Astral Codex Ten Podcast

Here is the cost of the current GOP tax bill placed in the context of other really expensive things. Although it's not  quite  enough money to solve world hunger, it's enough to end US homelessness four times over or fund nine simultaneous Apollo Programs. I'm writing this post sort of as penance. During the primaries, I wrote a post arguing that Sanders' college plan was  bad . And compared to an...

About 30% of the victims of sexual harassment are men. About 20% of the perpetrators of sexual harassment are women. Don't believe me? In a  Quinnipiac poll , 60% of women and 20% of men said they'd been sexually harassed.  Opinium , which sounds like a weird drug, reports 20% of women vs. 7% of men.  YouGov poll  in Germany finds 43% of women and 12% of men. The overall rates vary widely dependin...

Eliezer Yudkowsky's catchily-titled  Inadequate Equilibria  is many things. It's a look into whether there is any role for individual reason in a world where you can always just trust expert consensus. It's an analysis of the efficient market hypothesis and how it relates to the idea of low-hanging fruit. It's a self-conscious defense of the author's own arrogance. But most of all, it's a book of...

Earlier this year, Nathan Robinson of  Current Affairs  wrote  an article against school vouchers . He argued that private schools would be so focused on profit that they would sacrifice quality, and that competition wouldn't be enough to keep them in line. I counterargued that  yes it would , and cited among other things the success of food stamps (ie "food vouchers"). These give poor people acce...

Question I'd never thought to ask before: are we sure it's a good idea to let people know what the laws are? The Chinese legal system originated somewhat over 2000 years ago in the conflict between two views of law, legalist and Confucianist. The legalists, who believed in using the rational self-interest of those subject to law to make them behave in the way desired by those making the law, advoc...

Medieval Icelandic crime victims would sell the right to pursue a perpetrator to the highest bidder. 18th century English justice replaced fines with criminals bribing prosecutors to drop cases. Somali judges compete on the free market; those who give bad verdicts get a reputation that drives away future customers. "Anarcho-capitalism" evokes a dystopian cyberpunk future. But maybe that's wrong. M...

The Alchemist asked if I wanted a drink. I did, but no amount of staring could make my eyes settle on the color of the liquid in the flask. And the gold the alchemists paid the taxmen smelled funny and made crackling noises. I declined. I took the summons and set it on the table between us. The King's son was dying. The doctors, astrologers, witches, and other assorted wise people of the kingdom c...

I turn 33 today. I can only hope that age brings wisdom. We've been talking recently about the high-level frames and heuristics that organize other concepts. They're hard to transmit, and you have to rediscover them on your own, sometimes with the help of  lots of different explanations and viewpoints  (or one very good one). They're  not obviously apparent when you're missing them ; if you're not...

When I wrote about my experiences doing psychotherapy with people, one commenter  wondered  if I might be schizoid: There are a lot of schizoid people in the rationalist community from what I can tell. The basis of schizoid is not all the big bad symptoms you might read about. There are high functioning people with personality disorders all the time who are complex, polite and philosophical. You w...

SSC's  review of postmodernism  got very mixed reviews. Some of them made a good point: why should I be trying this at all? I'm not a postmodernist, I'm not a philosophy professor, surely someone much more qualified has already written a blog-post-length explanation of postmodernism. This is all true. My only excuse is that trying to figure out complicated concepts requires a different approach th...

Some of the Seattleites put together a  Postmodernism For Rationalists  presentation that's been sparking a lot of  discussion . It's not quite the way I would have explained things. I'm no expert in postmodernism, and can't give anything more than a very simple introduction to one of many facets of the movement. But I  am  an expert in explaining things to rationalists. So it's worth a try. Last...

Rat Park is a famous study in which lab rats were kept in a really nice habitat that satisfied their every need. Contrary to the usual results with lab animals, scientists couldn't get these happier rats addicted to drugs. Researchers concluded that drug addiction, far from being the simple biological story everyone assumed it was, was really a just coping mechanism for intolerable social situatio...

The Baffler publishes  a long article  against "idiot" New Atheists. It's interesting only in the context of so many  similar articles , and an inability to imagine the opposite opinion showing up in an equally fashionable publication. New Atheism has lost its battle for the cultural high ground. r/atheism will shamble on as some sort of undead abomination, chanting "BRAAAAAAIIINSSSS…are what fund...

A good scientist, in other words, does not merely ignore conventional wisdom, but makes a special effort to break it. Scientists go looking for trouble. —  Paul Graham,  What You Can't Say I. Staying on the subject of  Dark Age myths : what about all those scientists burned at the stake for their discoveries? Historical consensus declares this a myth invented by New Atheists. The Church was a grea...

Thanks to everyone who made interesting comments on yesterday's post about Dark Ages. Several people challenged the matching of the economic/population decline to the "fall of Rome". For example, from  David Friedman : On the graph you are citing, 36 million is the population in 200 A.D. The fall of the Western Empire is commonly dated to about 450 A.D. By 400 A.D., on the same graph, population i...

Cracked offers  Five Ridiculous Myths You Probably Believe About The Dark Ages ; number one is "The Dark Ages Were A Real Thing": The Dark Ages were never a thing. The entire concept is complete and utter horseshit cobbled together by a deluded writer. The term "Dark Ages" was first used in the 14th century by Petrarch, an Italian poet with a penchant for Roman nostalgia. Petrarch used it to descr...

Pop science likes to dub dopamine "the reward chemical" and serotonin "the happiness chemical". God only knows what norepinephrine is, but I'm sure it's cutesy. In real life, all of this is much more complicated. Dopamine  might be  "the surprisal in a hierarchical predictive model chemical", but even that can't be more than a gross oversimplification. As for serotonin, people have studied it for...

From  Boston Review :  Know Thy Futurist . It's an attempt to classify and analyze various types of futurism, in much the same way that a Jack Chick tract could be described as "an attempt to classify and analyze various types of religion". I have more disagreements with it than can fit in a blog post, but let's stick with the top five. First , it purports to explain what we should think about the...

Last post  talked about individual differences in whether people found others basically friendly or hostile. The  SSC survey  included a sort of related question: "Are people basically trustworthy?" The exact phrasing asked respondents to rate other people from 1 ("basically trustworthy") to 5 ("basically untrustworthy"). 4853 people answered. The average was 2.49 – so skewed a bit towards higher...

A few years ago I had lunch with another psychiatrist-in-training and realized we had totally different experiences with psychotherapy. We both got the same types of cases. We were both practicing the same kinds of therapy. We were both in the same training program, studying under the same teachers. But our experiences were totally different. In particular, all her patients had dramatic emotional...