Astral Codex Ten Podcast

I had been living in Japan for a year before I got the idea to look up whose portraits were on the banknotes I was handling every day. In the United States, the faces of presidents and statesmen adorn our currency. So I was surprised to learn that the mustachioed man on the ¥1,000 note with which I purchased my daily bento box was a bacteriologist. It was a pleasant surprise, though. It seems to m...

I. A: I like Indian food. B: Oh, so you like a few bites of flavorless rice daily? Because India is a very poor country, and that's a more realistic depiction of what the average Indian person eats. And India has poor food safety laws - do you like eating in unsanitary restaurants full of rats? And are you condoning Narendra Modi's fascist policies? A: I just like paneer tikka. This is how most ar...

I. Steve Kirsch is an inventor and businessman most famous for developing the optical mouse. More recently, he's become an anti-COVID-vaccine activist. He has many different arguments on his Substack , of which one especially caught my eye: He got Pollfish, a reputable pollster, to ask questions about people's COVID experiences, including whether they thought any family members had died from COVID...

I. Lately we've been discussing some of the ethics around genetics and embryo selection. One question that comes up in these debates is - are we claiming that some people are genetically inferior to other people? If we're trying to select schizophrenia genes out of the population - even setting aside debates about whether this would work and whether we can do it non-coercively - isn't this still i...

Seven years ago, I wrote an online serial novel, Unsong, about alternate history American kabbalists. You can read the online version here . The online version isn't going anywhere, but lots of people asked for a hard copy. I tried to get the book formally published, but various things went wrong and I procrastinated. Commenter Pycea finally saved me from myself and helped get it published on Amaz...

I. Lyman Stone wrote an article Why Effective Altruism Is Bad . You know the story by now, let's start with the first argument: The only cities where searches for EA-related terms are prevalent enough for Google to show it are in the Bay Area and Boston…We know the spatial distribution of effective altruist ideas. We can also get IRS data on charitable giving… Stone finds that Google Trends shows...

[I haven't independently verified each link. On average, commenters will end up spotting evidence that around two or three of the links in each links post are wrong or misleading. I correct these as I see them, and will highlight important corrections later, but I can't guarantee I will have caught them all by the time you read this.] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/links-for-may-2024  

In my book review of The Others Within Us , I wrote: [An Internal Family Systems session] isn't supposed to be just the therapist walking you through guided imagery, or you making up a story you tell yourself. The therapist asks you "Look inside until you find the part that's sabotaging your relationship", and you are supposed to discover - not invent, discover - that your unconscious gives it the...

There's been renewed debate around Bryan Caplan's The Case Against Education recently, so I want to discuss one way I think about this question. Education isn't just about facts. But it's partly about facts. Facts are easy to measure, and they're a useful signpost for deeper understanding. If someone has never heard of Chaucer, Dickens, Melville, Twain, or Joyce, they probably haven't learned to a...

Internal Family Systems, the hot new psychotherapy, has a secret. "Hot new psychotherapy" might sound dismissive. It's not. There's always got to be one . The therapy that's getting all the buzz, curing all the incurable patients, rocking those first few small studies. The therapy that was invented by a grizzled veteran therapist working with Patients Like You, not the out-of-touch elites behind a...

It's time to narrow the 150 entries in the Book Review Contest to about a dozen finalists. I can't read 150 reviews alone, so I need your help. You'll find the entries in six Google Docs (thanks to a reader for collating them): A - D E - I L - P R - S Th - The N The O - Y Please pick as many as you have time for, read them, and rate them using this form . Don't read them in order! If you read them...

Suffering is part of the human condition, except when it isn't. I met a man at an ACX meetup once who claimed he has never felt anxiety, not even the littlest bit. His father was the same way, so maybe it's genetic. Some people feel more pain than others. The "more pain" category includes some big demographic groups like redheads, who seem to feel some types of pain more intensely and may need up...

Manifold pivot || Lab leak hindcasting || CFTC extra-double-bans prediction markets   https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/mantic-monday-51324

Most recent post  here . Table Of Contents: 1: Comments From Robin 2: Comments About/From Goldin et al 3: Comments From The Rest Of You Yokels https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/mantic-monday-51324  

If you're from a country that doesn't have emotional support animals, here's how it works. Sometimes places ban or restrict animals. For example, an apartment building might not allow dogs. Or an airline might charge you money to transport your cat. But the law requires them to allow service animals, for example guide dogs for the blind. A newer law also requires some of these places to allow emot...

California's state senate is considering SB1047 , a bill to regulate AI. Since OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta are all in California, this would affect most of the industry. If the California state senate passed a bill saying that the sky was blue, I would start considering whether it might be green, or colorless, or maybe not exist at all. And people on Twitter have been saying that this bill...

Original post here . Table Of Contents: 1: Response From The Author 2: Attempted Fact Checks 3: People With Personal Experience At Their Workplace 4: People With Personal Experience In Civil Rights 5: The Origins Of Modern Wokeness 6: Other Countries 7: EEOC Lawsuits 8: Other Good Comments 9: Conclusions And Updates https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-the-cf9

The Origins Of Woke , by Richard Hanania , has an ambitious thesis. And it argues for an ambitious thesis. But the thesis it has isn't the one it argues for. The claimed thesis is "the cultural package of wokeness is downstream of civil rights law". It goes pretty hard on this. For example, there's the title, The Origins Of Woke. Or the Amazon blurb: "The roots of the culture lie not in the cultur...

Robin Hanson replied here to my original post challenging him on health care here . On Straw-Manning Robin thinks I'm straw-manning him. He says: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/response-to-hanson-on-health-care

In November 2022, Aella posted this Twitter poll : 19% of women without pre-menstrual symptoms believed in the supernatural, compared to 39% of women with PMS. I can't do chi-squared tests in my head, but with 1,074 votes this looks significant. Weird! Here's another one Now 72% of people with PMS self-describe as neurotic, compared to only 45% without. Aella writes more about this here , and sebj...

One of the most common arguments against AI safety is: Here's an example of a time someone was worried about something, but it didn't happen. Therefore, AI, which you are worried about, also won't happen. I always give the obvious answer: "Okay, but there are other examples of times someone was worried about something, and it did happen, right? How do we know AI isn't more like those?" The people...

Robin Hanson of Overcoming Bias more or less believes medicine doesn't work [EDIT: see his response here, where he says this is an inaccurate summary of his position. Further chain of responses here and here ] This is a strong claim. It would be easy to round Hanson's position off to something weaker, like "extra health care isn't valuable on the margin". This is how most people interpret the stud...

[previously in series: 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 ] When that April with his sunlight fierce The rainy winter of the coast doth pierce And filleth every spirit with such hale As horniness engenders in the male Then folk go out in crop tops and in shorts Their bodies firm from exercise and sports And men gaze at the tall girls and the shawties And San Franciscans long to go to parties. https://www.astralcod...

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: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/updates-on-lumina-probiotic

Original post here . Table of contents below. I want to especially highlight three things. First, Saar wrote a response to my post (and to zoonosis arguments in general). I've put a summary and some my responses at 1.11, but you can read the full post on the Rootclaim blog . Second, I kind of made fun of Peter for giving some very extreme odds, and I mentioned they were sort of trolling, but he's...