Astral Codex Ten Podcast

[self plagiarism notice: this is mostly copied from last year's contest announcement] 1. Announcing the second annual Adversarial Collaboration Contest An adversarial collaboration is an effort by two people with opposing opinions on a topic to collaborate on a summary of the evidence. Just as we hope that a trial with both prosecutor and defense will give the jury a balanced view of the evidence...

Ken Kesey, graduating college in Oregon with several wrestling championships and a creative writing degree, made a classic mistake: he moved to the San Francisco Bay Area to find himself. He rented a house in Palo Alto (this was the 1950s, when normal people could have houses in Palo Alto) and settled down to write the Great American Novel. To make ends meet, he got a job as an orderly at the loca...

The gabapentinoids are a class of drugs vaguely resembling the neurotransmitter GABA. Although they were developed to imitate GABA's action, later research discovered they acted on a different target, the A2D subunit of calcium channels. Two gabapentinoids are approved by the FDA: gabapentin (Neurontin®) and pregabalin (Lyrica®). Gabapentin  has been generic since 2004. It's commonly used for seiz...

"You say it's important to overcome biases. So isn't it hypocritical that you're not trying to overcome whichever bias prevents you from realizing you're wrong and I'm right?" — everybody Correcting for bias is important. Learning about specific biases, like  confirmation bias  or  hindsight bias , can be helpful. But bias arguments – "People probably only believe X because of their bias, so we sh...

[Related to:  The Whole City Is Center ] I. I got into  an argument  recently with somebody who used the word "lie" to refer to a person honestly reporting their unconsciously biased beliefs – her example was a tech entrepreneur so caught up in an atmosphere of hype that he makes absurdly optimistic predictions. I promised a post explaining why I don't like that use of "lie". This is that post. A...

I. In the old days, you had your Culture, and that was that. Your Culture told you lots of stuff about what you were and weren't allowed to do, and by golly you listened. Your Culture told you to work the job prescribed to you by your caste and gender, to marry who your parents told you to marry or at  least  someone of the opposite sex, to worship at the proper temples and the proper times, and t...

Along with more specific questions, I asked people who took  the SSC survey  to rate their experience with the mental health system on a 1 – 10 scale.  About 5,000 people answered. On average, they rated their experience with psychotherapy a 5.7, and their experience with medication also 5.7. This is more optimistic than a lot of the horror stories you hear would suggest. A lot of the horror stori...

I already  started  analyzing the  SSC survey  data on fetishes, but I wanted to move on to look at dominance, submission, sadism, and masochism. Why might this be interesting? For one thing, some people have fetishes for things that seem, well…bad. Getting hurt. Letting other people control and abuse them. As if they have a drive toward weakness and unhappiness. This is kind of reminiscent of the...

I. I went to Antigua Guatemala in April. Their claim to fame is the world's biggest Easter celebration. I wasn't even there for Easter. I was three weeks early. But already the roads were choked with pre-parties, practice parades, and centurion cosplayers.   I couldn't go out and grab dinner at 9 PM because all the streets looked like this   Day. Night. The hours of the morning when tourists are t...

The saying goes: "Never offend people with style when you can offend them with substance". This is the same idea as  "weirdness points" : you can only bother people a certain amount before they go away. So if you have something important to bother them about, don't also bother them in random ways that don't matter. In writing about science or rationality, you already risk sounding too nerdy or out...

1. According to the survey, only 13% of SSC commenters identify as rationalists. Almost none of the rationalists I know IRL comment on SSC. Saying "rationalist community" when you mean "SSC comments section" or vice versa will leave everybody pretty confused. 2. Not every blog by a Christian is "a Christian blog", and not every blog by a rationalist is "a rationalist blog". I would hope blogs by C...

A few years ago, I wrote the online serial novel  Unsong . Someday I want to get it published. But I want to fix it up before I try. I know publishers will have their own editors and their own demands. But I want something I'm happy with before I give it to someone else to tear apart. This post is to solicit feedback on what needs improvement and how it could be improved. I'm going to list some of...

I. Tyler Cowen  writes about cost disease . I'd previously heard the term used to refer only to a specific theory of why costs are increasing, involving labor becoming more efficient in some areas than others. Cowen seems to use it indiscriminately to refer to increasing costs in general – which I guess is fine, goodness knows we need a word for that. Cowen assumes his readers already understand t...

[ Epistemic status:  Somewhat confident in the medical analysis, a little out of my depth discussing the statistics] For years, we've been warning patients that their sleeping pills could kill them. How?  In every way possible.  People taking sleeping pills not only have higher all-cause mortality. They have higher mortality from every individual cause studied. Death from cancer? Higher. Death fro...

There's a silly subreddit called  r/totallynotrobots  where people pretend to be badly-disguised robots. They post cat pictures with captions like "SINCE I AM A HUMAN, THIS SMALL FELINE GENERATES POSITIVE EMOTIONS IN MY CARBON-BASED BRAIN" or something like that. There's another subreddit called  r/SubSimulatorGPT2 , that trains GPT-2 on various subreddits to create imitations of their output. Now...

I. Did cultural evolution create sexual purity taboos to prevent the spread of STIs? A few weeks ago, I wrote a post assuming this was obviously true; after getting some pushback, so I want to look into it in more depth. STIs were a bigger problem in the past than most people think. Things got especially bad after the rise of syphilis: British studies find an urban syphilis rate of 8-10% from  the...

Philip Morris is  pivoting to smoke-free cigarettes , because "society expects us to act responsibly, and we are doing just that by designing a smoke-free future". Also, KFC  "promises not to let vegans down"  with their new meatless chicken-like nuggets. They'll have to compete with factory-farming mega-conglomerate Tyson Foods, who are coming out with  their own vegetarian chicken option . Clear...

Last week  I reviewed  Alex Tabarrok and Eric Helland's  Why Are The Prices So D*mn High? . On Marginal Revolution, Tabarrok  wrote : SSC does have some lingering doubts and points to certain areas where the data isn't clear and where we could have been clearer. I think this is inevitable. A lot has happened in the post World War II era. In dealing with very long run trends so much else is going o...

I. Recently spotted on Tumblr: "This is going to be an unpopular opinion but I see stuff about ppl not wanting to reblog ferguson things and awareness around the world because they do not want negativity in their life plus it will cause them to have anxiety. They come to tumblr to escape n feel happy which think is a load of bull. There r literally ppl dying who live with the fear of going outside...

Peter Gerdes  says: As the examples of the Nicaraguan deaf children left on their own to develop their own language demonstrates (as do other examples) we do create languages very very quickly in a social environment. Creating conlangs is hard not because creating language is fundamentally hard but because we are bad at top down modelling of processes that are the result of a bunch of tiny modific...

Why have prices for services like health care and education risen so much over the past fifty years? When I  looked into this  in 2017, I couldn't find a conclusive answer. Economists Alex Tabarrok and Eric Helland have written a new book on the topic,  Why Are The Prices So D*mn High?  (link goes to free pdf copy, or you can read Tabarrok's summary on  Marginal Revolution ). They do find a conclu...

[Previously in sequence:  Epistemic Learned Helplessness ,  Book Review: The Secret Of Our Success ,  List Of Passages I Highlighted In My Copy Of The Secret Of Our Success ,  Asymmetric Weapons Gone Bad ] When I wrote  Reactionary Philosophy In An Enormous Planet-Sized Nutshell , my attempt to explain reactionary philosophy, many people complained that it missed the key insight. At the time I had...

[Previously in sequence:  Epistemic Learned Helplessness ,  Book Review: The Secret Of Our Success ,  List Of Passages I Highlighted In My Copy Of The Secret Of Our Success . Deleted a controversial section which I still think was probably correct, but which given the number of objections wasn't provably correct enough to be worth including. I might write another post giving my evidence for it lat...

[Previously in sequence:  Epistemic Learned Helplessness ,  Book Review: The Secret Of Our Success ] A rare example of cultural evolution in action: Throughout the Highlands of New Guinea, a group's ability to raise large numbers of pigs is directly related to its economic and social success in competition with other regional groups. The ceremonial exchange of pigs allows groups to forge alliances...

[Previously in sequence:  Epistemic Learned Helplessness ] I. "Culture is the secret of humanity's success" sounds like the most vapid possible thesis.  The Secret Of Our Success by anthropologist Joseph Henrich manages to be an amazing book anyway. Henrich wants to debunk (or at least clarify) a popular view where humans succeeded because of our raw intelligence. In this view, we are smart enough...