Scott Alexander (reading by Solenoid Entity / Astral Codex Ten podcast host)

I feel like psychology is the same way.

You can explain almost everything with your standard scientific toolkit.

Then you look at sex and you realize you'll need something much more complicated and worse.

And since sex is maybe the strongest and most primal form of desire, if the standard model of the mind doesn't explain sex, it probably doesn't really explain anything else.

There are probably all those weird curled up shadow dimensions in everything, just out of sight.

In this metaphor, psychoanalysis is like superstring theory.

It might not quite work, but it was a valiant attempt to fill a hole.

though Freud would probably have avoided using that exact terminology.

Here is an image of the cover of the book, and it is a link to the book's page on Amazon.

Thanks to Will Jarvis, the host of the Narratives podcast, for his support on Patreon.

Narratives is a podcast exploring stories about progress and paths towards a better, more definite vision of the future.

Previous guests include Freddie DeBoer, David Friedman, and Zvi Moshevitz.

You can check it out at narrativespodcast.com.

This is an audio version of Astral Codex X provided with the permission of the author Scott Alexander.

I am not the author Scott Alexander, I am solenoid entity, and you can contact me at astralcodexpodcast at protonmail.com.

If you enjoy Scott's writing and wish to support it, you can do so on Substack at astralcodex10.substack.com.

And if you've done that, and you'd like to further support the work that I do, turning his blog posts into podcast episodes, you can use Patreon at patreon.com slash sscpodcast.

If you would like to reference this material, please link to the original post.

Thank you for listening and I'll speak to you next time.