First time trying factor analysis, without really knowing what I’m doing, and I did not expect it to work this well.

I just put all of the SSC survey politics questions together in a heap and threw a factor analysis at them, and they neatly separated into two factors. Factor 1 loads most highly on opposing Donald Trump, and Factor 2 loads most highly on supporting Bernie Sanders. And from there they really nicely show exactly the behavior you would expect from separating a culture-war-axis from a class-war-axis of US politics.

For example, the better someone’s financial situation, the higher their score on Oppose-Trump, but the lower their score on Support-Sanders.

Support-Sanders and Oppose-Trump push the same direction on every political issue except immigration, where they push opposite directions.

The issue that correlates most highly with Support-Sanders is supporting the minimum wage; the issue that correlates most highly with Oppose-Trump is supporting immigration.

Surely it can’t be that easy, can it?

If you want insight into the way I think, and also want to understand why you should never trust me, the next thing I did was combine every question in the survey into one giant factor analysis, ignore all the warnings it threw up telling me not do this, dismiss through all the messages saying the results would not be valid, and come up with THE FIVE KEY DIMENSIONS ON WHICH ALL PEOPLE VARY:

1. Loads most highly on supporting immigration and opposing HBD

2. Loads most highly on being neurotic and depressed

3. Loads most highly on supporting minimum wage and Bernie Sanders

4. Loads most highly on identifying as an LWer and worrying about AI

5. Loads most highly on having a good romantic life and many children

2017 donation wrap-up

(I might or might not write up a longer thing later, but I wanted to get this down somewhere) I donated $68,522.21 in 2017.

By charity:

By cause area:

Misc notes:

The SSC Survey’s Big Five personality test claimed I was in the 10th percentile for conscientiousness, which I’m pretty sure is the result of overweighting ADHD-related stuff, so whatever. But then it *also* told me that I was in the 45th percentile for extraversion, and lolwut.

It told me I was in the 97th (!) percentile for conscientiousness, which is just obviously false.

I find the whole conscientiousness category really frustrating because I highly value a lot of the conscientiousness things but can’t do them well in practice, which is… not captured well by putting those two things in a single variable.

After I complained on here about my difficulty in getting ADHD meds, a friend referred me to her psychiatrist and other friends helped me actually get an appointment set up and I went to it and I got prescribed ADHD meds. A couple different kinds, so I can document how they affect me and figure out with the psychiatrist which ones work best.

I took them for the first time last Thursday. They’re supposed to last a fairly short time, four to six hours; I took one before I went to work and had a fine day at work, productive but not outrageously so, nothing to particularly write home about, and I had mostly forgotten that I was on ADHD meds by the time I got home.

There was a choir staging rehearsal, so I was watching the baby for the evening, and the dishwasher was broken so there was like a week of dishes in the sink, and I really wanted pasta with homemade tomato sauce so I started that on the stove and put the baby in his high chair with a spatula to chew on and sang him songs while I washed the dishes -

- and about halfway through this I realized that all of this was so profoundly out of character that my roommates, if they’d been home, might have suspected bodysnatching aliens.

I am too tired when I get home from work to cook dinner. Sometimes someone else cooks a thing I can eat, and sometimes I just drink an Ensure and go to bed. I hate doing dishes when the sink is full; I kind of hate doing dishes even when the sink is not full, and I’d done the dishes exactly once in the previous six months. I am not usually too tired to play with the baby, but only if he wants to come headbutt my pillows while I lie in bed.

Well, I thought, I guess ADHD meds actually do something! And I finished the dishes and finished the dinner and fed us both and did my laundry and cleaned my room and started putting the baby’s books on the bookshelves, which he objected to (he firmly believes that his books should be evenly dispersed through the house, so if he wants one it is always nearby), so I gave up and worked on a writing project I’m in the middle of.

If you knew two people, one of whom came home from work and cooked and cleaned and did childcare and then wrote fiction, and the other one who came home from work and crawled into bed and browsed Tumblr all evening, you would probably attribute other, underlying differences to them. The first one is motivated and driven; the second one is immature and not used to having to keep her own space clean and do her own chores. The first one is trustworthy and conscientious and gets things done; the second one, maybe not. The first one has more willpower; the first one works harder. 

It’s none of that. It’s brain chemistry.

I’m not saying that you can never accomplish anything through concerted effort - obviously you can, and effort matters a lot. I’m not saying that there’s no point in trying to expand the number of things you can do without changing your underlying brain chemistry; there is, and I do a lot of that, and it often works really well.

But I am saying that we attribute far, far too much of peoples’ behavior to virtue, to hardworkingness, to willpower, to passion, to values, when the actual underlying thing is none of those. And because of that, people hate themselves for being lazy, for being slow, for not trying hard enough. I wasn’t trying harder on drugs. I wasn’t trying at all. Cooking dinner on a normal night really is about willpower and effort and careful planning around my limitations and advance strategic decision making and triage. Cooking dinner on stimulants is just - the thing that happens when I walk into the kitchen and want to eat something. 

Drugs don’t work for everybody. (Honestly, they don’t totally work for me; I don’t like taking them two days in a row, and I wouldn’t want to take them if I had to get a specific thing done instead of Doing Things in general.) I think people who have a drug sometimes work for them are really lucky, in a lot of ways, because it’s hard to really believe that it’s not your priorities or personality, it’s your executive function, until you can observe how you behave with the same priorities and the same personality and vastly boosted executive function. But I also think this is true of people who never have a drug work for them. 

People vary, a lot, and one axis along which they vary is executive function, and it’s really hard to imagine what it’s like to be someone with way more executive function or way less executive function than you. At least for me, it doesn’t feel like trying harder or caring more. It feels like not needing to.

I’m sad. A lot of good, brilliant, kind people who believed in what the United States stood for, and wanted to work and study and build lives here, are instead stranded in countries where they are in a ton of danger. People who helped Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan, and risked retaliation for it, have been betrayed; we promised them they’d have the chance to come build lives here. We broke that promise. Hopefully no one in occupied countries will ever trust us or cooperate with us again.

I’ve been refraining from saying anything because I can’t think of anything charitable and balanced and open-minded that will resonate with people who think turning away Iranian PhD students is some sort of courageous strike for justice. I have nothing to say to those people right now. I value non-Americans and I want them to be safe and happy and I think we and they are strengthened when they have the chance to live and work here; if you don’t care about people who birth placed outside our borders, then for the moment I can’t think of anything to say to you. 

But I’m not going to stay quiet until I come up with something.

This is wrong. This is cruel. This should be fought in the courts and fought by any other achievable means. This is not defensible as a means of reducing violence; this is not defensible as a means of preserving our values; this is only defensible if you think people born in other countries don’t matter, and promises don’t matter, and integrity doesn’t matter, and symbolic expressions of loathing for Muslims matter a great deal. 

That’s not charitable at all. I don’t think I really care.

Clickbaity title, I know, but hear me out: I know a lot of people who have had problems like this starting their first programming job. Hoping this post is useful to folks in a similar situation.

Really?

Apparently some economists just discovered that you’re much more likely to move away if your house gets destroyed by lava. From the abstract:

(To be fair, their actual results are pretty interesting interesting. Basically, people under 25 ended up much richer and better educated if they were forced to move off of the island, so the fact that they didn’t move before suggests that the costs of moving were very high.)

Another recent “obvious” finding from economists: dropping bombs on a place makes the people there dislike you

(h/t Twitter)

Really?

Apparently some economists just discovered that you’re much more likely to move away if your house gets destroyed by lava. From the abstract:

(To be fair, their actual results are pretty interesting interesting. Basically, people under 25 ended up much richer and better educated if they were forced to move off of the island, so the fact that they didn’t move before suggests that the costs of moving were very high.)

Another recent “obvious” finding from economists: dropping bombs on a place makes the people there dislike you

(h/t Twitter)

TIL that there’s a disease (Dopamine Beta-Hydroxylase Deficiency, see here for more) that causes people’s bodies to produce basically no norepinephrine or epinephrine (adrenaline), and to instead produce dopamine in its place.

It has a lot of bad symptoms (”inability to stand motionless for more than one minute” is one of the diagnostic criteria) but people can still live with it, and some have lived past age 60.

#you can just replace two really important molecules with another one#and people can still live and function

I was reading about the homeobox yesterday for some reason. You can do stuff like make flies grow legs in place of antennae (uh, cw for… fly body horror, I guess) and as far as I know they survive reasonably well, at least in lab environments. In general, it seems like most mutations either kill you really early (like, spontaneous abortion early) or are pretty survivable into adulthood.

This probably isn’t the main way dopamine is broken down in the brain, so it might not change dopamine levels that much.

(you still would end up with less norepinephrine and I have no idea what that would do)

Effective Altruism is any of several social movements dedicated to ‘effective altruism’, the practice of applying evidence and reason to determine the most effective ways to improve the world, and the belief that people should act in the way that brings about the greatest positive impact.

The playwright and former EA member Brendan Behan once said that the first issue on any EA agenda was “the split”. For EA, that has constantly been the case. The first split came after the MIRI debates of 2012–14, with opponents of MIRI forming the nucleus of GiveWell, while the pro-MIRI forces continued to use the name Effective Altruism. 

After the end of the civil war, EA was around in one form or another for six months, when it split into the Official EA and the Provisional EA in 2015 following a debate about whether to include anti-feminists in the movement. The latter then had its own breakaways, namely the Real EA and the Continuity EA, each claiming to be the true successor of the original.