Jason Crawford

Things that can kill you quickly

2022-12-27T16:14:00+00:00

There are things that kill you instantly, like a bullet to the head or a fall from twenty stories. First aid can’t help you there. There are also things that kill you relatively slowly, like a bacterial infection. If you have even hours to live, you can get to the emergency room.

But there is a small class of things that will kill you in minutes unless someone comes to the rescue. There isn’t time to get to a hospital, there isn’t even time for help to arrive in an ambulance. There is only time for someone already on the scene to provide emergency treatment that either solves the problem, or stabilizes you until help arrives. Here, first aid can be the difference between life and death.

Not long ago I became a father. Being responsible for the life of someone so helpless and vulnerable spurred me to finally take first aid training, including CPR. Here’s what I learned from that experience, and what I think everyone should know about first aid.

What most of the things that kill you quickly have in common is that oxygen can’t get to your cells. If you are choking, oxygen can’t get in. If your heart stops beating, blood doesn’t flow. If you have a severe wound, you’re losing that blood rapidly. If any link in the respiratory-circulatory chain is broken, your cells are starved for oxygen and you have minutes to live.

The key first aid skills follow from this: CPR manually substitutes for heart and lung action; the Heimlich maneuver expels an object from the airway; a tourniquet stops life-threatening bleeding (on an extremity, at least—if the wound is elsewhere, there is a different technique, known as packing the wound).

The basic skills are remarkably simple. The course that I took was only a few hours of online instruction, followed by about an hour of in-person demonstration and practice with dummy patients. And I went through a lot of the optional material, including things like stroke, fainting, and jellyfish stings. I’m sure I’m nowhere near as good someone with more professional training or experience, but an introductory course is not daunting.

The most important thing I learned is that if you find yourself in an emergency situation, it is better to do almost anything rather than nothing. Again, if someone stops breathing for any reason, they have only minutes to live. They are dead by default, unless someone intervenes. There is very little you can do to them that is worse than cutting off their oxygen.

In fact, it is probably better to attempt CPR or the Heimlich maneuver than to do nothing, even if you have never been trained and are only guessing, or mimicking what you have seen on television. The skills were fairly unsurprising to me and were consistent with what I expected prior to training. This does not mean that you don’t need to bother with the training, and of course if someone trained is on hand then let them take over. But don’t let the bystander effect paralyze you if someone’s life is ever in your hands.

In fact, the American Heart Association promotes a form of CPR called “hands-only,” in which you only do chest compressions, without giving breaths mouth-to-mouth. Their instructions for this are: “push hard and fast in the center of the chest.” That’s about it. if you only know that, you can do better than nothing.

Similarly, if you can find an AED machine (automated external defibrillator), you do not need training to use it. The instructions are literally: open it and follow the prompts. The parts are clearly labeled, and there is a voice recording that walks you through every step of the process.

Look for the heart with the lightning bolt. Wensha

In the end, the biggest thing I gained was the confidence to act.

I made an Anki flashcard deck for the course and have been using it to keep my memory fresh. If you do a similar course, you can download my deck from AnkiWeb.

The lessons of Xanadu

2022-08-07T17:49:00+00:00

One of my all-time favorite articles is “The Curse of Xanadu,” by Gary Wolf, which ran in WIRED Magazine in 1995. On the surface, it’s a piece of tech history, a story of a dramatic failure. But look closer, and you can find deep philosophical insight.

Xanadu was a grand vision of a hypertext system, conceived long before the Web, that at the time of this article had been “under development” for three decades without launching. The visionary behind it was Ted Nelson, one of the originators of the concept of hypertext. Here’s how the article describes him and the project:

Nelson’s life is so full of unfinished projects that it might fairly be said to be built from them, much as lace is built from holes or Philip Johnson’s glass house from windows. He has written an unfinished autobiography and produced an unfinished film. His houseboat in the San Francisco Bay is full of incomplete notes and unsigned letters. He founded a video-editing business, but has not yet seen it through to profitability. He has been at work on an overarching philosophy of everything called General Schematics, but the text remains in thousands of pieces, scattered on sheets of paper, file cards, and sticky notes.

All the children of Nelson’s imagination do not have equal stature. Each is derived from the one, great, unfinished project for which he has finally achieved the fame he has pursued since his boyhood. During one of our many conversations, Nelson explained that he never succeeded as a filmmaker or businessman because “the first step to anything I ever wanted to do was Xanadu.”

Xanadu, a global hypertext publishing system, is the longest-running vaporware story in the history of the computer industry. It has been in development for more than 30 years. This long gestation period may not put it in the same category as the Great Wall of China, which was under construction for most of the 16th century and still failed to foil invaders, but, given the relative youth of commercial computing, Xanadu has set a record of futility that will be difficult for other companies to surpass.

The project had many of the earmarks of other failed or long-overdue efforts. As a product, it was over-designed:

Xanadu was meant to be a universal library, a worldwide hypertext publishing tool, a system to resolve copyright disputes, and a meritocratic forum for discussion and debate. By putting all information within reach of all people, Xanadu was meant to eliminate scientific ignorance and cure political misunderstandings. And, on the very hackerish assumption that global catastrophes are caused by ignorance, stupidity, and communication failures, Xanadu was supposed to save the world.

In contrast to the later Web, links in Xanadu did not point to entire documents, but to any arbitrary range of characters within any document. Links were to be bi-directional, so they could not be broken. And there was an advanced feature in which “parts of documents could be quoted in other documents without copying”:

The idea of quoting without copying was called transclusion, and it was the heart of Xanadu’s most innovative commercial feature—a royalty and copyright scheme. Whenever an author wished to quote, he or she would use transclusion to “virtually include” the passage in his or her own document.…

The key to the Xanadu copyright and royalty scheme was that literal copying was forbidden in the Xanadu system. When a user wanted to quote a portion of document, that portion was transcluded. With fee for every reading.

Transclusion was extremely challenging to the programmers, for it meant that there could be no redundancy in the grand Xanadu library. Every text could exist only as an original. Every user in the world would have to have instant access to the same underlying collection of documents.

The vision for the application of this technology was nothing short of utopian, based on delusions of technological solutions to social and epistemic problems:

… the Xanadu architects became obsessed with developing the widest possible applications of hypertext technology. A universal democratic library, they decided, was only the beginning. Xanadu could also provide a tool for rational discussion and decision making among very large groups. In the Xanadu docuverse, an assertion could always be followed back to its original source. An idea would never become detached from its author. Public discussion on important issues would move forward logically, rather than merely swirling ineffectively through eddies of rhetoric. In fact, any reader could, by creating and following links, freeze the chaotic flow of knowledge and grasp the lines of connection and influence.

The design also blithely ignored the realities of computer performance, developing as they were on minicomputers and early workstations:

The Onyx also had 128 Kbytes of RAM, which they later doubled to a screaming 256 Kbytes. Looking back at the specifics of the endeavor, the approach of the Xanadu programmers seems quixotic. [Xanadu collaborator Roger] Gregory and his colleagues were trying to build a universal library on machines that could barely manage to edit and search a book’s worth of text.

The project suffered from infighting and a lack of good management:

“It was not rapid prototyping—it was rabid prototyping,” said one of [Xanadu programmer Michael] McClary’s friends who watched the project closely.

There was never a realistic schedule: the team perpetually believed they were six months away from completion. The project was so badly conceived and managed that it couldn’t ship even after being acquired by Autodesk and given a full budget:

[Autodesk founder] John Walker, Xanadu’s most powerful protector, later wrote that during the Autodesk years, the Xanadu team had “hyper-warped into the techno-hubris zone.” Walker marveled at the programmers’ apparent belief that they could create “in its entirety, a system that can store all the information in every form, present and future, for quadrillions of individuals over billions of years.” Rather than push their product into the marketplace quickly, where it could compete, adapt, or die, the Xanadu programmers intended to produce their revolution ab initio.

“When this process fails,” wrote Walker in his collection of documents from and about Autodesk, “and it always does, that doesn’t seem to weaken the belief in a design process which, in reality, is as bogus as astrology. It’s always a bad manager, problems with tools, etc.—precisely the unpredictable factors which make a priori design impossible in the first place.”

There are too many good quotes in the article to include them all here—read the whole thing.

What struck me most deeply, however, was the response of some of the Xanadu team to the rise of the World Wide Web. You would think that the web would be an object lesson for them—a slap in the face hard enough to wake them from their pie-in-the-sky reverie and bring them back to Earth.

Indeed, one junior programmer on the later team, Rob Jellinghaus—who was born after the Xanadu project had begun (!)—did have such an awakening:

While the Xanaduers paid lip service to libertarian ideals, they imagined a more traditional revolution in which all users would be linked to a single, large, utopian system. But in their quest for a 21st-century model, they created a Byzantine maze.

“There were links, you could do versions, you could compare versions, all that was true,” Jellinghaus reports, “provided you were a rocket scientist. I mean, just the code to get a piece of text out of the Xanadu back end was something like 20 lines of very, very hairy C++, and it was not easy to use in any sense of the word. Not only was it not easy to use, it wasn’t anything even remotely resembling fast. The more I worked at it, the more pessimistic I got.”

The young programmer’s doubts were magnified by his dawning realization that a grand, centralized system was no longer the solution to anything. He had grown up with the Internet—a redundant, ever-multiplying and increasingly chaotic mass of documents. He had observed that users wanted and needed ever more clever interfaces to deal with the wealth of information, but they showed little inclination to obey the dictates of a single company.…

Although he sympathized with the fanaticism of his colleagues, Jellinghaus also began to question whether a hypertext revolution required the perfect preservation of all knowledge. He saw the beauty of the Xanadu dream—“How do you codify all the information in the world in a way that is infinitely scalable?”—but he suspected that human society might not benefit from a perfect technological memory. Thinking is based on selection and weeding out; remembering everything is strangely similar to forgetting everything. “Maybe most things that people do shouldn’t be remembered,” Jellinghaus says. “Maybe forgetting is good.” …

After a couple of months, he began to come to his senses. “What was I doing?” he remembers saying to himself. “This is silly. This was silly all along.”

But here was the reaction of Mark Miller, one of the original developers:

I asked Miller if the Internet was accomplishing his dreams for hypertext. “What the Web is doing is easy,” Miller answered. He pointed out that the Web still lacks nearly every one of the advanced features he and his colleagues were trying to realize. There is no transclusion. There is no way to create links inside other writers’ documents. There is no way to follow all the references to a specific document. Most importantly, the World Wide Web is no friend to logic. Rather, it permits infinite redundancy and encourages maximum confusion. With Xanadu—that is, with tranclusion and freedom to link—users would have had a consistent, easily navigable forum for universal debate.

“This is really hard,” Miller said.

And what about Nelson himself?

Nelson’s response to the Web was “nice try.” He said it is a trivial simplification of his hypertext ideas, though cleverly implemented. And he has not entirely given up hope for the old Xanadu code. “I’d like to stress that everyone involved in Xanadu believes that the software is valid and can be finished,” he asserted.

“It will be finished,” Nelson added. “The only question is which decade.”

Miller, Nelson, and the rest of the Xanadu team might have benefitted from reading another one of my all-time favorite articles: Clay Shirky’s “In Praise of Evolvable Systems”.

Shirky begins by pointing out several ways in which the fundamental standards of web technology have seemingly absurd limitations and inefficiencies: HTTP doesn’t use persistent connections and incurs the entire overhead of a new session for each file transferred, web servers have no built-in load balancing, HTML uses one-directional hypertext links that are easily broken, etc.:

HTTP and HTML are the Whoopee Cushion and Joy Buzzer of Internet protocols, only comprehensible as elaborate practical jokes. For anyone who has tried to accomplish anything serious on the Web, it’s pretty obvious that of the various implementations of a worldwide hypertext protocol, we have the worst one possible.

Except, of course, for all the others.…

The problem with that list of deficiencies is that it is also a list of necessities—the Web has flourished in a way that no other networking protocol has except e-mail, not despite many of these qualities but because of them. The very weaknesses that make the Web so infuriating to serious practitioners also make it possible in the first place. In fact, had the Web been a strong and well-designed entity from its inception, it would have gone nowhere.

Contrasting the “evolvable system” of the web with centrally designed protocols such as Gopher and WAIS, he concludes:

Centrally designed protocols start out strong and improve logarithmically. Evolvable protocols start out weak and improve exponentially. It’s dinosaurs vs. mammals, and the mammals win every time.

The Xanadu project still exists. I was able to quickly learn its current status, because it has a homepage on a global hypertext-based information system: https://xanadu.com.

“With ideas which are still radical, WE FIGHT ON. We hope for vindication, the last laugh, and recognition as an additional standard…” It complains that “everyone is hypnotized by the Web browser,” which is “basically crippled.”

The project is no longer entirely vaporware. There are two demo viewers of Xanadocs: “XanaduSpace is our best-looking viewer, our flagship demo—but alas, it’s a stuck demo and can’t go further.” The “new working viewer”, xanaviewer3, makes it “possible (but not easy) for anyone who is determined enough to create a xanadoc, and send it to others, who may open and use it.” One supposes that, in order to view it, the recipients of the document must be equally determined.

“With our limited resources,” they explain, “we can only go slowly, unlike today’s Red Bull–fueled young teams.”

The WIRED article describing Xanadu as running for over 30 years is now 27 years old, meaning Xanadu itself is nearing 60. If its “record of futility” was difficult to surpass back then, it is doubly so now.

The lessons of Xanadu can be learned at multiple levels.

On one level, the lesson is to scope projects realistically and to strive for simplicity of design.

On a deeper level, the lesson is to ship continually. Doing so keeps the schedule honest, forces difficult scope decisions, and allows for feedback from real users.

On a still deeper level, the lesson is to learn from failure, which the vast majority of the Xanadu team does not appear to have done: thirty years of missed deadlines did not cause them to fundamentally question their schedule, project management, or design scope.

But the deepest lesson, I think, is to value real-world results. Nelson and Miller didn’t fail to notice the Web, they failed to care about its success or even to recognize it as a success. Its epic, world-changing status in the history of technology is meaningless to them beside the fantasy system they had dreamed up.

In the end, despite the title of the WIRED article, Xanadu was not, in fact, cursed. It achieved exactly what its originators wanted: theoretical perfection in a Platonic realm of forms so idealized that it can never quite be brought to Earth.

My simple guide to life

2022-04-03T17:33:00+00:00

I first made a version of this chart seven years ago today. It’s worth a re-up (and it’s never been on my blog).

The meaning of this chart is:

Everything you do should be justified either by being inherently enjoyable, or by being important for some other purpose. Absolutely minimize activities that satisfy neither of these criteria: things that are neither fun nor important. (This seems obvious, but think of how often it’s violated: online flame wars, doomscrolling and general overconsumption of news, long sob stories about trivial inconveniences, endless stewing over long-ago wrongs, etc.)
Spend the vast majority of your time on things that are both enjoyable and important, such as (hopefully) career and family. Some time on chores, taxes, etc. is unavoidable. Some time on games and diversions is fine. But both should be small relative to the big, meaningful, deeply rewarding things.

(And just to anticipate one reaction: if you enjoy arguments on the Internet, then they can go under “fun and games”.)

It’s not a complete guide to life, but it’s important and something I apply often.

Reflections on six months of fatherhood

2022-01-31T05:06:00+00:00

To be fed from a spoon requires three distinct skills. First, you must open your mouth when the spoon approaches. Second, you must close your mouth around the spoon once it has fully entered the mouth (and not before). Third, you must swallow the food that remains in your mouth after the spoon is withdrawn, rather than spitting it out.

I know this because my daughter, who is six months old, did not possess these skills two months ago. She learned rapidly—ah, to possess the neuroplasticity of the young—but there was a brief period when she literally did not know how to be spoon-fed. (Note that I have not begun to describe the skills required to feed oneself with a spoon, in part because she has not yet acquired them.)

The first lesson I have received from fatherhood is that everything must be learned, or very nearly everything. Babies are born with a very small number of reflexes and instincts: to suck on whatever enters their mouth, to “root” around on mother’s chest to find the nipple, to cry when they are uncomfortable. Everything else is a mental step in a long, upward climb.

In the first weeks, both the parents and the child are focused on digestion. The infant is essentially an alimentary canal with arms and legs. (The limbs are superfluous and indeed get in the way more than they help; if children were properly engineered, they would be born limbless, and the arms and legs would grow in as they were needed.) The infant is learning to nurse, to sleep, and to poop, and that’s about all they do for a little while. Yes, they even need to learn how to poop, or at least that’s how the nurse in the maternity ward explained her grunting sounds and puzzled expression.

All capabilities come in the tiniest increments. At first she did not know what her hands were for, and was more likely to scratch her own face than to do anything useful with them. After a few months she started to realize that hands could grasp things, but not how to do so. She would pinch and grip randomly when something was under them. Just feeling. She started to hold the bottle when I fed her, but she made every conceivable mistake in doing so. She would put her hands on top of the bottle, rather than on the bottom or sides. (Gravity has to be learned.) She would try to balance it on her knuckles, to comic effect. She would get a grip on the bottle, then move her hands and lose her grip while drinking. She would hold the bottle very close to the nipple, giving her no leverage to lift it. She would squeeze it between her wrists instead of using her palms and fingers. (She still does that, actually, and she’s gotten remarkably good at it.)

At a certain point, she had learned that hands are good for holding things, but she would only grasp a toy if you literally put it in her hand. She would do nothing purposeful with it, not even look at it, and then drop it randomly, unconsciously. Later, if you held a toy out to her, she would stretch her arms out and reach for it. But she would not yet reach for a toy that was nearby on the ground. Then one day she started reaching for those toys, too. This was a triumph: her first sign of pursuing an object of her choosing, rather than one which was (literally) handed to her.

Gross motor skills, like fine ones, have also come by degrees. At first she could push herself half an inch or so along the ground by flailing her legs, not always intentionally. Then it was intentional. Quickly she realized that by combining half-inch scoots, she could travel a longer distance—maybe multiple inches. At that point she was mobile, barely. For a brief time she would crawl towards a toy she wanted, but only if the toy was within a foot or two of her. Soon she grasped the inductive argument: if I can scoot N inches, then I can scoot N+1 inches. From then on her range was unlimited. (Although she has yet to get up on all fours, and she crawls by dragging her belly along the ground, commando style.)

The crawling, and the grabbing, lead me to the other lesson I have received so far, which is that much of human motivation is curiosity and self-actualization, not mere comfort and pleasure—even at this very early stage. She has not yet said her first word, and yet already she seems driven by an insatiable desire to explore—to explore both the world and her own abilities. She delights in her toys but is not content with them; she wants to move beyond the delimited rectangle of her play mat, with its smooth, round objects of wood and plastic in bright solid colors. She seeks the world beyond the mat: to touch the carpet and the curtains, to crawl behind and underneath the chair, to handle a grown-up cup, to pull clothes out of the drawer, to grab at hair and glasses and clothing, to eat the tag hanging underneath the sofa.

She crawls towards objects of desire, but not all her motion is directed at a tangible goal in the environment. She climbs over cushions, or up a foam-block incline, or up my chest, apparently for the fun of doing so. The first time I helped her sit up, at a few months old, the look on her face was wonder and amazement. I’m sitting up! How did that happen? I didn’t know that could happen! Now when I offer a hand, she doesn’t just sit up: she stands. Sitting is for three-month-olds. She stands: wobbling, swaying, shaking, sometimes almost collapsing into a seated position, usually getting back up with the slightest tug. The look on her face is still one of exhilaration, every time.

If her utility function were purely based on physical comfort and pleasure, most of this would be inexplicable. She already has the cushiest life imaginable: she has servants to feed, clothe, and bathe her, to carry her from room to room, to soothe her to sleep, even to wipe her bottom; her slightest whim or discomfort is attended to quickly if she but makes it known. If the goal of life were to relax and take it easy, she would already be at the pinnacle, with nowhere to go.

But—as she reminds me, with every striving crawl across the room, with every curious coo at a strange new object—relaxation is not the goal of life. Not of hers, nor of mine, nor of humanity’s. Our lives are not complete without challenge, adventure, play, and curiosity. When the mere struggle for survival does not provide enough of that—and it has not, since hunter-gatherer times—we invent it for ourselves: through games and sports, through travel, through storytelling, through math and science. We run races, climb mountains, compose ballads, peer through telescopes. These things don’t put food on one’s table, a shirt on one’s back, or a roof over one’s head. That’s not why we do them. We do them in order to be fully human and fully alive. And so does she, even if, for now, she is climbing sofa cushions instead of mountains, and peering at a set of plastic measuring spoons from the kitchen rather than at the cosmos.

Daughter, that’s what you’ve taught me, just in your first six months. I only hope I can ever teach you nearly as much.

Precognition

2021-06-13T23:49:00+00:00

It’s almost impossible to predict the future. But it’s also unnecessary, because most people are living in the past. All you have to do is see the present before everyone else does.

To be less pithy, but more clear: Most people are slow to notice and accept change. If you can just be faster than most people at seeing what’s going on, updating your model of the world, and reacting accordingly, it’s almost as good as seeing the future.

We see this in the US with covid: The same people who didn’t realize that we all should be wearing masks, when they were life-saving, are now slow to realize/admit that we can stop wearing them.

For a dramatic historical example (from The Making of the Atomic Bomb), take Leo Szilard’s observations of 1930s Germany:

Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933. … In late March, Jewish judges and lawyers in Prussia and Bavaria were dismissed from practice. On the weekend of April 1, Julius Streicher directed a national boycott of Jewish businesses and Jews were beaten in the streets. “I took a train from Berlin to Vienna on a certain date, close to the first of April, 1933,” Szilard writes. “The train was empty. The same train the next day was overcrowded, was stopped at the frontier, the people had to get out, and everybody was interrogated by the Nazis. This just goes to show that if you want to succeed in this world you don’t have to be much cleverer than other people, you just have to be one day earlier.”

How to be earlier

Independent thinking. If you only believe things that are accepted by the majority of people, then by definition you’ll always be behind the curve in a changing world.
Listen to other independent thinkers. You can’t pay attention to everything at once or evaluate every area. You can only be the first to realize something in a narrow domain in which you are an expert. But if you tune your intellectual radar to other independent thinkers, you can be in the first ~1% of people to realize a new fact. Seek them out, find them, and follow them.

I was taking covid precautions in late February 2020, about three weeks ahead of official “lockdown” measures—but only because I was tuned in to the people who were six weeks ahead.

But:
Distinguish independent thinkers from crackpots. Both are “contrarian”; only one has any hope of being right. This is an art, honed over decades. Pay attention to both the source’s evidence and their logic. Credentials are relevant, but they are neither necessary nor sufficient.
Read broadly; seek out and adopt concepts and frameworks that help you understand the world (e.g.: exponential growth, network effects, efficient frontiers).

Finally:
Learn how to make decisions in the face of uncertainty. Even when you see the present earlier, you won’t see it with full clarity, nor will you be able to predict the future. You’ll just have a set of probabilities that are closer to reality than most people’s.

To return to the covid example: in January/February 2020, even the people farthest ahead of the curve weren’t certain whether there would be a pandemic or how bad it would be. They just knew that the chances were double-digit percent, before it was even on most people’s radar.

Find low-cost ways to avoid extreme downside, and low-investment opportunities for extreme upside. For example, when a pandemic might be starting, it makes sense to stock up on supplies, move meetings to phone calls, etc.—these are cheap insurance.

In some fantasy worlds, there are superheroes with “pre-cognition”, able to see the immediate future. They’re always one step ahead. But since most people are a few steps behind reality, you don’t need pre-cognition—just independent thinking.

Who is Scott Alexander and what is he about?

2021-02-13T21:58:00+00:00

Scott Alexander is my favorite blogger. I’d like to recommend him to more people, but it’s hard to know where to start, since he’s written over 1,500 posts. A little while ago a friend asked me to make a list of my favorite pieces of his. So, here is a beginner’s guide to the writings of Scott Alexander.

(I’ll refer to his “blog”, but there are really two: Slate Star Codex, which ran for over a decade and ended in 2020, and Astral Codex Ten, his new blog that launched this year. There’s lots of great stuff on the old one, but if you want to subscribe, be sure to subscribe to the new one.)

What is this blog about?

Like many great blogs, not any one thing: it’s the eclectic interests of a unique individual with a broad intellectual appetite.

Scott is a psychiatrist by profession, and some posts are about psychiatry, consciousness, and the brain. But he also writes about philosophy, politics, and science. He writes in-depth book reviews, some of which are arguably better than the book. And, as part of the “rationalist” community, he writes about epistemology: how to think and reason. (See also What is Astral Codex Ten?)

What makes the blog so good?

Scott writes with a rare combination of insight, humor, incisive clarity, relentless questioning, and (often) exhaustive data analysis. He asks big questions across a wide variety of domains and doesn’t rest until he has clear answers. No, he doesn’t rest until he can explain those answers to you lucidly. No, wait, he doesn’t rest until he can do that and also make you laugh out loud.

At his best, he hits some strange triple point, previously undiscovered by bloggers, where data, theory, and emotion can coexist in equilibrium. Most writing on topics as abstract and technical as his struggles just not to be dry; it takes effort to focus, and I need energy to read them. Scott’s writing flows so well that it somehow generates its own energy, like some sort of perpetual motion machine.

I like to think that I’m pretty good at writing. I’m good enough that I convinced myself to quit my day job and to write instead of coding or managing (which I’m actually qualified for and which can definitely make you more money). But I’m not nearly as good a writer as Scott.

How to use this guide

This guide is organized by topic. In each category I’ve highlighted a few posts that stood out in my memory.

There isn’t any one place to start with Scott Alexander. Just pick a subject you’re interested in and start reading.

Epistemology and rationalism

How to think, reason, and come closer to truth:

Beware The Man Of One Study. It’s easy to go wrong looking at a single scientific study.
Socratic Grilling. “One of the most important rationalist skills is ‘noticing your confusion’. But that depends on an even more important proto-skill of wanting things to make sense.”

Discussion and argument

How to have better discourse (and how to spot people who are arguing in bad faith):

Beware Isolated Demands For Rigor. On applying epistemological rigor in a biased way, demanding higher standards to justify ideas you don’t like.
All In All, Another Brick In The Motte. The “motte and bailey doctrine”, in which someone vacillates between a weak and strong version of their point in order to deflect attack.
Varieties Of Argumentative Experience. A way to categorize disagreements, from unproductive (“gotchas” and social shaming) to productive (“operationalizing” and good-faith surveys of evidence).
Against Bravery Debates. On “discussions over who is bravely holding a nonconformist position in the face of persecution, and who is a coward defending the popular status quo and trying to silence dissenters.”

Science

More like meta-science, actually: the philosophy and practice of science.

The Control Group Is Out Of Control. The replication crisis in science; why science is hard; parapsychology as “the control group for science.”
5-HTTLPR: A Pointed Review. How an entire body of work in neuroscience went completely wrong. The co-authors of the paper that sparked this called it “better than the original paper…. simply nails every aspect of the issue.”
Book Review: The Structure Of Scientific Revolutions. Diving into the classic by Thomas Kuhn.

Psychology

Book Review: The Seven Principles For Making Marriage Work. A critique of John Gottman and his claims about his marriage therapy techniques.
Book Review: All Therapy Books. General lampooning of therapy books.

Neuroscience

Guyenet On Motivation. The structure of the brain’s decision-making apparatus.
It’s Bayes All The Way Up. How the brain uses something like a Bayesian structure to integrate new evidence with prior beliefs.
Book Review: Surfing Uncertainty. The concept of “predictive processing” and what it explains about the brain.

Progress

Is Science Slowing Down? A response to an economics paper claiming that “ideas are getting harder to find,” arguing that “constant progress in science in response to exponential increases in inputs ought to be our null hypothesis.”
Does Reality Drive Straight Lines On Graphs, Or Do Straight Lines On Graphs Drive Reality? The fact that a particular intervention didn’t change a trend, doesn’t mean the intervention wasn’t important in driving the trend.
1960: The Year The Singularity Was Cancelled. Reviewing a theory of why progress may have slowed down.

History

Were There Dark Ages? Defending the concept of the “Dark Ages” from a variety of attacks.
Book Review: Albion’s Seed. “I read it… on the advice of people who kept telling me it explains everything about America. And it sort of does.”
Book Review: Secular Cycles. “There is a tide in the affairs of men. It cycles with a period of about three hundred years…. At least this is the thesis of Peter Turchin and Sergey Nefedov, authors of Secular Cycles.”

Politics

California, Water You Doing? The first Scott Alexander post I ever read. A good example of how to analyze a politically charged issue and actually understand a current topic.
Guns And States. A level-headed, data-driven analysis of gun control.
Employer Provided Health Insurance Delenda Est “Any other system would fix these problems.… But here we are, stuck with a system that somehow manages to fail everybody for different reasons.”

Economics

Reverse Voxsplaining: Drugs vs. Chairs. A rebuttal to a Vox story claiming that free markets are responsible for the high preice of EpiPens.
Financial Incentives Are Weaker Than Social Incentives But Very Important Anyway. “When you remove financial incentives, you don’t get everyone acting ethically for the good of all. You just get status incentives with no counterbalance.”

Media

A Failure, But Not Of Prediction. What exactly the media got wrong about covid.
Can Things Be Both Popular And Silenced? Untangling a paradox.
Sort By Controversial. A short story about an algorithm that outputs controversy-generating statements.

Culture

Is Everything A Religion? It’s easy to point at any philosophy or community and call it a “religion”; how seriously should we take this?
Black People Less Likely. If a group has low representation of blacks, can we infer that it is racist?
I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup. On political ingroups, outgroups, and “toleration”.
Kolmogorov Complicity And The Parable Of Lightning. Can controversial figures simply lay low when an oppressive power is against them?

More book reviews

Book Review: Against The Grain. “If, as Samuel Johnson claimed, ‘The Devil was the first Whig’, Against the Grain argues that wheat was the first High Modernist.”
Book Review: Reframing Superintelligence. On the long-term possibilities for and risks of AI.
Book Review: The Precipice. Analyzing risks that could cause the extinction of humanity.
Book Review: The Secret Of Our Success. On the concept of “cultural evolution”: can cultures evolve through natural selection, like species?

Other

Some uncategorizable favorites:

The Parable Of The Talents. “Rabbi Zusya once said that when he died, he wasn’t worried that God would ask him ‘Why weren’t you Moses?’ or ‘Why weren’t you Solomon?’ But he did worry that God might ask ‘Why weren’t you Rabbi Zusya?’”
Lizardman’s Constant Is 4%. Don’t trust poll results showing that a small percent of people have crazy beliefs. This one is insightful and hilarious; I read a lot of it out loud to my brother over dinner one night and had a hard time keeping a straight face.
The Goddess of Everything Else. Fiction, bordering on poetry, about how animals and especially humanity can rise above the evolutionary war of all against all—and, even while seeking our own benefit, learn to cooperate and to thrive together.

Announcing Progress Studies for Young Scholars

2020-05-19T21:48:00+00:00

Excited to announce that I’m launching an online high school summer program in the history of technology: Progress Studies for Young Scholars.

Daily online content, plus a speaker series featuring Tyler Cowen, Patrick Collison, Max Roser, Joel Mokyr, Deirdre McCloskey, and more. More details on my announcement at The Roots of Progress.

What I still want out of time management tools

2020-04-25T22:10:00+00:00

I made my first todo list almost 25 years ago. Ever since, I’ve been evolving my tools and system for tracking tasks, managing time, and improving productivity.

A personal productivity toolbox is a very personal and contextual thing. I find that my own systems have to be revised every few years, as my life and work situation changes. What worked in college is not what I needed as an employee; what worked as an engineer is not what I needed as a manager.

Right now there are two things I need:

Focus, without rigid schedules or artificial time slices

I have tried Pomodoro-ish things, like Vitamin-R. I’ve also tried distraction-blockers like StayFocusd and Freedom. And I use social media time limits on iOS. They all sort of work, but I’ve never stuck with any.

I think the mechanism of time is too rigid. There isn’t an optimal amount of time to spend on social media, or optimal hours of the day, not exactly.

An alternate mechanism, which I find valuable but have never seen productized, is deliberate transitions (a concept I learned from Jean Moroney). So, if you want to take a break, you can do that—but as a conscious choice, rather than an absent-minded distraction. If you want to browse Twitter, you can do that, but as a conscious choice, not out of habit.

I think this could work better, especially if combined with some desired allocation of time to different buckets, and something that nudged you towards whichever bucket was relatively farthest from todays’ goal.

I kind of want something that takes over my browser new-tab experience, so that every time I open a tab it reminds me of what I decided to do, and prompts me to either stick to that, or make a deliberate transition.

A way to triage tasks, articles, and emails

All todo-list apps help you track what to do. I haven’t seen one that helps you decide what not to do.

Tracking is easy—I can do that in any text file or notes app. My problem is that things linger on the list forever. Same problem with reading lists (like Instapaper). I save more stuff than I can ever realistically read.

Rather than fight this, I want to embrace it. I’m always going to write down more tasks, and save more articles, than I’m ever actually going to get around to. That’s natural and even healthy. What’s needed is good triage.

I have this idea for a todo list where items fade away the longer they’ve been on the list, and eventually disappear. If you want to rescue them, you have to mark them important—at which point they get more red-hot and insistent as time goes on. Call it “To-Don’t”.

I’m really tempted to build one or both of these. Please save me by telling me that someone has already built exactly what I want.

What went wrong with the ventilator stockpile?

2020-04-01T05:30:00+00:00

The New York Times reports on how the federal government tried and failed to increase the stockpile of ventilators. Some are reading this as a story about the private sector, the profit motive, or “greed”. I think it’s a story about incompetent project management.

The story in brief: The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) identified the ventilator shortage, and contracted with a small company, Newport, to make them. Newport got acquired by big company, Covidien. Contract was not important to Covidien and they canceled it. HHS found another supplier, but now it’s too late.

The big question that the story does not answer: For a critical strategic resource, why did the HHS rely on a single, small supplier?

To anyone familiar with business, the story of how this contract went is not surprising. Small companies get acquired all the time. Priorities always change in an acquisition. It’s not at all unusual for projects and contracts to get canceled. This risk was totally foreseeable.

Even if the company hadn’t been acquired, all kinds of things could have happened to it. Small companies go out of business all the time. Projects fail all the time. “Supplier risk” should be a standard checkbox on anyone’s contingency planning efforts.

This is even more so when you deliberately push the price down to 30% of the market rate. Newport did not even necessarily expect to be profitable on the contract:

Ventilators at the time typically went for about $10,000 each, and getting the price down to $3,000 would be tough. But Newport’s executives bet they would be able to make up for any losses by selling the ventilators around the world.

“It would be very prestigious to be recognized as a supplier to the federal government,” said Richard Crawford, who was Newport’s head of research and development at the time. “We thought the international market would be strong, and there is where Newport would have a good profit on the product.”

Why did the HHS put all their eggs in one basket? Did they have any risk management or contingency plan? Did they have any provisions in the contract, such as penalties for failure to deliver?

Why did the HHS take so long to realize that things were off track, and to react? They had clues immediately after the acquisition that Covidien was not happy with the contract. When did they start looking for a second supplier?

Covidien tried to renegotiate the contract almost immediately after the acquisition in 2012. But the story gives no indication that HHS did anything about the risk until two years later, in 2014, when Covidien said they wanted to cancel the contract.

When a key vendor doesn’t come through with a crucial resource, you do not get to blame the vendor for the failure of your project. It was on the HHS to make sure the ventilators got made, one way or another. First rule of leadership: everything is your fault.

The story suggests that Covidien bought Newport in order to take out a competitor with a lower-priced product. But there’s a hole in that story: If this lower-priced product was such a threat, then once Covidien owned it, why not use it to take out all their competitors?

A much more plausible answer to my mind is that the project was unprofitable owing to an artificially low price point, and it just wasn’t worth the focus and resources. This kind of thing happens all the time, and again, anyone with business experience would not be surprised. I mean, this is like Starbucks acquiring La Boulange and then shutting them down. It’s not some sinister ploy to “take out a competitor”, it’s just a project that got deprioritized.

And don’t even get me started on the FDA, who apparently had to approve all these devices. How much did they add to the timeline? And to the R&D expenses, which get baked into the cost of the product? Also, what about all the other regulatory capture that favors large companies in medtech and drives consolidation in the industry?

Many people look at this and conclude the problem was “outsourcing to the private sector” or “corporate greed.” I think it’s the opposite: we “outsourced” emergency preparedness to a centralized institution that is a single point of failure.

“Ascend the Hierarchy”: Let’s improve online discourse

2020-03-29T18:13:00+00:00

Many years ago Paul Graham wrote an essay, “How to Disagree”, that proposed a hierarchy of disagreement with seven levels, from DH0, “name-calling”, to DH6, “refuting the central point”. Someone then created a pyramid diagram based on this.

Recently when someone commented unhelpfully on Twitter, I replied with the diagram, and said:

Your level is: ‘contradiction’

I invite you to ascend the hierarchy.

People seemed to like it. So let’s make this a thing.

The image

Here’s a revised image to use (also on Wikimedia). This is public-domain.

I’ve added numbered labels to the levels for easy reference, the URL for Graham’s essay, and a hashtag.

How to use it

If someone makes a comment that is not worth a direct response:

Reply with this image.
Help them identify what level they’re currently at.
Invite them to #AscendTheHierarchy.

Who to use it with

People who seem to have good intentions, are arguing in good faith to come at truth, and are willing and able to ascend the hierarchy.

Don’t use it with trolls or those consumed by anger. Ignore, mute or block instead.

When to use it

When you need to respond productively to an unhelpful comment.

This is a substitute for (1) ignoring a comment or (2) responding in anger. It’s a way to get the conversation back on track and make it more productive.

Responding based on level

Putting the above together, this is a rough guide for responding based on the level of someone’s comment:

DH0: Block
DH1: Ignore
DH2–3: Reply with this image as above
DH4–6: Engage in good faith

Adjust your reaction up or down this list based on their intentions, how long the discussion has already gone on, and how much energy you want to give it. (But remember to use your time and energy wisely.)

Other ways to improve discourse

The best way is to model it. Aim for the highest levels yourself. Never go below DH4; strive for DH6.

Make your level explicit: “I understand your central point to be X. Here’s why that’s wrong…”

If someone is arguing at DH4 or 5 but not addressing your central point, help them get to 6 by restating your central point as clearly and concisely as possible, and asking them to address it directly.

The goal

The goal is to improve online discourse by making people aware of this hierarchy and inviting them to move up it.

I use the word “invite” deliberately to acknowledge that they have a choice, that I cannot control them, and that this is a request, not a demand. (Of course, choices have consequences, and those who refuse to ascend the hierarchy will be ignored, muted or blocked.)