“What Intellectual Progress Did I Make In The 2010s?”, Scott Alexander2020-01-08 (x-risk, psychedelics, autism, neuroscience, willpower, scientific bias; similar)⁠:

[Scott Alexander look back on how his ideas/beliefs evolved over the past decade of blogging at Jackdaws/LessWrong/SlateStarCodex. Primary topics:

1. Bayesian predictive coding as an unified theory of brain perception, control, behavior, and psychiatric disorders as bad priors/updates

   • Psychedelics use as modifying brain priors, explaining how psychedelics affect and sometimes benefit their users

   • trauma/attachment disorder

2. Philosophy of mental disease

3. efficacy of SSRIs

4. Genetics of psychiatric disorders, especially autism/transsexuals?

5. Willpower: also predictive coding???

6. Diet/weight loss: setpoints, somehow

7. Existential risk: dissolving the Great Filter, raising AI risk awareness

8. Secular stagnation: progress is slowing, perhaps because human populations aren’t growing exponentially

   • Baumol’s cost disease as core cause of economic stagnation and political backlash

9. The Replication Crisis: even worse than he thought

10. Psychological effects:

    • Placebo effect: much more powerless than he thought

    • Birth order effects: much more powerful than he thought

11. Utilitarianism: still confused, but more towards rule-utilitarianism

12. Politics: social media turbocharging tribalism/outgroup-bias

13. Ideology of liberalism and SJWism

14. Coordination problems as core problem of politics

15. Enlightenment: not actually that great, possibly wireheading]

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