Astral Codex Ten Podcast

Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/12/17/acc-should-we-colonize-space-to-mitigate-x-risk/ [This is an entry to the  2019 Adversarial Collaboration Contest  by Nick D and Rob S.] I. Nick Bostrom defines existential risks (or X-risks) as "[risks] where an adverse outcome would either annihilate Earth-originating intelligent life or permanently and drastically curtail its potential." Essentially t...

Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/12/12/acc-does-calorie-restriction-slow-aging/   [This is an entry to the  2019 Adversarial Collaboration Contest  by the delightfully-pseudonymous Adrian Liberman and Calvin Reese.] About the Authors: Adrian Liberman is currently a PhD student in biology at a university in the mid-Atlantic. He previously worked at the National Institute of Aging and remains a...

Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/12/11/acc-is-eating-meat-a-net-harm/   [This is an entry to the  2019 Adversarial Collaboration Contest  by David G and Froolow. Please also note my  correction to yesterday's entry .] Introduction Many people around the world have strong convictions about eating animals. These are often based on vague intuitions which results in unproductive swapping of opini...

Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/12/10/acc-is-infant-circumcision-ethical/   [This is an entry to the  2019 Adversarial Collaboration Contest  by Joel P and Missingno] "They practise circumcision for cleanliness' sake; for they would rather be clean than more becoming."  – Herodotus, The Histories – 2.37  The debate over circumcision in the Western world today is surprisingly similar to the c...

Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/12/09/2019-adversarial-collaboration-entries/   Thanks to everyone who sent in entries for the 2019 adversarial collaboration contest. Remember, an adversarial collaboration is where two people with opposite views on a controversial issue work together to present a unified summary of the evidence and its implications. In theory it's a good way to make sure you...

Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/12/04/symptom-condition-cause/   On my recent post on autism, several people chimed in to say that "autism" wasn't a unitary/homogenous category. It probably lumps together many different conditions with many different causes. It's useless to speculate on the characteristics of "autism" until it can be separated out further. I get this every time I talk about...

Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/28/ssc-meetups-everywhere-retrospective/   Slate Star Codex has regular weekly-to-monthly meetups in a bunch of cities around the world. Earlier this autumn, we held a Meetups Everywhere event , hoping to promote and expand these groups. We collected information on existing meetups, got volunteers to create new meetups in cities that didn't have them alread...

Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/26/mental-mountains/   I. Kaj Sotala has  an outstanding review  of  Unlocking The Emotional Brain ; I read the book, and Kaj's review is better. He begins: UtEB's premise is that much if not most of our behavior is driven by emotional learning. Intense emotions generate unconscious predictive models of how the world functions and what caused those emotions...

Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/20/book-review-all-therapy-books/   I. All therapy books start with a claim that their form of therapy will change everything. Previous forms of therapy have required years or even decades to produce ambiguous results.  Our  form of therapy can produce total transformation in five to ten sessions! Previous forms of therapy have only helped ameliorate the st...

Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/18/more-intuition-building-on-non-empirical-science-three-stories/ [Followup to:  Building Intuitions On Non-Empirical Arguments In Science ] I. In your travels, you arrive at a distant land. The chemists there believe that when you mix an acid and a base, you get salt and water,  and  a star beyond the cosmological event horizon goes supernova. This is tau...

Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/13/autism-and-intelligence-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/ [Thanks to Marco DG for proofreading and offering suggestions] I. Several studies have shown a genetic link between autism and intelligence; genes that contribute to autism risk also contribute to high IQ. But studies show autistic people generally have lower intelligence than neurotypical contro...

Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/15/fish-now-by-prescription/   I. LOVAZA™®© (ask your doctor if LOVAZA™®© is right for you) is an excellent medication. It is extraordinarily safe. It is moderately effective at its legal indication of lowering levels of certain fats in the bloodstream. It has moderately good evidence for having other beneficial effects as well, including treating certain p...

Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/09/28/sleep-now-by-prescription/   Ramelteon isn't a bad drug. It's just that its very existence stands as a condemnation of the entire medical system. All sleep medications have to straddle a very fine line between "idiotically dangerous" and "laughably ineffective", and Ramelteon manages better than most. It  outperforms placebo , it's not addictive, it won'...

Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/12/book-review-the-body-keeps-the-score/   I. The Body Keeps The Score  is a book about post-traumatic stress disorder. The author, Bessel van der Kolk, helped discover the condition and lobby for its inclusion in the DSM, and the brief forays into that history are the best part of the book. Like so many things, PTSD feels self-evident once you know about i...

Link:  https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/06/building-intuitions-on-non-empirical-arguments-in-science/   Aeon:  Post-Empirical Science Is An Oxymoron And It is Dangerous : There is no agreed criterion to distinguish science from pseudoscience, or just plain ordinary bullshit, opening the door to all manner of metaphysics masquerading as science. This is 'post-empirical' science, where truth no lo...

Link:  https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/04/samsara/   I. The man standing outside my front door was carrying a clipboard and wearing a golden robe. "Not interested," I said, preparing to slam the door in his face. "Please," said the acolyte. Before I could say no he'd jammed a wad of $100 bills into my hand. "If this will buy a few moments of your time." It did, if only because I stood too flabb...

Link:  https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/09/12/the-life-cycle-of-medical-ideas/   I. About five years ago, an Italian surgeon with the unlikely name of Dr. Zamboni posited the theory that multiple sclerosis was caused by blockages in venous return from the brain causing various complicated downstream effects which eventually led to the immune system attacking myelinated cells. The guy was a good sur...

Link:  https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/30/new-atheism-the-godlessness-that-failed/   Thucydides  predicted  that future generations would underestimate the power of Sparta. It built no great temples, left no magnificent ruins. Absent any tangible signs of the sway it once held, memories of its past importance would sound like ridiculous exaggerations. This is how I feel about New Atheism. If I...

Link:  https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/28/financial-incentives-are-weaker-than-social-incentives-but-very-important-anyway/   NYT:  Economic Incentives Don't Always Do What We Want Them To  (h/t MR). For the first time in history, the title actually understates the article, which argues that incentives can be surprisingly useless: Economists have somehow managed to hide in plain sight an enormo...

Link:  https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/24/highlights-from-the-comments-on-pnse/   ( original post ) Alex M  writes: I think one of the main problems with the current state of rationalism (and many other fake "sciences" such as economics or sociology) is fuzzy thinking and lack of falsifiable empirical testing. So somebody claims to be "enlightened." Does a smart person take that at face value?...

Link:  https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/23/indian-economic-reform-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/   From a recent  Charter Cities Institute  report: From India's independence from the British Raj in 1947 to the early 1990s, the country's economic policy was largely socialist. In the 1980s some early steps were taken to open the Indian economy to increased trade, reduce controls over industry,...

Link:  https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/21/the-pnse-paper/   I've mentioned this a few times, but it's worth going over in detail. The full title is  Clusters Of Individual Experiences Form A Continuum Of Persistent Non-Symbolic Experiences In Adults  by Jeffery Martin, with "persistent non-symbolic experience" (PNSE) as a scientific-sounding culturally-neutral code word for "enlightenment". Mar...

Link:  https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/16/is-enlightenment-compatible-with-sex-scandals/   Last year I reviewed  The Mind Illuminated , a meditation guide by Buddhist teacher Upasaka Culadasa. Last month, Culudasa's Buddhist community accused him of cheating on his wife with prostitutes for many years. Culadasa doesn't seem to agree with the exact details of the accusations, but he also doesn't...

Link:  https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/28/the-control-group-is-out-of-control/   I. Allan Crossman calls parapsychology  the control group for science . That is, in let's say a drug testing experiment, you give some people the drug and they recover. That doesn't tell you much until you give some other people a placebo drug you  know  doesn't work – but which they themselves believe in – and see...

Link:  https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/14/book-review-against-the-grain/   Someone on SSC Discord summarized James Scott's  Against The Grain  as "basically 300 pages of calling wheat a fascist". I have only two qualms with this description. First, the book is more like 250 pages; the rest is just endnotes. Second, "fascist" isn't  quite  the right aspersion to use here. Against The Grain  shou...