The anonymous review of The Anti-Politics Machine published on Astral Codex X focuses on a case study of a World Bank intervention in Lesotho, and tells a story about it:

The World Bank staff drew reasonable-seeming conclusions from sparse data, and made well-intentioned recommendations on that basis. However, the recommended programs failed, due to factors that would have been revealed by a careful historical and ethnographic investigation of the area in question. Therefore, we should spend more resources engaging in such investigations in order to make better-informed World Bank style resource allocation decisions. So goes the story.

It seems to me that the World Bank recommendations were not the natural ones an honest well-intentioned person would have made with the information at hand. Instead they are heavily biased towards top-down authoritarian schemes, due to a combination of perverse incentives, procedures that separate data-gathering from implementation, and an ideology that makes this seem like the natural and normal thing to do.

You asked why people who "believe in" avoiding nonmarital sex so frequently engage in and report badly regretting it. Instead of responding within your frame, I'm going to lay out the interpretive framework that seems most natural to me to use for this problem, and then answer in those terms.

I am sick of people rejecting good evidence about vitamin D because they are confused about the bad evidence and can't be bothered to investigate, so I am going to explain it.

Let's look at this like a 19th century physician who woke up from a coma this morning to trawl the public internet for info (I helped), knowing about evolution and bodies and counting and skepticism but not about "metastudies" or "scientific consensus" or "USDA guidelines." How much vitamin D do we need?

The Autobiography of Malcolm X isn't just an important historical document, but skillful storytelling about the investigation of a mystery: why are white people like that?

Early on in the pandemic, Ivermectin was one of the few interventions that seemed promising, but since then I'd seen mainly negative headlines about faked pro-Ivermectin data, so I implicitly categorized it with hydroxychloroquine as a discredited hypothesis. But in response to my recent blog post on Machiavellian attitudes towards informing the public, ChristianKl from LessWrong asked me why I hadn't mentioned Ivermectin along with vitamin D. After a quick Google Scholar search, I found that the evidence for it seems surprisingly strong.

If you parse what US authority figures like Dr Fauci are explicitly saying about COVID, you end up learning things like:

• An old white man in good health should take 6000 IU of vitamin D per day prophylactically.
• We won't have herd immunity until 80-85 percent of the population is vaccinated.
• From both a personal and public health cost-benefit analysis, nearly every adult ought to take at least a single-shot vaccine and it's not worth the health benefits for vaccinated people to avoid group gatherings or public spaces, or wear masks in public.
• From both a personal and public health cost-benefit analysis, children ought not to be vaccinated.
• Dr Fauci distorts his quantitative claims to be less surprising, so that they can more easily enter the common narrative. Therefore, you can extrapolate that any surprising number coming from Dr Fauci ought to be adjusted farther from the number that would make no waves, to infer his true opinion.

On the other hand, yesterday I visited a toy store that sells Dr Fauci figurines for children, insists that everyone wear masks regardless of vaccination status, and limits the number of people in the store.

Corporate mass media was happy to broadcast lies like "masks don't work" early in the pandemic. But while official state announcements clearly indicated the direction in which the press was expected to distort the narrative, they were careful not to brazenly say the opposite of the truth, that masks don't work, only to tell ordinary people not to use them because healthcare workers needed them. A literal-minded person who read and believed actual government statements rather than news and opinion articles would have inferred from the start that masks worked.

The usually reliable Zvi writes:

If you have had one shot of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, should you then get a shot of Pfizer or Moderna? If it is available, absolutely, yes you should.

When people give orders like this instead of making assertions about matters of fact, I have to assume that if there's no stated cost-benefit calculation, then no cost-benefit calculation was performed. So I have to do my own.

There are many different kinds of people. We hear about and from suburban professional Americans ("normies") a lot because a lot of our shared stories about what is going on are about them.

Microeconomically rational agents with similar beliefs and preferences will usually act similarly, and a statistical normal can emerge from this. But sometimes the details of a situation mean that the best thing to do looks very unusual.

Normies aren't microeconomically rational. Their main motivation is that they feel safe if they resemble some shared idea of normality, and scared otherwise. This is a cybernetic perceptual-control process. Normies will often justify their own actions, and reward and punish others', on the basis of what is normal. This leads to ganging up on people who aren't trying to follow the herd, even if they aren't hurting anyone.

If you're holding onto an autonomous perspective, you're alienated from opposition to autonomous perspectives. That doesn't mean you're doing something wrong. It just means you're in a conflict. It's helpful to be able to understand and predict the actions of people who are trying to hurt you, but it's not helpful to misinterpret a conflict as a disagreement you ought to try to reconcile.

Normies claim to be a larger and more powerful coalition than they actually are by conflating their conformity target with statistical normality. This can make it seem more dangerous or surprising than it is to be out of sync with normies.

Two public answers to private question in which I employ a technical definition of drama.