Astral Codex Ten Podcast

I. Suppose I were to come out tomorrow as gay. I have amazing and wonderful friends, and I certainly wouldn't expect them to hate me forever or tell me to burn in Hell or anything like that. But even more than that, I think they would understand and accept the decision. There would be a lot of not-so-obvious failure modes they  could  fall into, but wouldn't. For example, I don't think any of them...

Integrating Evolutionary Psychology and Behaviorism Summary  - All of us want to change other people's behavior to align more closely with our goals. Over the last century, behaviorists have discovered how reward and punishment change the behavior of organisms. The central idea of this talk is that we are intuitive behaviorists and that our relationships, emotions, and mental health can be better...

I. A lot of libertarians and anarcho-capitalists envision a future of small corporate states competing for migrants and capital by trying to have the best policies. But the Internet is about as close to that vision as we're likely to find outside the pages of a political philosophy textbook. And I am far from convinced. Let's back up. Internet communities – ranging from a personal blog like this o...

[Epistemic status: something I've been thinking about recently. There's a lot of complication around these issues and this is more to start a discussion than to present any settled solution] There's a scene in Fiddler on the Roof where Tevye is describing his peaceful little town. He says they never fight – except that one time about a horse some people thought was a mule. Someone interrupts him t...

Connor Leahy discusses the idea of an 'AGI Fire Alarm' and argues GPT-3 might be the last such warning we'll receive before it's too late to act.

Suppose a lot of  that stuff about bravery debates  is right. That lots of the advice people give is useful for some people, but that the opposite advice is useful for other people. For example, "You need to stop being so hard on yourself, remember you are your own worst critic" versus "Stop making excuses for yourself, you will never be able to change until you admit you've hit bottom." Or "You n...

It's been two and a half months since I deleted the blog, so I owe all of you an update on  recent events . I haven't heard anything from the  New York Times  one way or the other. Since nothing has been published, I'd assume they dropped the article, except that they approached an acquaintance for another interview last month. Overall I'm confused. But they definitely haven't given me any explici...

Trigger warning: deliberately provoking horror about graduates' real-​world post-​college prospects. Epistemic status: intended as persuasive speech, may somewhat overstate case. Ladies and gentlemen, I am honored to have been invited to speak here at the great University of [mumble]. Go Wildcats, Spartans, or Eagles, as the case may be! I apologize if what I have to say to you sounds a little unp...

[Related:  Tyler Cowen on rationalists ,  Noah Smith on rationalists ,  Will Wilkinson on rationalists , etc] If I were an actor in an improv show, and my prompt was "annoying person who's never read any economics, criticizing economists", I think I could nail it. I'd say something like: Economists think that they can figure out everything by sitting in their armchairs and coming up with 'models'...

So, I kind of deleted the blog. Sorry. Here's my explanation. Last week I talked to a  New York Times  technology reporter who was planning to write a story on Slate Star Codex. He told me it would be a mostly positive piece about how we were an interesting gathering place for people in tech, and how we were ahead of the curve on some aspects of the coronavirus situation. It probably would have be...

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/17/slightly-skew-systems-of-government/ [ Related To:   Legal Systems Very Different From Ours Because I Just Made Them Up ,  List Of Fictional Drugs Banned By The FDA ] I. Clamzoria is an acausal democracy. The problem with democracy is that elections happen before the winning candidate takes office. If somebody's never been President, how are you supposed to ju...

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/16/open-thread-156-25/   Normally this would be a hidden thread, but I wanted to signal boost  this request for help  by Professor Steve Hsu, vice president of research at Michigan State University. Hsu is a friend of the blog and was a guest speaker at one of our recent online meetups – some of you might also have gotten a chance to meet him at  a Berkeley meetu...

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/15/the-vision-of-vilazodone-and-vortioxetine/   I. One of psychiatry's many embarrassments is how many of our drugs get discovered by accident. They come from  random plants  or  shiny rocks  or  stuff Alexander Shulgin invented to get high . But every so often, somebody tries to do things the proper way. Go over decades of research into what makes psychiatric dr...

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/11/wordy-wernickes/   There are two major brain areas involved in language. To oversimplify, Wernicke's area in the superior temporal gyrus handles meaning; Broca's area in the inferior frontal gyrus handles structure and flow. If a stroke or other brain injury damages Broca's area but leaves Wernicke's area intact, you get language which is meaningful, but not v...

https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/13/proving-too-much/ The fallacy of  Proving Too Much  is when you challenge an argument because, in addition to proving its intended conclusion, it also proves obviously false conclusions. For example, if someone says "You can't be an atheist, because it's impossible to disprove the existence of God", you can answer "That argument proves too much. If we accept i...

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/10/the-obligatory-gpt-3-post/   I. I would be failing my brand if I didn't write something about GPT-3, but I'm not an expert and discussion is still in its early stages. Consider this a summary of some of the interesting questions I've heard posed elsewhere, especially comments by  gwern  and  nostalgebraist . Both of them are smart people who I broadly trust on...

A few years ago I surveyed nootropics users about their experiences with different substances and posted  the results  here. Since then lots of new nootropics have come out, so I'm doing it again. If you have nootropics experience, please take  The 2020 SSC Nootropics Survey . Expected completion time is ~15 minutes. Thanks!

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/04/problems-with-paywalls/   I. I hate paywalls on articles. Absolutely hate them. A standard pro-business argument: businesses can either make your life better (by providing deals you like) or keep your life the same (by providing deals you don't like, which you don't take). They can't really make your life worse. There are some exceptions, like if they outcompe...

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/01/book-review-origin-of-consciousness-in-the-breakdown-of-the-bicameral-mind/ I. Julian Jaynes'  The Origin Of Consciousness In The Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind  is a brilliant book, with only two minor flaws. First, that it purports to explains the origin of consciousness. And second, that it posits a breakdown of the bicameral mind. I think it's possible to...

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/05/28/bush-did-north-dakota/   Continuing  yesterday's discussion of fake news: Guess et al  says that 46% percent of Trump voters endorsed the Pizzagate conspiracy theory. Does this mean fake news is very powerful? We can compare this to belief in various other conspiracy theories, as measured by the  2016 Chapman University Survey Of American Fears . About 24% bel...

https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/24/guided-by-the-beauty-of-our-weapons/   [Content note: kind of talking around Trump supporters and similar groups as if they're not there.] I. Tim Harford writes  The Problem With Facts , which uses Brexit and Trump as jumping-off points to argue that people are mostly impervious to facts and resistant to logic: All this adds up to a depressing picture for thos...

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/05/28/creationism-unchallenged/   How much should responsible news organizations report on stupid things? If they don't report at all, the stupid things go unchallenged. But if they report too much, then they signal-boost the stupid thing and give it free publicity (eg Donald Trump). Also, people who mistrust the media might reflexively support the stupid thing just...

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/05/26/my-immortal-as-alchemical-allegory/   I. From Vox:  Solving The Mystery Of The Internet's Most Beloved And Notorious Fanfic . The fanfic is  "My Immortal" , a Harry Potter story so famous that it has its own Wikipedia page, and articles about it in  Slate ,  Buzzfeed , and  The Guardian . It's famous for being really,  really  bad. Spectacularly bad. Worse tha...

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/05/18/coronalinks-5-18-20-when-all-you-have-is-a-hammer-everything-starts-looking-like-a-dance/ It is the sixty-first day of shelter-in-place. Anti-lockdown protesters have stormed your state capitol, chanting Nazi, Communist, ISIS, and pro-Jeffrey Epstein slogans to help you figure out they're the bad guys. Inside, the Governor has just finished announcing his  37...

https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/09/16/cardiologists-and-chinese-robbers/   I. It takes a special sort of person to be a cardiologist. This is not always a good thing. You may have read about one or another of the "cardiologist caught falsifying test results and performing dangerous unnecessary surgeries to make more money" stories, but you might not have realized just how common it really is.  Mar...