Astral Codex Ten Podcast

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-phrase-no-evidence-is-a-red-flag   https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-phrase-no-evidence-is-a-red-flag Related to: Doctor, There Are Two Types Of No Evidence; A Failure, But Not Of Prediction. I. Click to enlarge Every single one of these statements that had "no evidence" is currently considered true or at least pretty plausible. In an extremely nit...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ancient-plagues   During our recent discussion of climate change, someone linked me to this New York Magazine piece making the case for doomism. I disagree with it pretty intensely, but most of my complaints are already listed in the sidebar (some scientists also complained, so they had to add a lot of sidebar caveats in) and I don't want to belabor them. The...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/does-georgism-work-part-3-can-unimproved   [Lars Doucet won this year's Book Review Contest with his review of Henry George's Progress and Poverty . Since then, he's been researching Georgism in more depth, and wants to follow up with what he's learned. I'll be posting three of his Georgism essays here this week, and you can read his other work at Fortress Of...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/does-georgism-work-part-2-can-landlords   [Lars Doucet won this year's Book Review Contest with his review of Henry George's Progress and Poverty . Since then, he's been researching Georgism in more depth, and wants to follow up with what he's learned. I'll be posting three of his Georgism essays here this week, and you can read his other work at Fortress Of D...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/does-georgism-work-is-land-really   [Lars Doucet won this year's Book Review Contest with his review of Henry George's Progress and Poverty . Since then, he's been researching Georgism in more depth, and wants to follow up with what he's learned. I'll be posting three of his Georgism essays here this week, and you can read his other work at Fortress Of Doors ]...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/diseasonality [ epistemic status: conjecture and speculation in something that isn't really my field ] I. It's still not totally clear why some diseases are seasonal. Seasonal diseases usually peak in late winter - so around January/February in the Northern Hemisphere and July/August in the Southern. Around the equator, which lacks seasons, they're less predic...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/model-city-monday-12621 Tegucigalpa, Honduras The socialist opposition has won Honduras' election and pledges to fight against charter cities there. "Immediately upon assuming the presidency, we are going to send the National Congress an initiative for the repeal of the ZEDE law," incoming president Xiomara Castro said . This was what everyone was afraid of. B...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-lifespan   [epistemic status: non-expert review of a book on a highly technical subject, sorry. If you are involved in biochemistry or anti-aging, feel free to correct my mistakes] David Sinclair - Harvard professor, celebrity biologist, and author of Lifespan - thinks solving aging will be easy. "Aging is going to be remarkably easy to tackle. Eas...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mm-omicron-variant Noah Smith has a good summary of the Omicron evidence here , including a lot of quotes from experts. But experts say a lot of stuff like "well, it could be bad, but we can't be sure", plus sometimes they disagree. This is the kind of situation where prediction markets are useful, so let's look at them. (source: Metaculus ) R0 is a measure of...

https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/06/14/the-virtue-of-silence/   Leah Libresco writes a couple of essays ( 1 , 2 ) on an ethical dilemma reported in the New York Times. In the course of a confidential medical history, a doctor hears her patient is suffering from stress-related complaints after having sent an innocent man to prison. The doctor wants to know whether it is ethical to report the matter...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-november   [Remember, 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 t...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/pascalian-medicine I. When I reviewed Vitamin D, I said I was about 75% sure it didn't work against COVID. When I reviewed ivermectin, I said I was about 90% sure. Another way of looking at this is that I must think there's a 25% chance Vitamin D works, and a 10% chance ivermectin does. Both substances are generally safe with few side effects. So (as many comm...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/higlights-from-the-comments-on-ivermectin   Thanks to everyone who commented on my recent post Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted To Know . Let's start with the negative comments. Leading pro-ivermectin website ivmmeta.com understandably disagreed with my fisking of them. They have a section where they respond to critics (see responses to Gideon Meyerowitz-...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-the   Andrew writes : One word I don't see mentioned anywhere is "manufacturing." It's one thing to make enough drug for a clinical trial, it's another to make millions of commercial doses reliably. FDA approval requires inspection of and confidence in these commercial-scale manufacturing processes. Zutano adds : To expand on th...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/when-will-the-fda-approve-paxlovid   https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/when-will-the-fda-approve-paxlovid I. You thought it wasn't going to be a prediction market post, but surprise, it's a prediction market post! Metaculus predicts January 1 as the median date for the FDA approving Paxlovid. They estimate a 92% chance it will get approved by March. For co...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-great   Thanks to everyone who commented on last week's post Secrets Of The Great Families . Some highlights: Many people knew of interesting families I'd missed. Stephen Frug brings up the Jameses: Any short list of the great families (or at least the great American families) should include the James's: Henry James is one of th...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ivermectin-much-more-than-you-wanted I know I'm two months late here. Everyone's already made up their mind and moved on to other things. But here's my pitch: this is one of the most carefully-pored-over scientific issues of our time. Dozens of teams published studies saying ivermectin definitely worked. Then most scientists concluded it didn't. What a great o...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-1115   Reciprocal Scoring, Part II I talked about this last week as a potential solution to the problem of long-term forecasting. Instead of waiting a century to see what happens, get a bunch of teams, and incentivize each to predict what the others will guess. If they all expect the others to strive for accuracy, then the stable Schelling point...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/apply-for-an-acx-grant   What is ACX Grants? I want to give grants to good research and good projects with a minimum of paperwork. Like an NIH grant or something, only a lot less money and prestige. How is this different from Marginal Revolution's Fast Grants , Nadia Eghbal's Helium Grants , or EA Funds ' grant rounds? Not different at all. It's total 100% pla...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-orban Lyman Stone on Twitter: Twitter avatar for @lymanstonekyLyman Stone 石來民 🦬🦬🦬 @lymanstoneky Here's the @slatestarcodex piece: astralcodexten.substack.com/p/dictator-boo… Overall, I agree with a lot of his assessment of Orban. But I want to quibble on two points: 1) The relationship between dictatorship and democracy 2)...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/secrets-of-the-great-families   I. Let's talk impressive families. Aldous Huxley was an author most famous for Brave New World , though his other stuff is also great and underappreciated. His brother Julian Huxley founded UNESCO and the World Wildlife Fund, was secretary of the Zoological Society of London and president of the British Eugenics Society, and coi...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/model-city-monday-11821 Telosa, USA Bloomberg: The Diapers.com Guy Wants To Build A Utopian Megalopolis Marc Lore founded diapers.com, various other internet startups, served a stint as Wal-Mart's e-commerce director, and made a few billion dollars. Now he wants to start a city with a new vision of socially responsible democracy. Why move to this city instead...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/dictator-book-club-orban   (previously: Erdogan , Modi ) I. Some are born great. Some achieve greatness. And some are Victor Orban's college roommates. Orban: Europe's New Strongman and Orbanland , my two sources for this installment of our Dictator Book Club, tell the story of a man who spent the last eleven years taking over Hungary and distributing it to gu...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/non-cognitive-skills-for-educational Suppose you want to study the genetics of intelligence. You probably want a sample size in the six digits, and you can't make a six digit number of people sit down and take IQ tests. Also, whenever you say "genetics" and "intelligence" in the same sentence, an angry mob shows up at your door. One solution is to switch to a...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-11121 Keynesian Beauty Contests I have no source for this, someone told me about it at a meetup. Suppose you want to run a forecasting tournament on whether nuclear war will destroy civilization by 2100. But nobody cares how much money they have in eighty years, plus if civilization is destroyed you can't collect your winnings. There are lots of...