Alexander, Scott

Criticism/Defense Of Billionaire Philanthropy

Taxes will probably not go to the same causes, e.g. reforming the bail system, grassroot efforts for migrants, etc.

Foundations are more effective than governments as they do their due diligence, e.g. Bill Gates. Reforming the government is a long battle.

Why Even Read Papers?

While tutorials and docs help you write code right now, the academic papers can help you understand where programming came from and where it’s going. You also understand the paths that foundational academic research did not take. There’s a lot of things that are old that are new again, over and over and over. The idea of Stack Overflow is that someone else has had your problem before; the idea of academic papers is that someone else has thought about this problem before.

The Parable of the Talents. Scott Alexander. slatestarcodex.com . Jan 31, 2015.

Overweight people, depressed people, and poor people aren’t fully to blame for their situation – and neither are unintelligent people. It’s accidents of birth all the way down.

Srinivasa Ramanujan:

• Grew up in poverty in a one-room house in small-town India.
• But a lot of poor people in the US had better conditions/opportunities
  • Either, a lot of intelligence is innate
  • Or, those poor people are just not trying hard enough.
• Ramanujan worked very hard at math, but it seems he couldn’t do this for anything else.
  • He dropped out of school because of being made to study non-mathematical subjects.

I excelled at writing and sucked ass at Math despite working hard.

No Clarity Around Growth Mindset. Scott Alexander. slatestarcodex.com . Apr 8, 2015.

Growth mindset: people who believe effort - and not ability - determines success are more resilient, skillful, hard-working, perseverant in the face of failure.

Most of the growth mindset experiments prime their subjects, but recent priming experiments have famously failed to replicate. Dweck’s experiment:

• Group A: easy test (success) -> final bound-to-fail test
• Group B: hard test (told they’re not working hard enough) -> final bound-to-fail test
• Group B outperformed Group A. Explanations:
  • Dweck: Telling As to work harder made them less helpless.
  • Alternative: B’s are used to failing get less flustered than A’s who have been artificially made to succeed.

In Dweck’s work, why do helpless children and the mastery-oriented children always start out performing at the same level? Shouldn’t the fixed-mindset kids already be underperforming? Why do we find enough fixed-mindset students at elite colleges?

Book Review: All Therapy Books. Scott Alexander. slatestarcodex.com . Nov 20, 2019.

Scott’s thesis: Each of the therapy books on their own can be convincing. But they should be taken in the context of All Therapy Books, which as a category are pretty worrying.

Dodo Bird Verdict : All psychotherapies are about equally good, and the only things that matters are “nonspecific factors” like how much patients like their therapist.

State Surveillance

In the aftermath of the Capitol insurrection, FBI was contacting people whose cellphones pinged cell towers near the Capitol during the riots. #state-surveillance

Crime Drama

Ozark’s highlights are Ruth Langmore’s 90s’ hip hop playlist, Wendy Byrde’s sociopathic ambition, and Del Rio’s suave. The show follows the Byrde family that has to launder money for the Navarro Cartel. The writers use shortcuts as the show proceeds, and grant excessive plot armor for the Byrde family in subsequent seasons.

How to Be Wrong

found that experts were barely able to forecast better than random chance. However, a small subset of people (coined “superforecasters” ) were better. In a competition, they beat teams of top professors and CIA professional analysts. These superforecasters were not smarter than everyone else nor did they have more knowledge/experience, they were great at being wrong.

Change your mind a little at a time. Seeing the world in shades of grey is less stressful, as the experience of encountering evidence against one of your beliefs is not high stakes.

Signs of a Scout

These Don’t Make You a Scout

Feeling objective. The more objective you feel, the more you trust your own intuitions and opinions as accurate representations of reality, and the less inclined you are to question them.

Being smart and knowledgeable. It’s not a case of “if people were smarter and well-informed, they’d realize their errors”. For example, found that polarization (on political fronts) on anthropogenic climate change increases as scientific intelligence increases. found similar patterns: political & religious polarization on stem cell research, the Big Bang, human evolution; political polarization on climate change; little evidence of political or religious polarization on nanotechnology and genetically modified foods.