Astral Codex Ten Podcast

Thanks to everyone who offered to host a meetup. We're scheduled for meetups in 77 cities (and one ship!) in 23 countries, soundly beating last year's list. Full list of cities, times, and places is below. Most people who are on the fence have said they've enjoyed going. Most people who felt intimidated about going have said they've enjoyed going. Most people who felt they were too different from...

STUDY: Trigger Warnings Are Harmful To College Students  says the Daily Wire, describing a study whose participants' average age was 37 and which did not measure harm. You can find the study involved  here . A group of Harvard scientists asked 370 people on Mechanical Turk to read some disturbing passages – for example, a graphic murder scene from  Crime and Punishment . Half the participants rece...

Official statistics say we are winning the War on Cancer. Cancer incidence rates, mortality rates, and five-year-survival rates have generally been moving in the right direction over the past few decades. More skeptical people  offer an alternate narrative . Cancer incidence and mortality rates are increasing for some cancers. They are decreasing for others, but the credit goes to social factors l...

"Nobody makes an IRC channel for no reason. Who are we doing this versus?" — topic of #slatestarcodex   I. Some old news I only just heard about: PETA is  offering to pay the water bills  for needy Detroit families if (and only if) those families agree to stop eating meat. (this story makes more sense if you know Detroit is in a crisis where the bankrupt city government is trying to increase reven...

The Tourist Board of Xanadu Did recently impose a fee On those who travel far from home To visit Kubla's pleasure dome Of $20, 9 – 3 So twice five miles of fertile ground With fence and wire are girdled round And signs proclaiming "ENTRY AT THE GATE" Where gather many a camera-bearing crowd And here are docents, who in solemn state Explain the Mongol histories aloud But oh! That deep romantic chas...

[ Previously in sequence:   Fundamental Value Differences Are Not That Fundamental ,  The Whole City Is Center . This post might not make a lot of sense if you haven't read those first.] I. Thanks to everyone who commented on last week's posts. Some of the best comments seemed to converge on an idea like this:   Confusing in that people who rely on lower-level features are placed higher, but the o...

Related to yesterday's post on people being too quick to assume value differences: some of the simplest fake value differences are where people make a big deal about routing around a certain word. And some of the most complicated real value differences are where some people follow a strategy explicitly and other people follow heuristics that approximate that strategy. There's a popular mental heal...

Ozy  (and  others ) talk about fundamental value differences as a barrier to cooperation. On their model (as I understand it) there are at least two kinds of disagreement. In the first, people share values but disagree about facts. For example, you and I may both want to help the Third World. But you believe foreign aid helps the Third World, and I believe it props up corrupt governments and disco...

Yesterday  I wrote about melatonin , mentioning that most drugstore melatonin supplements were 10x or more the recommended dose. A commenter on Facebook pointed me to an interesting explanation of why. Dr. Richard Wurtman, an MIT scientist who helped discover melatonin's role in the body and pioneer its use as a sleep aid,  writes : MIT was so excited about our research team's melatonin-sleep conn...

[I am not a sleep specialist. Please consult with one before making any drastic changes or trying to treat anything serious.] Van Geiklswijk et al  describe supplemental melatonin as "a chronobiotic drug with hypnotic properties". Using it as a pure hypnotic – a sleeping pill – is like using an AK-47 as a club to bash your enemies' heads in. It might work, but you're failing to appreciate the full...

The rationalist community started with the idea of  rationality as a martial art  – a set of skills you could train in and get better at. Later the metaphor switched to a  craft . Art or craft, parts of it did get developed: I remain very impressed with Eliezer's work on  how to change your mind  and everything presaging  Tetlock on prediction . But there's a widespread feeling in the rationalist...

I'm late to posting this, but it's important enough to be worth sharing anyway:  Sandberg, Drexler, and Ord on Dissolving the Fermi Paradox . (You may recognize these names: Toby Ord founded the effective altruism movement; Eric Drexler kindled interest in nanotechnology; Anders Sandberg helped pioneer the academic study of x-risk, and  wrote what might be my favorite  Unsong  fanfic ) The Fermi P...

Chris Stucchio  recommended  Matt Rognlie's criticisms of Piketty ( paper ,  summary ,  Voxsplainer ). Rognlie starts by saying that Piketty didn't correctly account for capital depreciation (ie capital losing value over time) in his calculations. This surprises me, because Piketty says he does in his book (p. 55) but apparently there are technical details I don't understand. When you do that, the...

[Original review is  here . Don't worry, people who had interesting comments on the review – I'll try to get a comments highlights thread up eventually.] For Ricardo, who published his Principles of Political Economy and Taxation in 1817, the chief concern was the long-term evolution of land prices and land rents. Like Malthus, he had virtually no genuine statistics at his disposal. He nevertheles...

[Epistemic status: I am not an economist. Many people who are economists have reviewed this book already. I review it only because if I had to slog through reading this thing I at least want to get a blog post out of it. If anything in my review contradicts that of real economists, trust them instead of me.] I. Thomas Piketty's  Capital In The Twenty-First Century  isn't just a book on inequality....

Sometimes I imagine quitting my job and declaring war on cost disease in medicine. I would set up a practice with a name like Cheap-O Psychiatry. The corny name would be important. It would be a statement of values. It would weed out the people who would say things like "How dare you try to put a dollar value on the health of a human being!" Those people are how we got into this mess, and they wou...

Last year, Bryan Caplan wrote about what he called  The Unbearable Arbitrariness Of Deploring : Let's start with the latest scandal. People all over the country – indeed, the world – have recently discovered that many celebrities are habitual sexual harassers. Each new expose leads to public outrage and professional ostracism. Why does this confuse me? Because many celebrities do many comparably b...

[Few people realize that the 1997 cult hit GATTACA was actually just the first film in a three-movie trilogy. The final two movies, directed by the legendary Moira LeQuivalence, were flops which only stayed in theaters a few weeks and have since become almost impossible to find. In the interest of making them available to the general public, I've written summaries of some key scenes below. Thanks...

I recently worked with a man who took LSD once in college and never stopped hallucinating. It's been ten years now and it's still going. We can control it with medication, but take the meds away and it starts right back up again. This is a real disease –  hallucinogen persisting perception disorder . Most descriptions of the condition emphasize that it's just some the visual effects and doesn't in...

[Content warning: suicide. Thanks to someone on Twitter I forget for alerting me to this question] Among US states, there's a clear relationship between gun ownership rates and suicide rates, but not between gun ownership rates and homicide rates: You might conclude guns increase suicides but not homicides. Then you might predict that the gun-loving US would be an international outlier in suicides...

These are some of the best comments from  Basic Income, Not Basic Jobs: Against Hijacking Utopia . I'm sorry I still haven't gotten a chance to read everything that people have written about it (in particular I need to look more into  Scott Sumner's take ). Sorry to anyone with good comments I left out. Aevylmar  corrects  my claim that Milton Friedman supported a basic income: Technically speakin...

Dr. Matthew Dumont treated a 44 year old woman with depression, body dysmorphia, and psychosis. She failed to respond to most of the ordinary treatments, failed to respond to electroconvulsive therapy, and seemed generally untreatable until she mentioned offhandedly that she spent evenings cleaning up after her husband's half-baked attempts to scrape lead paint off the walls. Blood tests revealed...

The  New York Times  recently reported on various anti-PC thinkers as  "the intellectual dark web" , sparking various annoying discussion. The first talking point – that the term is silly – is surely true. So is the second point – that it awkwardly combines careful and important thinkers like Eric Weinstein with awful demagogues like Ben Shapiro. So is the third – that people have been complaining...

Some Democrats angling for the 2020 presidential nomination have a big idea:  a basic jobs guarantee , where the government promises a job to anybody who wants one. Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders are all said to be considering the plan. I've pushed for a basic income guarantee before, and basic job guarantees sure sound similar. Some thinkers have even compar...

In 2008, Paul Graham wrote  How To Disagree Better , ranking arguments on a scale from name-calling to explicitly refuting the other person's central point. And that's why, ever since 2008, Internet arguments have generally been civil and productive. Graham's hierarchy is useful for its intended purpose, but it isn't really a hierarchy of  disagreements . It's a hierarchy of types of response, wit...