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This is Argument and Analysis, Part 2: Chapter 2: Everything I Believe is False, published by Eliezer Yudkowsky.

#include "stddisclaimer.h"

"Of course it was my fault. There's no one else here who could be responsible for anything."

"Now, just to be clear," Harry said, "if the professor does levitate you, Dad, when you know you haven't been attached to any wires, that's going to be sufficient evidence. You're not going to turn around and say that it's a magician's trick. That wouldn't be fair play. If you feel that way, you should say so now, and we can figure out a different experiment instead."

Harry's father, Professor Michael Verres-Evans, rolled his eyes. "Yes, Harry."

"And you, Mum, your theory says that the professor should be able to do this, and if that doesn't happen, you'll admit you're mistaken. Nothing about how magic doesn't work when people are sceptical of it, or anything like that."

Deputy Headmistress Minerva McGonagall was watching Harry with a bemused expression. She looked quite witchy in her black robes and pointed hat, but when she spoke she sounded formal and Scottish, which didn't go together with the look at all. At first glance she looked like someone who ought to cackle and put babies into cauldrons, but the whole effect was ruined as soon as she opened her mouth. "Is that sufficient, Mr. Potter?" she said. "Shall I go ahead and demonstrate?"

"Sufficient? Probably not," Harry said. "But at least it will help. Go ahead, Deputy Headmistress."

"Just Professor will do," said she, and then, "Wingardium Leviosa."

Harry looked at his father.

"Huh," Harry said.

His father looked back at him. "Huh," his father echoed.

Then Professor Verres-Evans looked back at Professor McGonagall. "All right, you can put me down now."

His father was lowered carefully to the ground.

Harry ruffled a hand through his own hair. Maybe it was just that strange part of him which had already been convinced, but... "That's a bit of an anticlimax," Harry said. "You'd think there'd be some kind of more dramatic mental event associated with updating on an observation of infinitesimal probability -" Harry stopped himself. Mum, the witch, and even his Dad were giving him that look again. "I mean, with finding out that everything I believe is false."

Seriously, it should have been more dramatic. His brain ought to have been flushing its entire current stock of hypotheses about the universe, none of which allowed this to happen. But instead his brain just seemed to be going, All right, I saw the Hogwarts Professor wave her wand and make your father rise into the air, now what?

The witch-lady was smiling benevolently upon them, looking quite amused. "Would you like a further demonstration, Mr. Potter?"

"You don't have to," Harry said. "We've performed a definitive experiment. But..." Harry hesitated. He couldn't help himself. Actually, under the circumstances, he shouldn't be helping himself. It was right and proper to be curious. "What else can you do?"

Professor McGonagall turned into a cat.

Harry scrambled back unthinkingly, backpedalling so fast that he tripped over a stray stack of books and landed hard on his bottom with a thwack. His hands came down to catch himself without quite reaching properly, and there was a warning twinge in his shoulder as the weight came down unbraced.

At once the small tabby cat morphed back up into a robed woman. "I'm sorry, Mr. Potter," said the witch, sounding sincere, though the corners of her lips were twitching upwards. "I should have warned you."

Harry was breathing in short gasps. His voice came out choked. "You can't DO that!"

"It's only a Transfiguration," said Professor McGonagall. "An Animagus transformation, to be exact."

"You turned into a cat! A SMALL cat! You violated Conservation of Energy! That's not just an arbitrary rule, it's implied b...

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This is The Methods of Rationality, Part 1: Chapter 1: A Day of Very Low Probability, published by Eliezer Yudkowsky.

Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling owns Harry Potter, and no one owns the methods of rationality.

This fic is widely considered to have really hit its stride starting at around Chapter 5. If you still don't like it after Chapter 10, give up.

This is not a strict single-point-of-departure fic - there exists a primary point of departure, at some point in the past, but also other alterations. The best term I've heard for this fic is "parallel universe".

The text contains many clues: obvious clues, not-so-obvious clues, truly obscure hints which I was shocked to see some readers successfully decode, and massive evidence left out in plain sight. This is a rationalist story; its mysteries are solvable, and meant to be solved.

The pacing of the story is that of serial fiction, i.e., that of a TV show running for a predetermined number of seasons, whose episodes are individually plotted but with an overall arc building to a final conclusion.

All science mentioned is real science. But please keep in mind that, beyond the realm of science, the views of the characters may not be those of the author. Not everything the protagonist does is a lesson in wisdom, and advice offered by darker characters may be untrustworthy or dangerously double-edged.

Beneath the moonlight glints a tiny fragment of silver, a fraction of a line...

(black robes, falling)

...blood spills out in litres, and someone screams a word.

Every inch of wall space is covered by a bookcase. Each bookcase has six shelves, going almost to the ceiling. Some bookshelves are stacked to the brim with hardback books: science, maths, history, and everything else. Other shelves have two layers of paperback science fiction, with the back layer of books propped up on old tissue boxes or lengths of wood, so that you can see the back layer of books above the books in front. And it still isn't enough. Books are overflowing onto the tables and the sofas and making little heaps under the windows.

This is the living-room of the house occupied by the eminent Professor Michael Verres-Evans, and his wife, Mrs. Petunia Evans-Verres, and their adopted son, Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres.

There is a letter lying on the living-room table, and an unstamped envelope of yellowish parchment, addressed to Mr. H. Potter in emerald-green ink.

The Professor and his wife are speaking sharply at each other, but they are not shouting. The Professor considers shouting to be uncivilised.

"You're joking," Michael said to Petunia. His tone indicated that he was very much afraid that she was serious.

"My sister was a witch," Petunia repeated. She looked frightened, but stood her ground. "Her husband was a wizard."

"This is absurd!" Michael said sharply. "They were at our wedding - they visited for Christmas -"

"I told them you weren't to know," Petunia whispered. "But it's true. I've seen things -"

The Professor rolled his eyes. "Dear, I understand that you're not familiar with the sceptical literature. You may not realise how easy it is for a trained magician to fake the seemingly impossible. Remember how I taught Harry to bend spoons? If it seemed like they could always guess what you were thinking, that's called cold reading -"

"It wasn't bending spoons -"

"What was it, then?"

Petunia bit her lip. "I can't just tell you. You'll think I'm -" She swallowed. "Listen. Michael. I wasn't - always like this -" She gestured at herself, as though to indicate her lithe form. "Lily did this. Because I - because I begged her. For years, I begged her. Lily had always been prettier than me, and I'd... been mean to her, because of that, and then she got magic, can you imagine how I felt? And I begged her to use some of that magic on me so that I could be pretty too,...

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This is Argument and Analysis, Part 12: .And I Show You How Deep The Rabbit Hole Goes, published by Scott Alexander.

Seen on Tumblr, along with associated discussion:

Yellow:

People’s minds are heartbreaking. Not because people are so bad, but because they’re so good.

Nobody is the villain of their own life story. You must have read hundreds of minds by now, and it’s true. Everybody thinks of themselves as an honest guy or gal just trying to get by, constantly under assault by circumstances and The System and hundreds and hundreds of assholes. They don’t just sort of believe this. They really believe it. You almost believe it yourself, when you’re deep into a reading. You can very clearly see the structure of evidence they’ve built up to support their narrative, and even though it looks silly to you, you can see why they will never escape it from the inside. You can see how every insult, every failure, no matter how deserved, is a totally unexpected kick in the gut.

When you chose the yellow pill, you had high hopes of becoming a spy, or a gossip columnist, or just the world’s greatest saleswoman. The thought of doing any of those things sickens you now. There is too much anguish in the world already. You feel like any of those things would be a violation. You briefly try to become a therapist, but it turns out that actually knowing everything about your client’s mind is horrendously countertherapeutic. Freud can say whatever he wants against defense mechanisms, but without them, you’re defenseless. Your sessions are spent in incisive cutting into your clients’ deepest insecurities alternating with desperate reassurance that they are good people anyway.

Also, men. You knew, in a vague way, that men thought about sex all the time. But you didn’t realize the, um, content of some of their sexual fantasies. Is it even legal to fantasize about that? You want to be disgusted with them. But you realize that if you were as horny as they were all the time, you’d do much the same.

You give up. You become a forest ranger. Not the type who helps people explore the forest. The other type. The type where you hang out in a small cabin in the middle of the mountains and never talk to anybody. The only living thing you encounter is the occasional bear. It always thinks that it is a good bear, a proper bear, that a bear-hating world has it out for them in particular. You do nothing to disabuse it of this notion.

Green

The first thing you do after taking the green pill is become a sparrow. You soar across the landscape, feeling truly free for the first time in your life.

You make it about five minutes before a hawk swoops down and grabs you. Turns out there’s an excellent reason real sparrows don’t soar freely across the open sky all day. Moments before your bones are ground in two by its fierce beak, you turn back into a human. You fall like a stone. You need to turn into a sparrow again, but the hawk is still there, grabbing on to one of your legs, refusing to let go of its prize just because of this momentary setback. You frantically wave your arms and shout at it, trying to scare it away. Finally it flaps away, feeling cheated, and you become a sparrow again just in time to give yourself a relatively soft landing.

After a few weeks of downtime while you wait for your leg to recover, you become a fish. This time you’re smarter. You become a great white shark, apex of the food chain. You will explore the wonders of the ocean depths within the body of an invincible killing machine.

Well, long story short, it is totally unfair that colossal cannibal great white sharks were a thing and if you had known this was the way Nature worked you never would have gone along with this green pill business.

You escape by turning into a blue whale. Nothing eats blue whales, right? You remember that from your ...

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This is Argument and Analysis, Part 11: Transhumanist Fables, published by Scott Alexander.

Once upon a time there were three little pigs who went out into the world to build their houses. The first pig was very lazy and built his house out of straw. The second pig was a little harder-working and built his house out of sticks. The third pig was the hardest-working of all, and built his house out of bricks. Then came the Big Bad Wolf. When he saw the house of straw, he huffed and he puffed and he blew the house down, eating the first little pig. When he saw the house of sticks, he huffed and he puffed and he blew the house down, eating the second little pig. When he saw the house of bricks, he got out a bazooka and blew the house to pieces, eating the third little pig.

Moral: Reality doesn’t grade on a curve.

Once upon a time there was a big strong troll who lived under a bridge. A little goat went across the bridge, and the troll reached out to grab and eat the goat. “Wait, Mr. Troll!”, the goat cried. “Soon my brother is coming, and he is even bigger than I am!” The troll let the goat pass, and soon came another goat, twice as big as the first. The troll reached out to grab and eat him, but the brother likewise objected, saying his brother was even bigger. Sure enough, a third goat arrived at the bridge, twice as big as the second, and the troll, now ready for a very hearty dinner, reached out to grab and eat him. “Wait!” said the third goat. “My brother is the biggest of us all!”. So the troll let the third goat pass. Then came the fourth goat, who was hundreds of miles tall and blotted out the sun, whose very steps caused earthquakes and made the rivers change course. Without even noticing, he stepped on bridge and troll, pulverizing both to bits.

Moral: Sometimes growth is superexponential.

Once upon a time, Chicken Little ran to her friend Henny Penny. “The sky is falling!” she shouted. “We must tell the king!” Henny Penny joined her, and together they headed toward the capital. On their way they run into their friend Goosey Loosey. “The sky is falling!” they shouted. “We must tell the king!” Goosey Loosey joined them, and together they headed toward the capital. On their way, they ran into the cunning Foxy Loxy. “The sky is falling!” they shouted. “We must tell the king!” “Oh,” said Foxy Loxy. “I know a shortcut to the palace. Follow me into my den.” So the birds all followed Foxy Loxy into his den, where he ate them all, laughing all the while about how gullible they were. Then an asteroid hit Earth, killing everyone.

Moral: Beware the absurdity heuristic.

Once upon a time, a young boy named Jack lived with his mother. Their family was very poor and owned only a single cow. “Go sell this cow at the market,” Jack’s mother told him, “so we will have food to eat for the winter.” Jack went to the market and came back with three beans. “These are magic beans!” he told his mother. “A man told me that when we plant them, they will grow into a beanstalk leading to a land of infinite riches.” His mother pooh – poohed him and threw the beans in the ground angrily. That winter, they both died of hunger.

Moral: Good decision theories should be able to resist Pascal’s Mugging.

Once upon a time, there was an old woodcutter who had no son. He made a little marionette out of pine wood and named it Pinocchio. Then he wished upon a star that it could become a real boy. The star turned out to be the evil Red Fairy, who brought Pinocchio to life, but told him that if he wanted to be a real boy he must murder everyone in the village. That night, Pinocchio took his father’s saw and killed Gepetto and everyone else in town.

Moral: Never create an intelligence unless you are certain it will share your values.

Once upon a time, an evil witch transformed a prince into a frog, telling him that o...

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This is Argument and Analysis, Part 8: Beware Isolated Demands For Rigor, published by Scott Alexander.

I.

From Identity, Personal Identity, and the Self by John Perry:

"There is something about practical things that knocks us off our philosophical high horses. Perhaps Heraclitus really thought he couldn’t step in the same river twice. Perhaps he even received tenure for that contribution to philosophy. But suppose some other ancient had claimed to have as much right as Heraclitus did to an ox Heraclitus had bought, on the grounds that since the animal had changed, it wasn’t the same one he had bought and so was up for grabs. Heraclitus would have quickly come up with some ersatz, watered-down version of identity of practical value for dealing with property rights, oxen, lyres, vineyards, and the like. And then he might have wondered if that watered-down vulgar sense of identity might be a considerably more valuable concept than a pure and philosophical sort of identity that nothing has.

Okay, but I can think of something worse than that.

Imagine Heraclitus as a cattle rustler in the Old West. Every time a rancher catches him at his nefarious business, he patiently explains to them that identity doesn’t exist, and therefore the same argument against private property as made above. Flummoxed, they’re unable to think of a response before he rides off into the sunset.

But then when Heraclitus himself needs the concept of stable personal identity for something – maybe he wants to deposit his ill-gotten gains in the bank with certainty that the banker will give it back to him next time he shows up to withdraw it, or maybe he wants to bribe the sheriff to ignore his activities for the next while – all of a sudden Heraclitus is willing to tolerate the watered-down vulgar sense of identity like everyone else.

(actually, I can think of something even worse than that, which is a TV western based on this premise, where a roving band of pre-Socratic desperadoes terrorizes Texas. The climax is no doubt when the hero strides onto Main Street, revolver in hand, saying “There’s a new sheriff in town.” And Parmenides gruffly responds “No, I’m pretty sure that’s impossible.”)

At its best, philosophy is a revolutionary pursuit that dissolves our common-sense intuitions and exposes the possibility of much deeper structures behind them. One can respond by becoming a saint or madman, or by becoming a pragmatist who is willing to continue to participate in human society while also understanding its theoretical limitations. Both are respectable career paths.

The problem is when someone chooses to apply philosophical rigor selectively.

Heraclitus could drown in his deeper understanding of personal identity and become a holy madman, eschewing material things and taking no care for the morrow because he does not believe there is any consistent self to experience it. Or he could engage with it from afar, becoming a wise scholar who participating in earthly affairs while drawing equanimity from the realization that there is a sense in which all his accomplishments will be impermanent.

But if he only applies his new theory when he wants other people’s cows, then we have a problem. Philosophical rigor, usually a virtue, has been debased to an isolated demand for rigor in cases where it benefits Heraclitus.

A fair use of philosophical rigor would prevent both Heraclitus and his victims from owning property, and thus either collapse under its own impracticality or usher in a revolutionary new form of economic thinking. An isolated demand for philosophical rigor, applied by Heraclitus to other people but never the other way around, would merely give Heraclitus an unfair advantage in the existing system.

II.

A while ago I wrote a post called Military Strikes Are An Extremely Cheap Way To Help Foreigners which ...

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This is Argument and Analysis, Part 7: Proving Too Much, published by Scott Alexander.

The fallacy of Proving Too Much is when you challenge an argument because, in addition to proving its intended conclusion, it also proves obviously false conclusions. For example, if someone says “You can’t be an atheist, because it’s impossible to disprove the existence of God”, you can answer “That argument proves too much. If we accept it, we must also accept that you can’t disbelieve in Bigfoot, since it’s impossible to disprove his existence as well.”

I love this tactic so much. I only learned it had a name quite recently, but it’s been my default style of argument for years. It neatly cuts through complicated issues that might otherwise be totally irresolvable.

Because here is a fundamental principle of the Dark Arts – you don’t need an argument that can’t be disproven, only an argument that can’t be disproven in the amount of time your opponent has available.

In a presidential debate, where your opponent has three minutes, that means all you need to do is come up with an argument whose disproof is inferentially distant enough from your audience that it will take your opponent more than three minutes to explain it, or your audience more than three minutes’ worth of mental effort to understand the explanation.

The noncentral fallacy is the easiest way to do this. “Martin Luther King was a criminal!” “Although what you say is technically correct, categories don’t work in the way your statement is impl – ” “Oh, sorry, time’s up.”

But pretty much anything that assumes a classical Aristotelian view of concepts/objects is gold here. The same is true of any deontological rules your audience might be attached to.

I tend to get stuck in the position of having argue against those Dark Artsy tactics pretty often. And the great thing about Proving Too Much is that it can demolish an entire complicated argument based on all sorts of hard-to-tease-apart axioms in a split second. For example, After Virtue gave (though it does not endorse) this example of deontological reasoning:

I cannot will that my mother should have had an abortion when she was pregnant with me, except perhaps if it had been certain that the embryo was dead or gravely damaged. But if I cannot will this in my own case, how can I consistently deny to others the right to life that I claim for myself? I would break the so-called Golden Rule unless I denied that a mother in general has a right to an abortion.

It seemed unfair for me to move on in the book without at least checking whether this argument was correct and I should re-evaluate my pro-choice position. But that would require sorting through all the weird baggage here, like what it means to will something, and whether your obligations to potential people are the same as your obligations to real people, and how to apply the Golden Rule across different levels of potentiality.

Instead I just thought to myself: “Imagine my mother had raped my father, leading to my conception. I cannot will that a policeman had prevented this rape, but I also do not want to enshrine the general principle that policemen in general have no right to prevent rape. Therefore, this argument proves too much.” It took all of five seconds.

Sometimes a quick Proving Too Much can tear apart extremely subtle philosophical arguments that have been debated for centuries. For example, Pascal’s Wager also proves Pascal’s Mugging (they may both be correct, but bringing the Mugging in at least proves ignoring their correctness to be a reasonable and impossible-to-critique life choice). And Anselm’s Ontological Argument seems much less foreboding when you realize it can double as a method for creating jelly donuts on demand.

Interestingly, I think that one of the examples of proving too much on Wikipedia can itself...

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This is Argument and Analysis, Part 6: The Virtue of Silence, published by Scott Alexander.

Leah Libresco writes a couple of essays (1, 2) on an ethical dilemma reported in the New York Times. In the course of a confidential medical history, a doctor hears her patient is suffering from stress-related complaints after having sent an innocent man to prison. The doctor wants to know whether it is ethical to report the matter to the police. The Times’ columnist says yes – it would save the poor prisoner. Leah says no – violating medical confidentiality creates an expectation that medical confidentiality will be violated in the future, thus dooming patients who are too afraid to talk about drug use or gay sex or other potentially embarrassing but important medical risk factors.

But both sides are ignoring the much bigger dilemma lurking one meta-level up: is it ethical to debate this dilemma in the New York Times?

Let’s look more closely at that phrase “violating medical confidentiality creates an expectation that medical confidentiality will be violated in the future.” There’s a very abstruse angels-and-clockwork interpretation of “creates an expectation” where, by making the decision to violate confidentiality, you are altering the Platonic machinery of the Universe in a way that allows other beings who know your source code to determine that you will do this. But most people don’t have the decision theory to understand this, and anyway most doctors do not publish their source code online.

The way “creates an expectation” pans out in our universe is that somebody hears that a doctor violated medical confidentiality, and that person tells someone else, and that person tells someone else, until eventually someone who was going to tell their doctor about having gay sex with drugs remembers having heard the story and decides not to.

How exactly would people hear about this doctor who revealed the innocence of the prisoner? Through the ensuing court case? Nah. Most people wouldn’t obsessively read the minutes of every single case at the local courthouse unless of course it has something to do with gender. Really, the only way that someone could hear about a doctor violating medical confidentiality is if she, like, somehow got a description of her intention to do so published in meticulous detail in the New York Times.

Oh, right.

The entire negative effect of the doctor breaking her promise is that it would make people doubt medical confidentiality in the future. But whether or not the doctor ends up breaking her promise, thousands of New York Times readers now know that doctors strongly consider breaking medical confidentiality, and that ethics columnists tell them it’s okay to do so. It seems like the whether the doctor actually keeps her promise or not in this particular case is of miniscule importance compared to the damage that the column has already done.

Silence is a hard virtue. All the other virtues have the advantage that, when you practice them, people will praise you. Sometimes if your moral system is very different from your friends’ people will attack you for your virtues, but getting attacked by sufficiently horrible people can sometimes be just as gratifying as praise. But if you stay silent, there’s no praise and no attacks. By definition, no one even knows you made a courageous moral choice.

(Eliezer mentioned in the comments of my Against Bravery Debates that he’s spent a couple decades pushing ideas almost everyone else thinks are crackpot, and he’s never appealed to bravery at all. He is one hundred percent correct and I have one hundred percent never noticed despite reading almost everything he’s written for several years. That’s the Virtue of Silence for you.)

(I had like five much better examples here, all of which would be very clever, and each time I had to c...

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This is Argument and Analysis, Part 5: All Debates Are Bravery Debates, published by Scott Alexander.

“I don’t practice what I preach because I’m not the kind of person I’m preaching to.”

Bob Dobbs

I.

I read Atlas Shrugged probably about a decade ago, and felt turned off by its promotion of selfishness as a moral ideal. I thought that was basically just being a jerk. After all, if there’s one thing the world doesn’t need (I thought) it’s more selfishness.

Then I talked to a friend who told me Atlas Shrugged had changed his life. That he’d been raised in a really strict family that had told him that ever enjoying himself was selfish and made him a bad person, that he had to be working at every moment to make his family and other people happy or else let them shame him to pieces. And the revelation that it was sometimes okay to consider your own happiness gave him the strength to stand up to them and turn his life around, while still keeping the basic human instinct of helping others when he wanted to and he felt they deserved it (as, indeed, do Rand characters).

II.

The religious and the irreligious alike enjoy making fun of Reddit’s r/atheism, which combines an extreme strawmanning of religious positions with childish insults and distasteful triumphalism. Recently the moderators themselves have become a bit embarrassed by it and instituted some rules intended to tone things down, leading to some of the most impressive Internet drama I have ever seen. In its midst, some people started talking about what the old strawmanning triumphalist r/atheism meant to them (see for example here).

A lot of them were raised in religious families where they would have been disowned if they had admitted to their atheism. Some of them were disowned for admitting to atheism, or lost boyfriends/girlfriends, or were terrified they might go to Hell. And then they found r/atheism, and saw people making fun of religion, and insulting it, in really REALLY offensive ways. And no one was striking them down with lightning. No one was shouting them down. No one was doing much of anything at all. And to see this taboo violated in the most shocking possible way with no repercussions sort of broke the spell for them, like as long as people were behaving respectfully to religion, even respectfully disagreeing, it still had this aura of invincibility about it, but if some perfectly normal person can post a a stupid comic where Jesus has gay sex with Mohammed, then there’s this whole other world out there where religion holds no power.

Gilbert tells the story of how when, as a young Christian struggling with doubt, he would read r/atheism to remind himself that atheists could be pretty awful. r/atheism is doing a bad job at being the sort of people who can convert Gilbert, and the new mods’ policy of “you should have more civil and intellectual discussions” might work better on him. I think it would work better on me too.

But there is – previously unappreciated by me – a large population of people for whom really dumb offensive strawmannish memes are exactly what they need.

III.

A friend described his experiences in the Landmark Forum’s self-improvement workshop. He said their modus operandi was to get people to take responsibility for the outcome of their actions. His example was an office worker who always did substandard work, and was always making excuses like “My boss doesn’t s support me” or “My computer system isn’t good enough” or “My coworkers aren’t pulling their fair share.” Landmark says those kinds of excuses are what’s keeping you back. And they taught (again, according to this one person) that the solution was to treat everything that happens in your life as your responsiblity – no excuses, just “it was my fault” or “it’s to my credit”.

Then a few days later, I was reading a book on therapy which...

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This is Argument and Analysis, Part 4: Cardiologists and Chinese Robbers, published by Scott Alexander.

I.

It takes a special sort of person to be a cardiologist. This is not always a good thing.

You may have read about one or another of the “cardiologist caught falsifying test results and performing dangerous unnecessary surgeries to make more money” stories, but you might not have realized just how common it really is. Maryland cardiologist performs over 500 dangerous unnecessary surgeries to make money. Unrelated Maryland cardiologist performs another 25 in a separate incident. California cardiologist does “several hundred” dangerous unnecessary surgeries and gets raided by the FBI. Philadelphia cardiologist, same. North Carolina cardiologist, same. 11 Kentucky cardiologists, same. Actually just a couple of miles from my own hospital, a Michigan cardiologist was found to have done $4 million worth of the same. Etc, etc, etc.

My point is not just about the number of cardiologists who perform dangerous unnecessary surgeries for a quick buck. It’s not even just about the cardiology insurance fraud, cardiology kickback schemes, or cardiology research data falsification conspiracies. That could all just be attributed to some distorted incentives in cardiology as a field. My point is that it takes a special sort of person to be a cardiologist.

Consider the sexual harassment. Head of Yale cardiology department fired for sexual harassment with “rampant bullying”. Stanford cardiologist charged with sexually harassing students. Baltimore cardiologist found guilty of sexual harassment. LA cardiologist fined $200,000 for groping med tech. Three different Pennsylvania cardiologists sexually harassing the same woman. Arizona cardiologist suspended on 19 (!) different counts of sexual abuse. One of the “world’s leading cardiologists” fired for sending pictures of his genitals to a female friend. New York cardiologist in trouble for refusing to pay his $135,000 bill at a strip club. Manhattan cardiologist taking naked pictures of patients, then using them to sexually abuse employees. New York cardiologist secretly installs spycam in office bathroom. Just to shake things up, a Florida cardiologist was falsely accused of sexual harassment as part of feud with another cardiologist.

And yeah, you can argue that if you put high-status men in an office with a lot of subordinates, sexual harassment will be depressingly common just as a result of the environment. But there’s also the Texas cardiologist who pled guilty to child molestation. The California cardiologist who killed a two-year-old kid. The author of one of the world’s top cardiology textbooks arrested on charges Wikipedia describes only as “related to child pornography and cocaine”.

Then it gets weird. Did you about the Australian cardiologist who is fighting against extradition to Uganda, where he is accused of “terrorism, aggravated robbery and murdering seven people”? What about the Long Island cardiologist who hired a hitman to kill a rival cardiologist, ahd who was also for some reason looking for “enough explosives to blow up a building”?

Like I said, it takes a special sort of person.

II.

Given the recent discussion of media bias here, I wanted to bring up Alyssa Vance’s “Chinese robber fallacy”, which she describes as:

..where you use a generic problem to attack a specific person or group, even though other groups have the problem just as much (or even more so).

For example, if you don’t like Chinese people, you can find some story of a Chinese person robbing someone, and claim that means there’s a big social problem with Chinese people being robbers.

I originally didn’t find this too interesting. It sounds like the same idea as plain old stereotyping, something we think about often and are carefully warned to avoid.

But after...

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This is Argument and Analysis, Part 3: Intellectual Hipsters and Meta-Contrarianism, published by Scott Alexander.

Related to: Why Real Men Wear Pink, That Other Kind of Status, Pretending to be Wise, The "Outside The Box" Box

WARNING: Beware of things that are fun to argue -- Eliezer Yudkowsky

Science has inexplicably failed to come up with a precise definition of "hipster", but from my limited understanding a hipster is a person who deliberately uses unpopular, obsolete, or obscure styles and preferences in an attempt to be "cooler" than the mainstream. But why would being deliberately uncool be cooler than being cool?

As previously discussed, in certain situations refusing to signal can be a sign of high status. Thorstein Veblen invented the term "conspicuous consumption" to refer to the showy spending habits of the nouveau riche, who unlike the established money of his day took great pains to signal their wealth by buying fast cars, expensive clothes, and shiny jewelery. Why was such flashiness common among new money but not old? Because the old money was so secure in their position that it never even occurred to them that they might be confused with poor people, whereas new money, with their lack of aristocratic breeding, worried they might be mistaken for poor people if they didn't make it blatantly obvious that they had expensive things.

The old money might have started off not buying flashy things for pragmatic reasons - they didn't need to, so why waste the money? But if F. Scott Fitzgerald is to be believed, the old money actively cultivated an air of superiority to the nouveau riche and their conspicuous consumption; not buying flashy objects becomes a matter of principle. This makes sense: the nouveau riche need to differentiate themselves from the poor, but the old money need to differentiate themselves from the nouveau riche.

This process is called countersignaling, and one can find its telltale patterns in many walks of life. Those who study human romantic attraction warn men not to "come on too strong", and this has similarities to the nouveau riche example. A total loser might come up to a woman without a hint of romance, promise her nothing, and demand sex. A more sophisticated man might buy roses for a woman, write her love poetry, hover on her every wish, et cetera; this signifies that he is not a total loser. But the most desirable men may deliberately avoid doing nice things for women in an attempt to signal they are so high status that they don't need to. The average man tries to differentiate himself from the total loser by being nice; the extremely attractive man tries to differentiate himself from the average man by not being especially nice.

In all three examples, people at the top of the pyramid end up displaying characteristics similar to those at the bottom. Hipsters deliberately wear the same clothes uncool people wear. Families with old money don't wear much more jewelry than the middle class. And very attractive men approach women with the same lack of subtlety a total loser would use.1

If politics, philosophy, and religion are really about signaling, we should expect to find countersignaling there as well.

Pretending To Be Wise

Let's go back to Less Wrong's long-running discussion on death. Ask any five year old child, and ey can tell you that death is bad. Death is bad because it kills you. There is nothing subtle about it, and there does not need to be. Death universally seems bad to pretty much everyone on first analysis, and what it seems, it is.

But as has been pointed out, along with the gigantic cost, death does have a few small benefits. It lowers overpopulation, it allows the new generation to develop free from interference by their elders, it provides motivation to get things done quickly. Precisely because these benefits are so muc...