#scott alexander

[scientiststhesis-at-pillowfort]

Remember Galton’s experiments on visual imagination? Some people just don’t have it. And they never figured it out. They assumed no one had it, and when people talked about being able to picture objects in their minds, they were speaking metaphorically.

And the people who did have good visual imaginations didn’t catch them. The people without imaginations mastered this “metaphorical way of talking” so well that they passed for normal. No one figured it out until Galton sat everyone down together and said “Hey, can we be really really clear about exactly how literal we’re being here?” and everyone realized they were describing different experiences.

I thought about this recently during a conversation with Ozy:

Ozy: I am currently eating chickpeas and rice and I am _delighted_ by the fact that I can eat this _whenever I want_ The nice thing about DISCOVERING YOUR FOOD PREFERENCES is that suddenly all the food in my cupboards is food I like and am looking forward to eating. and usually I get food I like by, like, luck? So this is excitement.

Scott: I don’t understand, why didn’t you buy things like that before?

Ozy: It took me a while to have enough of a sense of the food I like for “make a list of the food I like” to be a viable grocery-list-making strategy.

Scott: I’ve got to admit I’m confused and intrigued by your “don’t know my own preferences” thing.

Ozy: Hrm. Well, it’s sort of like… you know how sometimes you pretend to like something because it’s high-status, and if you do it well enough you _actually believe_ you like the thing? Unless I pay a lot of attention _all_ my preferences end up being not “what I actually enjoy” but like “what is high status” or “what will keep people from getting angry at me”

Scott: How does that apply to food?

Ozy: Well, sometimes people will tell you a certain food is high-status or healthy or a thing that everyone enjoys, and then I would like it. And a lot of times I just ate whatever was in front of me or ordered whatever the cheapest vegetarian thing on the menu was. And I… sort of vaguely had a sense that some things were more pleasurable to eat than other things but I didn’t like _keep track_ of what they were or anything. Because if I knew I might like the _wrong things_. And also because I didn’t intuitively grasp that the “liking” thing everyone was talking about was related to pleasure and not to like popularity/status.

So the fact that people talk about what foods they like about a zillion times a day isn’t enough to make everyone realize liking foods is a thing.

But it gets worse. A high school friend posted on Facebook a link to a really interesting answer on Quora. It makes you log on, so I’ll copy the relevant part below:

I have anosmia, which means I lack smell the way a blind person lacks sight. What’s surprising about this is that I didn’t even know it for the first half of my life.

Each night I would tell my mom, “Dinner smells great!” I teased my sister about her stinky feet. I held my nose when I ate Brussels sprouts. In gardens, I bent down and took a whiff of the roses. I yelled “gross” when someone farted. I never thought twice about any of it for fourteen years.

Then, in freshman English class, I had an assignment to write about the Garden of Eden using details from all five senses. Working on this one night, I sat in my room imagining a peach. I watched the juice ooze out as I squeezed at the soft fuzz. I felt the wet, sappy liquid drip from my fingers down onto my palm. As the mushy heart of the fruit compressed, I could hear it squishing, and when I took that first bite I could taste the little bit of tartness that followed the incredible sweet sensation flooding my mouth.

But I had to write about smell, too, and I was stopped dead by the question of what a peach smelled like. Good. That was all I could come up with. I tried to think of other things. Garbage smelled bad. Perfume smelled good. Popcorn good. Poop bad. But how so? What was the difference? What were the nuances? In just a few minutes’ reflection I realized that, despite years of believing the contrary, I never had and never would smell a peach.

All my behavior to that point indicated that I had smell. No one suspected I didn’t. For years I simply hadn’t known what it was that was supposed to be there. I just thought the way it was for me was how it was for everyone. It took the right stimulus before I finally discovered the gap.

So I guess you can just not be able to smell and not know it.

This makes me wonder what universal human experiences I and my friends are missing out on without realizing it.

I know one friend’s answer. He discovered he was color-blind sometime in his teens. This still surprises me. People are always taking Ishihara tests (those colorful dotted circles with numbers inside of them) and discovering they’re color blind. Going through life with everyone else saying “The light was red, but now it’s green” and thinking it was weird that they were making such a big deal about subtle variations in shades of brownish-gray, but it was probably one of those metaphors.

As for me? I took a surprisingly long time to realize I was asexual. When I was a virgin, I figured sex was one of those things that seemed gross before you did it, and then you realized how great it was. Afterwards, I figured it was something that didn’t get good until you were skilled at it and had been in a relationship long enough to truly appreciate the other person. In retrospect, pretty much every aspect of male sexual culture is a counterargument to that theory, but I guess it’s just really hard for my brain to generate “you are a mental mutant” as a hypothesis.

But even bigger than that, I think I might not have had emotions, at least not fully, for about five years as a teenager when I was on SSRIs. I even sort of noticed myself not having emotions, but dismissed that as an odd thing to happen and probably other people were just being really overexuberant about things. Later I learned emotional blunting is a commonly reported side effect of SSRIs and I was probably just really not experiencing emotions. When I came off them it took me several years to get used to having normal-intensity feelings again, but it wasn’t a sudden revelation, like “Wow, I was missing a fundamental human experience for the past several years!” Just a sense of things being different which was hard to cash out.

As always, I wonder if a lot of what other people interpret through vague social things might be biological, or at least more complicatedly social. I can’t enjoy jazz music even a little – the best I can do is pick up something sort of like a beat and half-heartedly feel like maybe I could snap my fingers to it if I could build up the energy. My brother fell in love with jazz as soon as he heard it and is now a professional jazz musician who has dedicated his life to it. Are we listening to the same thing when we hear a jazz tune? Or am I like a guy who can’t smell trying to appreciate perfume?

[halloween-gifs]

[st-just]

Did you know: White noise was named because its wave spectrum resembles white light. Pink noise was named because its wave spectrum resembles pink light. Brown noise was named after Robert Brown, who helped discover it. This is one of my least favorite facts.

-Scott Alexander, Book Review: Rhythms Of The Brain

[harrypotterhousequotes]

[morlock-holmes]

What exactly are we trying to solve?

The incuriosity and fuzziness with which people look at the west coast homelessness crisis drives me fucking batty.

Now look, I admit up front that I am also both incurious and wool-headed about this issue, but I work in a fucking restaurant for minimum wage. If you write a book about the fucking homeless crisis or run the city government I expect you to think a little bit harder than the average schmoe on the street, and I think that's reasonable.

One thing that pisses me off about the way people talk about homelessness is that they don't seem to know why it's bad, or what it would look like to solve it. Which I know sounds crazy but hear me out.

Scott Alexander helpfully reviews San Fransicko for me so I don't have to punch any holes in my drywall, but I want... Well, actually I was composing this as I finish Alexander's review, and I got to his utilitarian discussion at the end that cuts to the heart of the matter:

Along with all the problems and preaching, San Fransicko offers solutions. These won’t come as a surprise to anyone who’s read this far: they’re basically the Amsterdam plan presented earlier. Break up open-air drug markets. Force addicts into rehab by threatening prison sentences for noncompliance. Ban camping on streets and force the homeless into shelters. Offer permanent housing when appropriate, but make it contingent on good behavior. Have a strong psychiatric system with ability to commit people who need it, and enforced outpatient treatment when appropriate.

Would these work?

I’m pretty sure they would work well for housed people and the city as a whole. Homeless people would no longer block the streets and assault passers-by; they would be safely out of sight in shelters or in mental institutions. A new generation of tough DAs would crack down on crime. Stores could reopen, and citizens could walk the streets without fear. It’s hard for me to imagine this not working.

...

I have to admit - I talk a good utilitarian talk on this, but I don’t know if I live up to my ideals. An addictionologist interviewed in San Fransicko heaps contempt on well-off liberals who get the benefits of virtue-signaling while externalizing the costs onto poor people in bad areas:

[You] sit in the suburbs and feel smug about the fact that you oppose the war on drugs and have a Black Lives Matter sign in your yard. But you don’t have homeless people taking a crap on your front stoop every day or [have] all your packages stolen every single day

So I imagine - what if I lived in the worst parts of SF, had people crap on my front steps every day, had all my packages stolen, and (by the bounds of this hypothetical) wasn’t allowed to move to the suburbs, ever? I think I would last two weeks before I sacrificed all of my principles on the altar of “less human feces, please”.

Maybe, as a lefty, I'm supposed to read that and gasp and say, "How can you be so heartless?" or maybe I'm supposed to say, "Gosh, when you get right down to it, doesn't the poor guy have a point?"

But instead I'm going to ask:

Do you have any studies showing how effective those policies are at getting rid of human feces?

I'm not being a smart-ass, I'm genuinely wondering how Alexander didn't notice that so much of the criticism he himself quotes in Shellenberger's book has nothing to do with any of that stuff.

This is the particular quote from Shellenberger that caught me up short:

"An experiment with 249 homeless people in San Francisco between 1999 and 2002 found those enrolled in the city’s Housing First program, Direct Access to Housing, used medical services at the same rate as those who were not given housing through the program, suggesting that the Housing First program likely had minimal impact on the participants’ health."

Did it have an impact on how often they took a shit on a public sidewalk? Did it have an impact on the amount of litter they dumped on streets? Did it have an impact on time spent chasing people around and screaming obscenities? Did it have an impact on how often they injected heroine in the subway? Did it have an impact on how many sidewalks they blocked with tents?

All that fucking soul-searching, all that "Gosh, perhaps to solve the problem we simply must be cruel" and this reluctant commitment to reducing the effect of homelessness on tourists and housed locals, and realizing that, gosh, we might have to sacrifice the well-being of homeless people if that's what it takes, an utter commitment to ignoring anything but the reduction of social harm from mass camping...

And the criticism of DAH is that it doesn't improve the health outcomes of the people enrolled in it?!

ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?

This kind of goalpost shifting is RIFE within the discussion of west coast homelessness, where opponents of current policies or even speculative ones waffle back and forth about whether or not they give a shit about the health of the homeless or not.

Before all that soul-searching I quoted this is Scott's assessment of Housing First policy:

Conclusion: Housing First seems to work in getting people housing. It probably also helps people use fewer medical services, and it might or might not save money compared to not doing it (probably more likely when treating very severe cases, less likely in areas with high housing costs). It probably doesn’t affect people’s overall health or drug use status very much.

So... Housing first policies probably actually do a pretty damn good job at making the Homeless less obnoxious to tourists and housed people in a number of concrete ways related to litter, camping, public defecation, etc.?

There's good reason to think, pending further research, that they might actually do a pretty good job at reducing some of the problems that, after all that soul-searching, we decided were the only priorities we have?

I'm furious and unhappy at the way Portland is being covered by tent cities, mounds of trash, and grafitti. But I have this utterly baffling conversation with people where they go,

"This camping is shameful, the city should crack down on it!"

"So, get people into stable housing"

"Well, if you get people into stable housing it only puts a band-aid on the problem, they still can have health and behavioral problems that are really important."

And I always go, "Right, but I thought we were trying to reduce camping."

There's this kind of baffling goal-post moving. Alexander has a lot of paragraphs of hand-wringing over whether or not we should accept that sometimes we have to be TOUGH and HARD to really solve these problems, and accept that we may just have to care less about what Homeless people do or want, but he somehow hasn't noticed that he actually has very little data on whether or not Shellenberger's preferred policies work better than what he calls "Housing First" in terms of these metrics.

This is a wild guess and armchair psychologizing, but what seems to be happening is that in cities like San Francisco or Portland, as the problem gets worse, you, as a relatively better-off housed person, start thinking of Homelessness less and less in purely charitable terms with worries about how it effects the homeless, and more and more things like, "I don't like crossing the street because the sidewalk I was going to use is blocked by tents and piles of garbage" and "I don't like how often people chase after me screaming obscenities" and that feels somehow hard and uncompassionate, so you sort of start to assume that the only way to solve these problems is through policies that also feel hard and uncompassionate.

But I'm going to be honest, the case for that strikes me as extremely flimsy and I don't think I've ever seen anybody make it in a very convincing way.

[eccentric-opinion]

Nowadays people talk a lot about punching-up versus punching-down. But that just means bullies who want to successfully punch down will come up with a way to make it look like they're punching up. Take a group that’s high-status and wealthy, but find a subset who are actually in serious trouble and mock them, all the while shouting 'I'M PUNCHING UP, I'M PUNCHING UP!'

Scott Alexander

[imjacksfilmclub]

American Crime Story (TV Series, 2016- )

created by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski

It’s just an endless cycle of bullshit.

[st-just]

Nobody ever came out and said Jesus was wrong to love prostitutes, but Pope Sixtus V did pass a law instituting the death penalty for prostitution, in Jesus’ name. Nobody ever came out and said Jesus was wrong to preach peace, but they did fight an awful lot of holy wars.

Scott Alexander

[morlock-holmes]

Okay, guys, after reading a post by @centrally-unplanned I just took that ACX "AI Turing Test" that Scott Alexander did, and I am screaming, as the kids used to say.

You guys are way, way overthinking this.

I thought I would do better than average, and I guess I did; excluding three pictures I had seen before, I got 31/46 correct.

Not great if you're taking the SAT, but I feel like if I could call a roulette spin correctly 2 times out of 3 I could clean up in Vegas.

So, what is the secret of my amazing, D+ performance?

You have to look at the use of color and composition as tools to draw the eye to points of interest.

AI is really bad at this, when left to its own devices.

For example, here:

Part of the reason to suspect that this is AI is the "AI house style" and the bad hands that I literally only noticed right this exact second as I was typing this sentence. Even if the hands were rendered correctly, I would still clock this as AI.

The focal point of this piece ought to be the face of the woman and the little dragon she is looking at (Just noticed the dragon's wings don't match up either), but take off your glasses or squint at this for a second:

Your eye is being drawn by the bright gold sparkles on the lower right side of the piece. That particular bright gold is only in that spot on the image, but there's no reason to look there, it's just an upper arm and an elbow. The bright light source highlighting the woman's horn separates it out as a point of interest.

Meanwhile, the weird aurora streaming out of the woman's face on the left side means that it is blending in with the background.

In other words, the way the image is composed, and the subject matter suggest that your eye should be drawn here:

But the use of color suggests that you should look here:

That's a senseless place to draw the eye towards! It would be a really weird mistake for a human to make! In fact, I think there's a strong argument that the really close cropped picture of the face of the character is a strong improvement. It's still not a particularly good composition, but at least the color contrast now draws the eye to the proper points.

In fact, I would say that a good reason for my performance not being even better was this alarming statement at the start of the test:

I've tried to crop some pictures of both types into unusual shapes, so it won't be as easy as "everything that's in DALL-E's default aspect ratio is AI".

Uh...

So how about this one:

This is a lot better anatomically and in terms of the use of color and light to draw the eye towards sensible parts of the painting. The lighting makes pretty good sense in terms of coming from a particular direction and it also draws the eye to effectively to the face and the outstretched hand of the figure.

It's also a really flat and meaningless composition and subject matter that no renaissance artist would have chosen. What is this angel doing, exactly? Our eye is drawn to the face and hand, and the figure is looking off towards the left side, at, uh, what exactly?

But then I thought, "Well, maybe Scott chopped out a giant chunk of the picture, and this is just a detail from, like, the lower right eighth of some giant painting with three other figures that makes total sense"

This makes sense as a piece of a larger human made artwork, but if you tell me, "Nope, that's the whole thing and this is the original, un-cropped picture" I'd go, "Oh, AI, obviously.

All of the ones I had trouble with were AI art with good composition and use of color, and human ones with bad composition and use of color. For example, this one:

This has three solid points of interest arranged in an interesting relationship with different colors to block them out. I'd say the biggest tells are that the astronauts' feet are out of frame, which is a weird choice, and looking closely now, the landscape and smoke immediately to the right of the ship don't really make sense.

But again; I had to think, "Maybe Scott just cropped it weird and they had feet in the original picture."

Here's another problem:

StableDiffusion being bad at composition is such a known problem that there are a variety of tools which a person can use to manually block out the composition. In fact, let me try something.

I popped open Krita (Which now has a StableDiffusion plugin) and after literally dozens of generations and a couple of different models I landed on ZavyChromaXL with the following prompt:

concept art of two astronauts walking towards a spaceship on an alien planet, with a giant moon in th background, artstation, classic scifi, book cover

And this was the best I could do:

Not great, but Krita has a tool that lets you break an image into regions which each have different prompts, so I quickly blocked something out:

Each of those color blobs has a different part of the prompt, so the green region has "futuristic astronauts" the blue is the spaceship, the orange is the moon, grey is the ground and pink is the sky, which gives us:

Still way too much, so we can use Krita's adaptive patch tool and AI object removal to get:

I'm not saying it's high art, or even any good, but it's better than the stuff I was getting from a pure prompt, because a human did the composition.

But it's still so dominated by AI processes that it's fair to call it "AI Art".

Which makes me wonder how many of the AI pictures I called out as human made because one of the traits I was looking for, good composition, was in fact, actually made by a human.

[chrisdaps]

Tim Ferriss just tweeted this quote and I kind of love it. 

[90smovies]

Problem Child 2

[eccentric-opinion]

The intuition behind meritocracy is: if your life depends on a difficult surgery, would you prefer the hospital hire a surgeon who aced medical school, or a surgeon who had to complete remedial training to barely scrape by with a C-? If you prefer the former, you're a meritocrat with respect to surgeons. Generalize a little, and you have the argument for being a meritocrat everywhere else...

A better description might be: Your life depends on a difficult surgery. You can hire whatever surgeon you want to perform it. You are willing to pay more money for a surgeon who aced medical school than for a surgeon who failed it. So higher intelligence leads to more money.

This not only does away with "desert", but also with reified Society deciding who should prosper. More meritorious surgeons get richer not because "Society" has selected them to get rich as a reward for virtue, but because individuals pursuing their incentives prefer, all else equal, not to die of botched surgeries. Meritocracy isn't an -ocracy like democracy or autocracy, where people in wigs sit down to frame a constitution and decide how things should work. It's a dubious abstraction over the fact that people prefer to have jobs done well rather than poorly, and use their financial and social clout to make this happen.

- Scott Alexander

[harrypotterhousequotes]

[sesiondemadrugada]

Ed Wood (Tim Burton, 1994).

[st-just]

Okay, so trying not to be mean to Scott too regularly.

But it’s honestly kind of interestingly alien to hear a folk memory of the ‘90s in western culture as being unusually free and supportive of divergent viewpoints. Instead of like, a period of rigidly enforced political doctrine across all major parties and ‘serious’ outlets. (End of History! Unipolar Moment! the Era of big Government is Over! Efficiency! Innovation! Free Trade!).

It’s like when people talk about how back in the ‘90s people were colorblind and racism was on its way to being a dead issue, and have somehow completely forgotten like, not even the big systemic issues, but even just fucking OJ and Rodney King.

[synthecid]

Scott Alexander