Astral Codex Ten

Stuart Ritchie

11 min read

Stuart Ritchie

Article

Stuart Ritchie is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 7 times across 7 issues between February 16, 2021 and April 16, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “Stuart Ritchie, who literally wrote the book on how to tell good science from bad”; “other people (see eg Philippe Lemoine , Stuart Ritchie ) have beaten me to it”; “Stuart Ritchie says that this article was accepted to PNAS under a special deal”. It most often appears alongside China, Substack, Trump.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 7
  • Issue count: 7
  • First seen: February 16, 2021
  • Last seen: April 16, 2024

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Vitamin D: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
February 16, 2021 · Original source
I've waited until now to bring in the argument from authority. NICE, the UK health system's guideline-making authority, says that "there [is] little evidence for using vitamin D supplements to prevent or treat COVID‑19", which is a terrible framing (give me time to write a post on this) but gets the point across well enough. UpToDate, the private company that produces semi-canonical evidence aggregation for US doctors, says that "there is no clear evidence that vitamin D supplementation reduces the risk or severity of COVID-19" (sorry, you won't be able to read that link without a subscription). Stuart Ritchie, who literally wrote the book on how to tell good science from bad, says he's unsure, but in a way that sounds a bit skeptical. This seems like a pretty common position.
Inline links: says that, says that, wrote the book, unsure, a pretty common position
Against That Poverty And Infant EEGs Study
January 26, 2022 · Original source
I was going to try to fact-check this, but a bunch of other people (see eg Philippe Lemoine, Stuart Ritchie) have beaten me to it. Still, right now all the fact-checking is scattered across a bunch of Twitter accounts, so I'll content myself with being the first person to summarize it all in a Substack post, and beg you to believe I would have come up with the same objections eventually.
Inline links: Philippe Lemoine, Stuart Ritchie
People love studies showing that some effect is visible on MRI, or EEG, or some other three letter acronym. It makes it feel real - you can literally see the effects! In the physical brain! I think this temptation should be resisted. Effects that you can literally see in the physical brain are much rarer than effects that you can detect by asking people stuff, but it's really easy to get artifacts and smudges that you hallucinate into signal. @annemscheel, which looks at a different kind of EEG measure but highlights the very very many ways that noise and unreliability can be introduced into the analysis: ","username":"StuartJRitchie","name":"Stuart Ritchie","profile_image_url":"","date":"Tue Jan 25 22:00:17 +0000 2022","photos":[],"quoted_tweet":{},"reply_count":0,"retweet_count":2,"like_count":114,"impression_count":0,"expanded_url":{"url":"http://www.the100.ci/2017/03/10/cumulative-noise-a-mini-review-of-four-erp-studies-on-infants-perception-of-biological-motion/","image":"https://bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/15b9c6c1-fc94-4970-a57f-21e24ab0a89d_1024x684.jpeg","title":"Cumulative noise: A mini review of four ERP studies on infants’ perception of biological motion","description":"[Disclaimer: I am not an EEG expert. I probably got some things wrong. Please let me know about them.] TL;DR: I reviewed four infant ERP studies on the same topic and found that their results are maximally incongruent with each other. Yet the analytical choices made in the papers differ too much","domain":"the100.ci"},"video_url":null,"belowTheFold":false}" data-component-name="Twitter2ToDOM"> And finally, people want to discover a link between poverty and cognitive function so bad. Every few months, another study demonstrates that poverty decreases cognitive function, it's front page news everywhere, and then it turns out to be flawed. This recent analysis tried to replicate twenty poverty/cognition priming studies. 18/20 replications had lower effect sizes than in the original, and 16/20 had effect sizes statistically indistinguishable from zero. Most of these studies were vastly worse than the current paper - they were trying to do dumb things with priming as opposed to this much smarter thing with actual RCTs of childhood environment. Still, this whole field makes me nervous.
Inline links: This recent analysis
Stuart Ritchie says that this article was accepted to PNAS under a special deal where “US National Academy of Sciences members get an easier ride to publication”. I see different opinions about exactly what this consists of; Stuart thinks they can “hand-pick reviewers”; another researcher thinks they “do not have to go through anonymous peer review”.
Inline links: says, another researcher
Links For July
July 29, 2022 · Original source
11: Stuart Ritchie on the evidence around breastfeeding and intelligence. Lots of studies conflict, we really don’t know.
Inline links: the evidence around breastfeeding and intelligence
Universe-Hopping Through Substack
September 29, 2022 · Original source
I feel the same way about Substack. Everyone I know reads a sample of the same set of Substacks - mine, Matt Yglesias’, maybe Freddie de Boer’s or Stuart Ritchie’s. But then I use the Discover feature on the site itself and end up in a parallel universe.
Inline links: Matt Yglesias’, Freddie de Boer’s, Stuart Ritchie’s
"Is Wine Fake?" In Asterisk Magazine
November 21, 2022 · Original source
Rebuilding After The Replication Crisis: This is Stuart Ritchie, hopefully you all know him by now. “Fundamentally, how much more can we trust a study published in 2022 compared to one from 2012?”
Inline links: Rebuilding After The Replication Crisis:
Links For August 2023
August 09, 2023 · Original source
13: Fact check: was Elvis Jewish? Snopes says yes, but I’m more convinced by this argument for no. [update: commenter TheGenealogian agrees no] 14: Is GPT-4 getting worse? This isn’t absurd; some people claim OpenAI has simplified the model to cut costs (though OpenAI denies this). Matei Zaharia argues yes, but I’m more convinced by the AI Snake Oil blog’s argument for no (h/t Stuart Ritchie). 15: Vox has a good piece about AI company Anthropic. I would quibble that they’re not the only safety-focused or EA-affiliated org, and we have yet to see how truly safety-focused or altruistic any AI company can be while continuing to be an AI company. But granting that it’s all a matter of degree, I agree the degree seems pretty high for them. And NYT also has an Anthropic article. 16: Eliezer bets $150,000 to $1,000 against UFOs being aliens, and gives the same argument I would - it’s unlikely that any civilization advanced enough to travel through space would still be primitive enough to use macroscopic, biologically-piloted craft that sometimes crash. 17: More nails in the coffin of growth mindset. “When examining the highest-quality evidence (6 studies, N = 13,571), the effect was nonsignificant: d = 0.02, 95% CI = [−0.06, 0.10]. We conclude that apparent effects of growth mindset interventions on academic achievement are likely attributable to inadequate study design, reporting flaws, and bias.” I think the older, very-high-effect-size studies were clearly terrible, but I’d still like to look further into the newer, small-but-significant-effect-size-that-makes-a-difference-across-large-groups studies and how they went wrong. 18: Previous work showed that after adjusting for selection bias, “what college you go to doesn’t matter” for average earnings. I was always skeptical of this - are all those rich people sending their kids to Ivies for no reason? Now Chetty, Deming, and Friedman find that: Attending an Ivy-Plus college instead of the average highly selective public flagship institution increases students’ chances of reaching the top 1% of the earnings distribution by 60%, nearly doubles their chances of attending an elite graduate school, and triples their chances of working at a prestigious firm. Ivy-Plus colleges have much smaller causal effects on average earnings, reconciling our findings with prior work. One of the authors, David Deming, has a Substack here where he explains the study in more depth. Like everyone else, this study also finds that rich people are using “holistic admissions” and the de-emphasis of standardized testing to gain an advantage: H/T Nate Silver, who writes: “Not sure how you can look at this data, ostensibly be interested in either meritocracy or equality, and want to move away from standardized tests. It's the subjective measures that are most slanted in favor of the rich kids.” Cf. Erik Hoel. 19: From @data_depot: “In 2002, 48% of Americans said "the govt is run by a few big interests looking out for themselves." 52% said "it is run for the benefit of all people." In 2020, 84% said the govt is run by a few big interests. Only 16% said it is run for the benefit of all people.” Source seems to be here, which reveals 2002 was a local peak in trust in government; maybe because of post-9/11 unity, but even 2000 was 34%, much better than our current 16%. My first instinct is to attribute this to a rise in vulgar Marxism, in the sense of everyone (even conservatives) now being trained to think in terms of an elite class screwing over everyone else (cf my review of Manufacturing Consent). But there was a previous low of 19% in 1994, which doesn’t seem to correspond to anything especially bad going on in the US, so I don’t know. 20: AskReddit: Medical professionals - have you ever had a patient so lacking in common sense you wondered how they made it so far? Linking this because there’s lots of evidence showing that education (as a proxy for intelligence?) is associated with increased life expectancy, and this thread gives you a visceral appreciation of why that might be. 21: The Fall Of [programming help site] Stack Overflow: Looks like a weak downward trend since 2021 I can’t explain, plus a strong downward trend since 11/2022 which must be from ChatGPT. In case you were wondering how AI was affecting programming! (update: probably false, see here, though see also here for evidence of smaller but real decline) 22: This month in culture war topics: London’s Pride parade featured a convicted kidnapper/torturer/rapist/sadist as a speaker, who advocated that anti-trans people should be “punch[ed] in the f**king face” ; the organizers say they stand by her.
Inline links: yes, this argument for no, agrees no, argues yes, argument for no, Stuart Ritchie, Anthropic, an Anthropic article, the same argument I would, More nails in the coffin of growth mindset, Previous work, Chetty, Deming, and Friedman, has a Substack here where he explains the study in more depth, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!VcFl!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F4f08bfe5-ab31-453a-896a-54ef385da7d2_706x900.jpeg, Nate Silver, Erik Hoel, @data_depot, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!S4g-!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff18fa4d5-9ba9-4b86-a058-46246bfc8a4f_536x611.png, here, my review of, have you ever had a patient so lacking in common sense you wondered how they made it so far?, The Fall Of [programming help site] Stack Overflow, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!E7XK!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff8ba7c05-7dbb-4318-9da2-87b00d738ed7_649x518.png, probably false, see here, here, featured, stand by her
26: Friends of the blog Stuart Ritchie and Tom Chivers have a new podcast, The Studies Show, dedicated to explaining the latest scientific controversies. Highly recommended (on priors; I don’t listen to podcasts so I can’t be sure). Sample episodes on Ozempic safety and psychedelics for mental health.
Inline links: The Studies Show, Ozempic safety, psychedelics for mental health
Updates on Lumina Probiotic
April 16, 2024 · Original source
Lumina, the genetically modified anti-tooth-decay bacterium that I wrote about in December, is back in the news after lowering its price from $20,000 to $250 and getting endorsements from Yishan Wong, Cremieux, and Richard Hanania (as well as anti-endorsements from Saloni and Stuart Ritchie). A few points that have come up:
Inline links: I wrote about in December, $250, Yishan Wong, Cremieux, Richard Hanania, Saloni, Stuart Ritchie