Here are a bunch of loosely organized ideas that didn’t have a natural place in my review of WEIRDest People.
Heuristics and Biases
WEIRDest People is almost as important for understanding human biases as is Thinking Fast and Slow.
Continue ReadingBook review: The Cult of Smart, by Fredrik deBoer.
The Cult of Smart is a sporadically thoughtful book about education politics, sometimes rising above tribal politics, and sometimes repeating tired old tribal rants.
Continue ReadingBook review: The End of Alzheimer’s Program, by Dale Bredesen.
This sequel to The End of Alzheimer’s is an attempt at a complete guide to a healthy lifestyle.
Alas, science is still too primitive to enable an impressive version of that. So what we end up with is this guide that would overwhelm anyone who tries to follow it thoroughly, while still lacking the kind of evidence that would convince a skeptic.
Continue ReadingLast month, I conceded defeat in my bet (with Robin Hanson) that US COVID-19 deaths would be less than 250,000.
My biggest mistake was thinking voters would care about results, and unite against a common enemy as they did in WWII. I should have been more aware of the tendency to treat natural deaths as more acceptable than deaths due to a hostile agent. Robin clearly did better at evaluating this.
Continue ReadingI said in my review of WEIRDest People that the Flynn effect seems like a natural consequence of thinking styles that became more analytical, abstract, reductionist, and numerical.
I’ll expand here on some questions which I swept under the rug, so that I could keep that review focused on the book’s most important aspects.
Cultural Bias
After reading WEIRDest People, I find that the goal of a culture-neutral IQ test looks strange (and, of course, WEIRD). At least as strange as trying to fix basketball to stop favoring tall people.
Continue ReadingBook review: The WEIRDest People in the World, by Joseph Henrich.
Wow!
Henrich previously wrote one of the best books of the last decade. Normally, I expect such an author’s future books to, at best, exhibit regression toward the mean. But Henrich’s grand overview of humanity’s first few million years was merely a modest portion of the ideas that he originally tried to fit into this magnum opus. Henrich couldn’t quite explain in one volume how humanity got all the way to industrial empires, so he split the explanation into two books.
The cartoon version of the industrial revolution: Protestant culture made the West more autistic.
However, explaining the most important event in history makes up only about 25% of this book’s focus and value.
Continue ReadingBook review: The Precipice, by Toby Ord.
No, this isn’t about elections. This is about risks of much bigger disasters. It includes the risks of pandemics, but not the kind that are as survivable as COVID-19.
The ideas in this book have mostly been covered before, e.g. in Global Catastrophic Risks (Bostrom and Cirkovic, editors). Ord packages the ideas in a more organized and readable form than prior discussions.
See the Slate Star Codex review of The Precipice for an eloquent summary of the book’s main ideas.
Continue ReadingFrom The problem with rapid Covid testing, Mayank Gupta writes:
The absolute number of false positives would rise dramatically under slightly inaccurate, broad surveillance testing. At least initially, the number of people going to the doctor to ask what to do would also rise. One can imagine if doctors truly flubbed and didn’t know how to advise patients accurately, a lot of individual patients would lose trust in the medical system (testing, doctors, or both). The consequence of this would be more resistance to health public policy measures in the future.
For a reminder of why rapid testing is valuable, see Alex Tabarrok. Note also the evidence from the NBA that people who need useful tests can be more innovative than the medical system.
This seems like the tip of an important iceberg.
Continue ReadingBooks by serious researchers on how to defeat aging are now coming out almost as fast as I have time to read them.
This one mostly aims to enable us live in good health to 115, preferably via a few simple pills.
Continue ReadingLots of people want to frame the 2020 US election as a fight between the left and the right, with the wrong side being near an extreme on that spectrum. They are deceiving you.
The U.S. is facing some extremism, but it has little connection to the extremes of the left-right spectrum [1]. The latest dangers are extreme mainly on a very different spectrum. A spectrum on which Trump and the woke are very similar.
How to describe this spectrum? I’m unsure what the best description is, so I’ll list some that capture important components of it:
- causal reality versus social reality
- judging leaders by results versus “whose side are you on?”
- a republican form of government versus direct democracy or mob rule
- a focus on dominance hierarchies versus prestige hierarchies
- willingness to listen to those you disagree with versus an eagerness to punish people for insufficient loyalty to your faction
- “the buck stops here” versus devoting lots of effort to blaming enemies or scapegoats