Astral Codex Ten Podcast

There's some literature suggesting that people are more careful when they think in probabilities. If you ask them for a definite answer, they might give it and sound very confident, but if you encourage them to think probabilistically they might admit there's more uncertainty. I wanted to look into this in the context of the recent Supreme Court confirmation hearings, so I asked readers to estimat...

Thanks to the 129 people who tried altering their nighttime carbon dioxide levels after  my post on this , and who reported back to me. There was no difference between people who pre-registered for the study and people who didn't, on any variable, so I ignored pre-registration. 126 people reported one intervention they performed. The most common was sleeping with a window open:  People generally r...

[Content note: attempt to consider real people's real problems using angel-on-pinhead impractical reasoning and ideas] I. Imagine the state of nature, except for some reason there are cities. Some people in these cities play the drums all night and keep everyone else awake. The sleep-deprived people get together and agree this is unacceptable. They embark on a long journey to the wilderness where...

Quixote  writes: It's odd to me how bad San Francisco is, when other large cities like New York or Paris are basically utopias. But just a few comments down,  Lasagna  says: I despise (I'm choosing that word carefully) [New York City]. I still commute there every day, and I can't stand it – the broken infrastructure, the horrible smells, the $14 for a yogurt and coffee in the morning, the massive...

[Epistemic status: very unsure. I sympathize with many YIMBY ideas and might support them on net; this post is me exaggerating the NIMBY parts of my brain to a degree I'm not sure I honestly support. This focuses on San Francisco to make it easier, but other cities exist too. Thanks to  Nintil  for some of the bright-line argument in part four. Conflict of interest notice: I live in a lower-densit...

Grand Prize ($1000):   Does The Education System Adequately Serve Advanced Students? Editor's Choice ($500):   Should Transgender Children Transition? Honorable Mentions ($250):   Should Childhood Vaccination Be Mandatory? ,  Are Islam And Liberal Democracy Compatible? I'm sorry for jerking the number and value of the prizes around so many times, but I wanted to balance my preferences, the contest...

A neglected gem from Less Wrong:  Why The Tails Come Apart , by commenter Thrasymachus. It explains why even when two variables are strongly correlated, the most extreme value of one will rarely be the most extreme value of the other. Take these graphs of grip strength vs. arm strength and reading score vs. writing score:     In a pinch, the second graph can also serve as a rough map of Afghanista...

A prodrome is an early stage of a condition that might have different symptoms than the full-blown version. In psychiatry, the prodrome of schizophrenia is the few-months-to-few-years period when a person is just starting to develop schizophrenia and is acting a little bit strange while still having some insight into their condition. There's a big push to treat schizophrenia prodrome as a critical...

I. Writing a review of  The Black Swan  is a nerve-wracking experience. First, because it forces me to reveal I am about ten years behind the times in my reading habits. But second, because its author Nassim Nicholas Taleb is infamous for angry Twitter rants against people who misunderstand his work. Much better men than I have read and reviewed  Black Swan , messed it up, and ended up the victim...

The collective intellect is change-blind. Knowledge gained seems so natural that we forget what it was like not to have it. Piaget says children gain long-term memory at age 4 and don't learn abstract thought until ten; do you remember what it was like not to have abstract thought? We underestimate our intellectual progress because every every sliver of knowledge acquired gets backpropagated unbou...

When you first take the Artifact, you will see a vision of ALPHANION, Demon-Sultan of the Domain of Order, who appears as a grid of spheres connected by luminous lines. Alphanion will urge you to use the Artifact to enforce cosmic order, law at its most fundamental. He will show you visions of all the most brutal and sadistic crimes of history, of all the wars caused by nations that could not live...

This is the bi-weekly visible open thread (there are also hidden open threads twice a week you can reach through the Open Thread tab on the top of the page). Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. You can also talk at the  SSC subreddit  or the  SSC Discord server  – and also check out the  SSC Podcast . Also: 1.  Comment of the week is  Stefferi on  the circumstances leadin...

[This is an entry to the  Adversarial Collaboration Contest  by flame7926 and a_reader.] [ Content note: suicide, depression, transphobia, self-harm ] Transgender childhood transition is a hotly debated topic, with extensive media coverage devoted to it in recent years. (pro:  BBC ,  The Lancet  and  The New York Times ; contra:  The Cut , New Statesman  and  The Globe and Mail ).We see plenty of...

This is an entry to the  Adversarial Collaboration Contest  by Mark Davis and Mark Webb, who sent the following introduction along with their entry: Mark Davis is a naturopathic doctor. Naturopathic medicine is a century-old profession in the United States, but it's small, with fewer than 10,000 NDs licensed to practice naturopathic medicine in the US in 2018. The profession has been historically...

[This is an entry to the  Adversarial Collaboration Contest  by John Buridan and Christian Flanery.] Matter: To what extent does liberalism and democracy obtain in Islamic countries. Whether Islam consistently poses political opposition to liberalism and democracy. Two simple narratives have split the western world's perspective on Islam. These two narratives do not exhaust the  spectrum of opinio...

[This is an entry to the  Adversarial Collaboration Contest  by TracingWoodgrains and Michael Pershan (a k-12 math teacher), on advanced students in the education system] "What do America's brightest students hear? Every year, across the nation, students who should be moved ahead at their natural pace of learning are told to stay put. Thousands of students are told to lower their expectations, and...

This week I'll be presenting entries from the 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 hear the strongest arguments and counterarguments for both sides – like hearing a debate be...

Commenters on  yesterday's post  brought up an important point: sometimes bureaucracies aren't just inefficient information gathering and processing mechanisms. Sometimes they're the active ingredient in a plan. Imagine there's a new $10,000 medication. Insurance companies are legally required to give it to people who really need it and would die without it. But they don't want somebody who's only...

A surprisingly common part of my life: a patient asks me for a doctor's note for back pain or something. Usually it's a situation like their work chair hurts their back, and their work won't let them bring in their own chair unless they have a doctor's note saying they have back pain, and they have no doctor except me, and their insurance wants them to embark on a three month odyssey of phone call...

Say a prayer for John McCain Who passes from his earthly pain His eyes are shut upon his brow He warmongers to angels now Beyond the sky, where sorrows cease He rails against the Prince of Peace. The Holy Spirit, full of love McCain denounces as "a dove" All of the weak and the cowardly policies Heaven pursues that let sin subsist still Six thousand years of detente with the darkness In hippie cli...

[Content note: reading this post might cause feelings of suffocation or provoke panic attacks in susceptible individuals. Epistemic status is very speculative.] Last month I moved into a small cottage behind a big group house. The cottage is lovely. The big group house is also lovely, but the people in it started suffering mysterious minor ailments. Headaches, fatigue, poor sleep – all the things...

Effective altruism ("EA") is a movement dedicated to redirecting charity-related resources to the most important and successful charities. In practice this involves a lot of research into how important various problems are, and how well various charities work. Some of this research is done by well-funded official institutions. Other research, maybe exploring more unlikely scenarios or starting fro...

Because I hate you, I included this question on the SSC survey: It's a weird trick question, but I would say B is right. Imagine converting "(" to X and ")" to Y. Then the first answer is XYXY, and the second answer is YXXY. I suppose you could group the parentheses in pairs, in which case the answer would be "both", but in practice few people wanted to say that. Of the 6,000 answers I received, m...

Traffic to this blog is  declining . I need to act decisively to draw people back. Write something so interesting it can't  help  but go viral. I'm going to write about…negative results from the perception questions on last year's survey. The last SSC survey had a lot of optical illusions and visual riddles. I had hoped to expand on some of the work in  Why Are Transgender People Immune To Optical...

Introduction ADHD is typically considered a disorder of attention and focus. There are various other traits everyone knows are linked – officially, hyperactivity and "behavior problems"; unofficially, anger and thrill-seeking – but most people consider these to be some sort of effect of the general attention deficit. Dr. William Dodson pushes a different conception, where one of the key features o...