Now that Halloween’s over, here’s the stuff I read online in October (mostly) that made me go “Ooo I wanna share this with people!” (Now with bonus “evidence against my beliefs” section!)
Would love to hear your responses to any of these, you can go to the comments with the button down the bottom. I haven’t fact-checked any of these so let me know if you think any of them are making mistakes.
1:
People frequently1 think that I'm very stupid. I don't find this surprising, since I don't mind if other people think I'm stupid, which means that I don't adjust my behavior to avoid seeming stupid, which results in people thinking that I'm stupid. Although there are some downsides to people thinking that I'm stupid, e.g., failing interviews where the interviewer very clearly thought I was stupid, I think that, overall, the upsides of being willing to look stupid have greatly outweighed the downsides.
I don't know why this one example sticks in my head but, for me, the most memorable example of other people thinking that I'm stupid was from college. I've had numerous instances where more people thought I was stupid and also where people thought the depths of my stupidity was greater, but this one was really memorable for me.
Back in college, there was one group of folks that, for whatever reason, stood out to me as people who really didn't understand the class material. When they talked, they said things that didn't make any sense, they were struggling in the classes and barely passing, etc. I don't remember any direct interactions but, one day, a friend of mine who also knew them remarked to me, "did you know [that group] thinks you're really dumb?". I found that really delightful and asked why. It turned out the reason was that I asked really stupid sounding questions.
He gives a bunch more examples of the benefits he’s gotten from being willing to look stupid.
3: Malcolm Ocean on being and feeling ‘at home’
I am Home to the extent that (and in the ways that)
I can relax knowing that the systems around me aren’t going to subvert my needs & wants (whether malevolently or carelessly) and will in general support them.
I feel, and am, empowered to make changes to the situation in order to care for my needs.
This applies to any context, not just to a house. In particular, it can also apply to a group of people or a relationship.
4: Kanjun Qiu on research as understanding
I misunderstood the nature of research for most of my life, and this prevented me from doing any. I thought significant research came from following the scientific method until novel discoveries popped out. I'd never contributed something new to human knowledge before, so being a researcher—which required replicating this outcome—felt impossibly far out of reach.
But it turns out the novel discovery is just a side effect. You don't make novel discoveries by trying to make novel discoveries.
Instead, research is simply a continuation of something we already naturally do: learning. Learning happens when you understand something that someone else already understands. Research happens when you understand something that nobody else understands yet.
[…]
This was research. I wasn't straining to discover something new. I was accidentally doing it because I was curious, because my friend had asked a question I couldn't answer and it seemed nobody else had figured it out either.
Research, I realized, is what happens as a byproduct when you try to understand something and hit the bounds of what humanity currently knows
5: The etymology of ‘dysphoria’ feels surprisingly compassionate:
dysphoria (n.)
[…]
etymologically "hard to bear," from dys- "bad, hard" (see dys-) + pherein "to carry"
6: Online person Aella asked a bunch of her readers (~19k) about their kinks and also about their positions on the political compass. She found some small but apparently statistically significant correlations that are kinda interesting. (Note that she’s stretched the graphs diagonally for greater “memeability” lol, so the correlations aren’t all as strong as the visuals imply)
Men:
Women:
7: Your unvaccinated friend is roughly 20 times more likely to give you Covid (in Victoria)
8:
9:
10: Andrés Gómez Emilsson argues that pleasure and pain are logarithmic. I.e. that
The most intense pains are orders of magnitude more awful than mild pains (and symmetrically for pleasure).
In the post he also mentions something called ‘The Schmidt Sting Pain Index’:
Justin O. Schmidt stung himself with over 80 species of insects of the Hymenoptera order, and rated the ensuing pain on a 4-point-scale.
Schmidt implied it’s a logarithmic scale
each number is like 10 equivalent of the number before. So 10 honey bee stings are equal to 1 harvester ant sting, and 10 harvester ant stings would equal one bullet ant sting.
But the reason I bring it up is so you can check out the delightful qualitative descriptions Schmidt gave for each sting, e.g. “Asian Needle Ant: Nightfall following a day at the beach. You forgot the sunscreen. Your burned nose lets you know.”
11: Related to that pain post: this study asked 1604 sufferers of cluster headaches (A more painful form of headache than migraines) to rate the pain of cluster headaches and the pain of other things they’d personally experienced, for comparison. According to their responses, cluster headaches are the most painful human experience out of any of the experiences they asked about (including childbirth, getting shot, others), and by a large margin.
(And Gómez Emilsson would argue this 10 point pain scale is implicitly logarithmic so the cluster headache has an even bigger lead than this graph suggests).
12: Delightful bunch of tweet replies of all different people describing how love physically feels to them. Super interesting especially for me someone who’s not sure they’ve been in love before. The original tweet:
Some of the replies:
13:
Reasons I’m (Maybe) Wrong
A fun new section! I’ve noticed that when I’m browsing the internet or whatever and I see something that gives a plausible argument or evidence that goes against my current belief on something, I can easily just kind of not give the new evidence much attention or thought and then forget it, cos it’s like inconvenient. I want to counteract that tendency, and get better at paying attention to inconvenient evidence/arguments against what I currently believe, so I’ve decided to start sharing them with y’all each month and write a bit about each of them. In future I might make this its own monthly post, separate to the links post. Also in future I’d like to, for each piece, write about whether/how I’ve updated my beliefs based on it, and why. But this time I haven’t gotten to that, so I’m just sharing the links :) So here’s the evidence/arguments I encountered this month that suggest my current beliefs could be wrong (current at the time of encountering the linked piece at least!)
the narrative related to the ongoing surge of new cases in the United States (US) is argued to be driven by areas with low vaccination rates [1]. A similar narrative also has been observed in countries, such as Germany and the United Kingdom [2]. At the same time, Israel that was hailed for its swift and high rates of vaccination has also seen a substantial resurgence in COVID-19 cases [3]. We investigate the relationship between the percentage of population fully vaccinated and new COVID-19 cases across 68 countries and across 2947 counties in the US.
[…]
The percentage increase in COVID-19 cases was calculated based on the difference in cases from the last 7 days and the 7 days preceding them. For example, Los Angeles county in California had 18,171 cases in the last 7 days (August 26 to September 1) and 31,616 cases in the previous 7 days (August 19–25), so this county did not experience an increase of cases in our dataset.
[…]
At the country-level, there appears to be no discernable relationship between percentage of population fully vaccinated and new COVID-19 cases in the last 7 days (Fig. 1). In fact, the trend line suggests a marginally positive association such that countries with higher percentage of population fully vaccinated have higher COVID-19 cases per 1 million people.
[…]
Across the US counties too, the median new COVID-19 cases per 100,000 people in the last 7 days is largely similar across the categories of percent population fully vaccinated (Fig. 2).
15: Evidence for the learning value of university (This goes against my usual model of what the value of university is - my usual model is that it’s mainly signalling value, not learning value)
16: Jessica Taylor shares her negative experiences with the Rationality community, specifically CFAR/MIRI (A community I’m online-involved with and very enthusiastic about).
17: I usually have concerns that ‘defunding the police’ would lead to worse outcomes (while agreeing it’s a good idea to shift a bunch of responsibilities away from the police, e.g. responding to mental health emergencies). Against these concerns, Philip Bump points out that there’s no correlation between aggregate national police spending and crime rates over the last 60 years. Tbh this seems like pretty crude evidence to me (It’s not looking at smaller units e.g. cities, not controlling for anything, etc.), but it does make me want to look at more evidence on the relationship between police spending and crime.
18: Paper from Stoet and Geary (via Marginal Revolution, I haven’t read the paper)
“We investigated sex differences in 473,260 adolescents’ aspirations to work in things-oriented (e.g., mechanic), people-oriented (e.g., nurse), and STEM (e.g., mathematician) careers across 80 countries and economic regions using the 2018 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). We analyzed student career aspirations in combination with student achievement in mathematics, reading, and science, as well as parental occupations and family wealth. In each country and region, more boys than girls aspired to a things-oriented or STEM occupation and more girls than boys to a people-oriented occupation. These sex differences were larger in countries with a higher level of women’s empowerment.”
(Emphasis mine). Not sure what to make of this. Any ideas? The authors speculate that
“Women’s empowerment is associated with relatively high levels of national wealth and this wealth allows more students to aspire to occupations they are intrinsically interested in.”
i.e. that girls are more intrinsically interested in people stuff and boys are more intrinsically interested in thing/STEM stuff. I’m actually pretty agnostic about whether there is some kind of (small) direct genetic component to these kinds of gender differences, because it just seems super hard to separate out the pervasive effects of socialization and thus super hard to get good evidence on this in either direction. But I want it to not be the case lol, and could engage in motivated reasoning to hold on to that belief, so I’m including this study in this section for that reason. I guess with this study maybe their construction of “intrinsically” could include the effects of socialization? Would that be consistent with the fact that the difference is higher in countries with higher level of women’s empowerment?
19: (CW: Argument against trans-inclusive language) Helen Lewis argues for continuing to say “pregnant women” instead of “pregnant people.” Her argument seems mainly based on the political usefulness/importance of emphasising that certain issues disproportionately affect women and could be caused by sexism (e.g. anti-abortion laws). I don’t think she successfully argues for using “pregnant women” in general, but I think based on her arguments I have updated my own view now to something like: “As a general rule say ‘pregnant people’, but also pay attention to when it’s important to emphasise that a pregnancy-related issue disproportionately effects women and transmasculine people, and point this out”
Like I said, I would love to hear your thoughts on any of these links. I love discussions happening in the comments! Click this button to see any comments