Astral Codex Ten Podcast

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-march   Warning: 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, so you may want to read this online instead of in an email, to catch the edits. Some of these are from my six-month backlog a...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/shilling-for-big-mitochondria   In the 1930s, a shady outfit called Isabella Laboratories made a popular over-the-counter diet pill called  Formula 281  (slogan: "281 for the too weighty one"). If you're familiar with any of: the 1930s, shady pharma, or diet pills, your next question will be "did it contain amphetamines?". Actually, no! It contained 2,4-dinitr...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-scoring-rule-controversy   Metaculus scoring rule controversy Zvi considered using some Metaculus markets for his weekly coronavirus roundup, but was  turned off by the scoring rules . Ross Rheingans-Yoo  writes about the issue here . Everyone agrees Metaculus' scoring rule is "proper", a technical term meaning that it correctly incentivizes you...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/bay-area-plant-based-meat-reviews   By this point you've probably tried Impossible Burgers, and you know that restaurants can do some pretty impressive things with them. But there are so many interesting meat dishes - what if you want something other than a burger? This market is still developing, but I live in the Bay Area, which is probably its epicenter. An...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/a-modest-proposal-for-republicans   Read this first:  Book Review: Fussell On Class Dear Republican Party: I hear you're  having a post-Trump identity crisis . Your old platform of capitalism and liberty and whatever no longer excites people. Trump managed to excite people, but you don't know how to turn his personal appeal into a new platform. Most of what he...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-fussell-on-class   I. Paul Fussell  wants to talk about class . (well, wanted, past tense, it's a 1983 book, we'll come back to that later) He recognizes this might not be the most popular topic. When he tells people he's writing a book on class in America, "it is as if I had said I am working on a book urging the beating to death of baby whales us...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-judging-april-covid   Since this is getting broader than just Metaculus, I'm changing the name to Mantic Monday, after an obscure word for "oracular" (and changing the preview image to a mantis, since I don't know how else to visually represent "mantic". And posting it early Tuesday morning because I'm late). In April 2020, I made  my yearly pred...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/a-look-down-track-b   I. Depression  probably has something to do with decreased synaptogenesis in the brain , maybe the hippocampus in particular. Neurons are less likely to respond to stimuli by connecting to other neurons. The whole network becomes sparser than usual, and dysfunctional thought-loops that thrive in sparse network conditions start taking over...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ezra-klein-on-vetocracy   In my review last week of Ezra Klein's  Why We're Polarized , I linked to a related  Vox article on vetocracy : In a viral essay, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen makes a simple exhortation: It's time to build. Behind the coronavirus crisis, he writes, lies "our widespread inability to build." America has been unable to create enoug...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-cult   DeBoer argued that charter schools succeed through selection effects: they only take the best students. Several commenters pointed out this was illegal. It is, but they've found loopholes. Here's  Alexander H : I attended a charter school all 4 years quite recently. Admissions was entirely by lottery, open to everyone in...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-the-cult-of-smart   Oscar Wilde supposedly said George Bernard Shaw "has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends". Socialist blogger Freddie DeBoer is the opposite: few allies, but deeply respected by his enemies. I disagree with him about everything, so naturally I am a big fan of his work - which meant I was happy to read his latest...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/covidvitamin-d-much-more-than-you   Most health articles ask you to act on their opinions. I am specifically asking you  not  to act on mine. In a moment, I'll tell you whether or not I think Vitamin D prevents or treats coronavirus. But I'll give you a free spoiler: I am less than 100% certain of what I'm about to say. So if you want to take Vitamin D, take i...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/coronavirus-links-discussion-open   So far there have been three waves of coronavirus cases in the US. The first wave was the beginning, when it caught us unprepared. The second wave was in July, when we got sloppy and lifted lockdowns too soon. The third wave was November through January, because the coronavirus is seasonal and winter is its season (also prob...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/statement-on-new-york-times-article   There was recently a negative article about me and my blog in the  New York Times . Most of you already know the history behind this, but for anyone referred here by NYT, this is where I give my side and defend myself. Like many people in the early 2000s, I started a blog when I was in college. To stay anonymous, I wrote i...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-precision-of-sensory-evidence   In earlier posts, I've expressed confusion about two competing models of depression. In one - supported by an analogy to mania and various forms of sensory and motor disturbance - it's  inappropriately low neural confidence levels . In the other - supported by common sense - it's  a highly-confident global prior on negative...

[previously in sequence:  List Of Fictional Drugs Banned By The FDA ,  More Fictional Drugs Banned By The FDA ] VatiCoin:  After a thousand years, the Catholic Church discovered how to do indulgences right: as tradable digital tokens. Not only does an initial coin offering provide better price discovery than the Pope picking a random number, but sinners who do good deeds later can sell their coins...

[previously in sequence:  Taxometrics ,  Dynamical Systems . Epistemic status:  speculative . This should go without saying, but when I talk about "failures" in this post, I mean failures of biological processes, as in the term "congestive heart failure"; I don't mean to accuse people with psychiatric conditions of being failures.] I. Most psychiatric disorders are at least partly genetic. Some, l...

I. Ezra Klein is great. I know a lot of people throw shade on him for founding Vox. But as Van Gogh said about God creating the world, "We must not hold it against Him; only a master could make such a mistake". Ezra is a master and I was happy to be able to read his  Why We're Polarized . (Amazon recommended it to me as "Why We're Polarized By Ezra Klein", which I would also have been happy to rea...

Thanks to everyone who commented last week with prediction markets I missed. Two of them seemed to be especially interesting. Polymarket  is another cryptocurrency-based prediction market. It's got about two dozen contracts open, and some of them are pretty big - $5 million plus! With that kind of money, we ought to be seeing some really good predicting! We're...not. Either there's a 6% chance tha...

I heard from a journalist yesterday after writing  yesterday's post on WebMD . They've been trying to write a coronavirus article worthy of Zvi or any of the other illegibly smart people writing on the pandemic. Apparently the bottleneck is sources. In most journalistic settings, you can't just write "here's what I think". You have to write "here's what my source, a recognized expert, said when I...

I started a small database of psychiatry information. It's going well. I'm grateful for all your emails suggesting changes and corrections. Sort of. Here are some of the kinds of emails I get: "You said this drug is occasionally mildly addictive but the risk/benefit calculation is worth it for most people. But my cousin's friend took it and became really addicted and it ruined his life. Maybe you...

Thanks to everyone who has waited patiently for more information on this. I planned  a book review contest  for last summer, which I didn't get to do because of my unexpected hiatus. I currently have 31 entries, none of which I've read yet. My plan is to give the rest of you until March 1 to send in reviews. Send them to scott[at]slatestarcodex[dot]com. I originally wanted ones that you hadn't alr...

[Previously in sequence:  Taxometrics ] I. Imagine Alice has a chronic disease. Luckily, as long as she has a job, she will have health insurance. And health insurance provides her with a treatment. Every day she takes the treatment, her health will go up one point on a 0-100 scale; every day she misses the treatment, it will go down one point. If her health ever gets below 75, she will be too ill...

I was driving down to LA when the cops pulled me over. "You have to turn back sir, the Sphinx here eats any traveler who can't answer her riddle." "I've trained my whole life for this" I said, and stepped on the gas. Soon I saw a Sphinx lounging in the middle of the road. When she spotted me, she asked: "What has braces, crowns, and retainers, but is not teeth?" "A medieval king in armor. My turn....

Prediction markets are the future. They're a type of trustless, decentralized expertise that often equals or outperforms official sources. But they're not quite the present. Right now I only know of three prediction markets, and none of them live up to their potential. As usual, it's the government's fault: betting on prediction markets is technically gambling, which makes it mostly illegal (of co...