Astral Codex Ten Podcast

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/05/12/studies-on-slack/   I. Imagine a distant planet full of eyeless animals. Evolving eyes is hard: they need to evolve Eye Part 1, then Eye Part 2, then Eye Part 3, in that order. Each of these requires a separate series of rare mutations. Here on Earth, scientists believe each of these mutations must have had  its own benefits  – in the land of the blind, the ma...

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/05/05/book-review-contest-call-for-entries/   Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to write a book review and send it to me at scott[at]slatestarcodex[dot]com before August 5th 2020. Interested? Here's the small print (written in normal-sized print, for your convenience): Pick a book, then write a review similar to my SSC book reviews ( examples ). I'm m...

https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/08/17/the-goddess-of-everything-else-2/ [Related to:  Specific vs. General Foragers vs. Farmers  and  War In Heaven , but especially  The Gift We Give To Tomorrow ] They say only Good can create, whereas Evil is sterile. Think Tolkien, where Morgoth can't make things himself, so perverts Elves to Orcs for his armies. But I think this gets it entirely backwards; it's...

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/04/29/predictions-for-2020/   At the beginning of every year, I  make predictions . At the end of every year, I  score them . So here are a hundred more for 2020. Rules: all predictions are about what will be true on January 1, 2021. Some predictions about my personal life, or that refer to the personal lives of other people, have been redacted to protect their priv...

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/04/27/give-yourself-gout-for-fame-and-profit/   I. Actually, no. You should not do this. Most of you were probably already not doing this, and I support your decision. But if you want a 2000 word essay on some reasons to consider this, and then some other reasons why those reasons are wrong, keep reading. Gout is a disease caused by high levels of uric acid in the b...

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/04/24/employer-provided-health-insurance-delenda-est/ My  last post  didn't really go to deep into why I dislike the way we do health insurance so much. Of course, there are the usual criticisms based on compassion and efficiency. Compassion because poor people can't get access to life-saving medical care. Efficiency because it's ruinously expensive compared to ever...

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/04/20/the-amish-health-care-system/   I. Amish people spend only a fifth as much as you do on health care, and their health is fine. What can we learn from them? A reminder: the Amish are a German religious sect who immigrated to colonial America. Most of them live apart from ordinary Americans (who they call "the English") in rural communities in Pennsylvania and O...

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/04/17/depression-the-olfactory-perspective/   Depressed people have worse sense of smell, and people with worse sense of smell are more likely to get depressed.  Kohli 2016  tries to figure out what's going on. They review six studies testing how well depressed people can smell things. Most use something called "The Sniffin' Sticks Test" (really!) where people are a...

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/04/14/a-failure-but-not-of-prediction/   I. Vox asks  What Went Wrong With The Media's Coronavirus Coverage?  They conclude that the media needs to be better at "not just saying what we do know, but what we don't know". This raises some important questions. Like: how much ink and paper is there in the world? Are we sure it's enough? But also: how do you become bette...

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/04/10/coronalinks-4-10-second-derivative/ The second derivative is the rate of growth of the rate of growth. Over the past few weeks, the second derivative of total coronavirus cases switched from positive (typical of exponential growth) to zero or negative (typical of linear or sublinear growth) in most European countries. Over the past few days, it switched from p...

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/04/08/2019-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 , and  2018 . And here are the predictions I made for 2019. Strikethrough'd are false. Intact are true. Italicized are getting thrown out because I can't decide if t...

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/04/07/never-tell-me-the-odds-ratio/ [Epistemic status: low confidence, someone tell me if the math is off. Title was stolen from an old Less Wrong post that seems to have disappeared – let me know if it's yours and I'll give you credit] I almost screwed up yesterday's journal club. The study reported an odds ratio of 2.9 for antidepressants. Even though I  knew   od...

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/04/06/sscjc-real-world-depression-measurement/ The largest non-pharma antidepressant trial ever conducted just confirmed what we already knew: scientists love naming things after pandas. We already had  PANDAS  (Pediatric Autoimmune Neuropsychiatric Disorders Associated with Streptococcus) and  PANDA  (Proton ANnhilator At DArmstadt). But the latest in this pandemic...

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/04/01/book-review-the-precipice/   I. It is a well known fact that the gods hate prophets. False prophets they punish only with ridicule. It's the true prophets who have to watch out. The gods find some way to make their words come true in the most ironic way possible, the one where knowing the future just makes things worse. The Oracle of Delphi told Croesus he wou...

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/31/ssc-journal-club-macintyre-on-cloth-masks/   Content warning : this is a complicated analysis of something people care about a lot right now. I'm not confident in my analysis, the post comes to no clear conclusion and there are no easy answers about how to proceed. If I see this on Twitter with some headline about it DESTROYING somebody, I am going to be so ma...

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/30/legal-systems-very-different-from-ours-because-i-just-made-them-up/   [with apologies to the real  Legal Systems Very Different From Ours . See also the  List Of Fictional Drugs Banned By The FDA ] I. The Clamzorians are animists. They believe every rock and tree and river has its own spirit. And those spirits are legal people. This on its own is not unusual –...

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/27/coronalinks-3-27-20/   The United States now has  more coronavirus cases than any other country, including China , marking a new stage in the epidemic. As before, feel free to treat this as an open thread for all coronavirus-related issues. Everything here is speculative and not intended as medical advice. Hammer and dance Most of the smart people I've been re...

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/23/face-masks-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/   There's been recent controversy about the use of face masks for protection against coronavirus. Mainstream sources, including  the CDC  and  most of the media  say masks are likely useless and not recommended. They've recently been challenged, for example by  Professor Zeynep Tufekci in the  New York Times  and b...

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/19/coronalinks-3-19-20/   As before, feel free to treat this as an open thread for all coronavirus-related issues. Everything here is speculative and not intended as medical advice. How many real cases? As of today, the US has almost 10,000 official cases. How many real cases per official case? One epidemiologist  says  8x. In  this US News article , scientists e...

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/17/book-review-hoover/ You probably remember Herbert Hoover as the guy who bungled the Great Depression. Maybe you shouldn't. Maybe you should remember him as a bold explorer looking for silver in the jungles of Burma. Or as the heroic defender of Tientsin during the Boxer Rebellion. Or as a dashing pirate-philanthropist, gallivanting around the world, saving mil...

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/10/for-then-against-high-saturated-fat-diets/ I. In the 1800s, the average US man  weighed about  155 lbs. Today, he weighs about 195. The change is even starker at the extremes. Someone at the 90th percentile of weight back then weighed about 185 lbs; today, he would weigh 320 lbs. Back then,  about 1%  of men were obese. Today, about 25% are. This puts a lot of...

https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/09/05/book-review-surfing-uncertainty/   [Related to:  It's Bayes All The Way Up ,  Why Are Transgender People Immune To Optical Illusions? ,  Can We Link Perception And Cognition? ] I. Sometimes I have the fantasy of being able to glut myself on Knowledge. I imagine meeting a time traveler from 2500, who takes pity on me and gives me a book from the future where al...

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/06/socratic-grilling/   Imagine an kid in school first hearing about germ theory. The conversation might go something like this: Teacher:  Many diseases like the common cold are spread by germs, when one infected person contacts another. Student:  But I got a cold a few weeks ago, and I never touch anyone except my family members. And none of them were sick. Teac...

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/02/coronavirus-links-speculation-open-thread/   [ Epistemic status:  Very weak – I'm still trying to figure all of this out. Some things in here will almost certainly be wrong. Please don't let this overrule what government agencies or your common sense are telling you. For a more careful guide to the coronavirus and what to do about it, see  here .] Prepping For...

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/02/27/book-review-the-seven-principles-for-making-marriage-work/   I. John Gottman is a legendary figure, and the legend is told best by John Gottman. He describes wading into the field of marital counseling as a young psychology postdoc, only to find it was a total mess: When we began our research, the wide range of marital therapies based on conflict resolution sh...