Benquo

Reason isn't magic

Here's a story some people like to tell about the limits of reason. There's this plant, manioc, that grows easily in some places and has a lot of calories in it, so it was a staple for some indigenous South Americans since before the Europeans showed up. Traditional handling of the manioc involved some elaborate time-consuming steps that had no apparent purpose, so when the Portuguese introduced it to Africa, they didn't bother with those steps - just, grow it, cook it, eat it. The problem is that manioc's got cyanide in it, so if you eat too much too often over a lifetime, you get sick, in a way that's not easily traceable to the plant. Somehow, over probably hundreds of years, the people living in manioc's original range figured out a way to leach out the poison, without understanding the underlying chemistry - so if you asked them why they did it that way, they wouldn't necessarily have a good answer. Now a bunch of Africans growing and eating manioc as a staple regularly get cyanide poisoning. This is offered as a cautionary tale against innovating through reason, since there's a lot of information embedded in your culture (via hundreds of years of selection), even if people can't explain why. The problem with this argument is that it's a nonsense comparison. First of all, it's not clear things got worse on net, just that a tradeoff was made. How many person-days per year were freed up by less labor-intensive manioc handling? Has anyone bothered to count the hours lost to laborious traditional manioc-processing, to compare them with the burden of consuming too much cyanide? How many of us, knowing that convenience foods probably lower our lifespans relative to slow foods, still eat them because they're ... more convenient? How many people didn't starve because manioc was available and would grow where and when other things wouldn't? If this is the best we can do for how poorly reason can perform, reason seems pretty great. Second, we're not actually comp

170Jun 18, 2019

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Statisticism: How Cluster-Thinking About Data Creates Blind Spots

There is an epistemic stance, common among academics in quantitative fields, academics who wish they were in quantitative fields, and independent scholars who do not wish to decorrelate too much from the academic mainstream by communicating in an incompatible dialect, that treats statistical convergence as the gold standard of evidence....

Mar 1024

Have Americans Become Less Violent Since 1980?

The US homicide rate hit 10.2 per 100,000 in 1980, fell to 4.4 by 2014, then spiked to 6.5 in 2020. This looks like a story about violence rising, falling, and rising again. The actual story is simpler and worse: homicidal violence tripled in the 1960s and 70s. After adjusting...

Mar 576

Is GDP a Kind of Factory?

In 2021, economists Arvind Subramanian, Justin Sandefur, and Dev Patel announced that poor countries had finally started catching up to rich ones, vindicating the Solow growth model's prediction of "convergence." Now they say the rumors of Solow convergence's vindication were premature; the convergence trend reversed and poor countries are falling...

Mar 457

Three Missing Cakes, or One Turbulent Critic?

Zack Davis emailed me[1] asking me to weigh in on the moderators' request for comment on their proposal to ban Said_Achmiz. I've had a conflict with Said in the past in this thread and apparently they're claiming in private communications that this is a major reason I don't use the...

Jul 13, 202531

Levels of Republicanism

On Profitable Partial Exit from Perverse Regimes Through the Exercise of One's Formal Rights as a Citizen Enough criticism and analysis for the moment; here's a constructive program! Whole systems become richer through exchange and division of labor, which affords people more leisure to explore and investigate the environment, and...

May 13, 202523

Predation as Payment for Criticism

A predator's success depends on exploiting specific flaws in prey – poor awareness, slow reactions, weak social coordination. Unlike resource competition or disease, which select based on physiological robustness, predation creates focused pressure on intelligence, pressure which favors the development of consciousness. A cheetah doesn't catch just any gazelle, but...

Jan 30, 202510

LLMs for language learning

My current outlook on LLMs is that they are some combination of bullshit to fool people who are looking to be fooled, and a modest but potentially very important improvement in the capacity to search large corpuses of text in response to uncontroversial natural-language queries and automatically summarize the results....

Jan 15, 202510

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Benquo

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Benquo

Reason isn't magic

Can crimes be discussed literally?

Wait vs Interrupt Culture

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Benquo

Statisticism: How Cluster-Thinking About Data Creates Blind Spots

Have Americans Become Less Violent Since 1980?

Is GDP a Kind of Factory?

Three Missing Cakes, or One Turbulent Critic?

Levels of Republicanism

Predation as Payment for Criticism

LLMs for language learning

Reason isn't magic

Can crimes be discussed literally?

Wait vs Interrupt Culture

Parkinson's Law and the Ideology of Statistics

Statisticism: How Cluster-Thinking About Data Creates Blind Spots

Have Americans Become Less Violent Since 1980?

Is GDP a Kind of Factory?

Three Missing Cakes, or One Turbulent Critic?

Levels of Republicanism

Predation as Payment for Criticism

LLMs for language learning