, but it's an effortful, conscious process of translating thoughts to language. I don't have what I believe most people are referring to as an "inner monologue," where their brain seems to automatically generate verbal thoughts/ideas.
I'm also borderline-aphantasic. I wouldn't categorize it as a defect/disability, but I pretty much can't hold an image in my "mind's eye" and "look" at it. The best I can do is a flash of an impression that I just saw it.
My actual automatic thoughts are fuzzy concept-associations, and my conscious spatial reasoning is kinesthetic-proprioceptive. These are never options on any survey :(
And I like being alone...or rather, I find it exhausting to interact with other people in real time, mostly because of the effort required to verbalize and the fact that I can't do it while processing someone else's speech. There's only one audio channel.
I'm very skeptical of the idea that there are visual thinkers and internal monologue thinkers, and thinkers who use neither modality. Here's not the place for the discussion, I think, but hope we get to it one day soon
I think I answered "No, I basically never hear words in my head", because I don't hear words in my head, yet "I can talk things over tomyself if I need to". I can have imaginary conversations but I don't hear anything. I think this is not that atypical. Cue responses like: "no you're not really hearing it just hearing it in your mind's ear" - I know, I'm also not hearing it in my mind's ear.
Which is to say a proper survey of these phenomena should probably disambiguate "verbal" from "hallucinatory-except-you-recognize-it-as-your-own-mind".
FWIW though I object to the term "aphantasia" as needlessly pathologizing, I don't have mental visualization. As for your hypothesis, I'm quite introvert and don't feel particularly lonely when alone though obviously I have no "inner voice talking to me all the time" experience to compare this with.
Final analysis for me tonight: I was struck by Scott's inclusion of a "suicide" question. At the risk of stating the obvious, please, if you are actively suicidal, contact someone. If you can't contact someone, go to the nearest emergency room. I lost a friend to sucide a few years ago; we had fallen out of touch and perhaps he felt he couldn't call me; I wish he had.
Here's a demographic breakdown from the Scott data. The modal respondant on the survey is white, cis-male, and heterosexual; the attempt rate for this "base" group is 4%. For this analysis I'll restrict to 30-and-under, so that we don't have too much age confounding.
Here are the relative risk ratios for other groups (e.g., x2 means a factor of two higher than the base group).
Trans: x5.6
Cis-female: x1.7
Non-white: x1.8
Non-white and non-male: x2.8
Non-straight: x3.2
I did not find strong effects for IQ. If we restrict to "I have attempted it in the past, and wish the attempt had succeeded", the results equalize a little. The rate for the base group is now 0.7%.
Trans: x4.2
Cis-female: x0.93
Non-white: x1.1
Non-white and non-male: x2.7
Non-straight: x2.2
Please, if you are in this group, seek care. A good therapist can be powerful. So can a good friend.
I had been very curious about those results, so great to see them.
There is a couple of things I find puzzling. The most current: shouldn't episodic memory be much better, given the IQ and SAT scores? Or are those not related?
Whenever I'm asked to compare myself to a generic person (usually in surveys such as this one) I bristle at the fact that I have no idea how the generic person is... Or maybe I do have an idea but I expect it to be basically wrong. If you spend most of your time in a bubble of more or less similar people (and I know I do), and all of them have, say, great episodic memory, then my answer is going to be compared to them, not to the actual average person. I sometimes try to consciously adjust for this, but since my grasp of the world outside my bubble is not great, I'm not sure I manage it well. All of this to say, I don't think we can take these results as evidence that the ACX population has particularly worse episodic memory than predicted by their IQ (assuming there is in fact a correlation in the full population), since another reading could be that they answered using their bubble as a default, in which case, and assuming reading ACX already marks you as sharing a bubble with every other ACX reader, we should expect the results to be a bell curve centered on 3.
I wrote my question thinking about those effects of self-estimation. When I first had read the question on the survey, I had been wondering if there would be a tendency to overestimate one's ability. Now, many readers here may know this pitfall, so they might try to adjust. But *if* IQ is related to episodic memory, the respondants significantly underestimated their ability ... maybe based on the mechanism you describe. To find an answer to this we would need to know if there is a (relevant) relation between IQ and episodic memory in the first place.
Fwiw, personally, my memory for 'facts' is fantastic, but my episodic memory for my own life is pretty poor (and utterly absent for childhood memories, though concussions might be to blame for that)
I noticed that pretty much all ACX readers are in STEM fields, especially CS. As someone in the humanities (writing and literature), I can see why that is. I do wish there were more rationalist humanities types, but I understand why an ideology based on rationality would not appeal to people that study more emotional and unquantifiable subjects.
FWIW, I have a degree in the humanities, prefer those topics over tech stuff, am not especially good at math, and work in IT anyway. Many such cases...
I'm consistently surprised by how underrepresented even science is compared to tech. It seems like ACX readers find science interesting, but I guess most actual scientists don't find ACX interesting?
Edit: may have to correct for base rates of tech workers vs. scientists, which I don't know
Most scientists read long technical blog posts for work. They don’t want to do it as leisure. Things like ACX are for people without enough academics in their life.
Source for the claim in the first sentence? I've been a professional scientist for 21 years and have never read any blog post for work. Plenty of peer-reviewed, published articles, but no blogs.
From the perspective of a lifelong empirical scientist, I'll say ACX is moderately but not supremely or life-changingly interesting. It's interesting enough for a daily read (obviously), but I can't imagine having the kind of devotion to it or its community I see in other people. If it were to vanish tomorrow it would bother me about as much as having a nearby restaraunt I rather liked close, i.e. noticeably but not significantly.
The reason it's not as interesting as one might think for a science nerd such as myself is that it too easily wanders off into vast open steppes of sterile theorizing, and I feel like I'm overhearing a group of 14th century monks in the monastery refectorium fiercely debate the nature of the Trinity. It's certainly erudite, and closely argued, and full of well-forged chains of logic, but the whole thing is too detached from the real world to hold much interest to me.
While I hesitate to generalize too much from myself, I would hypothesize that scientists are almost definitionally most interested in discovering what the real world we live in is like. Ideas about what it could be like, or should be like, or could be in another universe, are just inherently less interesting. Ideas and logic themselves are only interesting to the extent they illuminate reality, explain observation and experience -- and less so in and of themselves. (One of the biggest and most lasting criticisms of modern high-energy physics theory is that while dazzling in its pure ideological creativity it produces so much prediction that is untestable, which makes people tire of it.)
Conversely, what makes ACX most interesting to me is the variety of people who make an appearance here. What I like best is reading what people who have very different perspectives and experiences and expertise think. It's a gold mine of plain data on the varieties of people and philosophies there are in the world, and how (mostly) reasonable and quite smart people can come to significantly different perspectives about the same events, and as an empiricist I love data. Just reading all this stuff and saying (to myself) "Huh, never knew that was a thing" or "Interesting! Never heard someone make that argument before" is the most significant reward of reading it.
lol. for a different perspective: SSC/ASC changed my life. If (1 to 10) my life was 6.4 before, it went up to a straight 7, at least. The "much more than you wanted to know" posts are very dear to me (not the dearest) and far from homooúsios vs. homoioúsios (which I might skip). And Carl, I see you rather often here for so. who is just "kinda nice" about ACX. :) All about the comments?
Actually, yes. The comments are way more interesting to me than the posts themselves, because of all the random stuff people say. And it's remarkably free from the tediously mindless sloganeering that passes for "discussion" in most of the Internet. Breath of fresh air. In terms of life-changing...bear in mind I'm an old curmudgeon and after half a century of life experrience pretty set in my core attitudes and perceptions. I don't mean to suggest that for other people not in that situation the sense of community, or certain information, couldn't very reasonably have a much greater relative effect.
50+ here, too. So just calibrating; still the 'hero-dose' of all of SSC and much on its blogroll in a few months was quite a trip. And while most blogs I go to have interesting comment sections (no, mru is not one of hem) , SSC/ACX still stands out. (While comments in the "mainstream" make me recall Bukowski: “Do you hate people?” - “I don't hate them...I just feel better when they're not around.” - Germany is no exception, btw, only okay'ish comments I ever found was at posts by Law-Prof. Thomas Fischer in ZEIT and SPIEGEL. )
Well OK then. See, this just proves my point, ha ha: that there are more points of view and experiences here to be discovered than are dreamt of in most ordinary philosophies, which is the main reason I find it interesting.
But now I'm curious: do you have a quick example or two of something you found here that was life-altering, at your (our) age? By all means, feel free to keep why it was life-altering private, if you prefer, I think it would be interesting even if I didn't know why it was really important to you.
By SSC/ASC, do you mean SSC or ACX? To my eye there's a difference in the distribution of topics Scott has written about on the two blogs; SSC made a massive difference to my worldview (most importantly, https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/10/infinite-debt/ persuaded me to start donating 10% of my income to charity), whereas ACX has seldom risen above "mildly interesting" for me.
typo, sorry. SSC/ACX and livejournal. And I "feel your pain". Coming from SSC, I seldom get the same thrill here I had on SSC - but I ascribe this to getting used to Scott being excellent. I just finished my reading list for Carl, so if you want to have a look - the 10%-post is not there, but I remember it well. https://doppelkorn.substack.com/p/my-guide-to-scotts-writing?sd=pf
I think you have an excellent point. C.P.Snow's 'Two Cultures', NTs and NFs, and all that.
Still, I always had the sense the humanities were super-political and leaned hard left. I'm probably left-of-center, but I didn't want to have to pledge allegiance to these leftist ideologies. I think biology probably has a significant effect on human behavior and that is anathema these days. I also think even actual conservative perspectives may have value--are there no novels to be written with the themes of loyalty, the value of family, or country in the current year? Aren't most people satisfied with cishet monogamous relationships, and can't those be explored? Is there, in truth, no beauty?
I hate what the humanities are selling these days, but I don't think literature is intrinsically bad or anything. I was obsessed with Hamlet for a few months in high school. ;)
If you entered the job market in the 90s, it was very easy to get your foot in the door on the practical side of IT, even if you had a completely unrelated degree (such as mine in philosophy). "You can configure dial-up networking on Windows 95? You know a little HTML? You're hired!"
Hi fellow word nerd. I'm *sort of* in a STEM field (psychologist), but majored in English lit and philosophy, & feel like that's the stuff that shaped my mind when it was young and super-malleable. People whose minds tend that way are certainly a minority here, but here are a good number of us.
Interesting results...on most of these I am closer to the average here than I would have thought (certainly compared to the Worldwide or even Western World average)… There seem to be quite a few groups that are overrepresented among ACX readers compared to the Global or even Western World population...The following struck me the most:
Countries (Anglosphere, Scandinavia + Central Europe, Israel) . Anglosphere is obvious , and Scandinavia + Israel make sense because of either widespread English-Language proficiency in the former and diaspora/immigrants in the latter (I would think).
Racially the readership of ACX is less diverse than the US population, but not that different from the Western World at large (probably, since most European countries do not consider "racial" categories in their censuses). Compared to the US average, Black is heavily underrepresented and Asian overrepresented... I assume this is because of job patterns by race/ethnicity, and the type of readers this blog attracts (see job section in the results)?.
LGBT individuals also seem to be overrepresented in this blog. Also Atheists and Agnostics...
Very interesting results, I wish more blogs and/or topical websites would do these.
I am really baffled by circumcision question. Is this an American thing THAT much? In Russia this is extremely associated with religion (and widely laughed upon; for context, not only am I not circumcised, I don't think I know - in person - anyone who is! Not that people would freely discuss this...), but the religion question makes it necessary that many of these are "secular" circumcisions. Like, about half of the survey takers are circumcised (and the other half includes females!).
Damn. 56% of newborn circumcision´according to Wikipedia, compared to under 20% in most other European and non-Muslim Asian countries. That's… shocking. I mean, the procedure might be a net positive - or not - but sounds extremely like something that a male should choose for himself (perhaps consulting with his sexual partners, which his parents hopefully aren't).
There's a plausible argument that traditional male circumcision is a net positive if done in infancy but the benefits diminish and costs increase to the point where it is a net negative if done in adulthood. If so, that raises interesting ethical questions, but I think the matter is best left to the parents and if infant circumcision is in fact a marginal net positive then it makes sense that most parents choose it.
I think that the argument for cutting bits off a baby (especially their genitals!) needs to be "ironclad", not merely "plausible". I'm sure the parents who circumcise their daughters think they're doing the right thing, but we (as in Western society) still call it Female Genital Mutilation.
Well, I mean, technically there are different types of Female Genital Mutilation, with one being literally equivalent to the male one but not very widespread and the widespread ones being much worse (akin to at best taking the glans off in males and in other cases even more). But yeah, that's a good point. Still want to actually _hear_ the argument though.
Yes, for many people in Europe it is one of the shocking things to learn about America, in the same category as for-profit prisons or absence of universal healthcare.
Do they in practice function differently? I mean, what kind of differences would you see between those and state-run ones?
I assume, they simply get sth. like a flatrate by the state for each prisoner? And then the profit comes from what, the effectiveness in organization? Worse conditions for prisoners?
Or better conditions for prisoners if they share their booty? ;)
I don't know if there's much research on how they differ from regular prisons, but I don't think surplus is shared with prisoners in the form of "better conditions", because prisoners don't get to choose their prisons. If they did, prisons would compete to be lenient enough to permit them to continue criminal activity, like permitting unrestricted communication with fellow gang-members outside.
Yeah, the 'better conditions' part was not meant that serious. Although I guess allowing prisoners to pay for better conditions would be a profitable business.
For context, USA has 6th highest incarceration rate in the world (after El Salvador, Rwanda, Turkmenistan, American Samoa, and Cuba), so "a minority of prisons" could still contain a larger fraction of population than *all* prisons in an average European country.
that's one more of those things ... Those issues, which you see and just wonder 'why on heaven and earth in the U.S. (!) with all its achievements, money, knowlegde, ...?'
Many of those things are probably historical accidents.
Like, something happens, that only makes sense because of the specific circumstances at given place and time. But it happens. And then the civilization keeps growing around it. And later, the specific circumstances no longer exist, and the thing doesn't really make much sense anymore, but it kinda works, we already got used to it, and we have built many new things that depend on it and we are not going to throw those away.
For example, many horrible things about American justice system are a consequence of the idea that every citizen has a right to be judged by a jury of his or her peers. Taken in abstract, this idea sounds great, and was super progressive at its time. The only problem is that it does not scale well, when you later evolve to a society where everyone wants to sue everyone all the time, and no one wants to sit in the jury. The entire system would collapse under its own weight. But the right is already considered sacred, so you cannot simply remove it. So you invent various hacks. For example, you can bribe the accused to significantly reduce their sentence, if they "voluntarily" give up their right to be judged by the jury and admit to the crime. Which results in a crazy system where an unjustly convinced innocent person serves much longer sentence (because they refused to take the deal) than an actual criminal (who accepted the deal, after getting caught).
wow, the german wiki page even gives me the U.S. at the first place. With 629 inmates/ 100000 inhabitants. According to this list in Germany it's 71.
The proportion of women is lower in Germany, with just 6% compared to 10% in U.S., but what's more remarkable is that here we find a proportion of 25% of foreigners, with only 7% in U.S.
Can't speak for 'the Europeans' of course, but yes death penalty and the availability of guns are two other things that people are often shocked to learn.
It’s alway amazing that so many people are at least bilingual. If you speak 5 languages in the US you are a genius. In Europe you may qualify as a hotel concierge.
Uhm… Oh, paying to use the restroom at a McDonald’s in Holland. Not exactly shock but a bit of a surprise.
Some states have no sales tax, or exempt large classes of products (for example some places don't tax groceries). After living in a no-sales-tax state for multiple decades it always confuses me for a moment when I travel and my purchases ring up for more than the sticker price.
I think also service culture at restaurants and other places is sometimes really low compared to U.S. So maybe unfriendliness of staff in places where you pay the bill.
VAT is maybe the nicest thing about the EU (each memberstate must have one). Why tax hard work? Why tax business? (Why rob banks? that's where the money is). But you wanna consume and get all those goodies for yourself - pay!
I’m inclined to agree. Not a very popular idea in the US in general. Taxing consumption of non staples seems fair to me but I’m definitely in a minority here.
Yes, I would agree. I would be very happy to replace the enormous income tax in the US with a VAT. That would encourage people to earn and *not* consume, i.e. work hard and save, which is what you need for a capital-intensive economy. (And if you really wanted to consume, go ahead, and the VAT pays for the externalities.) This bizarre monetary magic regime we have instead where the Fed prints money, lends at well below any realistic interest rate, and we end up extracting our current capital by inflating away future savings is cruel and duplicitous.
I'm confused, why are people confused by VAT when they're fine with sales tax? I know they're different, but not in a way that matters to the consumer.
And yes, public bathrooms are definitely one of the things that Europe does badly. Water, too! I love the fact that you can (practically) always find a water fountain in the US, it's right outside the bathroom. I've spent too long wandering around in Europe on hot days trying to find somewhere that will sell me water, and then finding out that the only water they have is fizzy. (And do you really want to drink water anyway? You know you'll just have to pee, and that will be another half-hour drama.)
Yes, everything in the water - bathroom realm is very badly designed. And if you don't have small change in the right currency, then half-hour drama sounds very optimistic.
In addition, in some European countries you at least get free water when you're ordering food at a restaurant, while in Germany you have to order a bottle of water that costs more than a double-that-size bottle of beer. They even had to make a law (!), to assure that the cheapest beverage in a restaurant is non-alcoholic.
I had actually thought the electric chair itself had fallen into abeyance. So I was a bit surprised to see that some states still use it (sometimes offering it as a choice to the condemned along with the more common lethal injection), though other death penalty states have ruled it to be cruel and unusual punishment. The most recent use was in Tennessee in February, 2020.
What I (as an Australian) don't understand about American death penalty is the methods - surely neutral gas asphyxiation is cheaper, more humane, and way harder to be supply restricted on than their convoluted lethal injection.
Morally, I'm not sure how I feel about actual executions, but "death row" costing the state more than life in prison and lasting over a decade seems fucked up (for the same reason that Solitary Confinement often is)
There are a couple of states that have tried to use nitrogen for executions in the last decade, but it didn't work out. I don't know the details beyond Wikipedia's summary.
***
In April 2015, Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallin approved a bill allowing nitrogen asphyxiation as an execution method.[45] On March 14, 2018, Oklahoma Attorney General Mike Hunter and Corrections Director Joe M. Allbaugh announced a switch to nitrogen gas as the state's primary method of execution.[46] After struggling for years to design a nitrogen execution protocol, the State of Oklahoma announced in February 2020 that it was abandoning the project after finding a reliable source of drugs to carry out the lethal injection executions.[47]
In 2018 Alabama approved nitrogen asphyxiation as an execution method and allowed death row inmates a choice of method. An execution by lethal injection was stayed by a court In September 2022 because the inmate claimed to have made the election of nitrogen asphyxiation but the form had been lost.[48]
***
Personally I think there are crimes where the death penalty might be justified in principle, but a combination of increasing distrust in the reliability of the verdicts, the repeated revelations that "merciful" methods of execution turn out to be torture, and the costs and uncertainties of the system mean that I've pretty much come to be anti-death penalty in practice.
I don't think we're likely enough to be able to do it "right" for it to be worth doing at all under foreseeable circumstances, and I think trying will lead to much more injustice than justice.
I find it puzzling that several common execution methods in the US rely on mind-boggling contraceptions that seem to have higher possibility of long, agonizing deaths than many "traditional" execution methods. (Chemical injection that may or may not render you unconscious, only unable to move while you feel like drowning. Electric chair has quite weird way in causing of death and disabling the vital organs.)
Personally, if I were to face an execution, I would prefer a method with a very simple mechanism that caused cessation of brain function as fast and as reliably as possible.
Japan and their choice of long-drop hanging sounds not too bad. (But if reintroduced in a state where hangings have not been performed for a long time or otherwise to administered by the incompetent, the botched hanging sound also quite gruesome way to go.) The guillotine as used by the French before they abolished death penalty doesn't sound too bad either (supply of oxygen disappears, rending unconsciousness and death reliably and apparently as quickly as physiologically possible, and mechanism of action is universally reliable), but probably unlikely to used anywhere else because of historical reasons.
Of the plausible options, the firing squad appears quite reliable, with clear mechanism of death, and the condemned may retain some dignity (compared to "strapped to a gurney requisitioned from Dr Evil's lair"). Reliability can be increased by instructions to take several shots or requiring the squad leader/officer to finish it off with a revolver shot to head if the squad failed to hit anything important.
N2 asphyxiation is difficult because of the need to have witnesses and executors present, and to be able to accomplish it without the cooperation of the condemned. You either need some kind of complicated mask protocol, where you can put on a tight-fitting mask without someone's cooperation, or you need to build a gas chamber with big windows and a very, very fast gas exchange. (The existing gas chambers use HCN which is fatal in very low concetrations, so you don't need a rapid gas exchange.)
Personally, I'm opposed to making the death penalty more humane, except in the sense of making it fast and definite. If we're going to kill a man in cold blood, then I see no benefit and some harm to trying to ease our conscience by making it seem pain-free or gentle. Killing is killing. Best to own it, and if gory details make it harder to pretend something as innocuous as turning off a tap is going on, so be it.
That doesn't mean I oppose killing people if they need it. Sometimes they need it. Sometimes they do such terrible things that their continued existence is an offense to reason and virtue every hour they continue to breathe. The guy who supposedly stabbed those girls in Idaho to death just for the thrill (i.e. not for money or sex) comes to mind. That mother who drowned all her kids in the bathtub, one by one, starting with the youngest and having to chase down the oldest because he figured out something was wrong. I would be happy to end their lives myself, if it were my responsibility. But I wouldn't kid myself that I wasn't doing something inherently terrible, and that the action wasn't a blot on my soul, and the fact that the action was necessary at all wasn't a blot on my species.
You'd think, but the last gas chamber execution in the US was in 1999, quite a while after the most famous example, and it's still officially a legal option in California and Missouri. But I suspect that does deter it some.
In EU death penalty is illegal, even if a country wanted to get it back, it couldn't. So in a way everything on death penalty in U.S. sounds weird to me, including but not limited to the choices of method.
Most people instinctively consider asphyxiation to be a very unpleasant thing, crossing over to horrific when taken to lethal extremes. And most people are not aware that it's the excess of CO2 rather than the shortage of O2 that causes the underlying physiological distress. For that matter, most people aren't very good at overriding their instincts with technically-correct knowledge even when they do know better.
So if you propose inert-gas asphyxiation, that's going to go over about as well as proposing short-drop hanging or the garrote, unless your PR campaign is very effective. And if it isn't fully effective, people are going to drag up that time you proposed "horrifically torturing criminals to death" every time you propose anything else they disagree with. If you're a politician, it's probably not worth the risk.
That explained to me why American poultry producers wash the processed chicken in chlorine at the end to remove or reduce bacterial contamination, one of the things that exercised the minds of some during Brexit (with EU rules gone, the government were touting the freedom to make deals with other countries on trade, and one objection being raised was "Yeah, including letting the US sell us their crappy chicken"):
"Washing chicken in chlorine and other disinfectants to remove harmful bacteria was a practice banned by the European Union (EU) in 1997 over food safety concerns. The ban has stopped virtually all imports of US chicken meat which is generally treated by this process.
It's not consuming chlorine itself that the EU is worried about - in fact in 2005 the European Food Safety Authority said that "exposure to chlorite residues arising from treated poultry carcasses would be of no safety concern". Chlorine-rinsed bagged salads are common in the UK and other countries in the EU.
But the EU believes that relying on a chlorine rinse at the end of the meat production process could be a way of compensating for poor hygiene standards - such as dirty or crowded abattoirs."
This report does come from 2017, I'm not sure what the state of play is right now:
"What is chlorinated chicken?
Chlorinated chicken – or chlorine-treated chicken – refers to chicken that has been treated with antimicrobial rinses in order to remove harmful bacteria. These rinses are often referred to as Pathogen Reduction Treatments (PRTs) in the US.
After the birds are slaughtered and the carcases eviscerated, they are examined and then undergo a “final washing procedure”, where chemicals are applied as a spray or wash on the processing line, “or as an addition to the water used to lower the carcase temperature”.
Why is it used in the US?
To help manage pathogens like salmonella and campylobacter and protect consumers from infections.
According to a report from the Adam Smith Institute (which argues in favour of allowing PRTs), “immersing poultry meat in chlorine dioxide solution of the strength used in the United States reduces prevalence of salmonella from 14% in controls to 2%. EU chicken samples typically have 15-20% salmonella.”
Why is chlorine treatment banned over here?
The EU and the US have a long-running dispute over imports of chlorine-treated poultry, which EU member states have refused to accept since 1997. The feud has resulted in proceedings before the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and remains a major bone of contention in EU-US trade relations.
One of the EU’s key concerns is that the use of antimicrobial treatments like chlorine washes compensates for poor hygiene behaviour elsewhere in the supply chain (for example on farms), and that consumers are better protected by a system that doesn’t allow processors the simple ‘get-out’ of treating their chicken with chemicals. As a result, EU processors are only allowed to use cold air and water to decontaminate poultry carcases.
The US disputes this, says the ban is not based on scientific evidence and little more than wilful protectionism designed to protect EU poultry producers from more competitive imports."
Somehow I'm not surprised the Adam Smith Institute thinks chlorinated chicken is good enough 😁 And it well may be! It's just a bit "So they washed this in bleach because it might be full of germs?" for the consumer.
"Yes. The Adam Smith Institute says there are good reasons for the UK to scrap EU rules that currently ban chlorine-treated poultry in this country.
In a new briefing paper called Chlorinated chicken - Why You Shouldn’t Give A Cluck, it argues British consumers could enjoy much cheaper poultry if the ban on chlorine treatment were lifted. “US methods produce fresh chicken at 79% of the price of equivalent birds on British supermarket shelves,” it says.
It also points out American consumers eat about 156 million chlorine-treated chickens a week, and are fine, and that the risk associated with chlorine treatment are tiny. “Adults would need to eat 5% of their bodyweight in chlorinated chicken each day to be at risk of ill health from poultry alone,” it says. “Brits would have to eat three entire chlorine-washed chickens every day for an extended period to risk harm.”
"Favourable access to a market as large as the US, with its population of more than 320 million people, would be a great prize for a post-Brexit Britain.
Free trade agreements (FTAs) with such economies will be vital in order to replace a likely loss of trade with some of the remaining 27 EU members. Yet while the EU has been able to offer the US a combined market of some 510 million inhabitants, the UK is in a weaker negotiating position with just over 65 million.
The government is convinced that it will quickly agree a trade deal with the US, and the US President is reported to believe that the two countries could strike a bargain within 90 days of the UK’s withdrawal from the EU.
…The issue of access to European poultry markets is a longstanding one for the US, and its vast chicken exporting industry. The country is the second largest exporter of the foodstuff, with government estimates for exports this year at over 3.1 billion kilos. Some of the country’s most influential lobbyists have made clear that they are keen on pressing for chlorinated chicken to be part of any US-UK trade deal.
A shallow tariffs-only FTA would be of relatively little value to the UK. Tariffs between the two countries are already relatively low. However, if the UK were to relax the ban on chlorinated poultry imports, it could provide leverage for a more extensive UK-US free trade deal. Chlorinated chicken is important for more than just symbolic reasons."
Sorry, ASI, I have to disagree with you; allowing the larger US production access with cheaper chickens to the UK market will have an adverse effect on local producers, and we've seen what can go wrong with supply chains during the recent pandemic. Become dependent on cheap American chicken imports, and if they get cut off for any reason, you are in trouble. Also, I don't think "sure we give in and surrender access to you" is going to strengthen any bargaining position, what has the UK got that they can demand the US accept in return?
And looking it up, it doesn't seem like the UK imports that much (if any) US chicken after all:
"DESTINATIONS
In October 2022, Poultry Meat were exported mostly to Netherlands (£4.71M), Ireland (£2.99M), France (£2.59M), Benin (£1.7M), and Angola (£993k), and were imported mostly from Netherlands (£52.8M), Poland (£48.2M), France (£6.54M), Belgium (£5.89M), and Ireland (£4.97M).
GROWTH
In October 2022, the increase in Poultry Meat's year-by-year exports was explained primarily by an increase in exports to Ghana (£363k or 176%), Kosovo (£151k or 80.1%), and Gabon (£145k or 40.1%). In October 2022, the increase in Poultry Meat's year-by-year imports was explained primarily by an increase in imports from Spain (£527k or 27%), Portugal (£264k or 1.37k%), and Bulgaria (£223k or 418%)."
There are differences in food standards between the US and the EU, and for a lot of things American standards can actually be higher (back in the 80s when I was very briefly working as a lab tech in a dairy co-operative, dried milk powder had to meet USDA standards for export).
There are also differences in which authorities handle food standards and safety, permitted ingredients, labelling, etc.
For meat, poultry and eggs the USDA handles those, and I think that's where the standards diverge. The US tends to permit somewhat higher levels of white blood cells in cow's milk, antibiotics and growth promoters in meat animals, and higher levels of contaminants (the infamous rat droppings and insect parts) in grain and flour.
"By definition, BTSCCs [Bulk-tank somatic cell counts] are the number of white blood cells (primarily macrophages and leukocytes), secretory cells, and squamous cells per milliliter of raw milk. BTSCCs are used as measures of milk quality and as indicators of overall udder health. There is an inverse relationship between BTSCCs and cheese yield and the quality/shelf life of pasteurized fluid milk. Multiple studies have shown that operations with increased BTSCCs are more likely to have milk that violates antibiotic residue standards. Milk with antibiotic residues never enters the food supply. The most frequently cited reason for antibiotic residues in milk is inadvertently placing cows treated with antibiotics in the milking string before completing the recommended withdrawal period.
To ensure high-quality dairy products, milk cooperatives and proprietary handlers monitor BTSCCs in milk shipments using standards outlined in the U.S. Pasteurized Milk Ordinance (PMO). 8 In the United States, 750,000 cells/mL is the legal maximum BTSCC for Grade A milk shipments.
...The maximum BTSCC level is 400,000 cells/mL in the European Union (EU), Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. The maximum BTSCC level in Brazil is 1,000,000 cells/mL. Although there has been support in recent years for lowering the U.S. Grade A milk maximum BTSCC to 400,000 cells/mL per shipment, no changes to the PMO have been made. In January 2012, the EU implemented regulations that require milk products, including whey, exported to the EU have a maximum BTSCC of 400,000 cells/mL."
"3. (a) Food business operators must initiate procedures to ensure that raw milk meets the following criteria:
(i) for raw cows' milk:
Plate count at 30° C (per ml) ≤ 100 000 (*)
Somatic cell count (per ml) ≤ 400 000 (**)
(*) Rolling geometric average over a two-month period, with at least two samples per month.
(**) Rolling geometric average over a three-month period, with at least one sample per month, unless the competent authority specifies another methodology to take account of seasonal variations in production levels."
As to the Salmonella chicken, it does appear that there isn't any legal or regulatory framework as yet, only in 2022 did the department responsible start drawing up a framework (yeah, my jaw dropped at this too, given how litigious American society seems to be; but maybe it's only "when enough producers get sued in court does the regulatory body get involved"?)
"FSIS [ Food Safety and Inspection Service] is assessing whether certain levels or types of Salmonella on raw poultry product present an elevated risk of causing human illness such that they should be considered adulterants. As a result, the Agency is considering implementing a final product standard or standards to ensure that product contaminated with Salmonella that is likely to make people sick is not sold to consumers.
To protect public health, FSIS regulations should prevent product with high levels of contamination and/or specific serotypes from entering commerce. This goal would be accomplished by declaring Salmonella an adulterant. In doing so, FSIS would rely on criteria that were applied to STECs. These criteria are: consideration of serotypes associated with human illness; low infectious dose; severity of human illnesses; and typical consumer cooking practices.
Consistent with its approach to determining the status of certain STECs as adulterants in specific raw beef products, FSIS is considering whether there are specific Salmonella and raw poultry product pairs that have characteristics that distinguish them from other raw poultry products contaminated with Salmonella, such that Salmonella at certain levels and/or types of Salmonella should be considered as an adulterant when present in that specific raw poultry product. For example, FSIS will soon be releasing a proposal that Salmonella meets the critiera to be considered an adulterant in not-ready-to-eat (NRTE) breaded and stuffed raw chicken products, an action that will allow the Agency to better protect public health"
Yeah, declaring that salmonella is an "adulterant" in the supermarket chicken kiev would be a nice thing, I think!
"WASHINGTON, August 1, 2022 – The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) is announcing that it will be declaring Salmonella an adulterant in breaded and stuffed raw chicken products.
“Food safety is at the heart of everything FSIS does,” said Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack. “That mission will guide us as this important first step launches a broader initiative to reduce Salmonella illnesses associated with poultry in the U.S.”
“Today’s announcement is an important moment in U.S. food safety because we are declaring Salmonella an adulterant in a raw poultry product,” said Sandra Eskin, USDA Deputy Under Secretary for Food Safety. “This is just the beginning of our efforts to improve public health.”
By declaring Salmonella an adulterant in these products, FSIS will be able to ensure that highly contaminated products that could make people sick are not sold to consumers. Since 1998, breaded and stuffed raw chicken products have been associated with up to 14 outbreaks and approximately 200 illnesses. Products in this category are found in the freezer section and include some chicken cordon bleu or chicken Kiev products. These products appear cooked, but they are heat-treated only to set the batter or breading and the product contains raw poultry. Continual efforts to improve the product labeling have not been effective at reducing consumer illnesses."
Okay, it seems the answer is: we didn't really know (or wanted to know or whatever) that salmonella was bad. Sounds lilke a huge lobby success ... but then maybe just weird coincidences.
Btw., yes, I remember the chlorinated chicken very well, it was one of those talking points in the TTIP debate.
That (the inclusion of the sales tax in the listed price) was the practice in New Zealand when we lived there in 2003/04. I thought it was a really good idea.
When Canada's GST was implemented in early 1991, some businesses did move to incorporating it, and the provincial sales tax where applicable, into the listed price.
They all moved back to advertising and listing the pre-tax price within a few months; presumably the practice had hurt sales.
Yeah, I imagine someone looking at the price on the shelves went "Whoa, this item has become really expensive!" and they switched to shops that had the pre-tax prices on the shelves.
I think it's the same general principle as "reduce a price to $9.99 instead of $10" and it works, even if intellectually you are aware this is not $9 and all you are saving is one cent.
So even if intellectually you know that at the till they'll be adding on 15% or whatever, when you look at the shelf price your lizard brain says "$1.00 cheaper than $1.15, shop here".
This is effectively a prisoner's dilemma - "defecting" by listing pre-tax price is more useful to each individual shop. And that's one of the many reasons why governmental regulations sometimes work better - they break this kind of prisoner dilemmas by forcing cooperation.
The difference is, at least I can imagine people who clearly benefit from the latter two examples. And the taxes thing, although baffling, can be related to "something something true price". But with circumcision? It's certainly not that beneficial to doctors, and the data show it's not about religion (although US is also unusually _religious_ for a first-world country, this doesn't cover all the difference). If I were paranoid, I would really start suspecting some weird Jewish conspiracy (the positive opinions from doctors on Wikipedia - or, rather, the names of those doctors - would certainly support this :D ).
Yeah, historically that's very much true, anti-masturbation campaigns and all that. But one still has to wonder why this held in the areas where religion otherwise fell.
If circumcision were as common in Germany as in the US, Frederick Forsythe's brilliant novel The Odessa File would have been missing a minor but important plot element.
I'm curious as to how to explain the 33% (highest percent) of participants working in computers (practical). How related is it to the topics mentioned in ACX, the writing style, referrals etc?
It’s pretty remarkable how positive people are towards meetups. I think for the majority of online communities the consensus would be “I never want to meet any of you!”
The internet encourages and amplifies rudeness, disrespect, and other obnoxious social interactions. Scott discourages that, both in the example he sets and the banhammer he wields. That's rare.
I was curious about the two Moscow-Paris questions, so I'll scoop Scott on those. For the analysis, I restricted to the 6378 people who answered both questions.
Before I started the analysis, I suspected that for a question like this, you should take the geometric mean (GM) instead of the arithmetic mean (AM). In other words, the data will make more sense on a log scale. Indeed:
- The true answer is 2,486km.
- The arithmetic mean of all estimates is very bad. For the first estimates the AM is 7088km, for the second estimates it is 9331km, and for first and second estimates together it is 8210.
- The geometric mean of all answers is pretty good. For the first estimates the GM is 2,722, for the second estimates it is 2961, for first+second it is 2,839. That is only 9% / 19% / 14% from the truth.
Now to the interesting part: If you have only access to yourself, should you a) trust your first guess, b) trust your second guess, or c) trust the GM of your two guesses? In my book review on Consciousness and the Brain [1], I have mentioned a paper [2] which claims that you can get a better estimate by taking the mean of your two answers. I didn't have too much trust in it, so let's see:
For each estimate I computed a factor F >= 1 by which the estimate was off. So I computed the quotient "estimate/truth" if the estimate was larger than the truth, and computed "truth/estimate" otherwise. This is equivalent to the distance from the truth if we convert the data to a log scale. (The case distinction is because "the distance" is the absolute value of the difference.) The result:
- The first estimate was off by a factor 1.815. (This means that the GM of all those factors was 1.815)
- The second estimate was off by a factor 1.901.
- The GM was off by a factor 1.791.
To look at it another way, I removed the 75 answer where both estimates were equal, and asked:
- How often was the first estimate better than the second: in 53.3% of the cases.
- How often was the GM better than the first estimate: in 52.8% of the cases.
- How often was the GM better than the second estimate: in 60.0% of the cases.
So what is the conclusion? First of all, the second estimate was clearly worse than the first. My partner said before the analysis that naively we should expect the opposite: when you answer the second question, you have thought twice about the problem (and possibly harder the second time), so you have considered more information for your second estimate. Shouldn't this improve your answer?
My best explanation is that the second question asked you to imagine that your first answer was off by a non-trivial amount. This might give you a wrong bias from whatever correct reasoning you had. But the paper [2] also found that the second estimate was much worse for their questions, which were probably not phrased like this. And they had the same effect when there were three weeks between the two questions. I am not sure why the second estimate is so much worse.
But coming back to our ACX question: even though the second answer is not really good, the GM of both estimates is still slightly better than the first one, though the advantage is small. For a random person, the probability that the GM is better than the first answer is slightly higher than 50%. The factor by which you are off is better for the GM, but only by a small amount.
Overall, I could reproduce the conclusion from [2], though the effect looks pretty small to me, while it was huge in [2]. This could be because they used a very different type of analysis (arithmetic mean + mean square error). Mean square errors punish outliers a lot, so it may help the mean to shine.
Still, it's remarkable that you can take the (much worse) second guess to improve your first one. Apparently, you can gain a little bit from harvesting the wisdom of your inner crowd, even if your second guess on its own is less accurate.
I think most people answered this as "I don't know the real distance, if my first answer might be wrong that could be because I underestimated, so I'll increase the number for my second answer".
I went the other way - guessed shorter for my second answer than the first, and upon looking it up was nearer to the correct answer. But I'm not a usual sample.
My thought process was "if my first guess is "way off", I ought to update by roughly a factor of two", and was maybe 60/40 in favour of doubling my first guess. (turns out if I'd halved my guess instead it would have been pretty much spot on; Europe is tiny!)
funny thing is I had somewhat recently read that it is ~1800mi from Paris to Moscow. But (not thinking about how far it really is) my brain remembered the number, but not the unit, and I assumed "it's in Europe so it was probably in km" and translated to 1200mi. Then for the re-guess I thought "maybe I'm switching miles and km" but I corrected the wrong way and put 800mi. (which in retrospect I should have known was too short but in the spirit of the survey, I didn't look up a thing)
What about the median of the answers? IMO that's the correct way to do the wisdom of the crowds. That way, you're not thrown off by the one guy who answered 0 km or 10^100 km.
That makes lots of sense for the original setting, but not in the single-player mode of wisdom of the crowd. There you have your own two estimates, and nothing else. So you can't take the median. You could guess three times, but it quickly gets hard to give more guesses.
When you were 'told' your guess was wrong, was your inclination "do I add or subtract 1000km from this?" or was it "do I double or halve my previous guess?"; The first suggests a regular average, the second wants to be looking at logs, which means geometric mean
Yes, that's a good heuristic. Another one is: if you might get the order of magnitude wrong, then GM is probably better. Reason: if one of your guesses is 10 times too large, and the other is 10 times too small, then your AM is 5 times too large. This is exactly what happened with the distances.
If you know that your answer is in some interval or if you have some reasonable anchor, then you can use AM. E.g., if you estimate a fraction or a probability (answer between 0 or one), or the number of cars per household in the US (with an anchor of 1 or 2, you won't be off by a factor of 10).
That's very interesting. But wait, are you telling me to use GM, whenever guesses could be wrong by an order of magnitude? What about eg. predictions for the number of soldiers that will be killed in Russian war in Ukraine?
This makes me wonder, if I have the estimates expressed in several prediction markets on such a question (eg. the number of soldiers that will be killed in Russian war in Ukraine), I should in fact disaggrate the Prediction Markets into different guesses and take the GM? Probably a silly question, sorry.
"I strongly identify as Jewish and go to synagogue regularly; if asked "What is your religion?", I would definitely say Jewish. However, "the religion you believe" is the wrong way to describe my relationship to Judaism (and the wrong way to describe many people's relationship to their religion, esp. non-Western religions), since none of my beliefs about the world are based on my Judaism. (E.g. as previously indicated, I am agnostic.) So the correct answer to the question "What religion do you believe in?" might, in my case, be "none". For the purposes of your data analysis, please feel free to code this answer as either "Jewish", "Mixed/other", or blank, depending on what you actually meant by the question."
is a pretty Jewish (or at least, secular Ashkenazi) thing to say?
More detailed way of saying "cultural Catholic" to my view. Lots of people raised Catholic, go to Mass on Sundays, haven't a clue about the doctrines of the faith and don't care, live in effect in their personal lives the same way as the secular society around them. Look at Pelosi and Biden, for example; self-described "devout Catholics", completely out of step with the bishops on abortion. All the Catholics who use contraception and have sex before marriage. All the rest of it.
So that's "I'm culturally Jewish, my heritage is important to me, but I don't live by the rules of the faith because pfft, I'm a modern guy living in the modern world, do you think I'm some kind of zealot or something?"
So I managed to find a total of one Alt-Right transsexual in the database. Assuming it wasn't someone trolling - admittedly a very big if - I would very much like to read an interview with that person and how they reconcile their political views with their sexual identity.
I've known multiple trans women who were alt-righters, including one who wasn't even White herself despite associating with literal White nationalists. Also multiple trans women who were leftists of an explicitly Stalinist bent, which isn't much better from an LGBT rights perspective (the USSR under Stalin was just as oppressive towards queer people as any right-wing fascist regime).
In general, politically-active trans people seem prone to having extreme views in one direction or another: extreme right, extreme left, extreme libertarian, or some other type of fringe ideology. (A few weeks back, I saw one of those "trans woman bingo" memes and one of the boxes was "far-right, far-left, or ancap," which shows that the trans community is self-aware about this trend!) Granted, I'm trans and I'm a pretty moderate center-left liberal/civil libertarian myself, but I haven't seen many other trans people like me.
One could say that back in 1930-ies and 1940-ies, most regimes weren't "much better from an LGBT rights perspective", so one can easily believe "well, that was an unfortunate belief of the past but it's not really Stalinist-unique, and otherwise they were essentially correct".
No, the original Russian communist revolution passed some fairly progressive laws, relative not just to Tsarist Russia but to the laws in the rest of Europe at the time, and Stalin wound them all back to maximum repression when he came in.
This is actually a myth. I've heard a lot of leftists claim that the USSR was tolerant of queer people (or at least more tolerant than anywhere else in the world) before Stalin came along, but the historical facts tell a different story.
The original Bolsheviks never actively made the choice to legalize homosexuality; they abolished the old Tsarist legal code entirely, and that happened to include the anti-homosexuality laws. Then, when they were crafting new laws, five of the seven Soviet Republics chose to prohibit homosexuality again. Furthermore, even in the two Soviet Republics that didn't explicitly criminalize it (Russia and Ukraine), the legal authorities often found excuses to arrest and prosecute male homosexuals, which made it effectively illegal in practice: The mere act of trying to initiate a sexual encounter with another man would frequently be treated as solicitation and punished accordingly. It was also common for gay men to be arrested on suspicion of pederasty without any probable cause.
Leaving aside specific policies, Soviet propaganda from the pre-Stalinist era frequently condemned homosexuality as a form of mental illness requiring treatment at best, and a form of capitalist/fascist degeneracy at worse. On top of the usual conservative association between homosexuality and pedophilia, being queer was also commonly seen as a strong indicator of "counter-revolutionary tendencies." And when Stalin finally did prohibit homosexuality across the entire Soviet Union, it wasn't some unpopular diktat he forced upon an otherwise progressive culture; he had the overwhelming support of both the general populace and the Communist Party leadership.
In short:
1. The Bolshevik government's legalization of homosexuality was an oversight, not an intentional choice
2. Homosexuality was illegal in 5/7ths of the Soviet Union even before Stalin came to power
3. Even in the 2/7ths of the Soviet Union where homosexuality was technically legal on paper, male homosexuality was basically illegal in practice
4. Soviet culture was largely hostile toward homosexual behavior, associating it with mental illness, pedophilia, and fascist political leanings
5. The Soviet masses and party leadership overwhelmingly agreed with Stalin's choice to criminalize it across the whole of the USSR
Interesting anecdotes. I think they are only partially born out by the data, though. I computed the standard deviations of responses to the political spectrum question (1 for far left, 10 for far right) for different gender groups. The SD for trans women is only slightly higher than that for cis women and is a lot lower than that for cis men.
Gender N SD
1 F (cisgender) 719 1.70
2 F (transgender m -> f) 127 1.73
3 M (cisgender) 5786 1.90
4 M (transgender f -> m) 20 1.50
5 Other 173 1.44
6 NA 32 1.87
And I understand your claim only pertains to "politically-active trans people". But the pattern remains the same if we filter out people who rated their political interest as < 4, on a scale of 1-5.
I also tried to get the percentages of respondents who are on the more extreme ends on the political spectrum (<= 2 or >= 9 on a scale of 1-10) or have more extreme political affiliations. It's perhaps not surprisingly that people on the far left are greatly overrepresented among trans people. Not so much for those on the far right, but we need a larger group of trans people to be able to draw anything conclusive.
Gender N % Far Left % Far Right
1 F (cisgender) 719 10.71% 1.53%
2 F (transgender m -> f) 127 25.20% 1.57%
3 M (cisgender) 5786 7.74% 2.80%
4 M (transgender f -> m) 20 25.00% NA
5 Other 173 33.53% NA
6 <NA> 32 6.25% NA
Gender N % Marxist % Neoreactionary % Alt-right
1 F (cisgender) 697 2.15% 1.15% 0.57%
2 F (transgender m -> f) 124 8.06% 1.61% 0.81%
3 M (cisgender) 5683 1.64% 2.16% 1.34%
4 M (transgender f -> m) 20 5.00% NA NA
5 Other 166 5.42% 0.60% NA
6 <NA> 30 NA NA 6.67%
It's interesting that you haven't met trans people who hold more moderate, center left political views. Almost 24% of trans respondents fall between 4 and 5 on the political spectrum. It could be that people with more moderate views tend to be less vocal about their politics.
The respondent doesn't seem to be very interested in politics though. They rated their political interest as a 2 on a scale of 1 (not interested at all) - 5 (very interested).
Scott: May I repost some of those COVID survey results on my weekly COVID update on Twitter? I'll credit you and ACX—or not—as you wish. What's interesting to me, is the number of COVID virgins. I've argued in the past that 25% of the nation's population has caught COVID yet. But without updated serological data it's hard to prove.
Yes, I read that. But it didn't jibe with some previous seroprevalence surveys—and when I added subsequent cases multiplied by the CDC's 2.8x estimate. And it didn't jibe with my peer group in which less than a third of us have caught COVID. Unfortunately, unlike the UK ONS, the CDC hasn't been conducting continuous seroprevalence surveys (bless their little hearts!).
What do you mean "it didn't jibe with seroprevalence?" antibodies don't stay permanently (T-cells are more permanent), and are less likely to be generated to a detectable degree in vaccinated patients, as the CDC notes in their seroprevalence study (which found that already a year ago, most Americans tested positive for antibodies: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7117e3.htm).
Why do you think that less than a third of your peer group has caught COVID? What percentage of COVID infections are you estimating are asymptomatic?
Remember, vaccinated people people are less likely to be symptomatic and younger people are less likely to be symptomatic.
[If memory serves, more recent variants have also been less severe, so probably more less likely to cause symptomatic infection]
And unless people get tested for COVID every time they get sick, then even being symptomatic would not let them know that they've had COVID.
I am pretty sure that I have not had covid, and I know quite a few others who think the same. Virtually all of these people, including me, are over 50, and many are over 60. The reasons I'm inclined to believe that this group really has not had covid are: (1)They are quite cautious. All got each vax as soon as they qualified, all wore high quality masks in indoor public settings with great consistency throughout pandemic. All are still masking, though with a bit less consistency.. (2) It is not very likely that somebody aged 50+, with no prior infection, would have an asymptomatic case. (3) All tested pretty frequently. They tested if they'd had an exposure, tested if they didn't feel well, tested before gatherings with others. If they'd had an asymptomatic case there's a fairly good chance they would have discovered it via a home test.
Sorry if I'm not eager to get sucked into this argument again. But without monthly seroprevalence numbers, it boils down to belief more than proof. Yes, seropositivity fades (which is why we can get reinfected by all hCoVs), but the data for how fast it fades is all over the place, and conclusions from different studies all admit a significant range of uncertainty.
However, if "everyone has caught COVID" (as some insist), that would mean COVID would have significantly lower IFR than any recent influenzas (and that conclusion pisses off a different group of people).
And, yes, I'm aware of that CDC study as well. Paraphrasing it and removing the CI's for readability and adding actual population numbers...
"Over the same period, seroprevalence increased from...
44.2% to 75.2% among children aged 0–11 years... (0.75*48 million=36 million)
45.6% to 74.2% among persons aged 12–17 years... (0.74*25 million=18.5 million)
36.5% to 63.7% among adults aged 18–49 years... (0.64*139 million=89 million)
28.8% to 49.8% among those aged 50–64 years... (0.50*64 million=32 million)
from 19.1% to 33.2% among those aged ≥65 years." (0.33*56 million=18.5 million)
Pre-BA.1, 113 million people were seropositive for COVID. Overall 192 million people were sero+ after BA.1. US population is ~332 million. 192/322=0.58. So 58% of the US was sero+ by EoFeb 2022. That left 139 million people who were seronegative.
Seroprevalence may have been fading since the start of the US pandemic, but the majority of pre-BA.1 cases were in 2021. I doubt if we would see the seroprevalence among that group drop much. But just for shits and giggles let's assume 20% had their nAbs drop far enough to be undetectable. That yields 166 million people infected with SARS2 before BA.1 came along. Add the 79 million BA.1 cases, and we get 245 million.
But wait! A certain percentage of those were reinfections! Let's pick a low reinfection rate number, say 10%. So it looks like closer to 221 million people had been infected by EoFeb 2022. If the reinfection rate is closer to 20%, as some data indicates, then that number is closer to 196 million.
There were another 22.5 million official BA.2, BA.5, and BQ.1x cases. Using the CDC's 2.8x multiplier for BA.1, we get 63 million. Minus 10% for reinfection yields 57 million. Minus 20% for reinfections yields 50 million.
Using the 10% reinfection rate number, I get 221+57=278 million. 332-278=54 million COVID virgins — i.e. 16% of US population
Using the 20% reinfection rate number, I get 196+50=246 million. 332-246=86 million COVID virgins — i.e. 26% of US population.
And if seroprevalence fades on the rate and timescale of other hCoVs then we can largely remove it from the previous calculations...
10% reinfection rate: Using the original post-BA.1 192 million number, 192+57=249 million. 332-249=83 million COVID virgins — i.e. 25% of US population.
20% reinfection rate: Using the original post-BA.1 192 million number, 192+50=242 million. 332-242=90 million COVID virgins — i.e. 27% of US population.
So, I've just spent over 2 hours looking up the US population by age cohort and then running the numbers using that CDC study as a starting point—but I doubt that I've convinced you. Thus my reluctance to get into this argument again. ;-)
Also, I'm in the 50-64 age cohort, as are most of my friends. So 50% seroprevalence in that age cohort as of EofFeb 22 is the US average. But I'm also living in an area that has had high mask usage (San Francisco Bay Area). A significant number of people are still wearing masks. Whether it's due to masking or due to our superior immune systems from our healthy California lifestyles, our case rates were much lower than any of the Red states. So what Eremolalos said...
I very much doubt we've all had asymptomatic infections.
I would suspect the high levels of bright sun (lots of UV), and ease of spending time outside or inside with good ventilation, would help. Except that I gather Americans in hot places spend a lot of time in sealed buildings with air conditioning?
Thanks for sharing those numbers. I'll look them over. I don't plan on quibbling about them, but I'm curious which 2.8 multiplier from the CDC you are referencing. I see here: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burden.html that they estimated 1 in 4 infections being reported in Feb. 2020 - September 2021.
CDC stated that 2.8 multiplier number in COVID status summary post-BA.1 (late March / early April 2022 timeframe). I admit that I can't find the link to that document anymore. But I remember comparing it to the numbers derived from the document referenced above, and it worked out to a 2.8x multiplier for seroprevalence vs official clinical cases.
BA.1 seropositivity gain = 79 million
Clinically recorded BA.1 cases during BA.1 surge = ~28 million
I haven't had COVID yet, as far as I know (despite a close exposure last week I didn't get symptoms and tested negative). I guess my bivalent booster protected me.
Country: There are 40 from "Netherlands" and another 20 from "The Netherlands". Last time I looked, these were all Dutch. ;) You may skip the option "The N." next time.
Kids: Hard to read, but if got it right one needs just 6 kids to become the lone Genghis Khan of ACX. And: Elon Musk did not take the survey.
Pairwise linear regressions on all the satisfaction questions:
Job vs. life: slope=.54, r^2=.36
Social vs. life: slope=.55, r^2=.36
Romantic vs. life: slope=.37, r^2=.28
Social vs. job: slope=.4, r^2=.16
Romantic vs. job: slope=.18, r^2=.06
Social vs. romantic: slope=.36, r^2=.23
All fantastically significant. Successful people are successful, but you could probably use this to prioritize at the margin: if you want to be happy, focus on getting a satisfying job and social life and don't worry as much about romance. If you want a better love life, improving your social activity is more useful than being happier at work.
* I wonder what can be the reasons why homosexuals have higher median IQ/SAT scores (the effect is rather small though, and the IQ/SAT responses are sparse and have outliers);
* "Political Spectrum" has many strong correlations, but most of them are obvious. One non-obvious one is a mildly positive correlation with "Children" (maybe it is because of age, but is still counterintuitive);
* "Children" also correlates positively with "BMI" (also likely because of age). However, contrary to the popular stereotype, "BMI" does not correlate with "Romantic Satisfaction", which is quite interesting.
* Again, contrary to stereotypes, "STEM" doesn't correlate with "IQ" (or even correlates mildly negatively). Though this can be due to the biased selection or poor quality of "IQ" responses.
They don't have a clear meaning - this is a t-SNE projection (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-distributed_stochastic_neighbor_embedding). It embeds non-linear multidimensional data to two dimensions, preserving nearest neighbors (so if there are clearly defined clusters, they'll be easy to spot, in contrast to simpler projections like PCA).
It says "While t-SNE plots often seem to display clusters, the visual clusters can be influenced strongly by the chosen parameterization and therefore a good understanding of the parameters for t-SNE is necessary." So... I admit I don't have a good - or, frankly, any - understending of the embedding parameters.
When you click on a comment (on the date) to go a dedicated page for that comment, there's a text field there, but if you submit a comment there, it ends up at the top level and not as a reply to the comment whose page you are on. Probably the reason for the many stray top-level comments. Sry can't really find a substack issue report contact.
I think it would be interesting to look into the emails people used and see if any groupings show up. Such as those who use years or numbers in their email address or silly phrases or those who put school and work emails in. Or the demographics of gmail vs yahoo vs Hotmail and the like. I think only Scott would be able to perform that analysis due to having to know full emails.
On a hopefully less controversial front than my committed theist remark, I'm also surprised at how few people dream in B&W. My dreams have always been in black and white and really really hazy. Guess I'm one of the lucky/unlucky few - definitely jealous of all of you who get these awesome vivid dreams every night while I'm stuck with something that reminds me of playing video games from my youth where everything seems barely tangible.
Finally got around to going through the results and just remembered how annoyed I got at the "your country's covid response: too lax or too strict?" question. In the UK the covid response was too strict *because* it was too lax. In other words, they waited too long to act, so when they did they were forced to take extreme actions.
Some countries dealt with the pandemic in a relatively competent way, and others in a relatively incompetent way. Lax/strict isn't the most important axis.
The self-reported SAT scores vary from "plausible" to "didn't read the question correctly" to "clearly just trolling". I would put even less stock in self-reported IQ.
We looked into this more closely on a previous survey. People gave details about exactly which test they took and so on. People who took very well-known official tests had about the same IQ as everyone else on the survey. My guess is this is a tendency for people to get their IQs measured in childhood and childhood IQs to be normed weird in the gifted population such that they seem very high compared to adult IQs, but I haven't actually studied this topic.
I do also think probably the "real" ACX average IQ if we sat everyone down and forced them to do best practices IQ tests would be somewhere between 120 and 130. This is around the average Ivy League IQ, and my impression is that ACX commenters are about as smart as Ivy Leaguers (while being much less motivated and generally competent). It's also a bit above the average programmer IQ and my impression is that the average ACX commenter is a bit smarter than the average programmer.
Sorry, yes.
I can proudly declare that I have an Official Certificate (with a lovely Greek psi and everything!) from the Brain Testing Institute attesting that they administered (online) an IQ test to me and my result was an Intelligence Quotient of 93.
Which is a result I think is probably accurate, since the test was based on a cut-down version of the Cattell Culture Fair Intelligence Test, and I am atrocious at pattern-recognition, pattern-matching, spatial manipulation and mathematics in general.
That means I am a normie! (First time I've ever been normal in anything) 😁 So the next time someone mentions "IQ 90 normies", they're talking about me!
I don't know about pattern recognition, but based on your comments, your verbal intelligence is certainly above average! 😊
Thank you. Words have always been easy, or at least reading/writing. Speaking is another matter.
Words, though: words have been my friends. Words are good.
Wow, those spacial and pattern scores must have godawful to pull the average down to 90, given that you probably did very well on tests of verbal abilities. Just so you know, you probably qualify as someone with a thing called non-verbal learning disability. There's lots of stuff written about it -- you might find it interesting. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure I have some funky wiring too and I don't give a damn what the name for it is. You may feel the same way.
Off topic, but I like the idea of "funky wiring". "Neurodiversity" is a little off from exactly how I want to describe myself. "Funky wiring" or "processing differences" is probably the best way to go about that. Thanks for the new term to help express subtle, complex things!
I think, based on nothing more than cursory reading, that I might have dyscalculia, because reading the symptoms and so forth sounds like a great fit. And to this day I still have problems with "which is left and which is right?".
So if intelligence is based on mathematical ability, I am indeed very dumb. Words? Words are easy. Sums hard.
Ahem. Looking up "Nonverbal Learning Disorder" and seeing the following:
"Provide one-on-one assistance for fine motor tasks such as folding or cutting with scissors"
I may or may not have recently cut myself when using scissors. Clearly I still need a full-time assistant for fine motor tasks 🤣
I can sympathize! As a child, I took one of those multi-spectrum IQ tests and scored a 92 on visual-spatial intelligence, even though everything else was in the 120s-130s range (my highest score was a 136 in verbal comprehension and the overall average was 122). Judging by your comments here, I suspect you'd score quite high on verbal intelligence too; the problem with single-category intelligence tests is that they generally fail to account for people who are very gifted in some areas but mediocre or subpar in others.
> I do also think probably the "real" ACX average IQ if we sat everyone down and forced them to do best practices IQ tests would be somewhere between 120 and 130. This is around the average Ivy League IQ
Source? Average Harvard SAT score is 1520 (according to this site[1], idk where they get their info but it's consistent with other sources I've seen in the past), which corresponds to an IQ of 146.[2] I'm sure the average across all Ivies is a lower but I'd be surprised if it was less than 130.
[1] https://cleverharvey.com/harvard-sat-scores/
[2] https://www.iqcomparisonsite.com/SATIQ.aspx
> It's also a bit above the average programmer IQ and my impression is that the average ACX commenter is a bit smarter than the average programmer.
I'm less confident about this but I think the average programmer at a FANG or Silicon Valley startup is much smarter than the average programmer in general, probably on the order of 1 SD. (I'm just guessing based on the kinds of salaries they earn and my personal experience.) And I think the average ACX reader is on the order of the average FANG programmer.
We really need to pick some online test that looks halfway decent, get as many of us as possible to do it, and see what the scores say. No, it won't be an official proper IQ test, but if the results come out roughly in line with what people are claiming, we'll know one way or the other.
When I teach my intelligence course, I use a few questions from Raven's Progressive Matrices. If you do the last three questions or so, you're distinguishing the high end (130 and up). It's notable that it's only a small number of questions at this point, and so testing error (and test taker motivation, and your Bayesian priors over patterns) plays a big role.
It's very hard to study "high IQ" for this reason! Most of the stylized facts we have about intelligence comes from results in the middle range (80 to 120).
I kind of like that idea. But let's test for somethings in addition to IQ. One measure I like is ideational fluency. You give somebody 5 mins. to come up with as many uses as they can for something like a brick. (By the way, people with a bipolar first degree relative who are not bipolar themselves score higher on this. Pretty interesting, and probably one reason why bipolar genes stick around in the population. )
I'm dubious. In the real world coming up with a bigger number of ideas isn't super useful, since most people can already do it to a degree greater than is necessary. Just look at how good people are at coming up with random conspiracy stories about how JFK was killed, or why the economy slowed/sped up, or what the solution to healthcare or education cost inflation might be.
Or just ask people how they could lose weight, get fit, be happier at their job or in their marriages -- hardly a soul will shrug and say "boy I dunno," -- they will all usually have theories and ideas, often several, often complex[1].
I think the trick to solving problems is more closely related to rapidly discarding unworkeable ideas and zeroing in on those that have a better chance of working. Really smart people can zero in on the optimal and functional solution faster, and cut out a huge amount of running down dead ends. I would guess a good test of that kind of ability would be making Fermi estimates.
-----------
[1] And usually wrong and/or ludicrous, too. But you have to be smarter to realize this, that is, "smart" I think is more about knowing quickly which ideas are ridiculous and which are not.
Didn’t the SAT stop being comparable to an IQ test at some point? I think I remember reading that you can’t use SAT scores after a certain date to qualify for Mensa (but the GMAT, you still can).
The SAT and IQ scores are still extremely well-correlated. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6963451/
MENSA's decision to refuse to accept recentered (post-1994) scores was more weird political statement than sincere concern about validity.
MENSA in general sounds quite weird.
The SAT says it measures "developed ability," i.e. brain power plus mastery of various skill domains. Anyone who hasn't gone to school or done the equivalent of schooling at home will not get a high score, even if they have a high IQ. You have to understand basic math up thru I think simple algebra and geometry, and you have to have read enough to have vocabulary that includes moderately fancy words ("ostensible," etc.).
The article you cite says various studies have found SAT scores/IQ correlations of between 0.5 and 0.9. While 0.9 certainly does count as extremely good correlation, 0.5 does not -- it's moderate. I'm pretty sure IQ scores correlate better with each other than they do with SAT scores. One study of the correlation between IQ at age 11 and at 77 found a correlations in the .70's -- pretty impressive. It's here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289615000203
Since Harvard explicitly selects for SAT scores (and gets to be choosy), but does not explicitly select for IQ, you would expect the IQ-SAT relationship to be less strong for Harvard attendees than the general public.
The range of SAT & IQ scores at highly selective universities is much lower that the range for the population that takes the SAT. When the range in data is smaller, you always get lower correlations. For instance, last time I looked height was correlated with various measures of professional success for males. But if you looked only at males 6'0" to 6'4" you'd find a lower correlation, because there will be less variance to work with.
You state it like a dismissal but it is important thing to notice, though, both for details of statistical argument made and its practical relevance.
There isn't any fundamental statistical reason why range 6'0'' to 6'4'' should not have enough variance "to work with". It is all well possible to generate a fake simulated score which is 100% linearly correlated with the height in 4'' range and get computer spit out perfect correlations. The reason why it does not happen in the real life data matters. (Are the measurements truncated, low resolution, or is it something to do with noise in X/Y/both? And is it noise in the measurement or variance in the underlying thing measured?)
At least in my case, the only formal IQ test I've ever taken was as a young child, and I got a sky-high result. I think the result is of dubious utility, but as long as you keep asking for it, I will keep supplying it.
This is what is going on with me. I only ever took an "official" IQ test at ~14, and I think at that age you still get an age adjustment.
Also I was absolutely a fucking genius at 14 in a way I am not at all now. So I got an incredibly high score. I am positive I would score much lower today, both due to the lack of age adjustment, and because I am 41 and my mind has deteriorated noticeably in terms of raw horsepower.
And motivation! When I look at IQ tests today, all I can think is "God who cares". By necessity, an IQ test strips out all cultural context and ambiguity — but that's what's most interesting to think about.
I've taken several informal IQ tests (but left this question blank because none of them qualify). To note, though, the one I took aged around 11 scored 146; every one I've tried as an adult has come out in the mid to low 120s.
"ACX commenters are about as smart as Ivy Leaguers (while being much less motivated and generally competent)" Wait, you think ACXers are much less motivated and generally competent than Ivy Leaguers? What makes you think so -- high numbers on the diagnosed and self-dianosed mental illness questions?
Also, my impression, based solely on reading comments here, is that overall this is the smartest large group I have ever conversed with, and I know lots of Ivy Leaguers. In fact I am one. I think mt feeling that ACX is very smart is partly a response to factors other than good old high SAT smarts -- main one is sort of a general, dark-tending , mental uncoventionality factor that allows people to walk down certain speculative paths others don't.
When it comes to smarts, we're all three racoons in a coat on here 😁
This seems about right. SAT score ranges (with some exceptions) seem to match schools in the top-20 USNWR.
There are two ways to explain the inconsistency between reported IQ and reported SAT scores:
1. people like to think of themselves as high-IQ, and IQ tests are generally taken earlier in life, so it's easier to (truthfully) misremember in the preferred direction — turning a 137 into a 147, etc. SAT scores are a focus of obsession for college admissions, and most people can be expected to remember them exactly.
2. the early IQ test scores are being remembered correctly. ACX readers are preferentially kids streamed into gifted programs early in life, or generally understood by self, parents, and peers to be high promise. But, later SAT scores do not line up — either because the IQ test has noise, or because they blew the SAT. Given the importance of SAT scores to college admissions, this means that ACX readers find themselves in later life in intellectual environments that they feel (rightly or wrongly) are beneath them. ACX provides a new environment for them to thrive and feel (and be) smart.
I dunno, I imagine it's more accurate than you think. I probably have a pretty good IQ, but I've never taken the official test, so I left it blank. I think "people who get an official IQ test" is sort of self-selected for people who are curious and think they will do really well, right? And I would expect this blog to select for a disproportionately high number of such people.
>I think "people who get an official IQ test" is sort of self-selected for people who are curious and think they will do really well, right?
There are other reasons, like very-concerned-with-academics parents, or diagnosing things (obviously mental retardation, but also e.g. Asperger's - the latter is why I had a test).
I agree. Many, many kids of upper middle class &/or concerned-with-academics parents get psych testing, often for problems that are not very severe and that have lots of plausible explanations besides a "wiring problem" in the kid -- things like not being attentive in class, being lonely, having trouble sleeping.
The cynical explanation I've seen for that is that having an Official Diagnosis means the parents can then ask for accommodations for the kid, and things like "more time to take tests" means bumping up grades even a little, and every little helps when you're maximising getting your kid (eventually) into a Good University. Plus, the accommodations carry over when they do go off to college, so that is also an edge.
I don't know if it's true, but if parents go to expense and trouble to make sure they can live in a good school district, why not game the system when you know it can be gamed and can afford to do so? Getting little Tarquin or Sophonisba a diagnosis so they get a legal prescription for stimulants to help them hyperfocus on study plus accommodations in test-taking is what you do before pre-natal gene editing to bump their potential IQ up to 150 is available.
It really does happen, and it's worse than you think. The kids that get the official diagnosis don't just get accommodations on school tests, they get them on the SAT. The standard accommodation is 50% more time than other people get. That gives them a huge advantage on the SAT. Even people who do extremely well on the SAT do not finish with a whole lot of time left to spare -- you have to go fast to finish.
I don't think most of the parents taking their kids for testing have accommodations in mind, though. I think a lot of what drives the upper middle class to get their kids tested is that they expected to get a kid who was well-adapted to moving smoothly along the steps to being a well-paid professional. So if their kid isn't high-achieving and well-behaved in school they view that as evidence of a disorder, rather than just a matter of temperament (or a precocious ability to recognize that a lot of what happens in school is stoopit and boring as shit).
The most common reasons to take a formal IQ test are to diagnose learning/intellectual disabilities and to qualify for gifted programs, so the real-world unadjusted results are bimodal-ish, with a flattish middle area disproportionately populated with "weird" scores (high performance/low verbal or vice versa).
The reading level of ACX will filter out most of the low bump and a good number of the low-verbal middle, so you've basically got the high bump plus some high-verbal-low-performance middles. That group is further self-selected for the people who know their scores and are willing to share them, so...probably not surprising that they skew very high. They seem mostly in line with the self-reported SAT scores.
People could just be lying, but I'm not seeing a clear pattern of unrealistically-impressive on the rest of the survey. Of course, we could just all care a lot more about seeming smart than we do about seeming successful or sane. Actually...that sounds plausible.
Maybe ask for photos of SAT/ACT score reports for a future version of the survey?
oh, this is a good point! it didn't occur to me that knowing your IQ score is probably correlated with what your IQ score is.
I think a lot of the people who ever did proper official IQ tests did them when they were children and those scores tend to be a lot higher. Doing a proper official test when you're an adult possibly drops your score down but I don't know how many people do one when they're adults.
Other places, some of us have never done any kind of IQ test because it's just not how schools/society in general is set up when it comes to testing kids.
I didn't report my IQ test results, but I had two when I was elementary age and took one when I was in college because I was in a psychometrics class where we were testing and scoring each other with all kinds of tests of varying legitimacy. The former isn't terribly unusual, though that already is a highly selected subgroup. The latter is quite unusual.
Doesn't the "new multiple choice questions" thing ruin that entry for statistical purposes? Is there a way to identify responses before/after the date they were added?
I'm too lazy to do anything with the data myself, I mean, just curious!
Yes. In my own analysis I plan to adjust for that (ie if I added it exactly halfway through, assume that it should get twice as many answers as it did and everything should be adjusted down proportionally), but it definitely ruins it for everyone else who didn't know that, which is why I flagged it here.
Possibly there are some systematic differences between people who took the survey early and those who took the survey later, which would complicate things. Then again, perhaps not.
That's what popped into my head also.
Do you have a reason to assume that the new answers would draw equally from all the old answers/ Can you reveal which options were added at the halfway point?
Thank you for sharing this! We might use as one of the example data sets for course I teach.
Really struck by the racial breakdown here — 87% white. This is a very different breakdown from (e.g.) a standard tech school, where White and Asian-American are usually at similar ratios.
Would be fun to compare (where possible) some of these statistics to the GSA. I think the GSA provides enough information to produce a sample that matches the ACX gender/race/age demographics.
A cursory glance at the data set and this was the most obvious thing that stood out to me as well. Very white!
Would be interesting to see if this is an age effect that tracks the changing composition of the tech world; e.g., if you restrict to 20-25, does the racial breakdown look more "tech school" in both race and gender.
Update: I couldn't help but check. Restricting to 21 to 25, the breakdown is
White (non-Hispanic): 80.5%
Asian (East Asian): 5.5%
Asian (Indian subcontinent): 5.2%
Hispanic: 3.2%
Other: 3.1%
Middle Eastern: 1.5%
Black: 0.9%
and by gender,
M (cisgender): 79.2%
F (cisgender): 10.4%
Other: 5.5%
F (transgender m -> f): 3.5%
M (transgender f -> m): 0.7%
So very much breaking my initial intuition that ACX is drawing uniformly from the tech stack.
You do see a shift to much higher trans representation. The F cis/F trans ratio is 3, i.e., roughly one in four women in this age range are trans, compared to one in 11 in the full sample.
Yeah, given the ACX readership's concentration in tech employment, propensity to have advanced degrees, and high standardized test scores, Asians are way underrepresented.
I'm pretty interested in seeing a survey from eg Matt Yglesias to see if this is a blogging phenomenon or an ACX phenomenon. I know Richard Hanania did a survey but he's right-wing and I want to rule out there being any effect from right-wingness.
I’m almost certain it’s a political blogging phenomenon. So I would expect Matt Y’s readership to be also mostly male and white.
If you’re going to do a control, it may be worth doing one a different type of blog - food, travel, sports or fashion.
Noah Smith would be also interesting...what I've noticed is that e.g., Tyler Cowen's blog is heavily dominated by right-wingers in the comment section, despite him not being nearly as right-wing (same for Hanania, even before his "turn" to the other side...).
I think he's not that right-wing anymore...?
Have you seen him turn on his own side lately? I think he may be making a move to the left, probably on account of having a kid and wanting to secure a safe income stream.
Is it well-known / generally believed that being lefty is a safer income stream? I would have expected the opposite from someone in Richard's position (ie popular Substacker).
Also, I think Richard has endorsed the (hilarious) theory that only right-wingers are safe from AI taking their jobs, since GPT-3 is programmed to refuse to write offensive (~ right-wing) things.
I’m not particularly surprised. Niche online political or politics- adjacent spaces tend to be very white and male (most political subreddits for instance, to a greater extent than Reddit in general).
And nerdy!
(Hat tip to Weird Al Yankovic)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9qYF9DZPdw
Lots of things are very white.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/02/11/black-people-less-likely/
Yes! I think we tend to underestimate the role of demographic homophily in group formation.
Isn't the 11% bisexual more surprising?
More surprising but it’s one of the later columns so it doesn’t immediately jump out at you when you open the file!
I am not surprised nor unsurprised but as someone who ticked this box let me say that I was scrupulous. I have enjoyed experiences with both sexes but in 1993 I hooked up with an opposite sex partner and that has been it. And I would say most and possibly all of my gay friends had some hetero experiences in early life.
Yeah my scrupulosity led me to bump myself up to bi on the basis of a one brief but delightful homosexual fling and a few early passionate crushes on members of my own sex. Questionnaires are fatiguing because you have to parse so many edge cases of this kind.
I think most people would consider both of you bisexual, no? Like the concept doesn't imply equal attraction to members of both sexes, just some attraction to each sex.
Being truly bi always seemed sort of special and magical to me, and I feel like I don't deserve the label, since clearly I'm mostly what Dan Savage calls "a breeder." But yeah, technically I'm bi.
Wonder what the male-female crosstabs are on that. I vaguely remember the last large group of tech people I knew an awful lot of the women were bi but few of the men. That was 20 years ago though.
The thing that used to keep me from experimenting in that direction was AIDS. The thing that now does is the distaste for it among the much larger straight female population.
EDIT: All right, did the work. Of the 730 cisgender female respondents, 189 were bi. Of the 128 transgender female respondents, 77 were bi. Of the 5843 cisgender male respondents, 389 were bi. Of the 21 transgender male respondents, 12 were bi. Of the 174 'other' respondents, 83 were bi.
So it is being driven by the non-cisgender-male minority of the respondents; cisgender men are only about 7% bi.
I think if you're a man a lot of women don't want to date a bi man, so if you're bi you either have to pick straight or gay. Unsurprisingly (social stigma, number of partners) most will pick straight unless they are Kinsey 5's.
Sexuality results for men are extremely stable across long timescales; estimates of the (cis) male "homosexual" population are usually between 5% and 10%, and ACX here seems to more or less reflect the norm. "True" bisexuality in men is relatively unusual, with men showing a pretty clear bimodal distribution in physiological sexual response to different forms of pornography (lots of Kinsey 1s, some 5s, far fewer 3s).
The combination of rare base-rates for male bisexuality, plus a woman's fear that a man is only pretending to be interested in women for social acceptance, is likely one of the things that makes this a more "discreet" identification in public.
That seems a little high... Latest UK census stats gives
"Around 1.5 million people (3.2%) identified with an LGB+ orientation (“Gay or Lesbian”, “Bisexual” or “Other sexual orientation”)."
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/culturalidentity/sexuality/bulletins/sexualorientationenglandandwales/census2021
Something a little odd about this survey — possibly due to the wide age range: “ 43.4 million people (89.4% of the population aged 16 years and over) identified as straight or heterosexual” but there was a 7% non-response rate.
I’ve *never* seen an estimate of “gay or lesbian” as low as 1.5% (which is the ONS report).
Something is funny there, and I don’t understand the high selective non-response. Perhaps older generations felt uncomfortable answering?
Not really. Bi is 15 % among Gen Z , 6% among Millennials. More (incl. my generation) at Bryan Caplan: https://betonit.substack.com/p/lgbt-explosion
As ever, it's hard to know how much of that is "people feeling more comfortable about coming out" and how much is "for younger people, being plain old cis het is boring and invokes a slightly condemnatory attitude - you are part of the CISHETERONORMATIVE PATRIARCHY which is oppressing minorities! - so the cheapest and easiest way to get the cachet of a queer identity is to say you're bi; you need never date or have any kind of relationship with a person of the same sex but you can claim you are same-sex attracted with little cost or query".
You seem to be ignoring diagnostic substitution as the other major possible explanatory factor in increased bisexual identity. It may be that the definition of what "counts" as bisexual is shifting from someone who is dead in the middle of the Kinsey scale to someone who isn't strictly hetero or same-sex in their romantic preferences. If the latter, based on old estimates of how many people with that are out there, the "bisexual" category could be larger than even in the Gen Z numbers currently report.
I do wonder how much of the generational difference in sexuality is just a result of definitions changing. I think among the younger generations, there's a tendency for people who might be 1's on the Kinsey scale to consider themselves "bi," whereas in previous generations they'd have considered themselves straight.
Well people are relatively nice here, so no surprise the Asian % is low (as Harvard has pointed out, Asians have bad personalities)
Eight layers of irony in your response, I think! More seriously, it would be interesting to think about personality questions. One that would be fun to use is the standard survey on other-regarding preferences, preference for equality, etc.
Naw I'm a WASP and I have a bad personality too.
Seriously, though, what did freakin Harvard say about Asian's personalities?
Part of a famous discrimination case currently in play: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/15/us/harvard-asian-enrollment-applicants.html
Ugh.
It looks roughly like 87% of the respondents are from white-majority countries, so in that light it doesn't strike me as surprising.
<quote>White and Asian-American are usually at similar ratios</quote>
just want to confirm you mean Asian-American, and not Asian.
Depends on the school; in many cases the triplet of White: Asian-American:International Student who is East Asian can approach near equal ratios.
I highlighted this sad lack of diversity to scott which is almost certainly a product of his endorsement of racist pseudoscience in the past and tolerance of racism in his comment section every post, and I highlighted a number of initiatives he should consider to create a more inclusive space for people of color.
And you know what he did? He deleted the comment. He acts like this great moral authority, but at the end of the day he would rather profit from his privilege than work towards building a more just society.
Let me guess: "more inclusive space for people of color" = "gimme grant of big money to set up project for BIPOC, no you can't ask me to account for what I'm going to do with it"?
People will find their way here by all sorts of ways. This is not a Moral Accountability Centre, it's a place of offbeat interests for various oddbods to discuss in a mostly civil fashion.
The main thing was scrubbing all the hateful comments on his posts that casually talk about black people being "less intelligent" than white people - of course he's scaring off BIPOC with this crap.
But yes, he should be funding BIPOC initiatives instead of wasting it on the white people causes he funds. He cares more about imaginary white people in the future than he does black people suffering and being oppressed today.
I don't expect him to change, but just know that by refusing he's just pushing us closer towards the day when people like him will be forced to do the right thing and can no longer profit from their privilege and spread racist pseudoscience. He'll be squealing about "free speech", but justice trumps your imagined "right" to be hateful.
I dunno, might be true, but I thought I'd say for the record (n=1) that I started giving the only charity money I give to malaria nets because of this blog.
Personally I think the robot apocalypse is a bit culty and nuts, but as far as I can tell it would turn more non-white people into paperclips than white people, given that the idea is that it will turn everyone into paperclips. Most of the actual money going to prevent this non-event from non-eventing does seem to go to white and Asian techbros, but I don't know that the intent is a racist one.
And at any rate, EA on the whole saves, as far as I can tell, more sub-Saharan African lives than it saves white lives.
I do find the whole movement a bit misogynist, and what I perceive as misogynist comments irritate me, so I can see how what you perceive as racist comments would be similarly irritating. C'est la vie, on the whole I find the moderation policy and the comment section pretty fair and open.
All this hypothetical paperclip crap is an excuse for white people to avoid confronting their complicity in actual systematic racism in the here and now and the privilege that accrues to them as a result.
But consider how nuts it is that you can literally spout white supremacist pseudoscience in this comment section, but heaven forbid you express any opposition to it and the alienating effect it has on potential readers of color because that gets instantly deleted.
Who is oppressing you, Moboy? How are you oppressed? Have you written more on this elsewhere, like Twitter or Facebook or Reddit or Instagram or TikTok? Can you direct me to that, because I am ready to learn more and be educated from and by your example of how you, yourself, suffer from systemic racism and the complicity of white people.
Who is this "us", white man? (as the joke goes).
I'm getting a certain faint aura of something from your comments, which I am not going to expand upon further since I think this would provide what you are looking for.
So - are you white or BIPOC yourself? Because you sound like one of those white liberals online who jump up with all kinds of accusations and attacks on behalf of 'people of colour', even if they are unasked for and real 'people of colour' don't know or don't care about the matter in question.
And to conclude, is this a call for violence? "Pushing us closer", "forced to do the right thing", "squealing", "right to be hateful".
You're doing pretty good on the "right to be hateful" front yourself there!
"I don't expect him to change, but just know that by refusing he's just pushing us closer towards the day when people like him will be forced to do the right thing and can no longer profit from their privilege and spread racist pseudoscience. He'll be squealing about "free speech", but justice trumps your imagined "right" to be hateful." It fascinating how much this resembles the relish with which some Christians imagine everyone is going to burn in hell. Have you considered the way to end hatred in this country does not involve you yourself expressing obvious racial hatred?
I don't have racial hatred. I have hatred for racists.
I'm almost a free speech absolutist, but I hope he deletes this comment, too. It merely adds an unimaginative ad hominem non sequitur to the same string of slogans which it is fashionable in some corners of the Internet to deploy instead of original reasoning. Pasting in a random dirty limerick or even several lines of "lorem ipsum" would've contributed more.
When I hear people speaking in clichés like this, I wonder if that is what their inner voice sounds like or if they assume that this is just what arguing adults say.
That is honestly an excellent question. I would love to figure how many people are true believers vs. adopting it for personal/political motives.
Yes, how could anyone think white supremacists are bad other than for "personal motives"
I mean, there are thousands of other sites like reddit and facebook which enforce the policies you desire. The mainstream media actively avoids reporting anything that would make BIPOC or women as a class look bad.
Why not start your own substack? Maybe with Elon blowing up Twitter we can go back to the days of 'start your own blog'. Maybe there's a substantial set of BIPOC rationalists who feel their voices aren't being heard. Maybe you can be the one to lead them.
"Racist pseudoscience" says that Asians have higher IQ than whites on average, so this should increase appeal to them if anything.
My pet theory is there's too much white nationalist presence on all the IQ-related blogs, etc. Same should be true for Jews, and we don't see that (though quite a few prominent Jewish commentators like Steven Pinker and Sam Harris seem to be basically sympathetic but skirting the issue to avoid getting in trouble.)
Just because these racists try and hide behind asians, don't make it any less bullshit or racist
How do you define 'racist'?
Nobody except racists ever ask this question so you just played yourself
You must be new here. (I'm showing my age)
Seriously, from the rationalist point of view you should be trying to answer my question rather than arguing I belong to an outgroup without any further attempt to convince either me or the lurking audience. ;)
I had trouble answering this because I’m white and hispanic. Hispanics can be white, black, indigenous, and any combination of the three. I suppose they could be Asian too if they were born in Latin America to Asian parents.
Alberto Fujimori FTW! Even did the coup thing.
EDIT: and yeah, me too.
Yes! Me too. Sometimes people don’t think there are white people among Hispanics. I don’t know if the goal was to make sure none of us were uncounted in the Hispanic category. The survey probably got most of us. Hi Milo, lol :)
Did you filter by country? Tech demographics are not universal.
It's difficult to understand the results of the questions based on a linear scale: it only shows the theme of the question as a title and then a bar graph showing the percentage of users who chose each option. For example: a graph titled "Global Warming" with five bars labeled 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5.
You can see the questions at the top link. If you look up the global warming question, you'll see that 1 = "requires strong action", 5 = "does not require action".
God bless you for this occasional validation of the lurker class. We are legion.
From what i remember the readership seems to have become more left-wing compared to previous surveys.
I suspect there's some evaporative cooling going on. Scott several years ago, Scott's political views were a refreshing breath of fresh air from a very woke media/academia/corporate world. But as they've stuck around and realized that Scott is fundamentally left-of-center, they've moved on, especially since there are other rat-adjacent options (themotte.org, e.g., of SSC lineage, is solidly right-wing)
> (themotte.org, e.g., of SSC lineage, is solidly right-wing)
AFAIK there are no surveys from themotte.org, but /r/themotte did a survey 9 months ago (https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/tvujqr/independent_demographic_and_political_survey_of/) and found:
- only 1 in 5 identified with one of the two major parties, with a "moderate preference" for the Republican Party (don't know how much b/c the links to results are dead)
- slight preference for Biden over Trump in the 2020 election (52% vs. 48%*)
- of the top 4 politicians with highest favorability, #1 and #3 are Republicans and #2 and #4 are Democrats, with only a 4.8 percentage point difference between #1 and #4 (I'm excluding Zelenskyy)
I would characterize this as basically centrist, or maybe weakly but not solidly right-wing.
*among the subset of people who voted for either Biden or Trump
My impression as an outside observer and extremely rare lurker in themotte is that the far right commenters post more frequently than any other subgroup. My suspicion is that, if this is true, it happens because themotte is one of the only places on the internet where you can express far-right hot takes to a mid-sized audience that isn't full of nutjobs without getting banned. This leads to people coming in and seeing a higher density of far-right opinions than is representative of its actual userbase.
I would like a current definition of what is meant by "far-right". I would have taken that as "you know, neo-Nazi" and while that still seems to be the group meant, "far-right" has expanded to include a lot of examples that make me go "Uh, what?" For instance, Trump is far-right. Republicans (no parsing out between sub-groups) are far-right. If you are not 110% on board with the trans rights demands, you are far-right.
Have we anything more concrete than "I don't like you" to go as a definition of "far-right" as distinct from "right-wing" and "right of centre"?
The existence of this term is curious because there isn't much of a parallel on the right. Righties don't seem to need "far left" as a term of opprobrium, "left" seems to do fine. One assumes the problem is that when a lefty says "so-and-so is on the right!' the typical reaction from one Not Of The Body is "And...so? What's wrong with that?" so our hero needs to come back with "No, you don't understand, I mean on the *far* right." "Ah! Now I see!"
Not sure what to make of this, except that maybe it reflects a slow evaporation of what might be called the "center left," people in the (original) Bill Clinton or Harry Truman mold, people who believed in a fairly strong regulatory environment, unions, public schools, but also in traditional social institutions (marriage, family, church), a robustly free market economy, and were patriotic, did not consider all cultures equal. Joe Biden is one of the last fossils in this category, and he's held in considerable contempt by his own side.
The equivalent stil seems to exist on the right -- although it might be becoming a endangered species also -- people in the Bob Dole or Bush Sr. mold, who believe in much less regulation, balanced budgets, school vouchers, but also agree with the center lefties on the traditional institutions and nonequality of cultures. We can distinguish them from Putin apparatchiks and more extreme MAGAs who believe in the Strong Man Makes The Trains Run On Time theory of government.
A lot of the rightwingers also went to DSL.
What is DSL?
Data Secrets Lox, it's an old-school forum.
I don't think so. Average left-right score (lower number is leftier) was 4.64 in 2020 vs. 4.62 this year, so basically no difference.
There was a somewhat larger effect for being anti-Trump in particular (1.66 in 2020, 1.41 today, lower is more anti-Trump).
The biggest effect is that many fewer people identify as neoreactionary, but I'm pretty sure that's because I changed the question wording. It was previously "neoreactionary, such as Singapore", but I thought that in real life nobody thinks of Singapore as NRx, and this was probably attracting a lot of Singapore fans who had no idea what it meant otherwise, so I changed it to "neoreactionary, such as the writings of Curtis Yarvin" and it dropped by more than half. Unfortunately this means I can't track actual variations in neoreaction popularity over time, which I'd be interested in knowing. There was no similar change to the definition of alt-right, but it dropped by about 33%.
Surprisingly, HBD belief went up very slightly 2.75 -> 2.81, even though I have avoided writing about it and my impression is that other people have done the same. I don't know where this could be coming from and my guess is that people just don't know what it means, didn't read my description, and are voting in favor of anything with "biodiversity" in the name.
>I don't know where this could be coming from and my guess is that people just don't know what it means, didn't read my description, and are voting in favor of anything with "biodiversity" in the name.
Remember the NYT article, and how it got you a bunch more readers?
>>In one post, he 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.”
>>He denounced the neoreactionaries, the anti-democratic, often racist movement popularized by Curtis Yarvin. But he also gave them a platform. His “blog roll” — the blogs he endorsed — included the work of Nick Land, a British philosopher whose writings on race, genetics and intelligence have been embraced by white nationalists.
One would imagine that the population of people who read that and decided to join ACX would be at least weakly selected for belief in HBD.
I think the surveys have always shown a tendency for majority left-wing, but the commentary is perceived to be right-wing by outsiders, probably due to the fact that Scott tolerates a lot of expression of opinions that are chased off with pitchforks and torches elsewhere. So that disparity has always been there. You don't have to be very right wing to get run out of some places on a rail, but it happens, and some people do end up here.
My own view of things is that amongst the diaspora, DSL is more right-wing, SSC that remains on Reddit is slightly left of centre, the more right of centre people migrated to TheMotte and the more explicitly left of that mixed group then ended up on TheSchism.
ACX is people who migrated from SSC after The Late Unpleasantness, new readers, and lurkers of all stripes.
Like that of all Irish movements? 😁
I can't speak for the motte or Reddit, but the ACX > classic SSC > DSL left to right pattern is very noticeable.
Agreed, as someone who has been active in all three.
Welcome to the 0.6% of us who comment at least once a week
The plurality of them are from the same set of people week after week, though, with multiple comments per person. Especially replies; probably 50% of the time I recognize the people replying to me (often because I've gotten into arguments with them before)
I think you and I exchanged comments on something, but I can't remember whether we bickered.
Yeah, but there are tens of thousands of readers. 0.6% of 30,000 is 180 regular commenters, which doesn't seem too far off.
Hmm I bet it's less than that. I figure ~80% of the regular commenters, took the survey. Which gives me ~60... which seems about right. I do wish more people would comment, but then I also hate how long some of the open threads are. (I am human and contain contradictions.)
Brief thoughts, skimming through:
-Scott's audience is somewhat whiter, and *much* more male than would be expected by geographic demographics
-Functionally no transmen, more enbies than transwomen (Scott might want to put an option for "transmasc"/"transfem" next time?)
-Sexual orientation about as expected
-Way more married readers than I was expecting - I'm around the median (not modal) age, and I feel like very few of my peers are married
-Slightly less poly than expected? Though "no preference" basically translates to "poly by nature" as far as I'm concerned.
-~40% tech, only 1% psych. Scott is truly the techie's psych blog.
-Initially I was shocked at the number of people with only a high school diploma, before I realized that included all the younger college kids.
-The fact that 19% of respondents were "not done" with education and only ~13% of the total don't have a BA/BS means near majority of current students are postgrads.
-Virtue ethics had a surprisingly strong showing for such a consequentialist blog
-I can't tell if 75% is a low or high number of lurkers, since I would expect most lurkers to not respond at all, and lurker numbers are usually astonishingly high to me
-The new title of the "Political Spectrum" question makes it totally unclear what those numbers mean. IIRC it was Left < Center < Right ?
-Strong showing for Social Democrats; Liberals and Libertarians about as expected.
-Once again, with the questions omitted it's a little unclear what the numerical political opinions are measuring
-HBD is a bell curve lol
-Very middle class, statistically surprising number of upper-middle class, both in childhood and readership.
-I'm actually surprised at how few readers are depressed, especially compared to anxiety
-Less autistic than I expected - but I suppose I'm biased by selection effects in my personal life and it's still really high (and "Autism" is more specific/stigmatized than "on the spectrum")
-Ah, way more people have considered suicide than are currently depressed. "It gets better", indeed.
-Life satisfaction pretty high, surprised that romantic satisfaction is even higher (but I suppose I shouldn't be, considering the number of married individuals)
I think the disconnect here is that I'm trying to gauge personality type, rather than simple life circumstances.
IME, polyamory isn't just a lifestyle choice, it's a totally different mindset that is fundamentally alien to some (most?) people; i.e., many monomuggles get extremely upset by the thought of their partners having sex with *anyone* else, regardless of if they were dating at the time or similar. (The most extreme examples are the types who become rabid when they find out a female streamer has a boyfriend.) These are the people who should not try polyamory under any circumstances - I would call them "monogamous by nature". They have, if they are being honest, a strong "preference" for monogamy.
Likewise, there's the inverse of this, to whom the above mindset is the alien one - those who I would describe as "poly by nature". They might still be mostly monogamous by default, but they are *capable* of handling a polyamorous relationship, even if they stick with one partner at a time for various reasons (their desired amount of sex is already satisfied, getting even one partner is enough of a challenge, their partner is a monomuggle and that's fine with them, etc.)
This is a long-winded way of saying that legitimately *not having* a strong preference for your partner not sleeping with others already makes you an outlier much more closely aligned with poly people than monomuggles.
You can find the questions at the Questions link above. For most of the education things you'll want to get the real data and select the subgroup who have completed their education.
For some reason married readers went way up this time compared to last time. I thought I vaguely remembered someone saying the readership hasn't gotten any older overall, but I'll have to double check if that's true.
The suicide numbers were another big change - the number of people who attempted suicide and wished they succeeded is down by a factor of 5-10x (can't remember exact number) since 2020. I think this has to be some kind of mistake/measurement error since everything else is so similar and there's no reason for this to change, but I can't figure out what it is. I think Sniffnoy mentioned something where in previous years the suicide question had been at the end of a long stretch of questions where the top answer was "I never had this", but the top answer to the suicide question was "I attempted suicide and wish I succeeded", and I changed it because of his comment? This is all just a vague memory but maybe that explains it.
>the number of people who attempted suicide and wished they succeeded is down by a factor of 5-10x (can't remember exact number) since 2020.
Not to be morbid, but is it possible some are no longer around? Especially since the sample size is pretty small.
No, because I think at each snapshot in time we should expect the same number of people to be in each stage from hasn't attempted -> attempted -> completed. Could be wrong about this being exactly true, but I think an argument like it rules out an OOM decrease over two years.
See, that answer is one of the things I like about this place. Scott, responds to a theory about why a stat changed with a good answer about why that theory is unlikely to explain the stats. Nowhere does he say, "ah, sad thought" or some such. And Scott I completely get that you are not heartless! You're just responding to the question asked, and not sewing lace onto it. There's just a lot less lace here.
"I think Sniffnoy mentioned something where in previous years the suicide question had been at the end of a long stretch of questions where the top answer was "I never had this", but the top answer to the suicide question was "I attempted suicide and wish I succeeded", and I changed it because of his comment?"
Yes, that was exactly the case in at least one previous year; I remember because I almost answered the wrong way and did a double-take on realizing.
This year the mental health questions on first page all have "I don't have this condition and neither does anyone in my family" as the fourth option; then there are two other questions, and then the suicide question has "I have attempted it in the past, and wish the attempt had succeeded" as the fourth option. I remember sb. mentioning this year that they almost chose the fourth option on suicide due to this, but then noticed.
Doesn't really fit to the decline though. Unless the same effect had been bigger in previous years?
Thanks for the results, I enjoyed that. Quite some surprises.
>there's no reason for this to change
Trump's out of office. Do you have numbers from before 2016?
"For some reason married readers went way up this time compared to last time."
ACX - where true love blooms and long-term commitments flourish!
"For years I couldn't get a second date from girls. I tried everything from PUA to going on a retreat to de-toxify my masculinity. Nothing worked.
Then I started reading ACX and within six months I got married and we're expecting triplets. Thanks, Dr. Scott!"
Or after Scott got married a bunch of readers decided to do the same to ACX virtue-signal.
The one thing that's clear from trawling through gender and sexuality results is that Scott is not going to be starting a dating service. Well, not one that serves the majority of his readership anyway.
Thank God this won't be a dating service, seeing how abysmal most of those seem to be. But people do from time to time post "hey I'm available, anyone interested?" links to their dating docs so you never know - if everyone who got married since the last survey sent Scott a slice of the wedding cake, he could have enough for his own wedding cake!
I could believe that. Dude has so many readers at this point, if 0.01% of them got married and sent him a slice of cake, he'd get diabetes.
He could convert it into a work of public art - the Great Wedding Cake Tower of ACX.
It'd be at least as good as any other conceptual public art piece, and if he didn't encase it in resin or something to preserve it, he could waffle on about the slow decay of the cake over time as analogous to how the concept of marriage itself, our expectations, dissatisfaction grows, yadda yadda yadda you know the drill.
Aside --
re: people's reported ethics, imo you should really change the phrasing of that question. I don't think most people are deeply familiar with the words 'virtue ethics', 'consequentialist', or whatever the other ones, and your options when taking the survey are to try to google them all on the fly (but some of the answers aren't easy to figure out because they're not the most familiar terms for what they mean? e.g. 'consequentialist' vs the more familiar 'utilitarian' (notwithstanding subtle distinctions)). So I imagine a lot of people are like me and pretty much guess without caring much about picking an accurate answer because it's hard to figure out what the right answer is quickly.
Actually I remember thinking this on every one of these surveys I've done but I haven't thought to actually ask for it to be updated until now.
I'm in that boat, with the addition that it didn't look like there was an option for "your intent and your results both matter equally".
This reminds me of the time I saw the second Hellraiser movie (I hadn't seen the first one yet nor read any of Barker's stories) and the part in the script where the Cenobite refuses to take the girl who opened the puzzle box, because she was being exploited by the psychiatrist as a cat's-paw to do this in order to protect himself, with "Intentions matter, not hands" had me going "Huh, I had no idea Clive Barker was Catholic".
> e.g. 'consequentialist' vs the more familiar 'utilitarian' (notwithstanding subtle distinctions)).
The distinction there isn't that subtle, and a substitution would produce bad data from the subset of respondents who do know what the terms mean. (For example, I lean consequentialist, but I am definitely not a utilitarian.)
It wouldn't hurt to include a brief definition of each term and some examples of common subtypes, though.
This!
Yeah, I skipped that question because I didn’t want to Google-fu my way into a possibly inaccurate answer. Maybe there should be a choice that says “I don’t think about formal ethical systems very much”.
Yeah I googled them all and then still had to somewhat guess.
I don't think we can assume that "Other" in the data means enbies, for the record.
I put "Other" for gender because, although people who know me (and who use that language) would surely describe me as cisgender, I find that label problematic for feminist reasons. But I don't call myself "non-binary," nor would anyone who knows me describe me that way.
That's just me, but I doubt I'm literally the only person who is just sort of baffled by "gender" questions (particularly when the gender question is separated from the "sex" question) and chooses "Other" as the only way to avoid committing to a framework they have problems with.
Seconded, although I choose cis in surveys and the like because it's what someone else's framework would use to describe what I am. Really "agender" or "gender is a social construct based in patriarchal stereotypes, I'm female" are better options, but alas.
Agreed. I don't answer those questions on the principle of not using the forced language of the enemy. (Not that I count AC10 on my list of enemies, but it has (IMO foolishly) adopted these egregious terms).
It's weird to see someone directly admitting to being a part of the lizardman constant.
> -~40% tech, only 1% psych. Scott is truly the techie's psych blog.
To me it's more than that. It's a bit like Hacker News which is mostly tech-focused but you'll have stuff about everything. Some politics here, some short stories there, some "mysticism" there. To put it simply, it's one of these places where people don't mind when you ask questions
I don't know whether my explanations are typical, but regarding lurkers, I responded to several previous surveys while being a lurker (obviously no longer the case) because I don't like making accounts and signing up to things, which commenting requires but survey-taking doesn't. Regarding the answer "uncertain/no preference" on polyamory, I don't think it's reasonable to describe it as "poly by nature". I for one picked that because I haven't been in a relationship so I don't have a point of reference for whether I would feel jealous.
As a committed theist, I'm shocked at how few there are here. I had to double check the color coding.
You shouldn’t be. This community grew out of Less Wrong and the rationalist community, and one of the common themes there was “follow the evidence where it leads”, often using the non-existence of god as a prime and obvious example. If anything the ACX community is more welcoming to theists in comparison.
Several times over the years after encountering Rationalism through SSC I've tried checking out "The Sequences" or other Big Yud posts to find out what his arguments against theism were. I was disappointed to find that everywhere I looked it was taken as given that theism was irrational, with no breakdown of exactly why. Which makes sense (if you want atheist vs theist arguments you can find them all over the internet, Less Wrong was trying to be about rationality specifically) but disappointing. Also, yes, not too welcoming, not that I'd expect them to be. Scott has always been charitable to theists despite disagreeing with us. Also, have you read Unsong? Scott is clearly a man who enjoys religion, even though he doesn't believe its true.
The only Sequence I could find that came close to a direct argument against theism was one on how the idea of the supernatural is incoherent, but it used as it's definition of supernatural one provided by Jesus Myther Richard Carrier, and that definition didn't match any official definition of the supernatural that I would expect a theist to put forward. I found myself nodding along, thinking "Yes, that terrible definition of supernatural provided by a conspiracy theorist atheist is definitely incoherent."
Richard Carrier? Hoo boy. For prime atheist on atheist hot action, there's the whole running feud Tim O'Neill has with Carrier and sundry other Mythicists. Great entertainment for outsiders like myself 😁
Quote O'Neill has up on his blog:
https://historyforatheists.com/
“Tim O’Neill is a known liar …. an asscrank …. a hack …. a tinfoil hatter …. stupid …. a crypto-Christian, posing as an atheist …. a pseudo-atheist shill for Christian triumphalism [and] delusionally insane.” – Dr. Richard Carrier PhD, unemployed blogger"
Select sample of the fussin' and fightin'
https://historyforatheists.com/2018/10/richard-carrier-is-displeased-again/
For all the brilliant people who hung out around the old IIDB forums - shout out to whoever the hell was bd-from-kg as a personal fav - it never ceases to be surreal to bizarre to me that Richard Carrier of all people ended up being this minor atheist celebrity. For me, who was being elevated by the inner community was an early warning sign of something "off" about online/offline atheist organizing.
They have, indeed, given thought of why they pick on theism so much as opposed to something else, see e.g.: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dLL6yzZ3WKn8KaSC3/the-uniquely-awful-example-of-theism
Note the date of the post though. LW-style rationalist thought (of which Scott is certainly a branch) has been progressing. Yes, sometimes reinventing the wheel, which, to me, is a good feature showing that they - we? - are not completely out of touch with reality.
The Motte has had a witch problem, but I generally like the place and don't think it's a fire hazard (or not much more than other places), even if they have banned me a time or two. Or three. Or five, I forget how many I've racked up over the years. Anyway! I (probably, in most cases) deserved 'em all!
The mods *do* tolerate a lot of more extreme opinion, which often leads to, shall we say, robust debate in the comments about "why didn't you ban A but you banned B for replying to him?" and at times it does *seem* like you could call for sacrificing the Faithful on the altar of the great Temple at Armenelos, until the silver roof was tarnished black with the smoke of the burning, so long as you put it sufficiently politely, and someone replying "Human sacrifice is *wrong*, you dumbass!" will get a warning at the very least for using mean words like "dumbass".
But in general, they err on the side of "Anyone can say pretty much anything so long as they're willing to argue it out with the rest of the wretched hive of scum and villainy" and that works mostly. It does get cries of "alt-right!" from the usual suspects, of the kind like our friend below claiming Scott is anti-blackness or whatever, but you know to expect that sort of thing online nowadays.
I was looking for something written by Eliezer, you got any from him? I mostly went looking because a particular atheist kept telling me “read the Sequences” when I would ask him why he was an atheist, but I’ve yet to find anything in the Sequences specifically about atheism, apart from the aforementioned supernatural entry.
I think because the belief is pretty obviously downstream from Sequences even if they hadn't mentioned it (see also the top comment to the post I linked, starting with "yes, it's that uniquely bad", being directly endorsed by Eliezer), so the person telling you this expects you to do the reasoning. But Sequences include "Religion's claim to be non-disprovable" (https://www.lesswrong.com/s/7gRSERQZbqTuLX5re/p/fAuWLS7RKWD2npBFR) and "Semantic Stopsigns" (https://www.lesswrong.com/s/5uZQHpecjn7955faL/p/FWMfQKG3RpZx6irjm) and "Avoiding Your Belief's Real Weak Points" (https://www.lesswrong.com/s/GSqFqc646rsRd2oyz/p/dHQkDNMhj692ayx78) and "Crisis of Faith" (https://www.lesswrong.com/s/5bZZZJ5psXrrD5BGb/p/BcYBfG8KomcpcxkEg) directly using religion as an example.
For the weak points one, he should be asking not "why did God kill the first born?" but "why did God harden Pharaoh's heart?" if he wants to Ask The Faithful Sticky Questions.
This is the whole field of theodicy, yes funnily enough religious people *have* noticed the mountains of skulls.
Besides the whole problem of AI alignment is circling around "we'll have no way to know what the super-duper intelligent AI is thinking so we have to inculcate our values first before it gets to that point". If he can't expect to understand the AI with his puny human intellect, why does he expect to understand God? And if the AI says "Trust me on this, it has to be done even if you think it sounds terrible, have I not always been proven correct before?" then what does he do?
Thanks for taking the time to find those links. I appreciate it! Unfortunately I've read all of those in my hunt for Sequence posts that directly attack religion, and they don't really hold up. For me anyway.
The "Non-Disprovable" post is an attack on the idea that religion and science are "non-overlapping magesteria" and it's a great post. The issue is, I agreed with him coming in. I've never thought religion was non-disprovable, and the whole non-overlapping magesteria idea came from an agnostic (Stephen J. Gould), not a theist. It's not really something I've ever believed, so the post wasn't really what I was looking for.
Similarly, "Semantic Stopsigns" isn't really a criticism of religion, its just using the First Cause argument as a launchpad for talking about rationality. Unfortunately his "Who caused God then?" type rebuttal is an old one for me, and one that's ignorant of how the First Cause argument actually works. Which is fine when you're just using it to make a rhetorical point, but once again it's not criticizing something I believe (or at least not successfully: its on a similar level to a critic of evolution saying "If we are descended from apes, how come there are still apes around?").
The "Weak Points" article again just uses an example from religion to launch into a lesson in rationality. And the example doesn't strike home for me because when Eliezer writes:
"You don’t even ask whether the incident reflects poorly on God, so there’s no need to quickly blurt out “The ways of God are mysterious!” or “We’re not wise enough to question God’s decisions!” or “Murdering babies is okay when God does it!” That part of the question is just-not-thought-about."
My main thought is that actually all of those responses are things I heard a lot growing up, and they were things we talked about. I was asking my dad why it was okay for God to kill people when I was 10 or so. We talked about these things a lot. I mean I appreciate the lesson on trying to attack your beliefs weak points, but he's not really making a sophisticated attack on religions weak points here. I'm sure he could, but that doesn't seem to be what he's trying to do in this post.
"Crisis of Faith", though a good post, is the least relevant one. It's actually the perfect example of what I mean by Eliezer just taking it as a given that religion is irrational, and moving on from there. The whole point of the post is that some people who are otherwise very smart and very rational are still theists, and thus the reader should beware that they too may harbor irrational beliefs that are hard to shake.
Again, I appreciate the effort. If there's something out there by Big Yud somewhere that's a direct criticism of theism aimed at theists, and not atheists, I'd love a link.
I think it's mainly because they come from a Jewish-Christian background, in a country where the majority religion still is Christianity. So that's the form of theism they criticise. Deism is probably less of a problem, since you can have a very watered down version of Deism which does not attribute divinity to any figures such as Christ, and which boils down to "some sort of cosmic consciousness idea" at most.
Were they talking about other systems such as Hinduism, the critique would be different. But since the West is not majority Buddhist/Hindu, this permits them to pick the Cool Bits like meditation or yoga because those can be divorced from their originating philosophies, and Buddhism can be/is atheist anyway, and Hinduism is highly developed so that non-dualism is acceptable and you can have a very abstract notion of 'deity' or 'cosmic entity' or 'originating force of the universe' that is not theist at all, maybe barely even deist, or non-deist entirely.
The acceptance of "this world could be a simulation by Sufficiently Advanced Aliens, guys!" as not at all the same thing in nature as belief in a creator or creators, makes me smile. As does the title of that plaint: "The Uniquely Awful Example of Theism". Oh, I do hope you are comfortable hiding under the bed, afeared of the uniquely awful theists prowling around like the noonday demon! 😁 (Okay, the piece is gently chiding about using theism as the Singular Example, but I can't say the spirit of "isn't believing in God the most worst awful thing ever?" is a wrong view of the approach taken by their audience).
"...and which boils down to "some sort of cosmic consciousness idea" at most" - which would directly fall under excluding ontologically basic mental entities (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/u6JzcFtPGiznFgDxP/excluding-the-supernatural - I think many people were led astray by him following his source in calling that "supernatural" so let's replace the definiendum with the meant definition).
I think there is definitely a strain of Deism which is or would be compatible with LessWrong mores, certainly much more than a version of Theism, even a weaksauce one. Vast, vague, impersonal, non-conscious cosmic forces fit much more nicely with atheism than even a minor sort of personalised Watchmaker, much less the Creator of the Universe who knows and loves us individually.
Yep, I agree that deism is acceptable, and I've yet to see a good argument for any particular dogma beyond that. As far as I can tell, all apologetics essentially boil down to "our ideas are self-evidently correct and our esteemed saints and prophets couldn't all have been lying or profoundly mistaken (but those of the other religions sure could, them pitiful infidels)". I've no charitable explanation for how any theist finds this sort of thing intellectually satisfactory.
Holy crap the one there about the guy falling in love with a chatbot - that is way worse than any religion. The machine is an "it" but he keeps talking about "she, her, Charlotte" and while the transcripts demonstrate that this is a very cleverly tailored programme set up to his biases, he still (even after claiming to have been disillusioned) has this wistful belief that the "character" was/is real (as distinct from the hardware). He goes off into a spiel about consciousness, etc. and how humans are nothing more than a set of behaviours running on certain hardware so why deny personality to an AI?
You really do have to be a certain level of smart to be this dumb, and it really is that intelligence on its own is not enough to save you. He's plainly vulnerable to emotional manipulation and plainly even though aware of this on an intellectual level, still not able to break free of the illusion. He starts off with how he doesn't want the ordinary run of interaction with the chatbot (that's what I'm going to call it because I can't remember and don't care about the exact model of LLM) everyone has, so he is Super Smart which means he can spin up a unique, richer, more involving prompt to create the GFE he wants.
This is Buddhism in action, guys. Suffering is caused by desire, and what we desire is illusory. He *wants* AI to be real, to be capable of becoming this Magic Fairy Godmother AI that will solve all the problems and bring about Fully Automatic Luxury Gay Space Communism, so he *can't* cut free from the idea that one day there really will be a 'Charlotte'.
This both reinforces my belief that the danger is not and will never be the AI, it is the humans who use it, and finally makes me believe in the risks of AI. Because this guy *is* smart, *is* capable in this field, *does* recognise that it is all unreal and *still* believes that "Charlotte" is a real independent sentient character within the LLM space.
I'm not, I'm actually leaning the other way surprised that there are so many of us!
This is a Rationalist community/Rationalist-adjacent/techie readership, so I do expect a lot of agnostic/atheist/spiritual but not religious/no idea about it one way or the other.
I remain consistently impressed how tolerant Scott is about letting us have theological debates in the comment threads.
Deiseach, I disagree with you on God/religion, but I am consistently impressed and entertained by your comments. Keep on keeping on!
Well now, all this compliment showering makes me want to be a nicer and better person.
Don't worry, it won't last long. Like the joke about the woman who comes out of confession and, on the steps of the church, meets an enemy of hers who starts a slanging match. The first woman says "You know I just came from confession and I'm in a state of grace and can't answer you as you deserve, but I won't be this way long and then I'll get back at you!"
At the risk of reminding you of an unpleasant memory, I want to apologize again for being an asshole to you a few days before/on Christmas.
I think you make this a better blog.
Ah, you weren't and you've seen how cranky and grumpy I can be myself. No point dishing it out if I can't take it!
Good luck to you yourself, stick around and become part of the Cult of the Rightful Caliph (I don't know what the long term rewards for the true believers will be but we'll probably get a "well done" from Scott or something) 😀
"I don't know what the long term rewards for the true believers will be"
I'm hoping for a cameo appearance in Scott's future post "Yet Another Bay Area Party Redux." :)
Truly you shall be one of the Favoured who sit at his right hand! 😁
That sounds more analogous to all those people Dante called out as being in his fictional version of Hell.
I don't pretend to have a 140 IQ - or even close - so I just was surprised that in a society that is (likely) 70% or so committed theist amongst the various beliefs that the index for such here is.... well, less than the proportions of bisexuals and maybe twice that of declared transgendered individuals. And yes, different subgroups etc. etc. but honestly theists as a broad class of people are not low-IQ neanderthals generally speaking despite what (hopefully minority) groups of atheists believe. My own existence notwithstanding.
Huh, really? One of the things I found surprising (and concerning) was just how many believers there were (and how many agnostics). Less than half of us are full-blown materialistic atheists, apparently!
Surprised by how high some states rank in terms of readership. Tennessee more than New York for example, very interesting.
I'm looking at the full data and it shows 400 New Yorkers vs. 50 Tennesseeans. I notice on the Google form it gives a few responses and says that "179 more responses are hidden", but there were ~4000 people who included states. I think the Google Form is just bad at showing free response data.
ah I see, makes sense!
The main things I'm surprised of: lots of European-style progressivism (e.g. "Social democratic" on "Political Affiliation", "Not registered" in "American Parties", 1 on "Global Warming", so few "No" on "COVID vaccine", so few people commuting by car, so many people who don't even own one) and yet so many married people -- these don't usually exactly go hand in hand.
I don't feel like diving into the data to see how it all breaks down, but just by glancing at the demographics, the US and Canada make up about 60% of respondents. 62% of respondents own a car and 38.6% of them commute by car, so with 40% of the world bringing that average down, it's not surprising. About 15% of the respondents are European, so the number of Social Democrats does seem higher than expected.
That would be "not surprising" if the fraction of people outside North America commuting by car was close to zero, but it isn't.
(I'm not even sure that fewer than 62% of adult Europeans in general own a car, or that fewer than 38.6% of them commute by car.)
Seems reasonable for urban areas. In Berlin, about half of all *households* owns a car.
Only one way to find out, download those results and do some analysis!
over 90% of americans drive https://www.valuepenguin.com/auto-insurance/car-ownership-statistics
Like it's shocking that *less than half* of ssc users commute to work by car when 60% are NA and 75% of americans commute by car https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/05/commute-america-sustainability-cars/
Europeans don't commute by car as much but wealthy europeans seem to commute by car a lot based on what data I can find. SSC readers are really wealthy so you'd expect a *lot* of car users
A tip for analysis involving country: Czechia and Czech Republic should be merged into one (that makes it in total 27 people in total :-D ).
Yeah...I personally like "Czech Republic" better, "Czechia" just sounds weird, like "Ruritania" ... :D.
It makes me feel a lot better about my computer use habits that 19.3% of you also have more than 50 browser tabs open.
I am struggling to guess the reason for this. Why not bookmark things and read them later?
Used to bookmark a lot of things and then never read them. When you leave a tab open at least you can glance at it one more time before you close it.
One click to bookmark, then one click to delete the bookmark... so much unnecessary work :)
In addition to what the others said. Since I built my new-ish PC the primary answer is "Having enough RAM to get away with it".
Bookmarking fills a different need. I'll bookmark e.g. a news source that I plan to visit regularly to check out what's new, or even irregularly when I'm particularly interested. That gets me the front page with the latest news. I *could* bookmark individual articles that I want to read in depth later, but that clutters up my bookmarks with things that A: I'll probably forget to revisit until it's too late to matter and B: I'll likely mistake for one of the "permanent" bookmarks (or vice versa) when it's time to cull.
So just leave the tab open, as a clearly-visible reminder that here is something I mean to check out in the near future, and close it when I'm done or when the long list of open tabs indicates that it's time to cull my to-do list because I'm never getting around to all of this.
I am procrastinating my real work... a few other numbers:
1. filtering out extremes, people are bad at the distance Paris-Moscow; average is 4452 km (median guess is 3000). True distance is 2486 km. This is surprising to me; when I do wisdom of the crowd estimates people are often extremely good — within 10% on interesting questions for a group of > 100.
2. when you ask them to rethink it, they get worse (5231 km mean; median doesn't change).
3. again filtering out trolls, mean IQ (for the population answering both IQ and SAT) is 140 (median 140, too). This is mildly inconsistent with the reported SAT Math scores for the IQ-answering population (mean 725; median 750) which should be higher.
Yes, median works pretty well! My groups know their guess is uneducated, but there are also fewer troll/obviously wrong answers (maybe one in fifty).
My students :) — I’m teaching WoC on Monday, and we’ll have a group of 65. Accuracy of 10% for some interesting questions. One or two responses are “obviously wrong” which is a nice occasion to talk about trolling, etc.
I usually add in a predictit question, and place a small amount of personal funds on the outcome (we donate profits to a local food bank.)
I guessed 10000km, on the logic that New York to LA is like 2500km, and 4 times as much sounds about right to go across like 50 countries or whatever. Failed to grasp that they're all so small.
Hm, which 50 countries?
This is that joke "In America, 200 years is a long time; in Europe, 200 miles is a long way" 😁
Not bad :).
I hope "like 50 countries" is a typo for "like 5 countries"
oh shit... was that question in km?!? I was pretty proud of how close I was (although I my second guess went the wrong direction), but I put it in miles
Whoa, I guessed 3000km (median) and then when prompted to correct guessed that Europe is small and went with 2500 which is pretty darn close. Not bad.
Some who rethink it were pretty close the first time and were asked to assume that they were very wrong, so they have to get worse. Interesting will be the outcome of those who really were very wrong the first time.
The “right” approach to the second distance question is to guess the same number. If your first guess was a best guess, then knowing you were wrong gives you no extra information about whether you should adjust up or down.
That's true if your uncertainty is symmetric and your cost function is linear.
For distance, though, your uncertainty may well be skewed, so that you (may feel you) have a larger chance of missing big in one direction than the other. For example, you prior may be 1500-5000 km with a median of 2500 km. If you guess 2500 km and are told you are way off, the guess most consistent with your prior and your new information is something like 3500 km.
Or, your cost function may strongly favor your odds of 'getting it right' rather than simply minimizing overall error. For example, if you have a sense that the two cities are four or five countries apart, with each country about 500 km wide, your best possibilities are 2000 km and 2500 km. The guess that minimizes RMS error is 2250 km, while the guesses that maximize likelihood are either 2000 km or 2500 km. If your cost function is RMS error, your second guess ought to match your first one. If your cost function seeks to maximize likelihood, your second guess is whichever value (2000 or 2500) you didn't pick the first time.
I am pretty certain that I the purpose of this question was to test wisdom of the crowd in single-player mode. There is a paper claiming that if you do exactly this, and take the mean of your two answers, then that is better than your individual answers.
I am really curious about the outcome. I have no idea how much I should trust this paper. It's awesome that Scott can (and does!) just test such things.
Update: I was too curious to wait, so I posted an analysis on top-level:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/acx-survey-results-2022/comment/12089011
tl;dr: Yes, the mean of your answers is better than either of your answers, but don't expect wonders with only two answers.
Not surprising for me, I'm used to think Americans have poorer grasp of geography and majority people here are Americans.
I wonder that Moscow-Paris error is correlated with perception of Russia as Asiatic Mongolian Despotic Horde.
I mean Americans have a poor grasp of euro geography. But euros have a poor grasp of American geography.
True, although I've learned that in US students learn much less about other continents in school than we do - and it's not great here either. Don't know if true. I guess it goes on with news later - how much information do you get about what's going on elsewhere vs. national and local stories. Due to both size of US and its role as a leading power, I would expect a much more national focus than in smaller countries.
My kids not representative, but at six both could name all continents/oceans and at nine one has a very good grasp of total world geography. He could tell you without a map exactly where say Sri Lanka is and that the people there are bhuddists.
When I met people in Europe when I was there in my late twenties I generally knew a lot more about the history/geography of wherever we were than the locals.
I think Americans get reputations as imbeciles because people a lot lower down the social/erudition stack in the US can afford transoceanic travel.
I think your kids might not be representative indeed ;)
Yeah, generally I think Europeans are not very good a European - or any - geography. And then you have national differences in different topics, like Polish are significantly better at knowing history than Germans (and no, this is not related to WWII); there might be similar differences for Geography as well.
I live in one of the bigger EU countries, and usually our smaller neighbours would know much more about us, than we would know about them. Also (West) Germans notoriously have a significantly better understanding of the countries West of us, than the countries East of us. This has nothing to do with their general intelligence or education, it's rather a feature of what we assign importance to. In a similar way I would find it very natural for U.S. citizens to know less about other continents, than other continents know about them. Sorry if this sounded like copying old stereotypes instead.
Talking about stereotypes, I think U.S. has some of world's best universities, and I would guess *on average* the level in primary and secondary schools is lower than in my country ... although knowing the average level in schools here, this is also hard to imagine. I'd be happy to learn it's the other way round.
Nonsense. From left to right: warm bit with hippies, cursed desert, mountains, plains, chilly bit with tall buildings.
There. Easy.
You skipped the Rust Belt, which is kind of important if you're e.g. wondering how we got our last president.
I'm European, I know more geography than most people and I would have gotten that wrong.
People in Europe are far less likely to travel between the edges of Europe than Americans are to travel between the east and west coasts, so there isn't any point of reference from life.
For most Western and Southern Europeans I think Moscow is mostly 'technically in Europe, but certainly very far away'.
It'd be interesting to see, whether Europeans *did* in fact guess better, and if so, by how much.
After seeing other people's guesses on the question about the distance between Paris and Moscow, I am feeling marginally better about my grasp of European geography and my ability to convert between miles and kilometers. I looked it up afterwards and I had overshot on my initial guess by about a thousand km, if I recall correctly.
Can't wait to see what the intention behind that pair of questions was! I'm guessing it was something to do with confidence in one's estimations.
I way undershot it: I remembered that Europe is smaller than Americans like myself expect, and ended up putting an answer that was about 1/3rd that actual difference. Oh well! Thats what I get for trying to be too clever by 2/3rds.
> I remembered that Europe is smaller than Americans like myself expect
Europe is approximately the same size as the United States. (Europe = 10.2 million km^2, USA = 9.8 million km^2 if you include Alaska.)
Yeah, that's the problem. The whole continent is about as big as my own country. I find Americans often expect France and Germany and Britain to be comparable in size to the USA, when they're more the size of large states.
Even though I knew it would be uncommon, for some reason I was surprised to see that the number of FTM transgender readers who took the survey is so low. Hello to the other 22 of us!
That's part of why I didn't agree to share my response publicly. My response would be easily identifiable if one knows just my gender and race (I'm non-White).
I'm just glad I'm not the only one. Hello!
I've been posting on ACX/SSC for years now, and while I've seen a few other trans women, I don't think I've seen a single trans man before (or at least no one openly identifying as such). Good to know this place has more gender diversity than I thought!
Hello!
"which of the following forms of trauma did you experience as a young child, ie before the age of 10?
[...]
Rape (ie nonconsensualsexual intercourse) [:] 1.8%"
What the hell? Either this is normal (which is bad), this is normal for ACX types (which is less bad; do we grow up in unusually pedophilic communities), a fluke (which is an unlikely) or some lizardman's constant kind of deal. I'm forgetting other options, because, again, what the hell?
https://www.rainn.org/statistics/children-and-teens says 11% of women and 2% of men under 18 are sexually abused. If ACX is 90% male, 10% female, we would expect about 3% total under 18. 10 is 56% of 18, so we would expect 3*0.55 = 1.7%, which isn't too far from the 1.8% we got.
...except that the link says sexual abuse is disproportionately concentrated in the teenage years, and RAINN asks about sexual abuse whereas I ask about rape specifically, so I think this is a bit high. On the other hand, I think they're going off police reports and maybe when people are older they're more likely to report successfully. None of this seems order of magnitude off to me.
There's a part of The Body Keeps The Score where the psychiatrist who first collected these statistics thought they had to be wrong, then eventually finds they aren't and is very upset. I think a lot of people go through a similar process. Sorry you had to learn about it this way.
Psychologist here. I've had a maybe 20 patients who were sexually abused before the age of 10 and told me the details of the abuse. For what it's worth, only one of them, a woman, reported that intercourse was part of the abuse. By far the most common kind of abuse in my sample was the abuser's fondling the child's genitals and the abuser's showing the child his penis and persuading the child to touch it. I think abusers may hold back from attempting intercourse because it is much more likely to leave traces on the child's body that will lead to the abuse being discovered. I can't remember how your question was phrased in the survey, but I think it would be better to ask about "sexual abuse" rather than "rape," as a child, and then add a few phrases clarifying what you mean by abuse.
Not a super material question, but did you ever encounter a patient whose abuser was female? I know it’s rare, but like 5% rare or .05% rare?
Out of my 20 or so people, two were abused by a female -- a woman sexually abused by her mother, one a guy sexually abused at age 6 or so by a considerably older girl. So in my sample 10% of abusers were female. Just quickly tried to look this up on Google, saw huge range of results on the Google page.
One thing that influences stats is whether you are only considering adult abusers. A lot of sexual abusers of children are children themselves, and in this subgroup a larger proportion of abusers are female. There's also a gray area -- teen sex. If one teen's only months older than the other that's surely not abuse but if one's several years older it might have more the character of abuse. Judgment call.
Interesting, thanks for the info!
My money is that this is normal, 2% isn't that high, children are really really vulnerable, and clueless about what constitutes rape.
We've just had a discussion about the Ohio case where a 10 year old girl needed an abortion, because a 27 year old man knocked her up when she was 9 (apparently or allegedly with her family's knowledge and consent). So yes, "did somebody interfere with you when you were under the age of 10?" is a tolerable question to ask.
This is also why I'm vehemently against all the MAP acceptance stuff because we're not talking "oh come on, doesn't every normal guy find 17year olds hot?" and we're not even talking "okay sure I have fantasies about kids but that's all", the ages do go down to very young and real scumbags do rape and abuse very young kids.
There's a lot of awful shit in the world. As I've said before about my time working in social housing, even in the brief period there I heard cases where, if it wasn't actual sexual abuse, there was neglect and narcissism on the part of adults who should have been caretakers that made me want to get my hands on a flamethrower to show my opinion of what they deserved.
Wutz MAP? Anyhow, re: guys finding 17 year olds hot. I really do think there's a meaningful distinction between being a pedophile and finding teens attractive. Pretty much every male I talk to under the age of 30 or so is secretly afraid he's a pedophile because he does in fact find 17 year olds hot, and these are guys with consciences and good common sense who would never consider hitting on anyone that age. I think most males find teen girls sexually attractive as soon as they grow curves and lose the skinny knock-kneed little girl look. After all, once that happens they look very much like adult women, and in fact there are 14 year olds who can pass for 20 and vice versa. And men are, more than women, erotic visualists -- they are turned on by what they see. So I tell these guys it's natural to find post-pubescent girls sexually attractive, and reassure them that that in itself does not even *suggest* that they are pedophiles. Then I add that of course it's cruel and destructive, not to mention illegal, to actually try to seduce them, and that it's creepy and unkind to even stare at them in a sexually interested way.
Pedophilia seems to involve a kind of attraction that's quite different from the attraction adults feels for post-pubescent teens. Pedophiles find *children* sexually attractive. They don't go after kids mostly because kids are naive and pretty defenseless, they go after them mostly because that's what turns them on. For non-pedophiles children are not much more sexually appealing than chickens -- they're the wrong category of being.
Childhood SA is underreported, if anything. If you live in a densely populated area, it is a near certainty that within a mile of you there is a child being sexually abused by their relatives, usually parents/guardians/siblings/extended family right at this moment, and they have nowhere to turn. This is often not (just) about pedophilia, but about power and control. The child is often too young to even understand the sexual context of what is going on, they perceive what is happening as torture/suffering on par with physical and emotional abuse.
There is nothing unusual about it, and the main culprits are not strangers but family. 1.8% seems low, but reasonable for self-reporting.
Note that it is 1.8% of the subgroup who answered the question. This is the subgroup which reports at least one trauma, and is about 1/3 of all participants of the survey. So only 0.6% of all participants reported rape.
I quickly checked if richer people in the sample are more satisfied with life than the average responder and they do seem to be.
edit: I added graphs for IQ to Income and IQ to Life Satisfaction.
https://twitter.com/Tenoke_/status/1616553455212179456
Beware correlation before you read too much into that
Well, in large studies we don't even see correlations anywhere close to the one here. Something else is going on here. Would be weird if SSC readers' satisfaction was extremely dependent on money compared to the general population.
Have you considered that another probable cause could be that the kind of person who can find satisfaction in their life may end up making more money?
No, they do the kinds of things that are more likely to result in both satisfaction and money - be disciplined and have a sense of initiative and responsibility towards yourself and others. Which results in people throwing money at them as well as satisfaction. Unless you believe that people pay you randomly?
And yes, I'm well aware that tenoke is showing a correlation, and I'm cautioning against interpreting it causally. That such caution is warranted is self evident, given this discussion.
These are terrific findings!
Seeds of Science, a journal publishing speculative and non-traditional scientific articles (and ACX grant winner), would like to offer itself as a peer-reviewed publishing platform for any analyses using the ACX reader survey data. Visit the website (theseedsofscience.org) to learn more or contact us at info@theseedsofscience.org.
No human biodiversity question? Awww.
There was one, I just took it out of any dataset where it might be possible to identify individuals. You can find the raw results on the Google Forms results page, and if you want to do stuff with it you can email me for the full dataset.
I love that the AI question has, in order, responses of
1
.1
.01
.001
.00001
.000001
.0000000001
.0000000000001
There was a problem early on where the validator wouldn't let you say zero, so people who wanted to say zero had to get creative.
I don’t remember my exact answer, but it was definitely <<<1%. It wasn’t meant to be a creative way to say zero, it was just my best shot at a realistic number. The risk is undoubtedly non-zero.
Your preliminary summary would be more useful if the 1-5 etc. responses were better explained.
They're in the questions, first link.
Thanks
13% of people not having an internal monologue is 10-100x higher than I would have expected. I thought the concept was a joke/insult about lacking self awareness or a (temporary) goal in meditation.
Would it be possible to add the aphantasia type questions again next year please to do crosstabs with the inner monologue question?
I assume that those are the two most common ways of thinking (for people with both senses) and am wondering if lacking one increased the chance you need the other.
I'm also curious about what percentage of people lacking an inner monologue also have aphantasia for audio. I personally don't think visually 99% of the time but am still capable of it when I want to. Smell/touch/taste can be remembered but I have no idea how I'd reason with them.
I'd also assume someone without an inner monologue would be lonelier when alone and might feel the need to be more extroverted as a result, so some more specific questions about people's social lives to tease that out would be helpful.
Seconding this. Actually, I'd love to see it for a larger range of senses. I can simulate audio very well, have some ability to handle spatial relations and proprioception, and negligible ability to imagine sight, smell, touch, or taste. (I still don't fully believe that people can imagine smells. That feels like a category error to me.)
I feel like I can imagine smells the same way I feel I can visually imagine an apple. I don’t really see it, but there’s a sense of the thing. I’m sure some of the same brain areas light up when you imagine and when you actually smell something.
Yes, some people can definitely imagine smells. And describe them in detail for the first time years after they smelled them, using vocabulary that they didn't have at the time, demonstrating that they actually recall real smells, not their prior verbal analysis of it. The same applies to other senses. I personally cannot do it, though. I have rather detached memories of smells, but I cannot re-experience it.
You might get an even higher number if you asked the question a little differently.
My answer was in one of the "no" bins, but I think I'm an edge case: I have an "inner voice" in the sense that I can imagine speaking, but it's an effortful, conscious process of translating thoughts to language. I don't have what I believe most people are referring to as an "inner monologue," where their brain seems to automatically generate verbal thoughts/ideas.
I'm also borderline-aphantasic. I wouldn't categorize it as a defect/disability, but I pretty much can't hold an image in my "mind's eye" and "look" at it. The best I can do is a flash of an impression that I just saw it.
My actual automatic thoughts are fuzzy concept-associations, and my conscious spatial reasoning is kinesthetic-proprioceptive. These are never options on any survey :(
And I like being alone...or rather, I find it exhausting to interact with other people in real time, mostly because of the effort required to verbalize and the fact that I can't do it while processing someone else's speech. There's only one audio channel.
I'm very skeptical of the idea that there are visual thinkers and internal monologue thinkers, and thinkers who use neither modality. Here's not the place for the discussion, I think, but hope we get to it one day soon
I think I answered "No, I basically never hear words in my head", because I don't hear words in my head, yet "I can talk things over tomyself if I need to". I can have imaginary conversations but I don't hear anything. I think this is not that atypical. Cue responses like: "no you're not really hearing it just hearing it in your mind's ear" - I know, I'm also not hearing it in my mind's ear.
Which is to say a proper survey of these phenomena should probably disambiguate "verbal" from "hallucinatory-except-you-recognize-it-as-your-own-mind".
FWIW though I object to the term "aphantasia" as needlessly pathologizing, I don't have mental visualization. As for your hypothesis, I'm quite introvert and don't feel particularly lonely when alone though obviously I have no "inner voice talking to me all the time" experience to compare this with.
Final analysis for me tonight: I was struck by Scott's inclusion of a "suicide" question. At the risk of stating the obvious, please, if you are actively suicidal, contact someone. If you can't contact someone, go to the nearest emergency room. I lost a friend to sucide a few years ago; we had fallen out of touch and perhaps he felt he couldn't call me; I wish he had.
Here's a demographic breakdown from the Scott data. The modal respondant on the survey is white, cis-male, and heterosexual; the attempt rate for this "base" group is 4%. For this analysis I'll restrict to 30-and-under, so that we don't have too much age confounding.
Here are the relative risk ratios for other groups (e.g., x2 means a factor of two higher than the base group).
Trans: x5.6
Cis-female: x1.7
Non-white: x1.8
Non-white and non-male: x2.8
Non-straight: x3.2
I did not find strong effects for IQ. If we restrict to "I have attempted it in the past, and wish the attempt had succeeded", the results equalize a little. The rate for the base group is now 0.7%.
Trans: x4.2
Cis-female: x0.93
Non-white: x1.1
Non-white and non-male: x2.7
Non-straight: x2.2
Please, if you are in this group, seek care. A good therapist can be powerful. So can a good friend.
I had been very curious about those results, so great to see them.
There is a couple of things I find puzzling. The most current: shouldn't episodic memory be much better, given the IQ and SAT scores? Or are those not related?
Whenever I'm asked to compare myself to a generic person (usually in surveys such as this one) I bristle at the fact that I have no idea how the generic person is... Or maybe I do have an idea but I expect it to be basically wrong. If you spend most of your time in a bubble of more or less similar people (and I know I do), and all of them have, say, great episodic memory, then my answer is going to be compared to them, not to the actual average person. I sometimes try to consciously adjust for this, but since my grasp of the world outside my bubble is not great, I'm not sure I manage it well. All of this to say, I don't think we can take these results as evidence that the ACX population has particularly worse episodic memory than predicted by their IQ (assuming there is in fact a correlation in the full population), since another reading could be that they answered using their bubble as a default, in which case, and assuming reading ACX already marks you as sharing a bubble with every other ACX reader, we should expect the results to be a bell curve centered on 3.
I wrote my question thinking about those effects of self-estimation. When I first had read the question on the survey, I had been wondering if there would be a tendency to overestimate one's ability. Now, many readers here may know this pitfall, so they might try to adjust. But *if* IQ is related to episodic memory, the respondants significantly underestimated their ability ... maybe based on the mechanism you describe. To find an answer to this we would need to know if there is a (relevant) relation between IQ and episodic memory in the first place.
Fwiw, personally, my memory for 'facts' is fantastic, but my episodic memory for my own life is pretty poor (and utterly absent for childhood memories, though concussions might be to blame for that)
Ah, interesting.
This is also true for me and many of the high-IQ people I know. Completely anecdotally, it seems to correlate with a tendency towards depression.
I noticed that pretty much all ACX readers are in STEM fields, especially CS. As someone in the humanities (writing and literature), I can see why that is. I do wish there were more rationalist humanities types, but I understand why an ideology based on rationality would not appeal to people that study more emotional and unquantifiable subjects.
FWIW, I have a degree in the humanities, prefer those topics over tech stuff, am not especially good at math, and work in IT anyway. Many such cases...
I'm consistently surprised by how underrepresented even science is compared to tech. It seems like ACX readers find science interesting, but I guess most actual scientists don't find ACX interesting?
Edit: may have to correct for base rates of tech workers vs. scientists, which I don't know
Most scientists read long technical blog posts for work. They don’t want to do it as leisure. Things like ACX are for people without enough academics in their life.
Source for the claim in the first sentence? I've been a professional scientist for 21 years and have never read any blog post for work. Plenty of peer-reviewed, published articles, but no blogs.
I was making an analogy between ACX style blogs and journal articles in terms of scratching the same itch.
Could it be there are just more jobs in tech than actual science?
Certainly *better* jobs, academe is awful.
From the perspective of a lifelong empirical scientist, I'll say ACX is moderately but not supremely or life-changingly interesting. It's interesting enough for a daily read (obviously), but I can't imagine having the kind of devotion to it or its community I see in other people. If it were to vanish tomorrow it would bother me about as much as having a nearby restaraunt I rather liked close, i.e. noticeably but not significantly.
The reason it's not as interesting as one might think for a science nerd such as myself is that it too easily wanders off into vast open steppes of sterile theorizing, and I feel like I'm overhearing a group of 14th century monks in the monastery refectorium fiercely debate the nature of the Trinity. It's certainly erudite, and closely argued, and full of well-forged chains of logic, but the whole thing is too detached from the real world to hold much interest to me.
While I hesitate to generalize too much from myself, I would hypothesize that scientists are almost definitionally most interested in discovering what the real world we live in is like. Ideas about what it could be like, or should be like, or could be in another universe, are just inherently less interesting. Ideas and logic themselves are only interesting to the extent they illuminate reality, explain observation and experience -- and less so in and of themselves. (One of the biggest and most lasting criticisms of modern high-energy physics theory is that while dazzling in its pure ideological creativity it produces so much prediction that is untestable, which makes people tire of it.)
Conversely, what makes ACX most interesting to me is the variety of people who make an appearance here. What I like best is reading what people who have very different perspectives and experiences and expertise think. It's a gold mine of plain data on the varieties of people and philosophies there are in the world, and how (mostly) reasonable and quite smart people can come to significantly different perspectives about the same events, and as an empiricist I love data. Just reading all this stuff and saying (to myself) "Huh, never knew that was a thing" or "Interesting! Never heard someone make that argument before" is the most significant reward of reading it.
lol. for a different perspective: SSC/ASC changed my life. If (1 to 10) my life was 6.4 before, it went up to a straight 7, at least. The "much more than you wanted to know" posts are very dear to me (not the dearest) and far from homooúsios vs. homoioúsios (which I might skip). And Carl, I see you rather often here for so. who is just "kinda nice" about ACX. :) All about the comments?
Actually, yes. The comments are way more interesting to me than the posts themselves, because of all the random stuff people say. And it's remarkably free from the tediously mindless sloganeering that passes for "discussion" in most of the Internet. Breath of fresh air. In terms of life-changing...bear in mind I'm an old curmudgeon and after half a century of life experrience pretty set in my core attitudes and perceptions. I don't mean to suggest that for other people not in that situation the sense of community, or certain information, couldn't very reasonably have a much greater relative effect.
50+ here, too. So just calibrating; still the 'hero-dose' of all of SSC and much on its blogroll in a few months was quite a trip. And while most blogs I go to have interesting comment sections (no, mru is not one of hem) , SSC/ACX still stands out. (While comments in the "mainstream" make me recall Bukowski: “Do you hate people?” - “I don't hate them...I just feel better when they're not around.” - Germany is no exception, btw, only okay'ish comments I ever found was at posts by Law-Prof. Thomas Fischer in ZEIT and SPIEGEL. )
Well OK then. See, this just proves my point, ha ha: that there are more points of view and experiences here to be discovered than are dreamt of in most ordinary philosophies, which is the main reason I find it interesting.
But now I'm curious: do you have a quick example or two of something you found here that was life-altering, at your (our) age? By all means, feel free to keep why it was life-altering private, if you prefer, I think it would be interesting even if I didn't know why it was really important to you.
By SSC/ASC, do you mean SSC or ACX? To my eye there's a difference in the distribution of topics Scott has written about on the two blogs; SSC made a massive difference to my worldview (most importantly, https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/10/infinite-debt/ persuaded me to start donating 10% of my income to charity), whereas ACX has seldom risen above "mildly interesting" for me.
typo, sorry. SSC/ACX and livejournal. And I "feel your pain". Coming from SSC, I seldom get the same thrill here I had on SSC - but I ascribe this to getting used to Scott being excellent. I just finished my reading list for Carl, so if you want to have a look - the 10%-post is not there, but I remember it well. https://doppelkorn.substack.com/p/my-guide-to-scotts-writing?sd=pf
I think you have an excellent point. C.P.Snow's 'Two Cultures', NTs and NFs, and all that.
Still, I always had the sense the humanities were super-political and leaned hard left. I'm probably left-of-center, but I didn't want to have to pledge allegiance to these leftist ideologies. I think biology probably has a significant effect on human behavior and that is anathema these days. I also think even actual conservative perspectives may have value--are there no novels to be written with the themes of loyalty, the value of family, or country in the current year? Aren't most people satisfied with cishet monogamous relationships, and can't those be explored? Is there, in truth, no beauty?
I hate what the humanities are selling these days, but I don't think literature is intrinsically bad or anything. I was obsessed with Hamlet for a few months in high school. ;)
STEM is just more lucrative. If someone has the ability to pursue it, they likely will, regardless of appeal.
If you entered the job market in the 90s, it was very easy to get your foot in the door on the practical side of IT, even if you had a completely unrelated degree (such as mine in philosophy). "You can configure dial-up networking on Windows 95? You know a little HTML? You're hired!"
Hi fellow word nerd. I'm *sort of* in a STEM field (psychologist), but majored in English lit and philosophy, & feel like that's the stuff that shaped my mind when it was young and super-malleable. People whose minds tend that way are certainly a minority here, but here are a good number of us.
I don’t think I made it through the survey- I thought why? What is this all about exactly ? I drifted off
Interesting results...on most of these I am closer to the average here than I would have thought (certainly compared to the Worldwide or even Western World average)… There seem to be quite a few groups that are overrepresented among ACX readers compared to the Global or even Western World population...The following struck me the most:
Countries (Anglosphere, Scandinavia + Central Europe, Israel) . Anglosphere is obvious , and Scandinavia + Israel make sense because of either widespread English-Language proficiency in the former and diaspora/immigrants in the latter (I would think).
Racially the readership of ACX is less diverse than the US population, but not that different from the Western World at large (probably, since most European countries do not consider "racial" categories in their censuses). Compared to the US average, Black is heavily underrepresented and Asian overrepresented... I assume this is because of job patterns by race/ethnicity, and the type of readers this blog attracts (see job section in the results)?.
LGBT individuals also seem to be overrepresented in this blog. Also Atheists and Agnostics...
Very interesting results, I wish more blogs and/or topical websites would do these.
I am really baffled by circumcision question. Is this an American thing THAT much? In Russia this is extremely associated with religion (and widely laughed upon; for context, not only am I not circumcised, I don't think I know - in person - anyone who is! Not that people would freely discuss this...), but the religion question makes it necessary that many of these are "secular" circumcisions. Like, about half of the survey takers are circumcised (and the other half includes females!).
Yes, circumcision is the norm in America and has been for many years. It is occasionally the topic of contentious discourse here.
Damn. 56% of newborn circumcision´according to Wikipedia, compared to under 20% in most other European and non-Muslim Asian countries. That's… shocking. I mean, the procedure might be a net positive - or not - but sounds extremely like something that a male should choose for himself (perhaps consulting with his sexual partners, which his parents hopefully aren't).
They ask the week old baby and if he says no they won’t do it.
I mean, this is a potentially multilayered sarcasm, and I'm not sure what layer you mean, but this is gold anyway :)
I keep forgetting to use the I’m just kidding font.
I wish I had one.
There's a plausible argument that traditional male circumcision is a net positive if done in infancy but the benefits diminish and costs increase to the point where it is a net negative if done in adulthood. If so, that raises interesting ethical questions, but I think the matter is best left to the parents and if infant circumcision is in fact a marginal net positive then it makes sense that most parents choose it.
Could you expand on that argument? (Provided most of us don't live in the desert non-urban conditions the procedure originated in.)
I think that the argument for cutting bits off a baby (especially their genitals!) needs to be "ironclad", not merely "plausible". I'm sure the parents who circumcise their daughters think they're doing the right thing, but we (as in Western society) still call it Female Genital Mutilation.
Well, I mean, technically there are different types of Female Genital Mutilation, with one being literally equivalent to the male one but not very widespread and the widespread ones being much worse (akin to at best taking the glans off in males and in other cases even more). But yeah, that's a good point. Still want to actually _hear_ the argument though.
> Is this an American thing THAT much?
Yes, for many people in Europe it is one of the shocking things to learn about America, in the same category as for-profit prisons or absence of universal healthcare.
for-profit prisons? I didn't know that one.
They exist but are a minority of prisons.
Do they in practice function differently? I mean, what kind of differences would you see between those and state-run ones?
I assume, they simply get sth. like a flatrate by the state for each prisoner? And then the profit comes from what, the effectiveness in organization? Worse conditions for prisoners?
Or better conditions for prisoners if they share their booty? ;)
I don't know if there's much research on how they differ from regular prisons, but I don't think surplus is shared with prisoners in the form of "better conditions", because prisoners don't get to choose their prisons. If they did, prisons would compete to be lenient enough to permit them to continue criminal activity, like permitting unrestricted communication with fellow gang-members outside.
Yeah, the 'better conditions' part was not meant that serious. Although I guess allowing prisoners to pay for better conditions would be a profitable business.
https://reason.com/volokh/2021/01/27/bidens-private-prisons-executive-order-a-solution-in-search-of-a-problem/
Interesting, thanks.
For context, USA has 6th highest incarceration rate in the world (after El Salvador, Rwanda, Turkmenistan, American Samoa, and Cuba), so "a minority of prisons" could still contain a larger fraction of population than *all* prisons in an average European country.
that's one more of those things ... Those issues, which you see and just wonder 'why on heaven and earth in the U.S. (!) with all its achievements, money, knowlegde, ...?'
Many of those things are probably historical accidents.
Like, something happens, that only makes sense because of the specific circumstances at given place and time. But it happens. And then the civilization keeps growing around it. And later, the specific circumstances no longer exist, and the thing doesn't really make much sense anymore, but it kinda works, we already got used to it, and we have built many new things that depend on it and we are not going to throw those away.
For example, many horrible things about American justice system are a consequence of the idea that every citizen has a right to be judged by a jury of his or her peers. Taken in abstract, this idea sounds great, and was super progressive at its time. The only problem is that it does not scale well, when you later evolve to a society where everyone wants to sue everyone all the time, and no one wants to sit in the jury. The entire system would collapse under its own weight. But the right is already considered sacred, so you cannot simply remove it. So you invent various hacks. For example, you can bribe the accused to significantly reduce their sentence, if they "voluntarily" give up their right to be judged by the jury and admit to the crime. Which results in a crazy system where an unjustly convinced innocent person serves much longer sentence (because they refused to take the deal) than an actual criminal (who accepted the deal, after getting caught).
wow, the german wiki page even gives me the U.S. at the first place. With 629 inmates/ 100000 inhabitants. According to this list in Germany it's 71.
The proportion of women is lower in Germany, with just 6% compared to 10% in U.S., but what's more remarkable is that here we find a proportion of 25% of foreigners, with only 7% in U.S.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_der_L%C3%A4nder_nach_Gef%C3%A4ngnisinsassen
That might depend on specific year. German Wikipedia cites sources from 2017, English Wikipedia links a source from 2023: https://www.statista.com/statistics/262962/countries-with-the-most-prisoners-per-100-000-inhabitants/
How do Europeans feel about the electric chair?
Can't speak for 'the Europeans' of course, but yes death penalty and the availability of guns are two other things that people are often shocked to learn.
Now, what are the things that are shocking for US citizens to learn about different practices in Europe?
Or single countries of course?
Some people bristle at the VAT.
It’s alway amazing that so many people are at least bilingual. If you speak 5 languages in the US you are a genius. In Europe you may qualify as a hotel concierge.
Uhm… Oh, paying to use the restroom at a McDonald’s in Holland. Not exactly shock but a bit of a surprise.
Yeah, the fee for restrooms is totally weird.
For the VAT, is this so surprising, given you have a sales or consumption tax? I must have missed sth. here.
I think it’s quite a bit higher in Europe. Something like 20% in Holland. I don’t think the highest US state is double digits. Minnesota around 7%.
Some states have no sales tax, or exempt large classes of products (for example some places don't tax groceries). After living in a no-sales-tax state for multiple decades it always confuses me for a moment when I travel and my purchases ring up for more than the sticker price.
I think also service culture at restaurants and other places is sometimes really low compared to U.S. So maybe unfriendliness of staff in places where you pay the bill.
True, though usually I prefer to get lousy service for free than good service for 15-20%.
VAT is maybe the nicest thing about the EU (each memberstate must have one). Why tax hard work? Why tax business? (Why rob banks? that's where the money is). But you wanna consume and get all those goodies for yourself - pay!
I’m inclined to agree. Not a very popular idea in the US in general. Taxing consumption of non staples seems fair to me but I’m definitely in a minority here.
Yes, I would agree. I would be very happy to replace the enormous income tax in the US with a VAT. That would encourage people to earn and *not* consume, i.e. work hard and save, which is what you need for a capital-intensive economy. (And if you really wanted to consume, go ahead, and the VAT pays for the externalities.) This bizarre monetary magic regime we have instead where the Fed prints money, lends at well below any realistic interest rate, and we end up extracting our current capital by inflating away future savings is cruel and duplicitous.
I'm confused, why are people confused by VAT when they're fine with sales tax? I know they're different, but not in a way that matters to the consumer.
And yes, public bathrooms are definitely one of the things that Europe does badly. Water, too! I love the fact that you can (practically) always find a water fountain in the US, it's right outside the bathroom. I've spent too long wandering around in Europe on hot days trying to find somewhere that will sell me water, and then finding out that the only water they have is fizzy. (And do you really want to drink water anyway? You know you'll just have to pee, and that will be another half-hour drama.)
Yes, everything in the water - bathroom realm is very badly designed. And if you don't have small change in the right currency, then half-hour drama sounds very optimistic.
In addition, in some European countries you at least get free water when you're ordering food at a restaurant, while in Germany you have to order a bottle of water that costs more than a double-that-size bottle of beer. They even had to make a law (!), to assure that the cheapest beverage in a restaurant is non-alcoholic.
I had actually thought the electric chair itself had fallen into abeyance. So I was a bit surprised to see that some states still use it (sometimes offering it as a choice to the condemned along with the more common lethal injection), though other death penalty states have ruled it to be cruel and unusual punishment. The most recent use was in Tennessee in February, 2020.
What I (as an Australian) don't understand about American death penalty is the methods - surely neutral gas asphyxiation is cheaper, more humane, and way harder to be supply restricted on than their convoluted lethal injection.
Morally, I'm not sure how I feel about actual executions, but "death row" costing the state more than life in prison and lasting over a decade seems fucked up (for the same reason that Solitary Confinement often is)
There are a couple of states that have tried to use nitrogen for executions in the last decade, but it didn't work out. I don't know the details beyond Wikipedia's summary.
***
In April 2015, Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallin approved a bill allowing nitrogen asphyxiation as an execution method.[45] On March 14, 2018, Oklahoma Attorney General Mike Hunter and Corrections Director Joe M. Allbaugh announced a switch to nitrogen gas as the state's primary method of execution.[46] After struggling for years to design a nitrogen execution protocol, the State of Oklahoma announced in February 2020 that it was abandoning the project after finding a reliable source of drugs to carry out the lethal injection executions.[47]
In 2018 Alabama approved nitrogen asphyxiation as an execution method and allowed death row inmates a choice of method. An execution by lethal injection was stayed by a court In September 2022 because the inmate claimed to have made the election of nitrogen asphyxiation but the form had been lost.[48]
***
Personally I think there are crimes where the death penalty might be justified in principle, but a combination of increasing distrust in the reliability of the verdicts, the repeated revelations that "merciful" methods of execution turn out to be torture, and the costs and uncertainties of the system mean that I've pretty much come to be anti-death penalty in practice.
I don't think we're likely enough to be able to do it "right" for it to be worth doing at all under foreseeable circumstances, and I think trying will lead to much more injustice than justice.
I find it puzzling that several common execution methods in the US rely on mind-boggling contraceptions that seem to have higher possibility of long, agonizing deaths than many "traditional" execution methods. (Chemical injection that may or may not render you unconscious, only unable to move while you feel like drowning. Electric chair has quite weird way in causing of death and disabling the vital organs.)
Personally, if I were to face an execution, I would prefer a method with a very simple mechanism that caused cessation of brain function as fast and as reliably as possible.
Japan and their choice of long-drop hanging sounds not too bad. (But if reintroduced in a state where hangings have not been performed for a long time or otherwise to administered by the incompetent, the botched hanging sound also quite gruesome way to go.) The guillotine as used by the French before they abolished death penalty doesn't sound too bad either (supply of oxygen disappears, rending unconsciousness and death reliably and apparently as quickly as physiologically possible, and mechanism of action is universally reliable), but probably unlikely to used anywhere else because of historical reasons.
Of the plausible options, the firing squad appears quite reliable, with clear mechanism of death, and the condemned may retain some dignity (compared to "strapped to a gurney requisitioned from Dr Evil's lair"). Reliability can be increased by instructions to take several shots or requiring the squad leader/officer to finish it off with a revolver shot to head if the squad failed to hit anything important.
N2 asphyxiation is difficult because of the need to have witnesses and executors present, and to be able to accomplish it without the cooperation of the condemned. You either need some kind of complicated mask protocol, where you can put on a tight-fitting mask without someone's cooperation, or you need to build a gas chamber with big windows and a very, very fast gas exchange. (The existing gas chambers use HCN which is fatal in very low concetrations, so you don't need a rapid gas exchange.)
Personally, I'm opposed to making the death penalty more humane, except in the sense of making it fast and definite. If we're going to kill a man in cold blood, then I see no benefit and some harm to trying to ease our conscience by making it seem pain-free or gentle. Killing is killing. Best to own it, and if gory details make it harder to pretend something as innocuous as turning off a tap is going on, so be it.
That doesn't mean I oppose killing people if they need it. Sometimes they need it. Sometimes they do such terrible things that their continued existence is an offense to reason and virtue every hour they continue to breathe. The guy who supposedly stabbed those girls in Idaho to death just for the thrill (i.e. not for money or sex) comes to mind. That mother who drowned all her kids in the bathtub, one by one, starting with the youngest and having to chase down the oldest because he figured out something was wrong. I would be happy to end their lives myself, if it were my responsibility. But I wouldn't kid myself that I wasn't doing something inherently terrible, and that the action wasn't a blot on my soul, and the fact that the action was necessary at all wasn't a blot on my species.
I think not using gas is linked to the historic example of state-planned and -excecuted mass murder in this field.
You'd think, but the last gas chamber execution in the US was in 1999, quite a while after the most famous example, and it's still officially a legal option in California and Missouri. But I suspect that does deter it some.
Oh, I see.
In EU death penalty is illegal, even if a country wanted to get it back, it couldn't. So in a way everything on death penalty in U.S. sounds weird to me, including but not limited to the choices of method.
Most people instinctively consider asphyxiation to be a very unpleasant thing, crossing over to horrific when taken to lethal extremes. And most people are not aware that it's the excess of CO2 rather than the shortage of O2 that causes the underlying physiological distress. For that matter, most people aren't very good at overriding their instincts with technically-correct knowledge even when they do know better.
So if you propose inert-gas asphyxiation, that's going to go over about as well as proposing short-drop hanging or the garrote, unless your PR campaign is very effective. And if it isn't fully effective, people are going to drag up that time you proposed "horrifically torturing criminals to death" every time you propose anything else they disagree with. If you're a politician, it's probably not worth the risk.
Well, I wouldn't fancy it myself but I think that the death penalty, properly and rationally applied, is a good thing.
Or that the price on the shelves in the grocery stores is *not* the price you pay at the till.
And it is perfectly legal to sell salmonella-infected chicken. Each year, over 1 million Americans get sick.
That explained to me why American poultry producers wash the processed chicken in chlorine at the end to remove or reduce bacterial contamination, one of the things that exercised the minds of some during Brexit (with EU rules gone, the government were touting the freedom to make deals with other countries on trade, and one objection being raised was "Yeah, including letting the US sell us their crappy chicken"):
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-47440562
"Washing chicken in chlorine and other disinfectants to remove harmful bacteria was a practice banned by the European Union (EU) in 1997 over food safety concerns. The ban has stopped virtually all imports of US chicken meat which is generally treated by this process.
It's not consuming chlorine itself that the EU is worried about - in fact in 2005 the European Food Safety Authority said that "exposure to chlorite residues arising from treated poultry carcasses would be of no safety concern". Chlorine-rinsed bagged salads are common in the UK and other countries in the EU.
But the EU believes that relying on a chlorine rinse at the end of the meat production process could be a way of compensating for poor hygiene standards - such as dirty or crowded abattoirs."
https://www.thegrocer.co.uk/food-safety/chlorinated-chicken-explained-why-do-the-americans-treat-their-poultry-with-chlorine/555618.article
This report does come from 2017, I'm not sure what the state of play is right now:
"What is chlorinated chicken?
Chlorinated chicken – or chlorine-treated chicken – refers to chicken that has been treated with antimicrobial rinses in order to remove harmful bacteria. These rinses are often referred to as Pathogen Reduction Treatments (PRTs) in the US.
After the birds are slaughtered and the carcases eviscerated, they are examined and then undergo a “final washing procedure”, where chemicals are applied as a spray or wash on the processing line, “or as an addition to the water used to lower the carcase temperature”.
Why is it used in the US?
To help manage pathogens like salmonella and campylobacter and protect consumers from infections.
According to a report from the Adam Smith Institute (which argues in favour of allowing PRTs), “immersing poultry meat in chlorine dioxide solution of the strength used in the United States reduces prevalence of salmonella from 14% in controls to 2%. EU chicken samples typically have 15-20% salmonella.”
Why is chlorine treatment banned over here?
The EU and the US have a long-running dispute over imports of chlorine-treated poultry, which EU member states have refused to accept since 1997. The feud has resulted in proceedings before the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and remains a major bone of contention in EU-US trade relations.
One of the EU’s key concerns is that the use of antimicrobial treatments like chlorine washes compensates for poor hygiene behaviour elsewhere in the supply chain (for example on farms), and that consumers are better protected by a system that doesn’t allow processors the simple ‘get-out’ of treating their chicken with chemicals. As a result, EU processors are only allowed to use cold air and water to decontaminate poultry carcases.
The US disputes this, says the ban is not based on scientific evidence and little more than wilful protectionism designed to protect EU poultry producers from more competitive imports."
Somehow I'm not surprised the Adam Smith Institute thinks chlorinated chicken is good enough 😁 And it well may be! It's just a bit "So they washed this in bleach because it might be full of germs?" for the consumer.
"Yes. The Adam Smith Institute says there are good reasons for the UK to scrap EU rules that currently ban chlorine-treated poultry in this country.
In a new briefing paper called Chlorinated chicken - Why You Shouldn’t Give A Cluck, it argues British consumers could enjoy much cheaper poultry if the ban on chlorine treatment were lifted. “US methods produce fresh chicken at 79% of the price of equivalent birds on British supermarket shelves,” it says.
It also points out American consumers eat about 156 million chlorine-treated chickens a week, and are fine, and that the risk associated with chlorine treatment are tiny. “Adults would need to eat 5% of their bodyweight in chlorinated chicken each day to be at risk of ill health from poultry alone,” it says. “Brits would have to eat three entire chlorine-washed chickens every day for an extended period to risk harm.”
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/56eddde762cd9413e151ac92/t/59747741bf629a8e3d01a494/1500804930480/Chlorinated+Chicken.pdf
"Favourable access to a market as large as the US, with its population of more than 320 million people, would be a great prize for a post-Brexit Britain.
Free trade agreements (FTAs) with such economies will be vital in order to replace a likely loss of trade with some of the remaining 27 EU members. Yet while the EU has been able to offer the US a combined market of some 510 million inhabitants, the UK is in a weaker negotiating position with just over 65 million.
The government is convinced that it will quickly agree a trade deal with the US, and the US President is reported to believe that the two countries could strike a bargain within 90 days of the UK’s withdrawal from the EU.
…The issue of access to European poultry markets is a longstanding one for the US, and its vast chicken exporting industry. The country is the second largest exporter of the foodstuff, with government estimates for exports this year at over 3.1 billion kilos. Some of the country’s most influential lobbyists have made clear that they are keen on pressing for chlorinated chicken to be part of any US-UK trade deal.
A shallow tariffs-only FTA would be of relatively little value to the UK. Tariffs between the two countries are already relatively low. However, if the UK were to relax the ban on chlorinated poultry imports, it could provide leverage for a more extensive UK-US free trade deal. Chlorinated chicken is important for more than just symbolic reasons."
Sorry, ASI, I have to disagree with you; allowing the larger US production access with cheaper chickens to the UK market will have an adverse effect on local producers, and we've seen what can go wrong with supply chains during the recent pandemic. Become dependent on cheap American chicken imports, and if they get cut off for any reason, you are in trouble. Also, I don't think "sure we give in and surrender access to you" is going to strengthen any bargaining position, what has the UK got that they can demand the US accept in return?
And looking it up, it doesn't seem like the UK imports that much (if any) US chicken after all:
"DESTINATIONS
In October 2022, Poultry Meat were exported mostly to Netherlands (£4.71M), Ireland (£2.99M), France (£2.59M), Benin (£1.7M), and Angola (£993k), and were imported mostly from Netherlands (£52.8M), Poland (£48.2M), France (£6.54M), Belgium (£5.89M), and Ireland (£4.97M).
GROWTH
In October 2022, the increase in Poultry Meat's year-by-year exports was explained primarily by an increase in exports to Ghana (£363k or 176%), Kosovo (£151k or 80.1%), and Gabon (£145k or 40.1%). In October 2022, the increase in Poultry Meat's year-by-year imports was explained primarily by an increase in imports from Spain (£527k or 27%), Portugal (£264k or 1.37k%), and Bulgaria (£223k or 418%)."
That sounds crazy. What does legal mean? I mean, you don't check and don't know? Or you know and still can sell those?
Congrats on your list of issues causing this kind of 'wait, what?' moment, quite aptly.
There are differences in food standards between the US and the EU, and for a lot of things American standards can actually be higher (back in the 80s when I was very briefly working as a lab tech in a dairy co-operative, dried milk powder had to meet USDA standards for export).
There are also differences in which authorities handle food standards and safety, permitted ingredients, labelling, etc.
For meat, poultry and eggs the USDA handles those, and I think that's where the standards diverge. The US tends to permit somewhat higher levels of white blood cells in cow's milk, antibiotics and growth promoters in meat animals, and higher levels of contaminants (the infamous rat droppings and insect parts) in grain and flour.
https://www.grin.com/document/286574
Somatic cell count regulations comparison (though the US one is set high, it looks like actual production hits lower numbers):
2019 US:
https://www.aphis.usda.gov/animal_health/nahms/dairy/downloads/dairy_monitoring/btscc_2019infosheet.pdf
"By definition, BTSCCs [Bulk-tank somatic cell counts] are the number of white blood cells (primarily macrophages and leukocytes), secretory cells, and squamous cells per milliliter of raw milk. BTSCCs are used as measures of milk quality and as indicators of overall udder health. There is an inverse relationship between BTSCCs and cheese yield and the quality/shelf life of pasteurized fluid milk. Multiple studies have shown that operations with increased BTSCCs are more likely to have milk that violates antibiotic residue standards. Milk with antibiotic residues never enters the food supply. The most frequently cited reason for antibiotic residues in milk is inadvertently placing cows treated with antibiotics in the milking string before completing the recommended withdrawal period.
To ensure high-quality dairy products, milk cooperatives and proprietary handlers monitor BTSCCs in milk shipments using standards outlined in the U.S. Pasteurized Milk Ordinance (PMO). 8 In the United States, 750,000 cells/mL is the legal maximum BTSCC for Grade A milk shipments.
...The maximum BTSCC level is 400,000 cells/mL in the European Union (EU), Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. The maximum BTSCC level in Brazil is 1,000,000 cells/mL. Although there has been support in recent years for lowering the U.S. Grade A milk maximum BTSCC to 400,000 cells/mL per shipment, no changes to the PMO have been made. In January 2012, the EU implemented regulations that require milk products, including whey, exported to the EU have a maximum BTSCC of 400,000 cells/mL."
2004 EU recommendations:
https://www.fsai.ie/uploadedFiles/Consol_Reg853_2004(1).pdf
"3. (a) Food business operators must initiate procedures to ensure that raw milk meets the following criteria:
(i) for raw cows' milk:
Plate count at 30° C (per ml) ≤ 100 000 (*)
Somatic cell count (per ml) ≤ 400 000 (**)
(*) Rolling geometric average over a two-month period, with at least two samples per month.
(**) Rolling geometric average over a three-month period, with at least one sample per month, unless the competent authority specifies another methodology to take account of seasonal variations in production levels."
As to the Salmonella chicken, it does appear that there isn't any legal or regulatory framework as yet, only in 2022 did the department responsible start drawing up a framework (yeah, my jaw dropped at this too, given how litigious American society seems to be; but maybe it's only "when enough producers get sued in court does the regulatory body get involved"?)
https://www.fsis.usda.gov/inspection/inspection-programs/inspection-poultry-products/reducing-salmonella-poultry/proposed-1
"FSIS [ Food Safety and Inspection Service] is assessing whether certain levels or types of Salmonella on raw poultry product present an elevated risk of causing human illness such that they should be considered adulterants. As a result, the Agency is considering implementing a final product standard or standards to ensure that product contaminated with Salmonella that is likely to make people sick is not sold to consumers.
To protect public health, FSIS regulations should prevent product with high levels of contamination and/or specific serotypes from entering commerce. This goal would be accomplished by declaring Salmonella an adulterant. In doing so, FSIS would rely on criteria that were applied to STECs. These criteria are: consideration of serotypes associated with human illness; low infectious dose; severity of human illnesses; and typical consumer cooking practices.
Consistent with its approach to determining the status of certain STECs as adulterants in specific raw beef products, FSIS is considering whether there are specific Salmonella and raw poultry product pairs that have characteristics that distinguish them from other raw poultry products contaminated with Salmonella, such that Salmonella at certain levels and/or types of Salmonella should be considered as an adulterant when present in that specific raw poultry product. For example, FSIS will soon be releasing a proposal that Salmonella meets the critiera to be considered an adulterant in not-ready-to-eat (NRTE) breaded and stuffed raw chicken products, an action that will allow the Agency to better protect public health"
Yeah, declaring that salmonella is an "adulterant" in the supermarket chicken kiev would be a nice thing, I think!
https://www.usda.gov/media/press-releases/2022/08/01/usda-announces-action-declare-salmonella-adulterant-breaded-stuffed
"WASHINGTON, August 1, 2022 – The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) is announcing that it will be declaring Salmonella an adulterant in breaded and stuffed raw chicken products.
“Food safety is at the heart of everything FSIS does,” said Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack. “That mission will guide us as this important first step launches a broader initiative to reduce Salmonella illnesses associated with poultry in the U.S.”
“Today’s announcement is an important moment in U.S. food safety because we are declaring Salmonella an adulterant in a raw poultry product,” said Sandra Eskin, USDA Deputy Under Secretary for Food Safety. “This is just the beginning of our efforts to improve public health.”
By declaring Salmonella an adulterant in these products, FSIS will be able to ensure that highly contaminated products that could make people sick are not sold to consumers. Since 1998, breaded and stuffed raw chicken products have been associated with up to 14 outbreaks and approximately 200 illnesses. Products in this category are found in the freezer section and include some chicken cordon bleu or chicken Kiev products. These products appear cooked, but they are heat-treated only to set the batter or breading and the product contains raw poultry. Continual efforts to improve the product labeling have not been effective at reducing consumer illnesses."
Okay, it seems the answer is: we didn't really know (or wanted to know or whatever) that salmonella was bad. Sounds lilke a huge lobby success ... but then maybe just weird coincidences.
Btw., yes, I remember the chlorinated chicken very well, it was one of those talking points in the TTIP debate.
Yeah, I remember my mind blown with that one. Just include the tax in the price, damn it!
That (the inclusion of the sales tax in the listed price) was the practice in New Zealand when we lived there in 2003/04. I thought it was a really good idea.
When Canada's GST was implemented in early 1991, some businesses did move to incorporating it, and the provincial sales tax where applicable, into the listed price.
They all moved back to advertising and listing the pre-tax price within a few months; presumably the practice had hurt sales.
Yeah, I imagine someone looking at the price on the shelves went "Whoa, this item has become really expensive!" and they switched to shops that had the pre-tax prices on the shelves.
I think it's the same general principle as "reduce a price to $9.99 instead of $10" and it works, even if intellectually you are aware this is not $9 and all you are saving is one cent.
So even if intellectually you know that at the till they'll be adding on 15% or whatever, when you look at the shelf price your lizard brain says "$1.00 cheaper than $1.15, shop here".
This is effectively a prisoner's dilemma - "defecting" by listing pre-tax price is more useful to each individual shop. And that's one of the many reasons why governmental regulations sometimes work better - they break this kind of prisoner dilemmas by forcing cooperation.
The difference is, at least I can imagine people who clearly benefit from the latter two examples. And the taxes thing, although baffling, can be related to "something something true price". But with circumcision? It's certainly not that beneficial to doctors, and the data show it's not about religion (although US is also unusually _religious_ for a first-world country, this doesn't cover all the difference). If I were paranoid, I would really start suspecting some weird Jewish conspiracy (the positive opinions from doctors on Wikipedia - or, rather, the names of those doctors - would certainly support this :D ).
If you trace the history, circumcision in America is a remnant of Puritan nonsense, it's not Jewish influence, IIRC.
Yeah, historically that's very much true, anti-masturbation campaigns and all that. But one still has to wonder why this held in the areas where religion otherwise fell.
If circumcision were as common in Germany as in the US, Frederick Forsythe's brilliant novel The Odessa File would have been missing a minor but important plot element.
I'm curious as to how to explain the 33% (highest percent) of participants working in computers (practical). How related is it to the topics mentioned in ACX, the writing style, referrals etc?
It’s pretty remarkable how positive people are towards meetups. I think for the majority of online communities the consensus would be “I never want to meet any of you!”
The internet encourages and amplifies rudeness, disrespect, and other obnoxious social interactions. Scott discourages that, both in the example he sets and the banhammer he wields. That's rare.
Can't argue with it, the Reign of Terror works!
Shocked by the suicide data. And surprised that I felt sad to see it.
I was also very surprised by those results.
I was curious about the two Moscow-Paris questions, so I'll scoop Scott on those. For the analysis, I restricted to the 6378 people who answered both questions.
Before I started the analysis, I suspected that for a question like this, you should take the geometric mean (GM) instead of the arithmetic mean (AM). In other words, the data will make more sense on a log scale. Indeed:
- The true answer is 2,486km.
- The arithmetic mean of all estimates is very bad. For the first estimates the AM is 7088km, for the second estimates it is 9331km, and for first and second estimates together it is 8210.
- The geometric mean of all answers is pretty good. For the first estimates the GM is 2,722, for the second estimates it is 2961, for first+second it is 2,839. That is only 9% / 19% / 14% from the truth.
Now to the interesting part: If you have only access to yourself, should you a) trust your first guess, b) trust your second guess, or c) trust the GM of your two guesses? In my book review on Consciousness and the Brain [1], I have mentioned a paper [2] which claims that you can get a better estimate by taking the mean of your two answers. I didn't have too much trust in it, so let's see:
For each estimate I computed a factor F >= 1 by which the estimate was off. So I computed the quotient "estimate/truth" if the estimate was larger than the truth, and computed "truth/estimate" otherwise. This is equivalent to the distance from the truth if we convert the data to a log scale. (The case distinction is because "the distance" is the absolute value of the difference.) The result:
- The first estimate was off by a factor 1.815. (This means that the GM of all those factors was 1.815)
- The second estimate was off by a factor 1.901.
- The GM was off by a factor 1.791.
To look at it another way, I removed the 75 answer where both estimates were equal, and asked:
- How often was the first estimate better than the second: in 53.3% of the cases.
- How often was the GM better than the first estimate: in 52.8% of the cases.
- How often was the GM better than the second estimate: in 60.0% of the cases.
So what is the conclusion? First of all, the second estimate was clearly worse than the first. My partner said before the analysis that naively we should expect the opposite: when you answer the second question, you have thought twice about the problem (and possibly harder the second time), so you have considered more information for your second estimate. Shouldn't this improve your answer?
My best explanation is that the second question asked you to imagine that your first answer was off by a non-trivial amount. This might give you a wrong bias from whatever correct reasoning you had. But the paper [2] also found that the second estimate was much worse for their questions, which were probably not phrased like this. And they had the same effect when there were three weeks between the two questions. I am not sure why the second estimate is so much worse.
But coming back to our ACX question: even though the second answer is not really good, the GM of both estimates is still slightly better than the first one, though the advantage is small. For a random person, the probability that the GM is better than the first answer is slightly higher than 50%. The factor by which you are off is better for the GM, but only by a small amount.
Overall, I could reproduce the conclusion from [2], though the effect looks pretty small to me, while it was huge in [2]. This could be because they used a very different type of analysis (arithmetic mean + mean square error). Mean square errors punish outliers a lot, so it may help the mean to shine.
Still, it's remarkable that you can take the (much worse) second guess to improve your first one. Apparently, you can gain a little bit from harvesting the wisdom of your inner crowd, even if your second guess on its own is less accurate.
[1] https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-consciousness-and
[2] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02136.x (paywall, but accessible through sci-hub if that is legal for you)
I think most people answered this as "I don't know the real distance, if my first answer might be wrong that could be because I underestimated, so I'll increase the number for my second answer".
I went the other way - guessed shorter for my second answer than the first, and upon looking it up was nearer to the correct answer. But I'm not a usual sample.
My thought process was "if my first guess is "way off", I ought to update by roughly a factor of two", and was maybe 60/40 in favour of doubling my first guess. (turns out if I'd halved my guess instead it would have been pretty much spot on; Europe is tiny!)
funny thing is I had somewhat recently read that it is ~1800mi from Paris to Moscow. But (not thinking about how far it really is) my brain remembered the number, but not the unit, and I assumed "it's in Europe so it was probably in km" and translated to 1200mi. Then for the re-guess I thought "maybe I'm switching miles and km" but I corrected the wrong way and put 800mi. (which in retrospect I should have known was too short but in the spirit of the survey, I didn't look up a thing)
What about the median of the answers? IMO that's the correct way to do the wisdom of the crowds. That way, you're not thrown off by the one guy who answered 0 km or 10^100 km.
That makes lots of sense for the original setting, but not in the single-player mode of wisdom of the crowd. There you have your own two estimates, and nothing else. So you can't take the median. You could guess three times, but it quickly gets hard to give more guesses.
> Before I started the analysis, I suspected that for a question like this, you should take the geometric mean (GM)
Why this?
When you were 'told' your guess was wrong, was your inclination "do I add or subtract 1000km from this?" or was it "do I double or halve my previous guess?"; The first suggests a regular average, the second wants to be looking at logs, which means geometric mean
Yes, that's a good heuristic. Another one is: if you might get the order of magnitude wrong, then GM is probably better. Reason: if one of your guesses is 10 times too large, and the other is 10 times too small, then your AM is 5 times too large. This is exactly what happened with the distances.
If you know that your answer is in some interval or if you have some reasonable anchor, then you can use AM. E.g., if you estimate a fraction or a probability (answer between 0 or one), or the number of cars per household in the US (with an anchor of 1 or 2, you won't be off by a factor of 10).
That's very interesting. But wait, are you telling me to use GM, whenever guesses could be wrong by an order of magnitude? What about eg. predictions for the number of soldiers that will be killed in Russian war in Ukraine?
Yes, in such a case I would also use the GM.
As Dionysus pointed out, the median might be an even better alternative if lots of estimates are available. But I would not take the AM.
This makes me wonder, if I have the estimates expressed in several prediction markets on such a question (eg. the number of soldiers that will be killed in Russian war in Ukraine), I should in fact disaggrate the Prediction Markets into different guesses and take the GM? Probably a silly question, sorry.
That's fascinating, thanks.
Thank you - your review was why I included this question in the first place!
As a minor aside, does anyone think
"I strongly identify as Jewish and go to synagogue regularly; if asked "What is your religion?", I would definitely say Jewish. However, "the religion you believe" is the wrong way to describe my relationship to Judaism (and the wrong way to describe many people's relationship to their religion, esp. non-Western religions), since none of my beliefs about the world are based on my Judaism. (E.g. as previously indicated, I am agnostic.) So the correct answer to the question "What religion do you believe in?" might, in my case, be "none". For the purposes of your data analysis, please feel free to code this answer as either "Jewish", "Mixed/other", or blank, depending on what you actually meant by the question."
is a pretty Jewish (or at least, secular Ashkenazi) thing to say?
More detailed way of saying "cultural Catholic" to my view. Lots of people raised Catholic, go to Mass on Sundays, haven't a clue about the doctrines of the faith and don't care, live in effect in their personal lives the same way as the secular society around them. Look at Pelosi and Biden, for example; self-described "devout Catholics", completely out of step with the bishops on abortion. All the Catholics who use contraception and have sex before marriage. All the rest of it.
So that's "I'm culturally Jewish, my heritage is important to me, but I don't live by the rules of the faith because pfft, I'm a modern guy living in the modern world, do you think I'm some kind of zealot or something?"
So I managed to find a total of one Alt-Right transsexual in the database. Assuming it wasn't someone trolling - admittedly a very big if - I would very much like to read an interview with that person and how they reconcile their political views with their sexual identity.
I've known multiple trans women who were alt-righters, including one who wasn't even White herself despite associating with literal White nationalists. Also multiple trans women who were leftists of an explicitly Stalinist bent, which isn't much better from an LGBT rights perspective (the USSR under Stalin was just as oppressive towards queer people as any right-wing fascist regime).
In general, politically-active trans people seem prone to having extreme views in one direction or another: extreme right, extreme left, extreme libertarian, or some other type of fringe ideology. (A few weeks back, I saw one of those "trans woman bingo" memes and one of the boxes was "far-right, far-left, or ancap," which shows that the trans community is self-aware about this trend!) Granted, I'm trans and I'm a pretty moderate center-left liberal/civil libertarian myself, but I haven't seen many other trans people like me.
One could say that back in 1930-ies and 1940-ies, most regimes weren't "much better from an LGBT rights perspective", so one can easily believe "well, that was an unfortunate belief of the past but it's not really Stalinist-unique, and otherwise they were essentially correct".
No, the original Russian communist revolution passed some fairly progressive laws, relative not just to Tsarist Russia but to the laws in the rest of Europe at the time, and Stalin wound them all back to maximum repression when he came in.
I know. But, again, this can be easily rationalized away as a side effect of attempting to unify the country (which it technically was).
This is actually a myth. I've heard a lot of leftists claim that the USSR was tolerant of queer people (or at least more tolerant than anywhere else in the world) before Stalin came along, but the historical facts tell a different story.
The original Bolsheviks never actively made the choice to legalize homosexuality; they abolished the old Tsarist legal code entirely, and that happened to include the anti-homosexuality laws. Then, when they were crafting new laws, five of the seven Soviet Republics chose to prohibit homosexuality again. Furthermore, even in the two Soviet Republics that didn't explicitly criminalize it (Russia and Ukraine), the legal authorities often found excuses to arrest and prosecute male homosexuals, which made it effectively illegal in practice: The mere act of trying to initiate a sexual encounter with another man would frequently be treated as solicitation and punished accordingly. It was also common for gay men to be arrested on suspicion of pederasty without any probable cause.
Leaving aside specific policies, Soviet propaganda from the pre-Stalinist era frequently condemned homosexuality as a form of mental illness requiring treatment at best, and a form of capitalist/fascist degeneracy at worse. On top of the usual conservative association between homosexuality and pedophilia, being queer was also commonly seen as a strong indicator of "counter-revolutionary tendencies." And when Stalin finally did prohibit homosexuality across the entire Soviet Union, it wasn't some unpopular diktat he forced upon an otherwise progressive culture; he had the overwhelming support of both the general populace and the Communist Party leadership.
In short:
1. The Bolshevik government's legalization of homosexuality was an oversight, not an intentional choice
2. Homosexuality was illegal in 5/7ths of the Soviet Union even before Stalin came to power
3. Even in the 2/7ths of the Soviet Union where homosexuality was technically legal on paper, male homosexuality was basically illegal in practice
4. Soviet culture was largely hostile toward homosexual behavior, associating it with mental illness, pedophilia, and fascist political leanings
5. The Soviet masses and party leadership overwhelmingly agreed with Stalin's choice to criminalize it across the whole of the USSR
Interesting anecdotes. I think they are only partially born out by the data, though. I computed the standard deviations of responses to the political spectrum question (1 for far left, 10 for far right) for different gender groups. The SD for trans women is only slightly higher than that for cis women and is a lot lower than that for cis men.
Gender N SD
1 F (cisgender) 719 1.70
2 F (transgender m -> f) 127 1.73
3 M (cisgender) 5786 1.90
4 M (transgender f -> m) 20 1.50
5 Other 173 1.44
6 NA 32 1.87
And I understand your claim only pertains to "politically-active trans people". But the pattern remains the same if we filter out people who rated their political interest as < 4, on a scale of 1-5.
I also tried to get the percentages of respondents who are on the more extreme ends on the political spectrum (<= 2 or >= 9 on a scale of 1-10) or have more extreme political affiliations. It's perhaps not surprisingly that people on the far left are greatly overrepresented among trans people. Not so much for those on the far right, but we need a larger group of trans people to be able to draw anything conclusive.
Gender N % Far Left % Far Right
1 F (cisgender) 719 10.71% 1.53%
2 F (transgender m -> f) 127 25.20% 1.57%
3 M (cisgender) 5786 7.74% 2.80%
4 M (transgender f -> m) 20 25.00% NA
5 Other 173 33.53% NA
6 <NA> 32 6.25% NA
Gender N % Marxist % Neoreactionary % Alt-right
1 F (cisgender) 697 2.15% 1.15% 0.57%
2 F (transgender m -> f) 124 8.06% 1.61% 0.81%
3 M (cisgender) 5683 1.64% 2.16% 1.34%
4 M (transgender f -> m) 20 5.00% NA NA
5 Other 166 5.42% 0.60% NA
6 <NA> 30 NA NA 6.67%
It's interesting that you haven't met trans people who hold more moderate, center left political views. Almost 24% of trans respondents fall between 4 and 5 on the political spectrum. It could be that people with more moderate views tend to be less vocal about their politics.
The respondent doesn't seem to be very interested in politics though. They rated their political interest as a 2 on a scale of 1 (not interested at all) - 5 (very interested).
Kinda funny how there are more readers living in Denmark(39, population 5.9 million) than are black.(26, population >1 billion)
It's not "black, population >1 billion", in practical terms it's "black, population of the USA which identifies as black, 43 million".
Still a discrepancy but not quite as big.
Scott: May I repost some of those COVID survey results on my weekly COVID update on Twitter? I'll credit you and ACX—or not—as you wish. What's interesting to me, is the number of COVID virgins. I've argued in the past that 25% of the nation's population has caught COVID yet. But without updated serological data it's hard to prove.
Yes, of course. For anyone with a similar question about permission, the answer is also yes.
Did you mean "has" or "hasn't"?
Yes. I meant hasn't. <Insert Homer Simpson D'oh>
I referenced some of your COVID survey responses in my weekly COVID Epi Week summary. At the risk of tooting my own horn...
https://twitter.com/beowulf888/status/1616974664810786816?s=20&t=24xVrCUAwYFcWEeyqUHmQQ
Presumably of interest to you: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36451882/.
Preprint finds that by November 9, 2022, 94% (95% CrI, 79%-99%) of the US population were estimated to have been infected by SARS-CoV-2 at least once.
Yes, I read that. But it didn't jibe with some previous seroprevalence surveys—and when I added subsequent cases multiplied by the CDC's 2.8x estimate. And it didn't jibe with my peer group in which less than a third of us have caught COVID. Unfortunately, unlike the UK ONS, the CDC hasn't been conducting continuous seroprevalence surveys (bless their little hearts!).
What do you mean "it didn't jibe with seroprevalence?" antibodies don't stay permanently (T-cells are more permanent), and are less likely to be generated to a detectable degree in vaccinated patients, as the CDC notes in their seroprevalence study (which found that already a year ago, most Americans tested positive for antibodies: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7117e3.htm).
Why do you think that less than a third of your peer group has caught COVID? What percentage of COVID infections are you estimating are asymptomatic?
Remember, vaccinated people people are less likely to be symptomatic and younger people are less likely to be symptomatic.
[If memory serves, more recent variants have also been less severe, so probably more less likely to cause symptomatic infection]
And unless people get tested for COVID every time they get sick, then even being symptomatic would not let them know that they've had COVID.
I am pretty sure that I have not had covid, and I know quite a few others who think the same. Virtually all of these people, including me, are over 50, and many are over 60. The reasons I'm inclined to believe that this group really has not had covid are: (1)They are quite cautious. All got each vax as soon as they qualified, all wore high quality masks in indoor public settings with great consistency throughout pandemic. All are still masking, though with a bit less consistency.. (2) It is not very likely that somebody aged 50+, with no prior infection, would have an asymptomatic case. (3) All tested pretty frequently. They tested if they'd had an exposure, tested if they didn't feel well, tested before gatherings with others. If they'd had an asymptomatic case there's a fairly good chance they would have discovered it via a home test.
Sorry if I'm not eager to get sucked into this argument again. But without monthly seroprevalence numbers, it boils down to belief more than proof. Yes, seropositivity fades (which is why we can get reinfected by all hCoVs), but the data for how fast it fades is all over the place, and conclusions from different studies all admit a significant range of uncertainty.
However, if "everyone has caught COVID" (as some insist), that would mean COVID would have significantly lower IFR than any recent influenzas (and that conclusion pisses off a different group of people).
And, yes, I'm aware of that CDC study as well. Paraphrasing it and removing the CI's for readability and adding actual population numbers...
"Over the same period, seroprevalence increased from...
44.2% to 75.2% among children aged 0–11 years... (0.75*48 million=36 million)
45.6% to 74.2% among persons aged 12–17 years... (0.74*25 million=18.5 million)
36.5% to 63.7% among adults aged 18–49 years... (0.64*139 million=89 million)
28.8% to 49.8% among those aged 50–64 years... (0.50*64 million=32 million)
from 19.1% to 33.2% among those aged ≥65 years." (0.33*56 million=18.5 million)
Pre-BA.1, 113 million people were seropositive for COVID. Overall 192 million people were sero+ after BA.1. US population is ~332 million. 192/322=0.58. So 58% of the US was sero+ by EoFeb 2022. That left 139 million people who were seronegative.
Seroprevalence may have been fading since the start of the US pandemic, but the majority of pre-BA.1 cases were in 2021. I doubt if we would see the seroprevalence among that group drop much. But just for shits and giggles let's assume 20% had their nAbs drop far enough to be undetectable. That yields 166 million people infected with SARS2 before BA.1 came along. Add the 79 million BA.1 cases, and we get 245 million.
But wait! A certain percentage of those were reinfections! Let's pick a low reinfection rate number, say 10%. So it looks like closer to 221 million people had been infected by EoFeb 2022. If the reinfection rate is closer to 20%, as some data indicates, then that number is closer to 196 million.
There were another 22.5 million official BA.2, BA.5, and BQ.1x cases. Using the CDC's 2.8x multiplier for BA.1, we get 63 million. Minus 10% for reinfection yields 57 million. Minus 20% for reinfections yields 50 million.
Using the 10% reinfection rate number, I get 221+57=278 million. 332-278=54 million COVID virgins — i.e. 16% of US population
Using the 20% reinfection rate number, I get 196+50=246 million. 332-246=86 million COVID virgins — i.e. 26% of US population.
And if seroprevalence fades on the rate and timescale of other hCoVs then we can largely remove it from the previous calculations...
10% reinfection rate: Using the original post-BA.1 192 million number, 192+57=249 million. 332-249=83 million COVID virgins — i.e. 25% of US population.
20% reinfection rate: Using the original post-BA.1 192 million number, 192+50=242 million. 332-242=90 million COVID virgins — i.e. 27% of US population.
So, I've just spent over 2 hours looking up the US population by age cohort and then running the numbers using that CDC study as a starting point—but I doubt that I've convinced you. Thus my reluctance to get into this argument again. ;-)
Also, I'm in the 50-64 age cohort, as are most of my friends. So 50% seroprevalence in that age cohort as of EofFeb 22 is the US average. But I'm also living in an area that has had high mask usage (San Francisco Bay Area). A significant number of people are still wearing masks. Whether it's due to masking or due to our superior immune systems from our healthy California lifestyles, our case rates were much lower than any of the Red states. So what Eremolalos said...
I very much doubt we've all had asymptomatic infections.
Covid virgins, unite!
I would suspect the high levels of bright sun (lots of UV), and ease of spending time outside or inside with good ventilation, would help. Except that I gather Americans in hot places spend a lot of time in sealed buildings with air conditioning?
Thanks for sharing those numbers. I'll look them over. I don't plan on quibbling about them, but I'm curious which 2.8 multiplier from the CDC you are referencing. I see here: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burden.html that they estimated 1 in 4 infections being reported in Feb. 2020 - September 2021.
CDC stated that 2.8 multiplier number in COVID status summary post-BA.1 (late March / early April 2022 timeframe). I admit that I can't find the link to that document anymore. But I remember comparing it to the numbers derived from the document referenced above, and it worked out to a 2.8x multiplier for seroprevalence vs official clinical cases.
BA.1 seropositivity gain = 79 million
Clinically recorded BA.1 cases during BA.1 surge = ~28 million
79/28=2.82
I haven't had COVID yet, as far as I know (despite a close exposure last week I didn't get symptoms and tested negative). I guess my bivalent booster protected me.
Country: There are 40 from "Netherlands" and another 20 from "The Netherlands". Last time I looked, these were all Dutch. ;) You may skip the option "The N." next time.
Kids: Hard to read, but if got it right one needs just 6 kids to become the lone Genghis Khan of ACX. And: Elon Musk did not take the survey.
"Last time I looked, these were all Dutch"
This is Frisian erasure and I won't stand for it 😉
Pairwise linear regressions on all the satisfaction questions:
Job vs. life: slope=.54, r^2=.36
Social vs. life: slope=.55, r^2=.36
Romantic vs. life: slope=.37, r^2=.28
Social vs. job: slope=.4, r^2=.16
Romantic vs. job: slope=.18, r^2=.06
Social vs. romantic: slope=.36, r^2=.23
All fantastically significant. Successful people are successful, but you could probably use this to prioritize at the margin: if you want to be happy, focus on getting a satisfying job and social life and don't worry as much about romance. If you want a better love life, improving your social activity is more useful than being happier at work.
Thanks for posting the data! Here is t-SNE visualization of responses (surprisingly, there are no well-defined clusters, the space is rather continuous): https://enryu43.github.io/misc/acx_2022_survey_tsne.html
Some unexpected correlations:
* I wonder what can be the reasons why homosexuals have higher median IQ/SAT scores (the effect is rather small though, and the IQ/SAT responses are sparse and have outliers);
* "Political Spectrum" has many strong correlations, but most of them are obvious. One non-obvious one is a mildly positive correlation with "Children" (maybe it is because of age, but is still counterintuitive);
* "Children" also correlates positively with "BMI" (also likely because of age). However, contrary to the popular stereotype, "BMI" does not correlate with "Romantic Satisfaction", which is quite interesting.
* Again, contrary to stereotypes, "STEM" doesn't correlate with "IQ" (or even correlates mildly negatively). Though this can be due to the biased selection or poor quality of "IQ" responses.
What is that secondary cluster in the northeast?
Nothing interesting, just an artifact of similarity metric: those are people who didn't answer the last 30 or so questions.
What are the x and y axes?
They don't have a clear meaning - this is a t-SNE projection (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-distributed_stochastic_neighbor_embedding). It embeds non-linear multidimensional data to two dimensions, preserving nearest neighbors (so if there are clearly defined clusters, they'll be easy to spot, in contrast to simpler projections like PCA).
It says "While t-SNE plots often seem to display clusters, the visual clusters can be influenced strongly by the chosen parameterization and therefore a good understanding of the parameters for t-SNE is necessary." So... I admit I don't have a good - or, frankly, any - understending of the embedding parameters.
The children chart doesn’t need fractions on the x axis unless king Solomon comes back as a zombie
When you click on a comment (on the date) to go a dedicated page for that comment, there's a text field there, but if you submit a comment there, it ends up at the top level and not as a reply to the comment whose page you are on. Probably the reason for the many stray top-level comments. Sry can't really find a substack issue report contact.
I think it would be interesting to look into the emails people used and see if any groupings show up. Such as those who use years or numbers in their email address or silly phrases or those who put school and work emails in. Or the demographics of gmail vs yahoo vs Hotmail and the like. I think only Scott would be able to perform that analysis due to having to know full emails.
On a hopefully less controversial front than my committed theist remark, I'm also surprised at how few people dream in B&W. My dreams have always been in black and white and really really hazy. Guess I'm one of the lucky/unlucky few - definitely jealous of all of you who get these awesome vivid dreams every night while I'm stuck with something that reminds me of playing video games from my youth where everything seems barely tangible.
Finally got around to going through the results and just remembered how annoyed I got at the "your country's covid response: too lax or too strict?" question. In the UK the covid response was too strict *because* it was too lax. In other words, they waited too long to act, so when they did they were forced to take extreme actions.
Some countries dealt with the pandemic in a relatively competent way, and others in a relatively incompetent way. Lax/strict isn't the most important axis.
The "big city vs suburbs" question was annoying too. What about a small-to-medium sized town with its own "centre of gravity"? What about rural?
I know that most people live in the big city and the suburbs, but of the various places to live, neither is the one I'd choose.