Astral Codex Ten Podcast

[Previously in series:  Search Terms That Have Led People To This Blog  and  More Search Terms That Have Led People To This Blog . Content warning: profanity, rape, and other unfiltered access to the consciousness of the Internet] Sometimes I look at what search terms lead people to SSC. Sometimes it's the things you would think – "slate star codex", "rationality", the names of medications I've wr...

Last post I thanked some of the people who have contributed to this blog. But  once again , it's time to honor some of the most important contributors: the many people who give valuable feedback on everything I write. Here's a short sample of some of…most interesting. I'm avoiding names and links to avoid pile-ons. Some slightly edited for readability. "A cowardly autistic cuckolded deviant Jew wh...

Today is the fifth anniversary of Slate Star Codex. Overall I'm very happy with how this project is going so far, and I want to take this opportunity to thank everyone who's made things work behind the scenes. Trike Apps generously volunteered to host me free of charge. I give them the highest praise it is possible to give a hosting company – namely, that I completely forgot about their existence...

Rereading  The Hungry Brain , I notice  my review  missed one of my favorite parts: the description of the motivational system. It starts with studies of lampreys, horrible little primitive parasitic fish: How does the lamprey decide what to do? Within the lamprey basal ganglia lies a key structure called the striatum, which is the portion of the basal ganglia that receives most of the incoming si...

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 2018. Some changes this year: I've eliminated a bunch of predictions about things that are very unlikely where I just plug in the same number each year, like "99% chance of no coup in the US". I've tried to have almost everything this year be new and genuinely uncertain. I...

[All things that have been discussed here before, but some people wanted it all in a convenient place] The most important study on the placebo effect is Hróbjartsson and Gøtzsche's  Is The Placebo Powerless? , updated three years later by a  systematic review  and seven years later with a  Cochrane review . All three looked at studies comparing a real drug, a placebo drug, and no drug (by the thir...

H/T Robin Hanson: Aeon's  The Good Guy / Bad Guy Myth . "Pop culture today is obsessed with the battle between good and evil. Traditional folktales never were. What changed?" The article claims almost every modern epic – superhero movies, Star Wars, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, etc – shares a similar plot. There are some good guys. There are some bad guys. They fight. The good guys win. The en...

Thanks to everyone who commented on the posts about conflict and mistake theory. aciddc  writes: I'm a leftist (and I guess a Marxist in the same sense I guess I'm a Darwinist despite knowing evolutionary theory has passed him by) fan of this blog. I've thought about this "conflict theory vs. mistake theory" dichotomy a lot, though I've been thinking of it as what distinguishes "leftists" from "li...

There were a lot of good comments on yesterday's conflict vs. mistake post. Some were very appropriate challenges: for example, doesn't public choice theory itself assume conflict between special interests? And didn't Marxism start off with a dry incentive-based explanation for why capitalists have to do what they do and how the incentive landscape needs to change? I want to explore these question...

Jacobite  – which is apparently still a real magazine and not a one-off gag making fun of  Jacobin  – summarizes their article  Under-Theorizing Government  as "You'll never hear the terms 'principal-agent problem,' 'rent-seeking,' or 'aligning incentives' from socialists. That's because they expect ideology to solve all practical considerations of governance." There have been some really weird an...

They say money can't buy love. But that was the bad old days of fiat money. Now there are dozens of love-based cryptocurrencies – LoveCoin, CupidCoin, Erosium, Nubilo – with market caps in the mid nine-figures. The 17-year-old genius behind CupidCoin just bought the state of Tennessee. You think I'm joking, but can you be sure? How weird is "too weird to be true" these days, and how confident are...

On  December's survey , I asked readers who had children whether they were happy with that decision. Here are the results, from 1 (very unhappy) to 5 (very happy):     The mean was 4.43, and the median 5. People are really happy to have kids! This was equally true regardless of gender. The male average (4.43, n = 1768) and female average (4.49, n = 177) were indistinguishable.

By Ted Chiang, on Buzzfeed: The Real Danger To Civilization Isn't AI: It's Runaway Capitalism. Chiang's science fiction is great and I highly recommend it. This article, not so much. The gist seems to be: hypothetical superintelligent AIs sound a lot like modern capitalism. Both optimize relentlessly for their chosen goal (paperclips, money), while ignoring the whole complexity of human value.

[Content note: Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions!] I. Allan Ginsberg's famous poem,  Moloch : What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?

Alex Tabarrok beat me to the  essay on Oregon's self-service gas laws  that I wanted to write. Oregon is one of two US states that bans self-service gas stations. Recently, they passed a law relaxing this restriction – self-service is permissable in some rural counties during odd hours of the night. Outraged Oregonians took to social media to protest that self-service was unsafe, that it would des...

"Birth order" refers to whether a child is the oldest, second-oldest, youngest, etc. in their family. For a while, pop psychologists created a whole industry around telling people how their birth order affected their personality: oldest children are more conservative, youngest children are more creative, etc. Then people got around to actually studying it and couldn't find any of that. Wikipedia's...

I started reading Foucault's  Madness And Civilization  with the expectation that it would be tedious and incomprehensible. You know, the stereotype that postmodernism / post-structuralism / Continentalism / etc. involves a lot of negation of the negation of the inversion of the Other within the Absolute within [and so on for 200 pages]. There was a little of that. But there was also a fascinating...

At the beginning of every year, I make predictions. At the end of every year, I score them. Here are  2014 ,  2015 , and  2016 . And here are the predictions I made for 2017. Strikethrough'd are false. Intact are true. Italicized are getting thrown out because I can't decide if they're true or not.

I didn't realize how much of a psychiatrist's time was spent gatekeeping Adderall. The human brain wasn't built for accounting or software engineering. A few lucky people can do these things ten hours a day, every day, with a smile. The rest of us start fidgeting and checking our cell phone somewhere around the thirty minute mark. I work near the financial district of a big city, so every day a ne...

The  Silmarillion  describes the fate of the three Silmarils. Earendil kept one, and traveled with it through the sky, where it became the planet Venus. Maedhros stole another, but regretted his deed and jumped into a fiery chasm. And Maglor took the last one, but threw it into the sea in despair. Well, Venus is still around. But what happened to the latter two? Surely over all the intervening mil...

[ This post is about the 2018 SSC Survey. If you've read at least one blog post here before, please  take the survey  if you haven't already. Please don't read on until you've taken it, since this could bias your results. ] I'm preregistering my hypotheses for the survey this year. So far I've glanced at Google's bar graphs for each individual question but haven't started exploring relationships y...

If you're reading this and have previously read at least one Slate Star Codex post, please  take the 2018 SSC Survey . This year's survey is in three sections. If you're strapped for time, just take Section 1. If you have a little more time, take both Sections 1 and 2. If you have a lot of time, take all three sections. Each section will take about ten minutes. There's some more information on the...

I wanted NSI-189 to be real so badly. Pharma companies used to love antidepressants. Millions of people are depressed. Millions of people who aren't depressed think they are. Sell them all a pill per day for their entire lifetime, and you're looking at a lot of money. So they poured money into antidepressant research, culminating in 80s and 90s with the discovery of selective serotonin reuptake in...

Thanks to everyone who commented on my last two posts, especially the many people who disagreed with me. Two things I will admit I got mostly wrong: 1. I was wrong to say there was "no case" for the tax bill. Aside from all of the minor provisions which can be good or bad, the case for slashing corporate rates is that they're more distortionary and less efficient than other forms of taxation. Than...

There was some good pushback on yesterday's article on taxes. But sorry, I'm still right. Many people responded with generic low-tax anti-government positions. Fine. Let's say the government is definitely bad and taxes are definitely too high. The current tax bill is  still  not the right way to do tax cuts. Budget director Mick Mulvaney  claims  that the richest 20% of people pay 95% of income ta...