Astral Codex Ten Podcast

[ Related to:   Book Review: Albion's Seed ] [ Epistemic status:  Not too serious] I realize I've been confusing everyone with my use of the word "Puritan". When I say "That guy is so Puritan!" people object "But he's not religious!" or "He doesn't hate fun!" I don't know what the real word for the category I'm calling "Puritan" is. Words like "Yankee", "Boston Brahmin", or "Transcendentalist" are...

I. Albion's Seed  by David Fischer is a history professor's nine-hundred-page treatise on patterns of early immigration to the Eastern United States. It's not light reading and not the sort of thing I would normally pick up. I read it anyway on the advice of people who kept telling me it explains everything about America. And it sort of does. In school, we tend to think of the original American co...

Last week  the FDA approved esketamine  for treatment-resistant depression. Let's review  how the pharmaceutical industry works: a company discovers and patents a potentially exciting new drug. They spend tens of millions of dollars proving safety and efficacy to the FDA. The FDA rewards them with a 10ish year monopoly on the drug, during which they can charge whatever ridiculous price they want....

[Title from  this unrelated story  or  this unrelated essay ] Last week I  wrote about  how conspiracy theories spread so much faster on Facebook than debunkings of those same theories. A few commenters chimed in to say that of  course  this was true, the conspiracy theories had evolved into an almost-perfect form for exploiting cognitive biases and the pressures of social media. Debunkings and tr...

[With apologies to Putnam, Pope, and all of you] Two children are reading a text  written by an AI : The hobbits splashed water in each other's faces until they were both sopping wet One child says to the other "Wow! After reading some text, the AI understands what water is!" The second child says "It doesn't  really  understand." The first child says "Sure it does! It understands that water is th...

The Verge  writes  a story (an exposé?) on the Facebook-moderation industry. It goes through the standard ways it maltreats its employees: low pay, limited bathroom breaks, awful managers – and then into some not-so-standard ones. Mods have to read (or watch) all of the worst things people post on Facebook, from conspiracy theories to snuff videos. The story talks about the psychological trauma th...

Imagine a black box which, when you pressed a button, would generate a scientific hypothesis. 50% of its hypotheses are false; 50% are true hypotheses as game-changing and elegant as relativity. Even despite the error rate, it's easy to see this box would quickly surpass space capsules, da Vinci paintings, and printer ink cartridges to become the most valuable object in the world. Scientific progr...

[Epistemic status: I am basing this on widely-accepted published research, but I can't guarantee I've understood the research right or managed to emphasize/believe the right people. Some light editing to bring in important points people raised in the comments.] You all know this graph:     Median wages tracked productivity until 1973, then stopped. Productivity kept growing, but wages remained sta...

[This post is having major technical issues. Some comments may not be appearing. If you can't comment, please say so on the subreddit.] I. I Come To Praise Caesar, Not To Bury Him Several years ago, an SSC reader made an r/slatestarcodex subreddit for discussion of blog posts here and related topics. As per the  usual process , the topics that generated the strongest emotions – Trump, gender, race...

I was going back over  yesterday's post , and something sounded familiar about this paragraph: A very careless plagiarist takes someone else's work and copies it verbatim: "The mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell". A more careful plagiarist takes the work and changes a few words around: "The mitochondria is the energy dynamo of the cell". A plagiarist who is more careful still changes the e...

A machine learning researcher writes me in response to  yesterday's post , saying: I still think GPT-2 is a brute-force statistical pattern matcher which blends up the internet and gives you back a slightly unappetizing slurry of it when asked. I resisted the urge to answer "Yeah, well, your  mom  is a brute-force statistical pattern matcher which blends up the internet and gives you back a slight...

Last week OpenAI announced  its latest breakthrough . GPT-2 is a language model that can write essays to a prompt, answer questions, and summarize longer works.  For example  (bold prompt is human-written, all other text is the machine-generated response): Prompt: For today's homework assignment, please describe the reasons for the US Civil War. It is easy to identify why the Civil War happened, b...

I. Chefs. Hundreds of them. Tall chefs, short chefs, black chefs, white chefs. I pushed forward through them, like an explorer hacking away at undergrowth. They muttered curses at me, but I was stronger than they were. I came to a door. I opened it. Sweet empty space. I shut the door behind me, sat down in the chair. "Hello," I said. "Detective Paul Eastman, pleased to make your acquaintance." "Do...

SSRIs are the most widely used class of psychiatric medications, helpful for depression, anxiety, OCD, panic, PTSD, anger, and certain personality disorders (Why should the same drug treat all these things? Great question!) They've been pretty thoroughly studied, but there's still a lot we don't understand about them. The SSC Survey is less rigorous than most existing studies, but its many questio...

I. I don't know much about gay history, but the heavily mythicized version of it I heard goes like this: At first open homosexuality was totally taboo. A few groups of respectable people with hilariously upper-class names like  The Mattachine Society  and  The Daughters Of Bilitis  quietly tried to influence elites in favor of more tolerance, using whatever backchannels elites use to influence one...

I. Zero To One  might be the first best-selling business book based on a Tumblr. Stanford student Blake Masters took Peter Thiel's class on startups. He posted his notes on Tumblr after each lecture. They became a minor sensation. Thiel asked if he wanted to make them into a book together. He did. The title comes from Thiel's metaphor that ordinary businessmen like restaurant owners take a product...

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 2019. Rules: all predictions about what will be true on January 1, 2020. Any that involve polling will be settled by the top poll or average of polls on Real Clear Politics on that day. Most predictions about my personal life, or that refer to the personal lives of other p...

Lots of people have asked me to recommend them a psychiatrist or therapist. I've done a terrible job responding: it's a conflict of interest to recommend my own group, and I don't know many people outside of it. So now I've put together a list (by which I mostly mean blatantly copied a similar list made by fellow community member Anisha M) of mental health professionals whom members of the rationa...

At the beginning of every year, I make predictions. At the end of every year, I score them. Here are  2014 ,  2015 ,  2016 , and  2017 . And here are the predictions I made for 2018. Strikethrough'd are false. Intact are true. Italicized are getting thrown out because I can't decide if they're true or not. Please don't complain that 50% predictions don't mean anything; I know this is true but ther...

Thanks to everyone who commented on  the review of  The Structure Of Scientific Revolutions . From  David Chapman : It's important to remember that Kuhn wrote this seven decades ago. It was one of the most influential books of pop philosophy in the 1960s-70s, influencing the counterculture of the time, so it is very much "in the water supply." Much of what's right in it is now obvious; what's wron...

In 2010, Ben Tilly of the blog Random Observations wrote  Analysis Vs. Algebra Predicts Eating Corn? , which said: I like learning about odd connections between disparate things. This probably is the oddest example that I know. Broadly speaking, mathematicians can be divided into those who like analysis, and those who like algebra. The distinction between the two types runs throughout math. Even t...

[Content warning: References to anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic canards] I feel deep affection for Gary Allen's  None Dare Call It Conspiracy , a bizarre screed about the Federal Reserve/Communist/Trilateral Commission plot for a one world government. From its ridiculous title to its even-more-ridiculous  cover image , this is a book that accepts its own nature. In the Aristotelian framework, where...

Thanks to the 8,171 people who took the 2019 Slate Star Codex survey. Some of the links below will say 13,171 people took the survey, but that's a bug – sometimes Google just adds 5,000 to things. You can: –  See the questions for the SSC survey. –  See the results from the SSC survey. I'll be publishing more complicated analyses over the course of the next year, hopefully starting later this week...

Related to:   Book Review: The Structure Of Scientific Revolutions Every good conspiracy theorist needs their own Grand Unified Chart; I'm a particular fan of  this one . So far, my own Grand Unified Chart looks like this: All of these are examples of interpreting the world through a combination of pre-existing ideas what the world should be like (first column), plus actually experiencing the worl...

When I hear scientists talk about Thomas Kuhn, he sounds very reasonable. Scientists have theories that guide their work. Sometimes they run into things their theories can't explain. Then some genius develops a new theory, and scientists are guided by that one. So the cycle repeats, knowledge gained with every step. When I hear philosophers talk about Thomas Kuhn, he sounds like a madman. There is...