Astral Codex Ten Podcast
Episodes
Archipelago and Atomic Communitarianism [Classic]
14 Jul 2019
Contributed by Lukas
I. In the old days, you had your Culture, and that was that. Your Culture told you lots of stuff about what you were and weren't allowed to do, and by...
Do People Like Their Mental Health Care?
14 Jul 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Along with more specific questions, I asked people who took the SSC survey to rate their experience with the mental health system on a 1 – 10 scal...
Survey Results: Sexual Roles
11 Jul 2019
Contributed by Lukas
I already started analyzing the SSC survey data on fetishes, but I wanted to move on to look at dominance, submission, sadism, and masochism. Why ...
Gay Rites are Civil Rites
11 Jul 2019
Contributed by Lukas
I. I went to Antigua Guatemala in April. Their claim to fame is the world's biggest Easter celebration. I wasn't even there for Easter. I was three we...
Style Guide: Not Sounding Like an Evil Robot
10 Jul 2019
Contributed by Lukas
The saying goes: "Never offend people with style when you can offend them with substance". This is the same idea as "weirdness points": you can only ...
Some Clarifications on Rationalist Blogging
05 Jul 2019
Contributed by Lukas
1. According to the survey, only 13% of SSC commenters identify as rationalists. Almost none of the rationalists I know IRL comment on SSC. Saying "ra...
Editing Unsong
04 Jul 2019
Contributed by Lukas
A few years ago, I wrote the online serial novel Unsong. Someday I want to get it published. But I want to fix it up before I try. I know publishers ...
Considerations on Cost Disease [Classic]
29 Jun 2019
Contributed by Lukas
I. Tyler Cowen writes about cost disease. I'd previously heard the term used to refer only to a specific theory of why costs are increasing, involvin...
More Confounders
27 Jun 2019
Contributed by Lukas
[Epistemic status: Somewhat confident in the medical analysis, a little out of my depth discussing the statistics] For years, we've been warning pati...
If Only Turing Was Alive to See This
22 Jun 2019
Contributed by Lukas
There's a silly subreddit called r/totallynotrobots where people pretend to be badly-disguised robots. They post cat pictures with captions like "SI...
Are Sexual Purity Taboos a Response to STIs?
22 Jun 2019
Contributed by Lukas
I. Did cultural evolution create sexual purity taboos to prevent the spread of STIs? A few weeks ago, I wrote a post assuming this was obviously true;...
If Kim Jong-un Opened a KFC, Would You Eat There?
21 Jun 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Philip Morris is pivoting to smoke-free cigarettes, because "society expects us to act responsibly, and we are doing just that by designing a smoke-f...
Followup on the Baumol Effect: Thanks, O Baumol
20 Jun 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Last week I reviewed Alex Tabarrok and Eric Helland's Why Are The Prices So D*mn High?. On Marginal Revolution, Tabarrok wrote: SSC does have som...
Nobody is Perfect Everything is Commensurable [Classic]
15 Jun 2019
Contributed by Lukas
I. Recently spotted on Tumblr: "This is going to be an unpopular opinion but I see stuff about ppl not wanting to reblog ferguson things and awarenes...
Highlights From the Comments on Cultural Evolution
13 Jun 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Peter Gerdes says: As the examples of the Nicaraguan deaf children left on their own to develop their own language demonstrates (as do other exampl...
Book Review: Why Are the Prices So D*mn High?
12 Jun 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Why have prices for services like health care and education risen so much over the past fifty years? When I looked into this in 2017, I couldn't fin...
Addendum to "Enormous Nutshell": Competing Selectors
09 Jun 2019
Contributed by Lukas
[Previously in sequence: Epistemic Learned Helplessness, Book Review: The Secret Of Our Success, List Of Passages I Highlighted In My Copy Of The S...
Asymmetric Weapons Gone Bad
09 Jun 2019
Contributed by Lukas
[Previously in sequence: Epistemic Learned Helplessness, Book Review: The Secret Of Our Success, List Of Passages I Highlighted In My Copy Of The S...
List of Passages I Highlighted in My Copy of "The Secret of Our Success"
08 Jun 2019
Contributed by Lukas
[Previously in sequence: Epistemic Learned Helplessness, Book Review: The Secret Of Our Success] A rare example of cultural evolution in action: Th...
Book Review: The Secret of Our Success
07 Jun 2019
Contributed by Lukas
[Previously in sequence: Epistemic Learned Helplessness] I. "Culture is the secret of humanity's success" sounds like the most vapid possible thesis....
[Repost] Epistemic Learned Helplessness
06 Jun 2019
Contributed by Lukas
[This is a slightly edited repost of an essay from my old LiveJournal] A friend recently complained about how many people lack the basic skill of beli...
In Favor of Niceness, Community, and Civilization [Classic]
01 Jun 2019
Contributed by Lukas
[Content warning: Discussion of social justice, discussion of violence, spoilers for Jacqueline Carey books.] [Edit 10/25: This post was inspired by a...
Postscript to APA Photo-Essay
30 May 2019
Contributed by Lukas
I was surprised how many people responded to my APA photo-essay with comments like "Seems psychiatry as a field is broken beyond repair" or "This pr...
The APA Meeting: A Photo-Essay
25 May 2019
Contributed by Lukas
The first thing you notice at the American Psychiatric Association meeting is its size. By conservative estimates, a quarter of the psychiatrists in ...
A Critical Period for Lactation Fetishes
17 May 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Enquist et al on lactation fetishes is one of my favorite papers. They wonder – as we've all wondered at one point or another – how people develo...
Age Gaps and Birth Order Effects
16 May 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Psychologists are split on the existence of "birth order effects", where oldest siblings will have different personality traits and outcomes than mid...
Is There a Case for Skepticism of Psychedelic Therapy?
12 May 2019
Contributed by Lukas
There's been an explosion of interest in the use of psychedelics in psychiatry. Like everyone else, I hope this works out. But recent discussion has b...
5-HTTLPR: A Pointed Review
10 May 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In 1996, some researchers discovered that depressed people often had an unusual version of the serotonin transporter gene 5-HTTLPR. The study became a...
Little Known Types of Eclipse
04 May 2019
Contributed by Lukas
A lunar eclipse occurs when the Earth gets between the Moon and the Sun. A solar eclipse occurs when the Moon gets between the Earth and the Sun. A te...
Update to Partial Retraction of Animal Value and Neuron Number
04 May 2019
Contributed by Lukas
A few weeks ago I published results of a small (n = 50) survey showing that people's moral valuation of different kinds of animals scaled pretty nice...
Buspirone Shortage in Healthcaristan SSR
03 May 2019
Contributed by Lukas
(Epistemic status: Unsure on details. Some post-publication edits 5/1 to make this less strident.) I. There is a national shortage of buspirone. Busp...
1960: The Year the Singularity Was Cancelled
24 Apr 2019
Contributed by Lukas
[Epistemic status: Very speculative, especially Parts 3 and 4. Like many good things, this post is based on a conversation with Paul Christiano; most...
Highlights From the Comments on College Admissions
19 Apr 2019
Contributed by Lukas
HalTheWise discusses a factor I missed (until I sneakily edited it in, so you may have read the later version that included it): One very powerful ...
Increasingly Competitive College Admissions: Much More Than You Wanted to Know
19 Apr 2019
Contributed by Lukas
0: Introduction This is from businessstudent.com Acceptance rates at top colleges have declined by about half over the past decade or so, raising ...
Pain as Active Ingredient in Dating
12 Apr 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Reciprocity is a simple dating site, created by some friends of mine. You sign up and see a list of all your Facebook friends who also signed up. You...
Short Book Reviews April 2019
11 Apr 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Timothy Carey's Method Of Levels teaches a form of psychotherapy based on perceptual control theory. The Crackpot List is specific to physics. But...
Social Censorship: The First Offender Model
04 Apr 2019
Contributed by Lukas
RJ Zigerell (h/t Marginal Revolution) studies public support for eugenics. He finds that about 40% of Americans support some form of eugenics. The po...
Two Wolves and a Sheep
31 Mar 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to have for dinner. "Mutton" takes the popular vote, but "grass" wins in the Electoral College. The ...
Partial Retraction of Post on Animal Value and Neural Number
31 Mar 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Commenter Tibbar used Mechanical Turk to replicate my survey on how people thought about the moral weights of animals. After getting 263 responses (t...
Cortical Neuron Number Matches Intuitive Perceptions of Moral Value Across Animals
28 Mar 2019
Contributed by Lukas
[EDIT: No longer confident in this post, see edit note at bottom. May formally partially-retract it later.] Yesterday's post reviewed research showi...
Neurons and Intelligence: A Birdbrained Perspective
27 Mar 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Elephants have bigger brains than humans, so why aren't they smarter than we are? The classic answer has been to play down absolute brain size in favo...
Translating Predictive Coding Into Perceptual Control
22 Mar 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Wired wrote a good article about Karl Friston, the neuroscientist whose works I've puzzled over here before. Raviv writes: Friston's free energy...
Book Review: Inventing the Future
21 Mar 2019
Contributed by Lukas
They say "don't judge a book by its cover". So in case you were withholding judgment: yes, this bright red book covered with left-wing slogans is, in ...
Gwern's AI-Generated Poetry
17 Mar 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Gwern has answered my prayers and taught GPT-2 poetry. GPT-2 is the language processing system that OpenAI announced a few weeks ago. They are keepi...
Does Reality Drive Straight Lines on Graphs, or Do Straight Lines on Graphs Drive Reality?
15 Mar 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Here's a graph of US air pollution over time: During the discussion of 90s environmentalism, some people pointed out that this showed the Clean Ai...
Puritan Spotting
14 Mar 2019
Contributed by Lukas
[Related to: Book Review: Albion's Seed] [Epistemic status: Not too serious] I realize I've been confusing everyone with my use of the word "Puritan...
Book Review: Albion's Seed [Classic]
13 Mar 2019
Contributed by Lukas
I. Albion's Seed by David Fischer is a history professor's nine-hundred-page treatise on patterns of early immigration to the Eastern United States....
Ketamine: Now by Prescription
12 Mar 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Last week the FDA approved esketamine for treatment-resistant depression. Let's review how the pharmaceutical industry works: a company discovers a...
Prospiracy Theories
06 Mar 2019
Contributed by Lukas
[Title from this unrelated story or this unrelated essay] Last week I wrote about how conspiracy theories spread so much faster on Facebook than ...
Meaningful
02 Mar 2019
Contributed by Lukas
[With apologies to Putnam, Pope, and all of you] Two children are reading a text written by an AI: The hobbits splashed water in each other's faces ...
In Mod We Trust
01 Mar 2019
Contributed by Lukas
The Verge writes a story (an exposé?) on the Facebook-moderation industry. It goes through the standard ways it maltreats its employees: low pay, l...
Rule Thinkers In, Not Out
28 Feb 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Imagine a black box which, when you pressed a button, would generate a scientific hypothesis. 50% of its hypotheses are false; 50% are true hypotheses...
Wage Stagnation: Much More Than You Wanted to Know
28 Feb 2019
Contributed by Lukas
[Epistemic status: I am basing this on widely-accepted published research, but I can't guarantee I've understood the research right or managed to emph...
RIP Culture War Thread
23 Feb 2019
Contributed by Lukas
[This post is having major technical issues. Some comments may not be appearing. If you can't comment, please say so on the subreddit.] I. I Come To P...
My Plagiarism
22 Feb 2019
Contributed by Lukas
I was going back over yesterday's post, and something sounded familiar about this paragraph: A very careless plagiarist takes someone else's work an...
GPT-2 as Step Toward General Intelligence
21 Feb 2019
Contributed by Lukas
A machine learning researcher writes me in response to yesterday's post, saying: I still think GPT-2 is a brute-force statistical pattern matcher wh...
Do Neural Nets Dream of Electric Hobbits?
21 Feb 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Last week OpenAI announced its latest breakthrough. GPT-2 is a language model that can write essays to a prompt, answer questions, and summarize long...
The Proverbial Murder Mystery
16 Feb 2019
Contributed by Lukas
I. Chefs. Hundreds of them. Tall chefs, short chefs, black chefs, white chefs. I pushed forward through them, like an explorer hacking away at undergr...
Survey Results on SSRIs
09 Feb 2019
Contributed by Lukas
SSRIs are the most widely used class of psychiatric medications, helpful for depression, anxiety, OCD, panic, PTSD, anger, and certain personality dis...
Respectability Cascades
07 Feb 2019
Contributed by Lukas
I. I don't know much about gay history, but the heavily mythicized version of it I heard goes like this: At first open homosexuality was totally taboo...
Book Review: Zero to One
02 Feb 2019
Contributed by Lukas
I. Zero To One might be the first best-selling business book based on a Tumblr. Stanford student Blake Masters took Peter Thiel's class on startups....
Predictions for 2019
26 Jan 2019
Contributed by Lukas
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 2019. Rules: all predicti...
Psychiat-List Now Up
25 Jan 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Lots of people have asked me to recommend them a psychiatrist or therapist. I've done a terrible job responding: it's a conflict of interest to recom...
2018 Predictions: Calibration Results
24 Jan 2019
Contributed by Lukas
At the beginning of every year, I make predictions. At the end of every year, I score them. Here are 2014, 2015, 2016, and 2017. And here are the ...
Highlights from the Comments on Kuhn
20 Jan 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Thanks to everyone who commented on the review of The Structure Of Scientific Revolutions. From David Chapman: It's important to remember that Kuh...
Kernel of Doubt: Testing Math Preference vs. Corn-Eating Style
17 Jan 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In 2010, Ben Tilly of the blog Random Observations wrote Analysis Vs. Algebra Predicts Eating Corn?, which said: I like learning about odd connectio...
Too Many People Dare Call it Conspiracy
16 Jan 2019
Contributed by Lukas
[Content warning: References to anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic canards] I feel deep affection for Gary Allen's None Dare Call It Conspiracy, a bizarr...
SSC Survey Results 2019
14 Jan 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Thanks to the 8,171 people who took the 2019 Slate Star Codex survey. Some of the links below will say 13,171 people took the survey, but that's a bu...
Paradigms All the Way Down
12 Jan 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Related to: Book Review: The Structure Of Scientific Revolutions Every good conspiracy theorist needs their own Grand Unified Chart; I'm a particular...
Book Review: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
10 Jan 2019
Contributed by Lukas
When I hear scientists talk about Thomas Kuhn, he sounds very reasonable. Scientists have theories that guide their work. Sometimes they run into thin...
Preregistration of Investigations for the 2019 SSC Survey
06 Jan 2019
Contributed by Lukas
This post is about the 2019 SSC Survey. If you've read at least one blog post here before, please take the surveyif you haven't already. Please don't...
What Happened to 90s Environmentalism?
03 Jan 2019
Contributed by Lukas
0. Introduction I grew up in the 90s, which meant watching movies about plucky children fighting Pollution Demons. Sometimes teachers would show them ...
Please Take the 2019 SSC Survey
01 Jan 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Please take the 2019 Slate Star Codex Survey. The survey helps me learn more about SSC readers and plan community events. But it also provides me wit...
Beware the Man of One Study [Classic]
29 Dec 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Aquinas famously said: beware the man of one book. I would add: beware the man of one study. For example, take medical research. Suppose a certain dr...
Refactoring: Culture as Branch of Government
20 Dec 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Ribbonfarm likes to talk about refactoring, a conceptual change in how you see the world. I'm not totally sure I understand it, but I think it means ...
Fallacies of Reversed Moderation
20 Dec 2018
Contributed by Lukas
A recent discussion: somebody asked why people in Silicon Valley thought that only high-tech solutions to climate change (like carbon capture or geoen...
Trump: A Setback for Trumpism
14 Dec 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Donald Trump has been called a setback for many things. America. The global community. The environment. Civil service. Civil society. Civility. Civili...
Diametrical Model of Autism and Schizophrenia
12 Dec 2018
Contributed by Lukas
One interesting thing I took from Evolutionary Psychopathology was a better understanding of the diametrical theory of the social brain. There's bee...
Del Giudice on the Self-Starvation Cycle
07 Dec 2018
Contributed by Lukas
[Content note: eating disorders] Anorexia has a cultural component. I'm usually reluctant to assume anything is cultural – every mediocre social sci...
Book Review: Evolutionary Psychopathology
05 Dec 2018
Contributed by Lukas
I. Evolutionary psychology is famous for having lots of stories that make sense but are hard to test. Psychiatry is famous for having mountains of exp...
Book Review: The Mind Illuminated
30 Nov 2018
Contributed by Lukas
I. The Mind Illuminated is a guide to Buddhist meditation by Culadasa, aka John Yates, a Buddhist meditation teacher who is also a neuroscience PhD....
Is Science Slowing Down?
27 Nov 2018
Contributed by Lukas
[This post was up a few weeks ago before getting taken down for complicated reasons. They have been sorted out and I'm trying again.] Is scientific pr...
The Economic Perspective on Moral Standards
17 Nov 2018
Contributed by Lukas
[Content warning: scrupulosity] I. "There is no ethical consumption under late capitalism". I hear this from a bunch of people. Sometimes it is taken ...
Preschool: Much More Than You Wanted to Know
15 Nov 2018
Contributed by Lukas
I. A lot of people pushed back against my post on preschool, so it looks like we need to discuss this in more depth. A quick refresher: good randomiz...
Ketamine: An Update
09 Nov 2018
Contributed by Lukas
In 2016, I wrote Ketamine Research In A New Light, which discussed the emerging consensus that, contra existing theory, ketamine's rapid-acting antid...
SSRIs: An Update
09 Nov 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Four years ago I examined the claim that SSRIs are little better than placebo. Since then, some of my thinking on this question has changed. First, ...
Marijuana: An Update
08 Nov 2018
Contributed by Lukas
[Originally to be titled "Marijuana: I Was Wrong", but looking back I was suitably careful about everything, and my reward is not having to say that.]...
Preschool: I Was Wrong
07 Nov 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Kelsey Piper has written an article for Vox: Early Childhood Education Yields Big Benefits – Just Not The Ones You Think. I had previously followed...
My California Ballot
05 Nov 2018
Contributed by Lukas
These are my preliminary choices for California elected positions and ballot initiatives. Some of them are based on Ozy's recommendations and the B...
Working with Google Trends
02 Nov 2018
Contributed by Lukas
[Epistemic status: low. You tell me if you think this works.] Commenter no_bear_so_low has been doing some great work with Google Trends recently – ...
Sort by Controversial
01 Nov 2018
Contributed by Lukas
[Epistemic status: fiction] Thanks for letting me put my story on your blog. Mainstream media is crap and no one would have believed me anyway. This s...
Nominating Oneself for the Short End of a Tradeoff
26 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
I've gotten a chance to discuss The Whole City Is Center with a few people now. They remain skeptical of the idea that anyone could "deserve" to hav...
Cognitive Enhancers: Mechanisms and Tradeoffs
24 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
[Epistemic status: so, so, so speculative. I do not necessarily endorse taking any of the substances mentioned in this post.] There's been recent inte...
The Chamber of Guf
16 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
[I briefly had a different piece up tonight discussing a conference, but the organizers asked me to hold off on writing about it until they've put up ...
Anxiety Sampler Kits
13 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
The best thing about personalized medicine is that it's obviously right. The worst thing is we mostly have no idea how to do it. We know that differen...
Kavanaugh: A Probability Poll
09 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
There's some literature suggesting that people are more careful when they think in probabilities. If you ask them for a definite answer, they might gi...
Nighttime Ventilation Survey Results
06 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Thanks to the 129 people who tried altering their nighttime carbon dioxide levels after my post on this, and who reported back to me. There was no di...
Next Door in Nodrumia
05 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
[Content note: attempt to consider real people's real problems using angel-on-pinhead impractical reasoning and ideas] I. Imagine the state of nature,...
Highlights from the Comments on NIMBYs
04 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Quixote writes: It's odd to me how bad San Francisco is, when other large cities like New York or Paris are basically utopias. But just a few comm...
Steelmanning the NIMBYs
03 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
[Epistemic status: very unsure. I sympathize with many YIMBY ideas and might support them on net; this post is me exaggerating the NIMBY parts of my b...