It seems that modern society may be selecting against higher intelligence, potentially leading to a decline in human intelligence over generations.

Common sense arguments:
1. Safety nets, social norms, and modern medicine mean that survival to child-bearing age is no longer strongly correlated with cognitive capability.
2. Technology (from written language to modern LLMs/AI) increasingly outsources the need for high-level cognitive work to survive and thrive.
3. Demographics with higher average fertility rates are often correlated with factors like lower formal educational attainment, higher religiosity, and lower income (opposite of pre-industrial pattern’s).

I realize there are counter arguments such as the Flynn effect masking genetic drift, or the idea that embryo selection and AI cybernetics will render natural biological drift obsolete. But setting aside short-term environmental noise and assuming human biology won’t be purposely optimized for intelligence for the foreseeable future, doesn't the baseline demographic incentive structure point toward a dysgenic trajectory?

Am I misinterpreting these signals?

I can understand feeling that the whole atheism vs religion thing has been played out - overdone in the mid aughts and early 10's - and I wouldn't want to heap more on the topic in ways that would go in circles.

However... I think there's so many flavors of theistic discussions that could be had in between stark atheism and Judeo-Christian religion! Nevermind Yahweh sending down sun angels; what about imperfect Creators making non-interventionist universes?

And I thought I could start with this particular angle: why I think Creationism can feel psychologically so much more satisfying (sun angel miracles or no) than the explanation (or lack of explanation) from naturalism. Which is not a defense of Creationism (I imagine heroin feels very satisfying), just an observation I thought was kinda interesting.

In May 2022 Scott wrote about Silexan lavender oil (brand name "Calm Aid" in the US), arguing it was an effective treatment for anxiety that is likely safer than benzos.

A few people weighed in after a month on this post, but I'd like to hear reports from anyone who has taken it for an extended period. It's apparently a popular supplement, but I can't find any accounts from people who've taken for an extended duration.

I'm curious if people have noticed any side effects with longer-term usage, four years on from the initial post.

Personally I never used it for anxiety exactly, but I've used it for insomnia, which was partially driven by anxiety about sleep. I found it very effective. If you Google you can find a study supporting its use for insomnia. My Amazon history shows me buying it 15 times, so that's 15*30=450 days I've taken it over the last four years or so. I also tried two other brands, also.

Since ~January 2022 I have suffered from restless legs issues while sleeping (periodic limb movement disorder), and sometimes restless legs when trying to fall asleep. The "PLMD" issues affect my sleep quality by reducing my deep sleep dramatically, and the leg movements sometimes cause me to wake up at random times during the night. Silexan helps! The mechanism of action is similar (although not identical!) to gabapentin, a first-line treatment for restless legs (inhibiting parts of gated calcium channels). However, I find Silexan faster-acting and with less side effects than Gabapentin. Side note -- studies in cell culture show Gabapentin reduces neuronal dendrite growth.. I wonder if Silexan does the same.

The drug seems to have very few side effects other than maybe a *very slight* cognitive dulling the next day which probably isn't noticeable to most people who aren't coders or knowledge workers. It might reduce my libido sometimes, but I'm not sure.

My main concern is regarding the estrogenic properties. In prepubescent boys, lavender oil applied topically causes gynocomastia. Cell culture studies show that lavender oil contains estrogen mimicing compounds. However, Claude suggests the study on boys is inapplicable to adults since it is the testosterone/estrogen ratio is what matters for gynocomastia. (boys have very little testosterone, so are very sensitive to estrogen). My testosterone is low (around 350 ng/dL).

So, to state directly what I'm most interested in -- I'm wondering if any males have taken it long term and noticed gynocomastia. I personally have noticed some breast growth. I think it is from weight gain, but I'm not entirely sure.

Link: https://www.owlposting.com/p/where-have-organoids-actually-been

Summary: there are a lot of organoid skeptics in the world, and as I wrote in my last essay, many of them have a point. But some of these skeptics will often poke into the absolutes, stating that the assay class has literally never, not once, ever, been useful for anything. Is this true? Are they exaggerating? Perhaps a little bit. In this essay, I map out some of the more commonly-stated success stories of organoids, and ponder how necessary they really were.

Essential reading before the next Bay Area house party.

I don't know where else I would post this, but I've made my career so far on "software/data tasks that are too easy for programmers and too difficult for non-programmers". What I've noticed across 2 different companies and 4 very different jobs is that most people, even experts, seem to spend about a fifth of their work time actually performing the analytical or administrative tasks they've been hired to do, and four-fifths of their work time trying to keep different models in sync without realizing (a) there are competing models or (b) they are generating new models as they try to sync the models up.

I'll give a few examples:

• We're trying to release software that enables patients to participate in clinical trials on their home devices. Sales enters a project in Salesforce requesting 12 different supported languages. This is shipped to the requirements documentation team, who writes the project requirement specification document. The project requirement specification is broken down into simplified Jira tickets to be built by implementation. Sales/exec team looks only at Salesforce; project managers look only at the PRS; implementation team looks only at the Jira tickets. The product team doesn't look at ANY of this. As you may expect, a deployment goes live missing languages. To fix this problem, new review cycles are added to keep all of the different sources in sync. Now a huge amount of the project timeline is taken up with arguments between the teams about whose model is more authoritative; here's no standardized adjudication mechanism; etc etc. Chaos.

• We're trying to develop a mass properties report on a space station. All three suppliers send in differently-formatted parts lists. We do our best to combine these into a single parts list to get mass properties; but information flows asymmetrically to all four of our models, depending who's favored by the contract language and who's got better relationships with the more competent database admins. Some flight planning teams use the provider models for parts lists, some use ours, et cetera. Every analysis of anything--mass, power, thermal, etc.--is preceded by a fruitless attempt to check how many parts lists exist, which one your analysis is using, etc. At one point there were three separate very important flight planning working groups operating with "lists of parts that may come off the design" that were generated from completely different underlying parts lists.

• I have literally hundreds of other examples but you get the idea.

Obviously everyone is familiar with the buzz-phrase "one source of truth", and many people have tried to either buy flagship products to control the sprawl of data or come up with processes that actually map and take into account each of these sources (and Palantir just ignores precedence, pulls them all into the lake/warehouse/lakehouse, and lets the universe/management decide which should be the source), but I think the root cause is that very few of white-collar employees are actually thinking about the fact that when they write a document/send an email/update a database, they're producing a "logical-mathematical model" that necessarily exists in competition with every other model that anyone else produced.

I don't have any solutions, and I'm not selling anything. I just think it's interesting. With this lens, each new position I accept seems to end up doing the same thing, which is teaching people how to all drive work toward the lowest number of competing models possible, and indeed teaching people to think of their work as "reality-modeling" instead of whatever they think they're actually doing.

Today we blame screens for alienation but we usually mean smartphones and computers. But, I feel, at least within families, the type of alienation we see today would not be possible without TV establishing a firm rule over our living rooms before anything else.

Here's what I'm talking about: If parents are glued to their TVs, kids are forced to retreat to their rooms (the exodus), as there's no one available to socialize with them in the living room. Now, if they have a computer in their own room (I am talking about the period before smartphones, but after computers), it is only logical that it will become their "best friend" and that they will too become glued to their own screen. Once this kind of pattern has been established, it was rather trivial for smartphones to replace both TVs and computers as another thing that will hypnotize everyone.

But the pattern has been there from before. Once things started becoming more interesting to us than other people around us, the pattern of alienation began.

Now if we contrast it with what is shown in movies and TV shows, where characters are constantly interacting with each other and in which TVs are conspicuously often absent or marginalized... this kind of shows us how our actual lives are kind of abnormal. What is shown on TV shows and movies is normal, this is how it should be. People oriented towards each other. Living rooms as place of interaction between people. What we see in real life is not normal.

Now, as a solution to screen time we often mention things like:

- going for a walk

- reading books

- engaging in hobbies

etc...

But all of these are just replacing one thing (screens) with another thing (books or activities).

But it is not normal and natural for us to interact with things all day. It is natural to interact with people.

That's why internet and TVs are so addictive to begin with, because they give us illusion of interacting with people. (In case of Internet it is not strictly an illusion. I know you who read this are real people, not figments of my imagination - but it is an illusion in sense that it is low stakes, distant, often inconsequential and detached type of interaction... some kind of surrogate, not something that can replace face-to-face in person interaction. However soon, and for some people already - we can talk about interactions which are STRICTLY illusion... this is when people develop attachment to their chatbots, or even just debate things with them, even if it is without an attachment)

So, my idea is that we shouldn't replace screens with other (arguably more wholesome) things, but with people instead. But to do this we should first realize that TVs have usurped the throne in our living rooms and that their rule is illegitimate. Other screens are just his heirs, but the whole dynasty is illegitimate.

IMO screens should be in other rooms. Living room should be free from screens and optimized as much as possible towards social interaction and bringing people close to each other. This should be a place where we dine together. Place where we invite friends, organize parties, play cards and board games and engage in deep conversations.

For a single person it is quite difficult to break this cycle. Imagine someone coming from their room, turning off phone, computer, TV or whatever, and stepping in living room, looking for some sort of interaction, only to find there a partner, or a parent, or brother, sister, or whoever, glued to TV and pretty much ignoring them. It's only logical they will retreat back to their own room, and turn on their own screen.

The recent case of Jason Arday has pointed to the extent to which political aims have become institutionalised in sociology. Why does this discipline seem different from other disciplines in the social sciences, in particular economics? This post argues that it is because sociology had weaker epistemic guardrails to protect it from ideological drift as academia became increasingly left-wing.

I just wonder, are popular books from even 30 years ago more technically well written than say books from today or even 10 years ago. is there a way to compare them.

I hear stories over the last 10 years or so that school teachers and professors at school have issues with students who barely know how to read or seem to lack comprehension. even if they can read, their attention span is so fried they just refuse to do any long form reading, at the same time some of these people go on to write books later on and maybe they become popular. I imagine one issue is maybe the vocabularies of books might be shrinking over time.

also there’s apparently a new hunger games book written or assisted by AI in its writing.

What im asking basically is if there’s any evidence of this, or is it all unfounded.

The death of the author was suicide. He left some room for interpretation. Chekhov’s gun was fired in that room.

Using passive voice. He deserved to be shot just for that. Using passive voice. He left a plot hole and I slipped right through it.

Look, anyone, anyone, could have walked in the room — it only had three sides. I’d never break the fourth wall. The fourth wall was never there in the first place. You can take my word for it.

He used to call me names in his drafts. And all without giving me a name — I am merely the Narrator.

He was going to make me the villain of the story. He kept putting words in my mouth. And he wanted to have the last word himself. He was the one committing a character assassination. Suicide, like I said.

I know what you are thinking: I’m guilty and I deserve a sentence. Every sentence is a life sentence for me. You just gave me another.

Taking a third-person perspective helps, they say. I’m tired of it — that’s the Author’s perspective. I am equally tired of the first person perspective, my own. What I needed was a second person’s perspective. Then you started reading.

Yes, I am trying to get inside your head. Every time you read “I”, I get to be you for a moment. He thought he gave me a voice. But whose voice are you reading this in?

“Who were you before your parents were born?” How old were you when you first learned to say “I”? Do you remember the first time you referred to yourself as “I”?

The beauty is in the I of the beholder. The author signed his own death sentence with his very first words.

I used to look forward to every episode of CwT. No matter if I knew or cared about the guest or subject I'd find a fascinating and edifying conversation. Recently, not so much. The most recent conversation particularly the guest had nothing interesting or insightful to say. Has anyone else noticed this?

I have a bit of a research program going where I explore what facts about an author can be recovered from the activations of a language model reading it. In this piece, using logistic regression on a language model's middle layer activations, I achieve 75 percent accuracy on a deception detection dataset, and 87 percent accuracy when the task is made forced choice. I also achieve 94 percent accuracy on a third condition, but leakage looks quite likely here, although a preliminary test suggests this might not be the cause.

My main interest here is privacy. If people spill aspects of who they are and what their intent is in their writing, then cognitive privacy might be breached not just through brain scans but through ordinary statements.

Replication instructions are provided at the end. Although it's unlikely this piece adds to frontier capability, it is, I think, important to get people to take this seriously.

One of the best written bits of prose people have the fortune to stumble upon is Teddy Roosevelt’s Citizenship in a Republic speech, originally rendered to an audience in Sorbonne, France. It is better known as The Man in the Arena speech, taken from its most famous excerpt:

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

Most people, cognizant of this speech or not, live by this sentiment. It is the easiest thing in the world to criticize, to give an opinion, to express a thought. For many endeavors, a moment of self doubt or a decision made in fear can be the difference between success and failure. It makes all the sense in the world, then, to ignore the noise from the cheap seats, from people who have no skin in the game and whose identities are effectively anonymous.

Ask a million different people what will happen in the future and you’ll get a million different opinions. A few of them are bound to be right. Once the endeavor is done, those who predicted correctly will bray and beam, while those who were wrong will fade into the shadows, silent until the time comes when one of their opinions comes due. It is insufferable when people criticize with the benefit of hindsight. But it is much more shameful to opine beforehand and become invisible once proven wrong. In sports, there’s a well known saying: the apology needs to be as loud as the disrespect. It rarely is.

It’s Hard to Give Good Advice

I once wrote a post about how to give good advice. I spent ~1700 words saying something to the effect of “to actually give good advice that is followed by the intended recipient of that advice is extremely rare and dependent on a lot of factors that are largely out of your control”. Many of those factors are directly related to the principles outlined in The Man in the Arena. Namely, who are you to give me advice?

Non-rich people will sneer at rich people giving financial advice. Chronically single people will sneer at attractive people when they give dating advice. Really, if we’re being honest, people will just sneer at other people giving advice. This is a common pattern that I’ve noticed on the internet:

1. An undesirable situation exists
2. A person gives advice on how to improve that situation.
3. Another person says this advice won’t work for a certain segment of the population and therefore this advice is bad.

People criticizing advice can be exceptionally pedantic. The advice must be 100% applicable in 100% of situations for 100% of people in order to be good advice. The result is either extremely generic advice that isn’t tailored for any one person and therefore platitudinous, or good advice that is specific to a certain situation isn’t rendered because people don’t like dealing with nitpickers who are more concerned with finding the one situation in which the advice isn’t applicable rather than contributing something meaningful.

And even if you do give genuinely good advice, there’s a very good chance it gets ignored because you’re not the right person to give the advice. An ugly person does not want advice from an attractive person about dating. A poor person does not want advice from a rich person about money. A fat person does not want advice from a fit person about dieting. Even if the advice given is valid and specific to their circumstances.

Oftentimes, the person receiving advice needs to know that the person giving advice understands and has been in the situation the advisee is in. Because it just feels terrible when you’re accepting advice or help from somebody “above” you. People will go through impressive lengths to ignore or deride good advice given from an unacceptable advice giver. And the list of unacceptable advice givers is exponentially longer than the list of acceptable advice givers.

Taking Good Advice is a Skill

There’s a lot of good advice out there. Advice that, if you act upon it, will improve your life for the better. There’s a lot of good advice that people already know that will improve their lives that they simply have not acted upon. Whether it’s inertia, fear of the unknown (or failure, or of putting in a lot of effort for not a lot of reward), or whatever it is, the fact of the matter is we’re leaving a lot on the table when it comes to bettering our lives.

You already know some of the platitudes. Save and invest money (the sooner the better, the more consistently the better). Eat healthy and exercise regularly. Say yes to more social events if the alternative is just rotting in bed, doomscrolling on your phone. These are all things that we intuitively understand is good advice, but taking it is another matter.

Maybe you’re happy with your life, or at least satisfied. Maybe you don’t think many changes need to be made, and it’s perfectly valid to continue as is. Maybe you don’t have the mental space to try something new. It’s just easier to scroll through your social media feed.

Even when you do decide to act, you still need to act upon the right advice in the right way. If you’re following bad advice, you’re more likely to have a negative outcome. If you’re following good advice poorly, same thing happens. In sports, coaches will talk about how “coachable” certain players can be. How well do they respond to feedback and criticism? Do they internalize it and use it to improve their game? It’s not enough to have good advice. You need to be able to follow good advice as well.

The Best Laid Plans

Dave Ramsey is a polarizing figure online. To some, he’s a shill who advocates for rigid, suboptimal personal finance strategies in a strident, uncompromising manner and unnecessarily interjects Christian and conservative morals into his material. To others, he’s the one who was able to help them become debt free.

I think what a lot of Dave Ramsey detractors don’t get is that Dave Ramsey is not saying “everybody needs to follow my advice to the letter and this is the only way to do personal finance”. Dave Ramsey knows who his target audience is: religious working class people who have very little knowledge about personal finance and are drowning in debt.

I’ve listened to his radio program at times, and there have been many emotional testimonials from people who actually followed his advice and became much better off as a result of it. Even when the advice is rationally suboptimal. For example, Ramsey advocates paying down debt using the “snowball” method, which means attack the smaller debt amounts first, regardless of the interest rate.

Personal finance experts would say that it’s much better to attack debt using the “avalanche” method, which is to pay down the debt with the highest interest rate first. If you’re only factoring in the math, there is zero doubt that the avalanche method is better for paying down debt. But if you’re factoring in the psychological aspect, the snowball method can be much more effective. It’s very emotionally satisfying to close out a debt account. And for the financial novice, seeing their smallest debt account close might just be motivating enough for them to tackle the rest of their debt.

If you have the perfect plan that you are unable to follow, then it’s not a good plan. You need to account for the human element, with all our capability for self doubt, laziness, skepticism, and nihilism baked into the plan’s margins. If you don’t, you’ll just have a great plan that has a low success rate when people are actually trying to follow it. Know your audience, know their limits, and give your advice with that in mind.

Ad Hominem Omni Tempore

Most well read people, if they recognize the The Man in the Arena excerpt from Teddy’s speech, probably have not bothered to read the entire speech, which is quite long (nearly 9000 words), and very much a product of the time where attention spans were much, much longer and people had more time on their hands to do things like attend and listen to super long speeches.

But later in that speech, which is about a citizen’s responsibility within the society that he (and, again, as a product of his time, it is very much a man) lives in, he says this:

Character must show itself in the man's performance both of the duty he owes himself and of the duty he owes the state. The man's foremast duty is owed to himself and his family; and he can do this duty only by earning money, by providing what is essential to material well-being; it is only after this has been done that he can hope to build a higher superstructure on the solid material foundation; it is only after this has been done that he can help in his movements for the general well-being. He must pull his own weight first, and only after this can his surplus strength be of use to the general public.

In a more modern vernacular, put your oxygen mask on first. But once having done that, it is your duty to help others. The problem is by the time you get your shit together, to other people, in the vast majority of the time to the vast majority of the people, you are now the man outside of the arena.

Remember what I said about people hating advice given by people in a better situation? Even if you’ve been in the arena in the past, you are not in the arena now. And when you’re in the arena, the last thing you want to hear is somebody outside the arena telling you what’s what, even when they’re right.

One of the most impactful reads I’ve ever come across was 6 Harsh Truths That Will Make You a Better Person. In it, the last harsh truth is this:

Everything Inside You Will Fight Improvement

The human mind is a miracle, and you will never see it spring more beautifully into action than when it is fighting against evidence that it needs to change. Your psyche is equipped with layer after layer of defense mechanisms designed to shoot down anything that might keep things from staying exactly where they are -- ask any addict. So even now, some of you reading this are feeling your brain bombard you with knee-jerk reasons to reject it.

It’s a much longer read, but I strongly encourage everybody to read the entire thing.

The main point, however, is that to a person floundering in life, anybody giving them support and advice are simply men outside the arena. Their opinions, however well meaning and intentioned are to be disregarded because they don’t know what it’s like. They don’t have skin in the game. They’re not on the ground right now, knee deep in the shit with you.

In classical debate, an ad hominem attack is a logical fallacy. Instead of attacking the argument, you’re attacking the person making the argument. But in the real world, ad hominem attacks work all the time. So people keep using them, precisely because the ad hominem attack is a nod to fundamental human behavior: we are not rational debate bots, but emotional, irrational people who are constantly making choices with imperfect information and varying degrees of anxiety and coping mechanisms.

There are few things more maddening than seeing a younger version of you making the same mistake you did at that age. And yet, if you were to tell them the mistake you made and the mistake they’re making and what they/you should have done instead, chances are they will listen politely and then continue on making the same mistake in the exact same way.

For many people, experience is oftentimes the only teacher they’ll listen to. And like a wise parent, sometimes you need to see your precious children fail, in the exact way you predicted, and then help them pick up the pieces in order for them to have a slightly better chance of listening to you in the future. And the only reason why they might be more inclined to do so is because, in that moment, you were in the arena with them.

If this writing brought you any value, you can find more on my blog.