https://open.substack.com/pub/grognoscente/p/on-political-fetishism?r=f8jbq&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

Apologies for linking to the Substack; it's a long post, with embedded links and images, and I don't want to risk screwing everything up by trying to copy it here in its entirety.

In short, it's a neuropsych perspective on the current state of political discourse. I discuss a strange quirk of how our brains learn about reward cues and then attempt to tease out what this can tell us about the Trump phenomenon and the reaction thereto, polarization, identitarianism, political hypocrisy, whataboutism, the weaponization of tragedy, conspiracism as copium, the unpalatability of nuance, and the general ease with which our attention to values, principles, and substantive policy can be captured and redirected toward figures, teams, slogans, and symbols. I close with a few thoughts on how might better resist the influence of political fetishism on our own thinking.

Appreciate your thoughts.

I know this sub is big on biodeterminism. What do you think of this study that finds "children who engaged in more conversational turns between the ages of 18 and 24 months had higher IQ scores and language skills in adolescence".

The overview is that "Up to 40 conversational turns per hour, each increase of two turns per hour is associated with a one-point increase in Full Scale IQ. Above 40, returns diminished and the same IQ increases required greater increases in turns."

A 20 point increase in standard IQ ten years later seems wild. Is this just a poor study?

Personally I've heard great things about ketamine tablets and psilocybin mushrooms (obviously not in any supervised therapeutic capacity at this budget), in addition to magnesium supplements, weighted blankets, mechanical keyboards, SSDs, blue laser pointers (note: probably illegal and very dangerous in many cases) etc. What else is there to buy along these lines?

Some people find huge benefits from mouth-taping while sleeping; others from taking magnesium at night or using an eye mask; and still others report life-changing results from trying an elimination diet. Some recommend getting diagnostic blood tests while others recommend just taking things like vit d or b12 to see if they have an impact for you. Our bodies are incredibly complex, and we often lack a clear understanding of when something isn’t operating as optimally as it could.

Here are a couple of examples from my own experience:

For most of my life, as soon as I finished a meal, I’d instinctively go grab a snack, usually something sweet. I didn’t think much about it, and if someone had asked if I was “addicted to sugar,” the question would have seemed confusing. Then one day, I noticed I’d go for these snacks even when I was very full, which made me wonder why. On a whim, I decided to try refraining from snacks, especially sugary foods, for two weeks. The first few days were tough—I was shocked by the intensity of my cravings—but after that, they disappeared entirely. Clearly, I had been addicted to sugar without realizing it, and given how many snacks I was consuming, the effect of continuing on that path would have been significant. Now, over ten years later, I can honestly say that what began as a random, small-scale experiment became a life-changing shift.

I also run and bike a lot and thought of myself as fit, with strong legs. So I was shocked to discover, during a physical therapy assessment for an unrelated reason, that I had serious, interconnected imbalances. My glutes were almost non-functional, my hip flexors were weak and tight, and I was using an incorrect breathing form. These issues explained a range of physical challenges I hadn’t realized were connected (or even fixable) and were the root cause of some sexual health issues that had been particularly frustrating.

In short, I think quick, inexpensive diagnostic tests and personal experiments are highly underrated. So many things in our bodies can be slightly off or suboptimal without us realizing it. Often, these small, low-cost tests have the potential to make a huge impact on our lives. I’m curious—what diagnostic tests or simple experiments have you found helpful or believe are worthwhile yet overlooked by others?

This thread is intended to fill a function similar to that of the Open Threads on SSC proper: a collection of discussion topics, links, and questions too small to merit their own threads. While it is intended for a wide range of conversation, please follow the community guidelines. In particular, avoid culture war–adjacent topics.

I thought you guys might enjoy this warm-ish paleoanthropological take.

Consciousness, religion, reasoning? All fake.

Or at least, “fake” in the sense we like to pretend they’re serious teleological matters, ends-in-themselves, rather than a bunch of fluff and nonsense cooked up to get us laid.

Broadly, we didn’t get conscious or smart because it led to better survival. This is actually quite well attested - we’ve had, and by “we” I mean the genus Homo, gigantic, H Sap-sized brains for more than a million years.

We’ve had 1300cc+ brains for wayyyyy longer than we’ve been human. Neanderthals? Check. H Heidelelbergensis? Check? Even H Erectus?? That’s an affirmative.

https://imgur.com/GF9KJGB

And yet, through the great majority of that time, with our giant brains, we got by with simple stone tools and crawlingly-slow technological and cultural advance.

We didn’t get smart to get better at tools or reasoning - we got smart to justify our emotions and desires, and convince other people that we should get bigger portions of mammoth meat and that they should let us have sex with them.

“But this traditional view may be changing: some scholars now argue that reasoning evolved in order to help us give others socially justifiable reasons for our actions and decisions and, if necessary, to provide argumentation for others so that our intentions would carry more weight socially—in other words, that these ‘decisions’ have in fact already been taken at a subconscious, intuitive level, before the reasoning occurs.”

“Indeed, all of the higher-order human cognitive abilities, also including language and the social emotions, are thought to have evolved due to social selection pressure, rather than environmental selection pressure. This means that, as humans were developing their cognitive abilities, it was the selective environment provided by other humans that affected an individual’s fitness. Thus, living in groups with other people who were also developing these abilities provided a competitive selection pressure that progressively improved human qualities of consciousness and reasoning. These abilities were then applied to the physical, non-social world.”

Indeed, the evidence isn’t just there in the “brain size vs technical innovation” graph up there: if we evolved intelligence and reason to build better tools and dominate the world, why are we so stunningly BAD at it?

I’m sure I don’t have to persuade this crowd that a massive rogue’s gallery of cognitive biases exists. We are outright bad at reasoning and impartially seeking the truth, it’s literally the founding ground truth of the rational-sphere.

It’s because reasoning wasn’t selected for, it was an accident, a lagniappe we stumbled into by making our internal “PR firms” so good at their jobs they accidentally invented general intelligence.

“This explains why reasoning has been so difficult to analyse and understand until now: scholars have been confusing the side effect (better solutions brought about by reasoned argumentation) with the reason the mechanism evolved (socially justifying our motivations and desires).”

The parallel between creating artificial minds that are really good at language and words which ALSO accidentally turned out to be really good at general intelligence is left to the reader - but it’s definitely a fun little “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” epicycle.

From this substack post.

Any evo psyche or paleo folks here? What's your take?

I don't know how you're supposed to get access to information these days, but here are some useful resources that many people seem not to know about:

• archive.is - For viewing cached versions of e.g. news articles that are behind paywalls
• sci-hub.is - For pdf versions of scientific journal articles
• libgen.is - For academic (and nonacademic) books

All three of these have (in my experience) a >95% success rate. Libgen has so many books that the biggest problem is finding the exact version of the book you're looking for (instead of a translation or something). I don't know what I would do without these resources.

Really though, what do people do without these? For reading the news, do people A) subscribe to hundreds of regional publications just so you can read single articles, or B) see headlines fly by on social media and just read the comments? For reading books and papers, do people A) have no ability to follow up on citations or B) head over to a university library just to read the methods section of something, or C) pay $35 or whatever for single papers?

If there was a spotify for journal articles and a spotify for news, sure I would pay for that. But as far as I can tell there isn't, so this is the best alternative I've found. I often think that, because the way you use the internet is essentially private, people lack opportunities to learn usage patterns from others. So I am asking, how do y'all get your information these days?

I've noticed an interesting arbitrage opportunity across prediction markets—specifically on Futuur, where Trump’s odds have recently surged to around 80%. This creates some potential for those who think Kamala Harris has a viable chance of winning or for anyone looking to hedge.

Has anyone else spotted similar pricing mismatches between prediction markets? Curious to hear your strategies and takes on the volatility across markets.

Market link: https://futuur.com/q/133793/what-will-be-the-party-of-the-next-president-of-the-united-states

There was a post where Scott describes what he calls (IIRC) his favorite paper ever. It involved a psychic experiment of some kind where the results seem perfectly contradictory. Anyone remember it?

(Sorry that's not a lot to go on.)

I'm finishing up part one of nand2tetris, a fantastic course in computing that I found by prioritizing curriculum quality over any particular subject.

I'm looking for courses, curricula or books that bring you from 0 to 1, deliver an impressive amount of information in a short period of time, and just overall are well-structured and delivered. What do you have?

Per Wikipedia, the Majority criterion is:

A winner-takes-all voting system criterion that says that, if only one candidate is ranked first by over 50% of voters, that candidate must win

Approval voting advocates say their system passes the majority criterion because the candidate with the most approvals e.g. first rankings wins. Effectively, everyone the voter approves of is ranked first, and everyone they disapprove of is ranked last. But I don’t think this captures much of what really matters about the majority criterion. What matter is not who voters rank first within the constraints of their voting system but what their actual first preference is. I think in terms of what I call the robustfied majority criterion:

The robustified majority criterion**:** Suppose that the voters honestly listed their preferences for candidates numerically (1, 2, 3…) and an absolute majority of voters listed A as 1. The voters then held an election in which everyone voted honestly and non-strategically- e.g. listing their preferences in exact order in an IRV election, stating honestly who they approved and disapproved of in an approval election, or picking their favorite in a plurality election. A should be the winner of that election.

Although that might sound complex, it captures a simple idea. A is the sole favorite of >50% of the population, and everyone votes honestly, A should win.

Instant runoff (and even plurality voting!) passes this criterion.

Approval voting fails as follows. 60% of voters want A to win. 20% want B to win. 20% want C to win. A voters also approve of B, even though she is not their favorite. B will win with 80%, thus failing the robustified majority criterion.

Now every form of voting is imperfect, but for me this is quite a severe failure, and that’s why I don’t like approval voting.

There is a genuine soul-enriching point to human existence which doubles as the reason for society (individual humans acting together in a community) to exist. I'm convinced that an inability to understand this reason is why all civilizations inevitably collapse.

The entire point of human and societal existence is to conquer all of the universe. We are in something of a video game, and the single long-term goal is either exploring all of the universe after which we discover the creator by ourselves, or enough of the universe that the creator decides that we deserve his revealing himself to us.

How do I know this?

It is implicit in the existence of everything. In:

i. The naturalness of human curiosity and exploration.

ii. The boringness of existence without definite goals.

Once you solve your basic problems around things like food, clothing and shelter, what else is there to do? What might it be that humans are supposed to do?

Spending all of our time seeking personal pleasure clearly doesn't work. It leads nowhere. And, at its nadir, leads to cultural degeneration and eventual civilizational collapse.

It makes total sense. Think about it.

The only way to prevent civilizational collapse is to never allow the correct kind of culture degenerate. To ensure which, you need to forever uphold it. Which is impossible without continual long-term goals. What is the ultimate long-term goal?

Exploring and conquering all of the universe.

The huge distance between everything in the universe and the expected lifespan of the universe both entirely make sense within that context.

"Wow. All of that is insane. How do you even know that a creator exists in the first place?"

It is obvious that a creator more powerful than us created the universe.

The usual kind of people who believe that they are smart like to make easy counterarguments to argue against God with the straw man of Abrahamic religions and similar poor conceptions of God and smirk at having defeated arguments about the existence of God.

Abrahamic conceptions of God are obviously very weak. Maybe there are better ones?

The obvious argument for the existence of a creator is that we have no other explanations for how things come into being other than that they were created by someone or something. Since we have no other explanations for things coming into being, it is only reasonable to accept the only one that we do have to be true.

Hence the most reasonable assumption we can make is that a creator of the universe does exist.

Our world is very clearly a programmed environment. There are consistent rules to how things work (which we continue to discover and call 'Physics'), and certain limits (limit to the speed to light, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle) to ensure that the entire environment remains stable no matter what we do.

It's all very simple.

"But but.. the big bang"

If a 3 year-old human child can set up falling dominoes and know what will happen, why then isn't it possible that the creator of our world can make what we refer to as 'the big bang' or a precursor/several precursors to it happen knowing that 'intelligent life' ends up created at some point in the process?

If a creator created us, who then created our own creator?

Given that we can only operate based on knowledge that exists within our own world, it is hard, and maybe impossible to answer that question. And it is maybe possible that we come to develop very good theories about that the more we understand about our own world in the future.

Once you understand that there is a concrete goal which human society is supposed to pursue, it becomes easy to solve several other problems which humans currently pretend are difficult.

The failure to understand the point of existence is what leads people down false paths and focus on all of the catastrophic ideologies which are contemporarily popular or becoming increasingly popular.

Essentially, there is a concrete goal to be pursued and every single human who is part of society really is a team member with different strengths and weaknesses who has to work on helping achieve the ultimate goal.

Understanding this makes it a lot easier to answer the usual questions around how to run society.

(Via: https://buttondown.com/tZero19e/archive/the-point-of-human-existence-the-purpose-of/)

Background info: This phenomenon was observed by Charles Spearman when he created the "g factor":

Spearman's law of diminishing returns (SLODR), also termed the cognitive ability differentiation hypothesis, predicts that the positive correlations among different cognitive abilities are weaker among more intelligent subgroups of individuals. More specifically, SLODR predicts that the g factor will account for a smaller proportion of individual differences in cognitive tests scores at higher scores on the g factor.

There have been many studies that have analyzed this phenomenon ever since its inception. Most have agreed with the hypothesis, although there have been some that have disputed it. A recent meta analysis on the topic has suggested that the hypothesis is valid.

I feel like this phenomenon is important when discussing the implications of a high score on an IQ test on intelligence, as it seems to indicate that the g-loading of a test significantly decreases as IQ increases:

Detterman and Daniel rediscovered this phenomenon in 1989.^([57]) They reported that for subtests of both the WAIS and the WISC, subtest intercorrelations decreased monotonically with ability group, ranging from approximately an average intercorrelation of .7 among individuals with IQs less than 78 to .4 among individuals with IQs greater than 122

G explains less of the variance between two people with "high ability", and the "specific abilities"(defined as basically anything other than g) matter more.

Doesn't this call into question our entire idea of what "IQ" means at higher levels? People frequently tend to conflate IQ and g and use the predictive validity of g to legitimize IQ. SLODR suggests this conflation is less valid at the ranges of ability that are the most appealing to discuss in this community. Namely, that the chances of a person who scores extremely highly on an iq test being beaten out in "general intelligence" by a person who scores highly(but lower than the former person) on an iq test are higher than the same happening between a normal iq score and a low iq score.

To be clear: SLODR has not been studied well at extremely high levels of IQ(think >130). This is simply because it is hard to find a significant number of people with that IQ or higher. The trend of decreasing g-loading could get better or worse at these ranges, but through extrapolation we can infer that the trend continues.

TLDR: SLODR implies that high iqs say less about intelligence when comparing them to each other, isn't this relevant in posts that Scott makes about high IQs(specifically this famous one that he made a while back):

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. You could post:

• Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

• Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

• Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

• Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).