Yes, I used to think I was a very smart person, smartest in most rooms I entered. I now realize I had never entered any really smart rooms. I now say publicly and often that Scott Alexander is the smartest person I have ever encountered as well as one the best explainers--and his commenters are often nearly that smart and persuasive as well. It has been humbling to recognize what a truly smart person looks like . . . but also a great blessing.
It's worth emphasizing two things, one about Scott and one about Lumina:
1. "Critique" is in a sense too strong a word for my thoughts on Scott. I think he's chosen a role that suits him and does incredibly good work in that role; my interest in writing that was in sketching out why it strikes me as a consciously chosen role and the tradeoff and sense of wistfulness inherent in it. Standing above the fray has benefits, but it also means he started a crescendo in ~2014 in a symphony he has of yet not precisely finished. "Takes Scott Alexander seriously" is the common thread among the great majority of thinkers I enjoy and my own intellectual journey was both heavily within communities his work spawned and heavily inspired by his work; however he chooses to take his path, I'm very glad he's taking it.
2. On Lumina in particular, while I have sounded my own excitement as well (https://x.com/tracewoodgrains/status/1778632308334993484) I do want to pair it with a note of caution, inspired in part by a mutual friend. The people taking it right now are the clinical trials, and trials do exist for a reason. Many things that sound plausible and good in vacuums do not work in vacuums, and the notes I'm hearing from people with reason to know are basically "We'll see."
My current model is this:
The company is good and well-intentioned. They found something cool and ignored and figured it would be worth giving a serious shot at.
Scott, and the others who have promoted it, are good and well-intentioned. Everyone's excited about the magic mouth bacteria that make people not have cavities.
Lumina has been the subject of an incredibly effective advertising blitz tailored perfectly to appeal to people in this general Sphere.
Clinical trials exist for reasons beyond sheer bureaucratic tedium. There are many unknowns remaining.
Putting these all together, my current impression is that it's a low-cost, high-potential-upside intervention on an individual level that the company is doing a service in providing, but I'm wary of aiding a consensus impression that it's a miracle product while hard data remains so sparse. It's cool, it's fun, I'm hyped like everyone else, but I don't want everyone to get ahead of the evidence for pure trust-network reasons.
Scott Alexander is utterly wrong on pediatric transgenderism. An example of his writing on the topic (from August 2023):
"The effects of birth-sex puberty are irreversible and will make it much harder to transition in the future. The effects of puberty-blockers are mostly reversible, and preserve the option to either transition or return to birth-sex in the future. Like all drugs there are potential side effects, some of which are irreversible, but in the case of puberty blockers these seem mild and comparable to other psychiatric interventions. I think the precautionary principle supports having confused children who don’t know what they want do the reversible rather than the irreversible thing."
I absolutely love Scott's writing and trust him immensely too, but I think you might be trusting him a bit too much here. He says himself in his post on it,
>[Conflict of interest notice: Lantern is mostly rationalists and includes some friends. My wife consulted for them early on. They offered my wife and me free samples (based on her work, not as compensation for writing this post); she accepted, and I’m still debating. Consider this an attempt to spotlight interesting work that people I like are doing, not a hard-hitting investigation.]
If Scott did do one of his hard hitting investigations, and came to the conclusion it was a trust worthy product you should have high hopes for, that would be the ultimate endorsement in my eyes. But it's not that, it's as he said, it's him highlighting work personal friends have done. And Scott's been very open about how the opinions of others, especially those he is close to, have a strong impact on him. Not enough that it'd make him outright lie, I hope, but probably enough that he's not digging deep into all the ways mouth bacteria could go wrong like he might if total strangers created the product.
I don't have any particular reason to think the mouth bacteria project will go wrong, and certainly no reason to think it'd go disastrously wrong and cause a super-spreading contagion that ruins everyone's biome forever like you'd assume the FDA fears judging by their standards. But, I am very happy to not be among the first people trialing the product, and will gladly wait a few years to see if it actually works and whether it has side effects.
Scott wasn’t rational enough to consider the real possibility that not enough is known about the oral microbiome to guarantee this won’t have terrible consequences in some people. Please read why some people consider this to be bordering on fraudulent: (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38565695
Scott writes a lot of good posts, and I think it's okay to privately assign some blind trust to him, but to explicitly announce that you do that and extol the virtues of doing so, at length, seems dangerous.
In general I'm not a huge fan of things that are okay to do but not to talk about, but in this case my point is that if people do trust Scott more as a result of this post, it's going through *two* layers of indirection - "I'm following Scott off a cliff because he told me to and I trust him, and I trust Scott because Richard Hanania told me to and I trust *him*"
And I'm claiming that part of rationality is minimizing the number of layers like that, and maximizing object-level understanding of why to do something.
(In particular I'm quite worried about the branch of possibility where EAs start feeling pressure to donate a kidney to demonstrate their commitment to EA. At that point we really are an organ-harvesting cult.)
I know this isn't the primary crux of the article but your point about the free marketers being at the table with the rest of the conservative movement; in not sure you're right about that
The people pushing things like YIMBYism, permitting reform, increasing immigration- the biggest free market reforms necessary in our day in age- are people like Matt Ygllesias and Noah Smith. That is to say moderate democrats.
Meanwhile the future of the republican party is Ron DeSantis outlawing lab grown meat because it's ick.
My number one priority is likewise free markets but I'm not convinced the way to achieve that is supporting the current iteration of the GOP
How can someone claim to be rational when they use words like this?
“But we’ve also seen their critics — MAGAs, tankies, the “Intellectual Dark Web,” Putinists and other kinds of third world fetishists, etc — and realized that they’re no less crazy, just less powerful.”
I’ve posted many, many times about this on Twitter, always evidence-based. This is not about Trump, nor is it about his post-election behavior.
I was a professional pollster and political scientist for many years and I am quite familiar with the FACT that American elections are frequently stolen. Both parties do it when they can get away with it, although for structural reasons it is easier for Democrats (just as for the same structural reasons it is easier for Republicans to gain partisan advantage by gerrymandering but both parties do it when they can).
I'm skeptical, and would place this on the same level as a supplement. There's a good biological model to support it working, but no human data right now?
Infecting myself with magical bacteria is a bit over the line for me. Unless you know you're very prone to cavities and they're plaguing your life (I don't know any such person IRL in our generation) I don't know why you'd do that except that it sounds cool : the upside appears very limited?
When you talk about right-wingers, I think you're missing the main reason why they are right.
They have excellent intuitions about ancient evolutionary problems. If you talk to a right-winger about vaccines, he will say terrible nonsense. But if you talk to a right-winger about how to eliminate jihadism, he will speak to the point, because he is well acquainted with the pre-modern world of jihadism and barbarism. He has an evolutionary memory.
A rational person will understand how important the trial and error of evolution are and will listen to right-wing people to get information from their evolutionary memory. The evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa wrote a lot about this.
The prime drive of Elite Human Capital 💯 is to front-run itself, but it's hard to front-run one of its apex paladins such as Scott Alexander, so we merely follow.
Very good - Scott Alexander is always worth taking seriously. Keep us posted on the cavities - this is a really exciting development (I did read some of the literature on the product).
Yes, I used to think I was a very smart person, smartest in most rooms I entered. I now realize I had never entered any really smart rooms. I now say publicly and often that Scott Alexander is the smartest person I have ever encountered as well as one the best explainers--and his commenters are often nearly that smart and persuasive as well. It has been humbling to recognize what a truly smart person looks like . . . but also a great blessing.
Hear, hear.
It's worth emphasizing two things, one about Scott and one about Lumina:
1. "Critique" is in a sense too strong a word for my thoughts on Scott. I think he's chosen a role that suits him and does incredibly good work in that role; my interest in writing that was in sketching out why it strikes me as a consciously chosen role and the tradeoff and sense of wistfulness inherent in it. Standing above the fray has benefits, but it also means he started a crescendo in ~2014 in a symphony he has of yet not precisely finished. "Takes Scott Alexander seriously" is the common thread among the great majority of thinkers I enjoy and my own intellectual journey was both heavily within communities his work spawned and heavily inspired by his work; however he chooses to take his path, I'm very glad he's taking it.
2. On Lumina in particular, while I have sounded my own excitement as well (https://x.com/tracewoodgrains/status/1778632308334993484) I do want to pair it with a note of caution, inspired in part by a mutual friend. The people taking it right now are the clinical trials, and trials do exist for a reason. Many things that sound plausible and good in vacuums do not work in vacuums, and the notes I'm hearing from people with reason to know are basically "We'll see."
My current model is this:
The company is good and well-intentioned. They found something cool and ignored and figured it would be worth giving a serious shot at.
Scott, and the others who have promoted it, are good and well-intentioned. Everyone's excited about the magic mouth bacteria that make people not have cavities.
Lumina has been the subject of an incredibly effective advertising blitz tailored perfectly to appeal to people in this general Sphere.
Clinical trials exist for reasons beyond sheer bureaucratic tedium. There are many unknowns remaining.
Putting these all together, my current impression is that it's a low-cost, high-potential-upside intervention on an individual level that the company is doing a service in providing, but I'm wary of aiding a consensus impression that it's a miracle product while hard data remains so sparse. It's cool, it's fun, I'm hyped like everyone else, but I don't want everyone to get ahead of the evidence for pure trust-network reasons.
Finding Slate Star Codex 10 years ago or so was a mental life changer for me.
Pro: It's made me a much better thinker.
Con: I can't have a normal conversation anymore.
Scott Alexander is utterly wrong on pediatric transgenderism. An example of his writing on the topic (from August 2023):
"The effects of birth-sex puberty are irreversible and will make it much harder to transition in the future. The effects of puberty-blockers are mostly reversible, and preserve the option to either transition or return to birth-sex in the future. Like all drugs there are potential side effects, some of which are irreversible, but in the case of puberty blockers these seem mild and comparable to other psychiatric interventions. I think the precautionary principle supports having confused children who don’t know what they want do the reversible rather than the irreversible thing."
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-fetishes#§comments-that-were-very-angry-about-my-introductory-paragraph
I absolutely love Scott's writing and trust him immensely too, but I think you might be trusting him a bit too much here. He says himself in his post on it,
>[Conflict of interest notice: Lantern is mostly rationalists and includes some friends. My wife consulted for them early on. They offered my wife and me free samples (based on her work, not as compensation for writing this post); she accepted, and I’m still debating. Consider this an attempt to spotlight interesting work that people I like are doing, not a hard-hitting investigation.]
If Scott did do one of his hard hitting investigations, and came to the conclusion it was a trust worthy product you should have high hopes for, that would be the ultimate endorsement in my eyes. But it's not that, it's as he said, it's him highlighting work personal friends have done. And Scott's been very open about how the opinions of others, especially those he is close to, have a strong impact on him. Not enough that it'd make him outright lie, I hope, but probably enough that he's not digging deep into all the ways mouth bacteria could go wrong like he might if total strangers created the product.
I don't have any particular reason to think the mouth bacteria project will go wrong, and certainly no reason to think it'd go disastrously wrong and cause a super-spreading contagion that ruins everyone's biome forever like you'd assume the FDA fears judging by their standards. But, I am very happy to not be among the first people trialing the product, and will gladly wait a few years to see if it actually works and whether it has side effects.
Scott wasn’t rational enough to consider the real possibility that not enough is known about the oral microbiome to guarantee this won’t have terrible consequences in some people. Please read why some people consider this to be bordering on fraudulent: (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38565695
This post seems honestly a bit dangerous to me.
Scott writes a lot of good posts, and I think it's okay to privately assign some blind trust to him, but to explicitly announce that you do that and extol the virtues of doing so, at length, seems dangerous.
In general I'm not a huge fan of things that are okay to do but not to talk about, but in this case my point is that if people do trust Scott more as a result of this post, it's going through *two* layers of indirection - "I'm following Scott off a cliff because he told me to and I trust him, and I trust Scott because Richard Hanania told me to and I trust *him*"
And I'm claiming that part of rationality is minimizing the number of layers like that, and maximizing object-level understanding of why to do something.
(In particular I'm quite worried about the branch of possibility where EAs start feeling pressure to donate a kidney to demonstrate their commitment to EA. At that point we really are an organ-harvesting cult.)
I know this isn't the primary crux of the article but your point about the free marketers being at the table with the rest of the conservative movement; in not sure you're right about that
The people pushing things like YIMBYism, permitting reform, increasing immigration- the biggest free market reforms necessary in our day in age- are people like Matt Ygllesias and Noah Smith. That is to say moderate democrats.
Meanwhile the future of the republican party is Ron DeSantis outlawing lab grown meat because it's ick.
My number one priority is likewise free markets but I'm not convinced the way to achieve that is supporting the current iteration of the GOP
How can someone claim to be rational when they use words like this?
“But we’ve also seen their critics — MAGAs, tankies, the “Intellectual Dark Web,” Putinists and other kinds of third world fetishists, etc — and realized that they’re no less crazy, just less powerful.”
I’ve posted many, many times about this on Twitter, always evidence-based. This is not about Trump, nor is it about his post-election behavior.
I was a professional pollster and political scientist for many years and I am quite familiar with the FACT that American elections are frequently stolen. Both parties do it when they can get away with it, although for structural reasons it is easier for Democrats (just as for the same structural reasons it is easier for Republicans to gain partisan advantage by gerrymandering but both parties do it when they can).
As I mentioned in a reply to your tweet promoting this I’m surprised Scott Alexander wants his photo out there. Maybe times have changed?
I'm skeptical, and would place this on the same level as a supplement. There's a good biological model to support it working, but no human data right now?
See here
https://twitter.com/salonium/status/1778393370383065350
This sounds fine for low-stakes stuff.
Infecting myself with magical bacteria is a bit over the line for me. Unless you know you're very prone to cavities and they're plaguing your life (I don't know any such person IRL in our generation) I don't know why you'd do that except that it sounds cool : the upside appears very limited?
Meanwhile there are always unknown unknowns.
When you talk about right-wingers, I think you're missing the main reason why they are right.
They have excellent intuitions about ancient evolutionary problems. If you talk to a right-winger about vaccines, he will say terrible nonsense. But if you talk to a right-winger about how to eliminate jihadism, he will speak to the point, because he is well acquainted with the pre-modern world of jihadism and barbarism. He has an evolutionary memory.
A rational person will understand how important the trial and error of evolution are and will listen to right-wing people to get information from their evolutionary memory. The evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa wrote a lot about this.
The prime drive of Elite Human Capital 💯 is to front-run itself, but it's hard to front-run one of its apex paladins such as Scott Alexander, so we merely follow.
Very good - Scott Alexander is always worth taking seriously. Keep us posted on the cavities - this is a really exciting development (I did read some of the literature on the product).