> Whenever something big happens in politics, people are like “WOW OUR VERY SOULS HAVE PERMANENTLY CHANGED” when in fact people almost always have the same opinions that they did yesterday... Currently, <2% of Democrats and Republicans support [political assassination].
Without wishing to comment directly on the object-level question, I'd point out:
- Some phenomena are driven by bulk behavior and some are driven by tail risk. For assassinations, it probably matters more how the 99.99999th percentile "AQ" people feel than how the median American feels, or even how the 99th percentile American feels.
- It's hard to resolve any rare attitude, especially a *taboo* rare attitude, to a resolution greater than Lizardman's Constant.
Oh, weird, I just wrote something about potato hesitancy! Potatoes causing leprosy and scrofula was one of those medical hypotheses that turned into a folk myth after being rejected by scientists. The populist writer William Cobbett helped keep it going for decades after 1813.
Other odd potato facts I learned that didn't make it into my article:
* Frederick the Great threatened to mutilate peasants if they refused to grow potatoes.
* Another reason Europeans were prejudiced against the potato is that they'd started off by feeding it to livestock, which made it animal food, not people food.
* The most traditional way to eat potatoes is to freeze-dry them and turn them into jerky. This was done by the Inca and their precursors by carrying a sack of potatoes up a mountain and leaving it overnight to freeze, then carrying it back down to thaw, and repeating a few times until they were weak enough that you could crush them with your feet like grapes.
I am extremely grateful to the friend who sent me here, and if I ever go to Fayetteville I will assuredly be grateful to all the people who sent me to The Big Biscuit. (It’s possible I have a new life goal now actually and who doesn’t like those?)
Down in NWA last weekend i was shocked to see The Big Biscuit in Fayetville (https://maps.app.goo.gl/SrpedNq4pzPq5w2T7), a breakfast chain with 4.9 stars and 3800 reviews. Perhaps biscuits fall into your Thai rating zone? At this point with google ratings any rating between 4.1-4.8 is essentially meaningless. Its nice knowing we can still chase 4.9 white whales though.
Adam, what I love about pieces like this is the illusion of lightness wrapped around a mind that is clearly running diagnostics on everything.
You scatter 26 items as if it’s just a link-dump, but the pattern underneath is almost embarrassingly visible: the world is weirder, less stable, less linear than we pretend — and yet it keeps failing to collapse in all the ways our apocalyptically wired brains expect.
The leprosy-potato thing, the worm-radio metaphor, the psych studies that don’t add up, radiologists who refuse to vanish on schedule — all of it points to the same quiet punchline:
“Reality is not cooperating with our theories, and it never has.”
Maybe that’s why your updates always read like cognitive palate cleansers.
A reminder that our models are provisional, our certainties are flimsy, and some of the most important events in science and culture begin as mistakes, obsessions, or people misreading signals they swear are obvious.
So here’s my question back to you — the one your post accidentally provokes:
If everything that looks stable is actually stitched together from accidents, biases, and half-broken stories, then why are we still so convinced that our current explanations are the ones that finally got it right?
> I previously cited their work showing that supposedly scientific personality tests do not obviously outperform the bullshit ones
Could you elaborate on this or provide a link to where you already did? From the article's summary, it sounded to me like Big 5 clearly outperformed both the Enneagram and the MBTI, and that even adapting the tests to be closer to one another left the Big 5 slightly ahead. What you're saying sounds like quite the opposite.
under the section "Why is the Jungian test less accurate?").
According to the table, the continuous Enneagram version (or something like that) predicts *better* than the Big 5. And in the whole section, they don't mention anything about that??? Is it an artefact of using almost twice as many input variables for prediction, so the test overfits or something like that? I don't understand and find it very weird that they say nothing about it. Do you or anyone else have any idea what's going on here?
Conversely, I feel like the bar chart doesn't look too bad for the big 5. I mean, 23% accuracy is far from 100%, but how deterministic can the relationship between personality and life outcomes realistically be? I think it's hard to know the upper bound here (though I'm sure it's higher than that).
I *am* impressed that the less "scientific" tests perform so well. Perhaps describing personality reasonably well is not too hard a task? And/or there were many less successful personality theories which have been improved upon pre-scientifically / died out over time? Or maybe we're just starting to get the hang of things, so we haven't improved that much yet.
> This review was about a military topic. Due to its sensitive nature and a changing situation, the author has asked that it be removed and that he not be acknowledged in any way, sorry.
> Whenever something big happens in politics, people are like “WOW OUR VERY SOULS HAVE PERMANENTLY CHANGED” when in fact people almost always have the same opinions that they did yesterday... Currently, <2% of Democrats and Republicans support [political assassination].
Without wishing to comment directly on the object-level question, I'd point out:
- Some phenomena are driven by bulk behavior and some are driven by tail risk. For assassinations, it probably matters more how the 99.99999th percentile "AQ" people feel than how the median American feels, or even how the 99th percentile American feels.
- It's hard to resolve any rare attitude, especially a *taboo* rare attitude, to a resolution greater than Lizardman's Constant.
Happy you enjoyed the biology article!
Oh, weird, I just wrote something about potato hesitancy! Potatoes causing leprosy and scrofula was one of those medical hypotheses that turned into a folk myth after being rejected by scientists. The populist writer William Cobbett helped keep it going for decades after 1813.
https://blog.outlandish.claims/p/dont-take-medical-advice-from-porcupines
Other odd potato facts I learned that didn't make it into my article:
* Frederick the Great threatened to mutilate peasants if they refused to grow potatoes.
* Another reason Europeans were prejudiced against the potato is that they'd started off by feeding it to livestock, which made it animal food, not people food.
* The most traditional way to eat potatoes is to freeze-dry them and turn them into jerky. This was done by the Inca and their precursors by carrying a sack of potatoes up a mountain and leaving it overnight to freeze, then carrying it back down to thaw, and repeating a few times until they were weak enough that you could crush them with your feet like grapes.
I am extremely grateful to the friend who sent me here, and if I ever go to Fayetteville I will assuredly be grateful to all the people who sent me to The Big Biscuit. (It’s possible I have a new life goal now actually and who doesn’t like those?)
Potentialism!!
Down in NWA last weekend i was shocked to see The Big Biscuit in Fayetville (https://maps.app.goo.gl/SrpedNq4pzPq5w2T7), a breakfast chain with 4.9 stars and 3800 reviews. Perhaps biscuits fall into your Thai rating zone? At this point with google ratings any rating between 4.1-4.8 is essentially meaningless. Its nice knowing we can still chase 4.9 white whales though.
Adam, what I love about pieces like this is the illusion of lightness wrapped around a mind that is clearly running diagnostics on everything.
You scatter 26 items as if it’s just a link-dump, but the pattern underneath is almost embarrassingly visible: the world is weirder, less stable, less linear than we pretend — and yet it keeps failing to collapse in all the ways our apocalyptically wired brains expect.
The leprosy-potato thing, the worm-radio metaphor, the psych studies that don’t add up, radiologists who refuse to vanish on schedule — all of it points to the same quiet punchline:
“Reality is not cooperating with our theories, and it never has.”
Maybe that’s why your updates always read like cognitive palate cleansers.
A reminder that our models are provisional, our certainties are flimsy, and some of the most important events in science and culture begin as mistakes, obsessions, or people misreading signals they swear are obvious.
So here’s my question back to you — the one your post accidentally provokes:
If everything that looks stable is actually stitched together from accidents, biases, and half-broken stories, then why are we still so convinced that our current explanations are the ones that finally got it right?
thanks for the citation!
Thanks for the post!
> I previously cited their work showing that supposedly scientific personality tests do not obviously outperform the bullshit ones
Could you elaborate on this or provide a link to where you already did? From the article's summary, it sounded to me like Big 5 clearly outperformed both the Enneagram and the MBTI, and that even adapting the tests to be closer to one another left the Big 5 slightly ahead. What you're saying sounds like quite the opposite.
Yep, here: https://www.experimental-history.com/i/149964663/unfortunately-were-still-losing-to-bullshitters
Thanks!
I am *very* confused by their table which you've shared (can be found here:
https://www.clearerthinking.org/post/how-accurate-are-popular-personality-test-frameworks-at-predicting-life-outcomes-a-detailed-investi#:~:text=average%20and%20median%20accuracy
under the section "Why is the Jungian test less accurate?").
According to the table, the continuous Enneagram version (or something like that) predicts *better* than the Big 5. And in the whole section, they don't mention anything about that??? Is it an artefact of using almost twice as many input variables for prediction, so the test overfits or something like that? I don't understand and find it very weird that they say nothing about it. Do you or anyone else have any idea what's going on here?
Conversely, I feel like the bar chart doesn't look too bad for the big 5. I mean, 23% accuracy is far from 100%, but how deterministic can the relationship between personality and life outcomes realistically be? I think it's hard to know the upper bound here (though I'm sure it's higher than that).
I *am* impressed that the less "scientific" tests perform so well. Perhaps describing personality reasonably well is not too hard a task? And/or there were many less successful personality theories which have been improved upon pre-scientifically / died out over time? Or maybe we're just starting to get the hang of things, so we haven't improved that much yet.
Your ukraine war blog link is broken and just goes to acx
Weird, Scott seems to have taken it down? A version lives on in podcast form here: https://sscpodcast.libsyn.com/your-review-the-russo-ukrainian-war
Apparently at the author's request, according to https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/non-book-review-contest-2025-winners :
> This review was about a military topic. Due to its sensitive nature and a changing situation, the author has asked that it be removed and that he not be acknowledged in any way, sorry.
I too have my own unique thoughts about Potatoes and LLMs...
https://cephalo.substack.com/p/the-data-center-vs-the-potato