Astral Codex Ten Podcast

I. A spectre is haunting Europe. Several spectres, actually. One of them is the spectre of communism. The others are literal ghosts. They live in abandoned mansions. Sometimes they wail eerily or make floorboards creak. If you arrange things just right, you might be able to capture them on film. Or at least this must have been the position of the founders of the Fabian Society, Britain's most infl...

Thanks to everyone who expressed interest in  the adversarial collaborations contest . There was a lot of good discussion in the last thread, with lots of people offering projects, but I'm not sure if people actually got in contact with each other and finalized their agreements. So, if you proposed a collaboration in the last thread, please go back, take a look, and see if someone you might want t...

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 for and against a suspect, so we hope an adversarial collaboration will give readers a balanced view of evidence for and against some thesis. It's typic...

Everyone knows medical care in the US is expensive even with insurance and prohibitively expensive without it. I have a lot of patients who are uninsured, or who bounce on and off insurance, or who have trouble affording their co-pays. This is a collection of tricks I've learned (mostly from them) to help deal with these situations. They are US-based and may not apply to other countries. Within th...

That story  about the blockchain-based dating site gets better: its designer is an enlightened being. I got this from  Vinay Gupta's wiki , which describes some of his thoughts and experiences. Since reading  Mastering The Core Teachings Of The Buddha , I've been looking at a bunch of this stuff, and it's interesting how it does (or doesn't) converge. For example, from the MCTB review: If you real...

[Content warning: harassment. This discusses the comments to  SSC Survey Results: Sexual Harassment Levels By Field ] brmic  writes : Thank you for posting this and the data file. FWIW, I tried to reproduce the results and couldn't reproduce the correlations between female victimization, male victimization and male perpetration. fem vic vs. male vic is 0.65, same as yours. fem vic vs. male perp is...

[content note: sexual harassment] I. Recent discussion of sexual harassment at work has focused on a few high-profile industries. But there has been relatively little credible research as to how rates really differ by occupation type. There are many surveys of harassment rates in specific industries, but they can't be credibly compared with one another. The percent of people who report sexual hara...

Medicine loves guidelines. But everywhere else, guidelines are still underappreciated. Consider a recommendation, like "Try Lexapro!" Even if Lexapro is a good medication, it might not be a good medication for your situation. And even if it's a good medication for your situation, it might fail for unpredictable reasons involving genetics and individual variability. So medicine uses guidelines – al...

Bizzolt  writes : DC Public Schools HS teacher here (although I'm not returning next year, as is the case with many of my colleagues). As noted, one of the biggest factors in the graduation rates is the unexcused absences–if you look at the results of our external audit and investigation here, you see that for many schools, a significant number of our seniors "Passed Despite Excessive Absences in...

[Some changes to the conclusions in this post; see edit at the end and entry 21 on Mistakes page] US News:  DC Schools Brace For Catastrophic Drop In Graduation Rates . "Catastrophic" isn't hyperbole; the numbers are expected to drop from 73% (close to the national average of 83%) all the way down to 42%. There's no debate about why this is happening – it's because the previous graduation rate was...

[I am not a neuroscientist and apologize in advance for any errors in this article.] Hey, let's review the literature on adult neurogenesis! This'll be really fun, promise. Gage's  Neurogenesis In The Adult Brain , published in the  Journal Of Neuroscience  and cited 834 times, begins: A milestone is marked in our understanding of the brain with the recent acceptance, contrary to early dogma, that...

From  sclmlw : While I don't agree with lots of Jordan Peterson, I think Scott fundamentally missed the boat in some of his criticisms because he systematically views things from a different perspective than Peterson, which was missed. From what I can tell, Peterson is intensely interested in the idea, "Everyone has the capacity to become a Nazi war criminal. What causes that phenomenon?" His answ...

Recently on Marginal Revolution:  Are the Amish unhappy? The average levels of life satisfaction [among the Amish] was 4.4; just above the neutral point…the Amish fall lower than members of many other groups. In a study of more than 13 thousand college students from 31 nations, for example, only students from Kenya (whose average life satisfaction was 4.0) scored lower than the Amish (Diener & Die...

There's a Jewish tradition that laypeople should only speculate on the nature of God during Passover, because God is closer to us and such speculations might succeed. And there's an atheist tradition that laypeople should only speculate on the nature of God on April Fools' Day, because believing in God is dumb, and at least then you can say you're only kidding. Today is both, so let's speculate. T...

I got Jordan Peterson's  Twelve Rules For Life  for the same reason as the other 210,000 people: to make fun of the lobster thing. Or if not the lobster thing, then the neo-Marxism thing, or the transgender thing, or the thing where the neo-Marxist transgender lobsters want to steal your precious bodily fluids. But, uh…I'm really embarrassed to say this. And I totally understand if you want to sto...

This is in response to questions I get about how to interact (or not interact) with the inpatient mental health system and involuntary commitment. The table of contents is: 1. How can I get outpatient mental health care without much risk of being involuntarily committed to a hospital? 2: How can I get mental health care at a hospital ER without much risk of being involuntarily committed? 3. I woul...

I sometimes advertise  sci-hub.tw  – the Kazakhstani pirate site that lets you get scientific papers for free. It's clearly illegal in the US. But is it unethical? I can think of two strong arguments that it might be: First, we have intellectual property rights to encourage the production of intellectual goods. If everyone downloaded  Black Panther , then Marvel wouldn't get any money, the movie i...

A few months ago, I wrote  Toward A Predictive Theory Of Depression , which used the predictive coding model of brain function to speculate about mood disorders and emotions. Emotions might be a tendency toward unusually high (or low) precision of predictions: Imagine the world's most successful entrepreneur. Every company they found becomes a multibillion-dollar success. Every stock they pick sho...

I'm traveling and not in a position to record "SSC Journal Club: Friston on Computational Mood" so I thought I'd release this SSC classic to tide people over: [Content warning: Politics, religion, social justice, spoilers for "The Secret of Father Brown". This isn't especially original to me and I don't claim anything more than to be explaining and rewording things I have heard from a bunch of oth...

I've been trying to delve deeper into  predictive processing theories of the brain , and I keep coming across Karl Friston's work on "free energy". At first I felt bad for not understanding this. Then I realized I wasn't alone. There's an entire not-understanding-Karl-Friston internet fandom, complete with its own  parody Twitter account  and Markov blanket memes. From the journal  Neuropsychoanal...

I. The big news in psychiatry this month is Cipriani et al's  Comparative efficacy and acceptability of 21 antidepressant drugs for the acute treatment of adults with major depressive disorder: a systematic review and network meta-analysis . It purports to be the last word in the "do antidepressants work?" question, and a first (or at least early) word in the under-asked "which antidepressants are...

Thanks to everyone who commented on  the post about technological unemployment . From  Onyomi : Not saying I necessarily think this is what is going on, but one simple possible explanation for why technological unemployment could happen now when it never happened much in the past could be quite simply the greatly accelerated pace of change. For most of history, technological change was very, very...

[Taken from  here .] I. Deep in the forest, thousands of miles from civilization, there is an isolated village. It has not seen contact with any other humans for a long time. It is, however, a pleasant and flourishing community, which strongly values freedom and entrepreneurship. There is, however, one tiny quirk. In this village, there is a ritual. Every year, a boy who reaches 18 is cannibalized...

[I am not an economist or an expert on this topic. This is my attempt to figure out what economists and experts think so I can understand the issue, and I'm writing it down to speed your going through the same process. If you have more direct access to economists and experts, feel free to ignore this] Technological unemployment is a hard topic because there are such good arguments on both sides. T...

Those yearly  "predictions for next year"  posts are starting to reach the limit of their usefulness. Not much changes from year to year, and most of what does change is hard to capture in objective probabilistic predictions. So in honor of this blog's five year anniversary, here are some predictions for the next five years. All predictions to be graded on 2/15/2023: