Astral Codex Ten Podcast

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-progress-and-poverty   [ This is the third of many finalists in the book review contest. It's not by me - it's by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. I'll be posting about two of these a week for several months. When you've read all of them, I'll ask you...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/prospectus-on-prospera   Who among us hasn't looked out at the great edifice of human civilization in all its complexity, and thought "Yeah okay but I could do it better"? Centuries of utopian communes, micronations, and seasteads have dreamed of rebuilding society from first principles, free from entrenched interests and the debris of the past. If you got all...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/link-unifying-predictive-coding-with   [epistemic status: I know a little about the predictive coding side of this, but almost nothing about backpropagation or the math behind the unification. I am posting this mostly as a link to people who know more.] This is a link to / ad for a great recent Less Wrong post by lsusr,  Predictive Coding Has Been Unified With...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-april [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 this.]...

[ This is the second of many finalists in the book review contest. It's not by me - it's by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. I'll be posting about two of these a week for the next few months. When you've read all of them, I'll ask you to vote for your favorite, so remember which ones you liked. - SA ] I....

[ This is the first of many finalists in the book review contest. It's not by me - it's by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. I'll be posting about two of these a week for the next few months. When you've read all of them, I'll ask you to vote for your favorite, so remember which ones you liked. The broken...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/metis-and-bodybuilders Fitness researcher Menno Henselmans writes about  optimal program design for bodybuilders . His thesis is that peer-reviewed studies prove bodybuilder lore is wrong in lots of places. For example: Traditional bro wisdom holds short rest periods of 1-3 minutes are optimal for bodybuilding. There never seemed to be much of a formal argumen...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/two-unexpected-multiple-hypothesis   I. Start with Lior Pachter's  Mathematical analysis of "mathematical analysis of a vitamin D COVID-19 trial" . The story so far: some people in Cordoba did a randomized controlled trial of Vitamin D for coronavirus. The people who got the Vitamin D seemed to do much better than those who didn't. But there was some controver...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/2020-predictions-calibration-results   At the beginning of every year, I make predictions. At the end of every year, I score them (this year I'm very late). Here are  2014 ,  2015 ,  2016 ,  2017 ,  2018 , and  2019 . And here are the predictions I made for 2020. Some predictions are redacted because they involve my private life or the lives of people close to...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ambidexterity-and-cognitive-closure   Back in a more superstitious time, people believed left-handers were in league with the Devil. Now, in this age of Science, we realize that was unfair. Yes, left-handers are  statistically more likely  to be in league with the Devil. But so are right-handers! It's only the ambidextrous who are truly pure! At least this is...

https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/31/the-parable-of-the-talents/   [Content note: scrupulosity and self-esteem triggers, IQ, brief discussion of weight and dieting. Not good for growth mindset.] I. I sometimes blog about research into IQ and human intelligence. I think most readers of this blog already know  IQ is 50% to 80% heritable , and that it's so important for intellectual pursuits that  e...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/oh-the-places-youll-go-when-trying   I. What is the right dose of Lexapro (escitalopram)? The  official FDA packet insert  recommends a usual dose of 10 mg, and a maximum safe dose of 20 mg. It says studies fail to show 20 mg works any better than 10, but you can use 20 if you really want to. But Jakubovski et al's  Dose-Response Relationship Of Selective Sero...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/towards-a-bayesian-theory-of-willpower   I. What is willpower? Five years ago, I reviewed  Baumeister and Tierney's book  on the subject. They tentatively concluded it's a way of rationing brain glucose. But their key results have  failed to replicate , and people who know more about glucose physiology say it  makes no theoretical sense . Robert Kurzban, one o...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/more-antifragile-diversity-libertarianism In yesterday's  review of  Antifragile , I tried to stick to something close to Taleb's own words. But here's how I eventually found myself understanding an important kind of antifragility. I feel bad about this, because Taleb hates bell curves and tells people to stop using them as examples, but sorry, this is what I'...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-antifragile   Nassim Taleb summarizes the thesis of  Antifragile  as: Everything gains or loses from volatility. Fragility is what loses from volatility and uncertainty [and antifragility is what gains from it]. The glass on the table is short volatility. The glass is fragile: the less you disrupt it, the better it does. A rock is "robust" - neithe...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/adding-my-data-point-to-the-discussion   [ warning: boring inside baseball post ] From  The Hypothesis :  Here's Why Substack's Scam Worked So Well . It summarizes a common Twitter argument that Substack is doing something sinister by offering some writers big advances. The sinister thing differs depending on who's making the argument - in this case, it's maki...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-the-new-sultan   I. If you only learn one thing from this post: it's pronounced "air-do-wan". If you learn two things from this post, learn that, plus how a country which starts out as a flawed but somewhat-liberal democracy can lapse into near-dictatorship over the course of a few years. I got  The New Sultan: Erdogan And The Crisis Of Modern Turk...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/sleep-is-the-mate-of-death   Melancholic depressive patients report that they feel worst in the morning, just after waking up, get better as the day goes on, and feel least affected in the evening just before bed. Continue the trend, and you might wonder how depressed people would feel after spending 24 or 36 or 48 hours awake. Some scientists made them stay a...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-mantic-matt-y   The current interest in forecasting grew out of Iraq-War-era exasperation with the pundit class. Pundits were constantly saying stuff, like "Saddam definitely has WMDs, trust me, I'm an expert", then getting proven wrong, then continuing to get treated as authorities and thought leaders. Occasionally they would apologize, but they...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/richard-nixon-vs-cool   In  the highlights post on class , I wrote: When I was in middle school, I used to wonder - there are cool kids and uncool kids, right? But suppose all the uncool kids agreed to think of themselves as cool, and to make fun of the currently-cool kids. Then you would just have two groups of kids, each considering themselves superior and l...

https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exaggerated-differences/   Contra Grant On Exaggerated Differences I. An article by Adam Grant called  Differences Between Men And Women Are Vastly Exaggerated  is going viral, thanks in part to a share by Facebook exec Sheryl Sandberg. It's a response to an email by a Google employee saying that he thought Google's low female representation wa...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/trapped-priors-as-a-basic-problem   Introduction and review Last month I talked about   van der Bergh et al's work on  the precision of sensory evidence , which introduced the idea of a  trapped prior . I think this concept has far-reaching implications for the rationalist project as a whole. I want to re-derive it, explain it more intuitively, then talk about...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-consequences-of-radical-reform   The thread that runs from Edmund Burke to James Scott and  Seeing Like A State  goes: systems that evolve organically are well-adapted to their purpose. Cultures, ancient traditions, and long-lasting institutions contain irreplaceable wisdom. If some reformer or technocrat who thinks he's the smartest guy in the room sweeps...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-class   To my surprise, we have some genuine upper-class people reading this blog. Here's what they thought, starting with  Cabayun : While I hardly grew up in the upper-upper world Fussell is describing (though my grandparents and to a lesser extend parents surely did), a lot of the particulars stood out to me as right on the m...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-march   [link back to the original links post:  here ] On  the article about privateers , local naval expert Bean writes: It's time for the standard disclaimer any time Proceedings comes up: Proceedings is intended as a forum for discussion of matters of interest to naval officers, and it is not peer reviewed. Often very not pee...