Astral Codex Ten Podcast

Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demands-for-rigor/   I. From  Identity, Personal Identity, and the Self  by John Perry: "There is something about practical things that knocks us off our philosophical high horses. Perhaps Heraclitus really thought he couldn't step in the same river twice. Perhaps he even received tenure for that contribution to philosophy. But suppose so...

Link:  https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/18/too-much-dark-money-in-almonds/ Everyone always talks about how much money there is in politics. This is the wrong framing. The right framing is  Ansolabehere et al's : why is there so  little  money in politics? But Ansolabehere focuses on elections, and the mystery is wider than that. Sure, during the 2018 election, candidates, parties, PACs, and outs...

Link:  https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/06/06/against-tulip-subsidies/ I. Imagine a little kingdom with a quaint custom: when a man likes a woman, he offers her a tulip; if she accepts, they are married shortly thereafter. A couple who marries sans tulip is considered to be living in sin; no other form of proposal is appropriate or accepted. One day, a Dutch trader comes to the little kingdom. He e...

Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/16/against-against-pseudoaddiction/   I. "Pseudoaddiction" is one of the standard beats every article on the opioid crisis has to hit. Pharma companies (the story goes) invented a concept called "pseudoaddiction", which looks exactly like addiction, except it means you just need to give the patient more drugs. Bizarrely gullible doctors went along with this...

Thanks to everyone who offered to host a meetup. Full list of cities, times, and places is below. If you're reading this, you're invited. Please don't feel like you "won't be welcome" just because you're new to the blog, demographically different from the average reader, or hate SSC and everything it stands for. You'll be fine! Some suggestions for organizers: 1. Bring a sign that says SSC MEETUP...

Link:  https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/11/lots-of-people-going-around-with-mild-hallucinations-all-the-time/ [ Related to:   Relaxed Beliefs Under Psychedelics And The Anarchic Brain ,  HPPD And The Specter Of Permanent Side Effects ] I. Hallucinogen persisting perceptual disorder is a condition where people who take psychedelics continue hallucinating indefinitely. Estimates of prevalence rang...

Link:  https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/10/ssc-journal-club-relaxed-beliefs-under-psychedelics-and-the-anarchic-brain/ Thanks to Sarah H. and the people at her house for help understanding this paper] The predictive coding theory argues that the brain uses Bayesian calculations to make sense of the noisy and complex world around it. It relies heavily on priors (assumptions about what the world m...

Link:  https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/09/partial-retraction-age-and-birth-order-effects/   On Less Wrong, Bucky  tries to replicate  my results on birth order and age gaps. Backing up: two years ago, I looked at SSC survey data and found that  firstborn children were very overrepresented . That result was replicated a few times, both in the SSC sample and in other samples of high-opennness STE...

Link:  https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/16/book-review-seeing-like-a-state/ I. Seeing Like A State  is the book G.K. Chesterton would have written if he had gone into economic history instead of literature. Since he didn't, James Scott had to write it a century later. The wait was worth it. Scott starts with the story of "scientific forestry" in 18th century Prussia. Enlightenment rationalists n...

Link:  https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/04/list-of-passages-i-highlighted-in-my-copy-of-ages-of-discord/   Turchin has some great stories about unity vs. polarization over time. For example in the 1940s, unity became such a "problem" that concerned citizens demanded more partisanship: Concerned about electoral torpor and meaningless political debate, the American Political Science Association in...

Link:  https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/02/book-review-ages-of-discord/   I. I recently reviewed  Secular Cycles , which presents a demographic-structural theory of the growth and decline of pre-industrial civilizations. When land is plentiful, population grows and the economy prospers. When land reaches its carrying capacity and income declines to subsistence, the area is at risk of famines, di...

Last autumn we organized meetups in 85 different cities (and one ship!) around the world. Some of the meetup groups stuck around or reported permanent spikes in membership, which sounds like a success, so let's do it again. For most cities:  If you're willing to host a meetup for your city, then decide on a place, date, and time, and post it in the comments here, along with an email address where...

Ten years ago, everyone was talking about superintelligence, the singularity, the robot apocalypse. What happened? I think the main answer is: the field matured. Why isn't everyone talking about nuclear security, biodefense, or counterterrorism? Because there are already competent institutions working on those problems, and people who are worried about them don't feel the need to take their case d...

  I admitted in  my last post on Reaction  that I devoted insufficient space to the question of why society does seem to be drifting gradually leftward. And I now realize that in order to critique the Reactionary worldview effectively we're going to have to go there. The easiest answer would be "because we retroactively define leftism as the direction that society went". But this is not true. Comm...

From the  New York Times :  Are We Living In A Computer Simulation? Let's Not Find Out . It lists the standard reasons for thinking we might be in a simulation, then brings up some proposals for testing the hypothesis (for example, the cosmic background radiation might look different in simulations and real universes). But it suggests that we not do that, because if we learn we're in a simulation,...

Or at least this is the theory proposed in  Brain Evolution Through The Lens Of Parasite Manipulation  by Marco del Giudice. The paper starts with an overview of parasite manipulation of host behavior. These are the stories you hear about  toxoplasma-infected rats seeking out cats  instead of running away from them, or  zombie ants climbing stalks of grass  so predators will eat them. The parasite...

Last year, a study came out showing that beef jerky and other cured meats, could trigger mania in bipolar disorder ( paper ,  popular article ). It was a pretty big deal, getting coverage in the national press and affecting the advice psychiatrists (including me) gave their patients. The study was pretty simple: psychiatrists at a mental hospital in Baltimore asked new patients if they had ever ea...

There is a tide in the affairs of men. It cycles with a period of about three hundred years. During its flood, farms and businesses prosper, and great empires enjoy golden ages. During its ebb, war and famine stalk the land, and states collapse into barbarism.   Chinese population over time   At least this is the thesis of Peter Turchin and Sergey Nefedov, authors of  Secular Cycles . They start o...

"I don't practice what I preach because I'm not the kind of person I'm preaching to." — J. R. "Bob" Dobbs I. I read Atlas Shrugged probably about a decade ago, and felt turned off by its promotion of selfishness as a moral ideal. I thought that was  basically  just being a jerk. After all, if there's one thing the world doesn't need (I thought) it's more selfishness. Then I talked to a friend who...

There's a tradition on Reddit that when somebody repeats some cliche in a tone that makes it sound like she believes she is bringing some brilliant and heretical insight – like "I know I'm going to get downvoted for this, but believe we should have  less  government waste!" – people respond "SO BRAVE" in the comments. That's what I mean by bravery debates. Discussions over who is bravely holding a...

Thanks to everyone who commented on  Against Against Billionaire Philanthropy . For whatever reason, the comments there were exceptionally good. In particular, I'm happy that our usually-quiet leftists finally showed up with some strong (and interesting) pushback. I usually highlight good comments with short responses, but it was hard for me to avoid debating some of these. I realize that's compli...

I want to signal-boost Tumblr user  squareallworthy 's analysis of various UBI plans: 1.  Jensen et al's plan 2.  Healy et al's plan 3.  Andrew Yang's plan 4.  Torry's plan 5.  Sheahen's plan 6.  Dolan's plan 7.  Stern and Murray's plans 8.  Santens' plan 8½.  Varoufakis and Reich's plan 9.  Yang's plan, redux He finds that most of them fail on basic math – they rely on funding schemes that wouldn...

[Conflict of interest notice: I've volunteered for both private and public charities, but more often private. I received a small amount of money for work done for a private charity ten years ago. Some of the private charities have been partially funded by billionaires.] From Vox:  The Case Against Billionaire Philanthropy . It joins  The Guardian ,  Truthout ,  Dissent Magazine ,  CityLab , and a...

[ Trigger warning: Death, pain, suffering, sadness ] I. Some people, having completed the traditional forms of empty speculation – "What do you want to be when you grow up?", "If you could bang any celebrity who would it be?" – turn to "What will you say as your last words?" Sounds like a valid question. You can go out with a wisecrack, like Oscar Wilde ("Either this wallpaper goes or I do"). Or w...

I. "Silliest internet atheist argument" is a hotly contested title, but I have a special place in my heart for the people who occasionally try to prove Biblical fallibility by pointing out whales are not a type of fish. (this is going to end up being a metaphor for something, so bear with me) The argument goes like this. Jonah got swallowed by a whale. But the Bible says Jonah got swallowed by a b...