Astral Codex Ten Podcast

Glen Weyl posted a reply to my post criticizing his essay on technocracy, and kindly agreed to let me elevate it into a top-level post. (consider this a standing offer to anyone else I write a post criticizing to do the same) I've very slightly edited some parts to adjust for differences in how the code works. You can read more from Glen Weyl on  his website ,  his Twitter , or by buying  his book...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/contra-weyl-on-technocracy   I. I am not defending technocracy. Nobody ever defends technocracy. It's like "elitism" or "statism". There is no Statist Party. Nobody holds rallies demanding more statism. There is no Citizens for Statism Facebook page with thousands of likes and followers. Yet for some reason libertarians don't win every single national election...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ontology-of-psychiatric-conditions   [reposted from  here , with edits] I. Taxometrics is the study of whether psychiatric conditions are categorical or dimensional. Something is  categorical  if it neatly, objectively separates into different groups. For example, consider humans and rabbits. If we take a mixed group containing some humans and some rabbits, an...

In the 1950s, a shady outfit called Obetrol Pharmaceuticals made a popular over-the-counter diet pill called Obetrol. If you're familiar with any of: the 1950s, shady pharma, or diet pills, your next question will be "did it contain amphetamines?" and the answer is yes, loads of them. Obetrol was a mix of four different amphetamine salts: racemic amphetamine sulfate, dextroamphetamine sulfate, met...

Logistics Don't worry, there will be real posts next week. Jan 22 Substack First, thanks for following me to Substack. I know some of you are skeptical. I was too at first, but Substack has gone above and beyond in allaying my concerns. They've let me test out a "no popup telling you to subscribe" feature. They've changed the comment section to be more like WordPress. We've agreed I'm here for a y...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/youre-probably-wondering-why-ive   Welcome to Astral Codex Ten! Some of you are probably veterans of my old blog, Slate Star Codex. Others may be newbies wondering what this is all about. I'm happy to finally be able to give a clear answer: this is a blog about ṛta. Ṛta is a Sanskrit word, so ancient that it brushes up against the origin of Indo-European langu...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/still-alive   I. This was a triumph I'm making a note here, huge success No, seriously, it was awful. I  deleted my blog  of 1,557 posts. I wanted to protect my privacy, but I ended up with articles about me in  New Yorker ,  Reason , and  The Daily Beast . I wanted to protect my anonymity, but I Streisand-Effected myself, and a bunch of trolls went around pos...

Mark Twain: There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact. If this is true of all science, it is doubly true of social psychology. At its best, social psychology is an unmatched window into human motivations, a "look under the hood" of the way people talk and act. The best research in social psychology is as we...

https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and-reptilian-muslim-climatologists-from-mars/   Beware of Phantom Lizardmen I have only done a little bit of social science research, but it was enough to make me hate people. One study I helped with analyzed whether people from different countries had different answers on a certain psychological test. So we put up a website where people an...

https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/12/23/we-are-all-msscribe/   AskReddit asked recently: If you could only give an alien one thing to help them understand the human race, what would you give them? At the time I had no good answer. Now I do. I would give them  Charlotte Lennox's write-up of how MsScribe took over Harry Potter fandom  (warning: super-long but super-worth-it). Ozy informs me that every...

https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/28/why-were-early-psychedelicists-so-weird/   [Epistemic status: very speculative, asserted with only ~30% confidence. On the other hand, even though psychiatrists don't really talk about this it's possible other groups know this all already] A few weeks ago I gave a presentation on the history of early psychedelic research. Since I had a tough crowd, I focused o...

https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/13/evil-is-anti-inductive/   I. A recent Cracked piece:  Five Everyday Groups Society Says It's Okay To Mock . It begins: There's a rule in comedy that says you shouldn't punch down. It's okay to make fun of someone rich and famous, because they're too busy molesting groupies with 100-dollar bills to notice, but if you make a joke at the expense of a homeless per...

Stuart Russell is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of California at Berkeley, holder of the Smith-Zadeh Chair in Engineering, and Director of the Center for Human-Compatible AI. His book "Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach" (with Peter Norvig) is the standard text in AI, used in 1500 universities in 135 countries. His research covers a wide range of topics in artificial in...

Reporter Degrees Of Freedom I. A sample of Thursday's  talk at Yale   These are four headlines describing the same study,  Milkie, Nomaguchi and Denny (2015) . The study found that of twenty or so outcomes, only three of them – all measuring delinquent behavior among teenagers – show significant effect from time spent with parents (and this result remains after Bonferroni correction). So Vox has a...

https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/07/25/how-the-west-was-won/   I. Someone recently linked me to Bryan Caplan's post  A Hardy Weed: How Traditionalists Underestimate Western Civ . He argues that "western civilization"'s supposed defenders don't give it enough credit. They're always worrying about it being threatened by Islam or China or Degeneracy or whatever, but in fact western civilization can no...

https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/08/29/reverse-voxsplaining-drugs-vs-chairs/   [Content note: this is pretty much a rehash of things  I've said before , and that  other   people   have   addressed   much   more   eloquently . My only excuse for wasting your time with it again is that SOMEHOW THE MESSAGE STILL HASN'T SUNK IN. Pitching this as "market" vs. "government" is overly simplistic, but maybe...

https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/27/a-modern-myth/   1. Eris A middle-aged man, James, had come on stage believing it was an audition for  American Idol . It wasn't. Out ran his ex-lover, Terri. "You said you loved me!" she said. "And then when I got pregnant, you disappeared! Twenty years, and you never even sent me a letter!" The crowd booed. As James tried to sputter a response, his wife ran...

https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/08/a-theory-of-religion/   Related to  Monday's post  but spun off for length reasons: my crazy theory about where religion comes from. The near-universal existence of religion across cultures is surprising.  Many people  have speculated on what makes tribes around the world so fixated on believing in gods and propitiating them and so on. More recently people lik...

Link: https://slatestarscratchpad.tumblr.com/post/633822178059730944/here-are-the-nine-ways-the-election-could-end You are Joseph R. Biden Jr. You sit in a convention center in Delaware, surrounded by advisors and confidantes. You are acutely aware that the hopes of a hundred million people are with you. You feel like they should be more tangible, like being the focus of a hundred million minds sh...

I. Why is there such a strong Sunni/Shia divide? I know the Comparative Religion 101 answer. The early Muslims were debating who was the rightful caliph. Some of them said Abu Bakr, others said Ali, and the dispute has been going on ever since. On the other hand, that was fourteen hundred years ago, both candidates are long dead, and there's no more caliphate. You'd think maybe they'd let the matt...

This week the SSC Meetup features guest speaker Jason Crawford, author the blog The Roots of Progress, discussing 't he non-linear model of innovation.' "Innovation is often described with a "linear" model from discovery to invention to distribution. There is an element of truth in this, but a naive interpretation of the model does not match the reality of science and invention. In this talk, I'll...

I. There was an argument on Tumblr which, like so many arguments on Tumblr, was terrible. I will rephrase it just a little to make a point. Alice said something along the lines of "I hate people who frivolously diagnose themselves with autism without knowing anything about the disorder. They should stop thinking they're 'so speshul' and go see a competent doctor." Beth answered something along the...

I. One of the most interesting responses I got to  my post supporting the junior doctors strike  was by Salem, who  said  that this situation was (ethically) little different than that around adjunct professors, who also become overworked and miserable trying to break into a high-status profession. Salem very kindly didn't directly accuse me of hypocrisy, but maybe he should have. While I sympathi...

David Friedman on Legal Systems Very Different from Ours: A brief survey of a range of legal system, past and present, from Imperial China and Periclean Athens to modern Amish and Romany.   David Friedman is an academic economist with a doctorate in physics recently retired from spending the previous twenty-three years teaching in a law school. His first book, The Machinery of Freedom: Guide to a...

[Epistemic status: not very serious] [Content note: May make you feel overly scrutinized] Sometimes I hear people talking about how nobody notices them or cares about anything they do. And I want to say…well… Okay. The Survey of Earned Doctorates tells us that the United States awards  about a hundred classics PhDs per year . I get the impression classics is more popular in Europe, so let's say a...