Astral Codex Ten Podcast
Episodes
Book Review: The Body Keeps the Score
15 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/12/book-review-the-body-keeps-the-score/ I. The Body Keeps The Score is a book about post-traumatic str...
Building Intuitions on Non-empirical Arguments in Science
10 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/06/building-intuitions-on-non-empirical-arguments-in-science/ Aeon: Post-Empirical Science Is An Oxymoro...
Samsara
06 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/04/samsara/ I. The man standing outside my front door was carrying a clipboard and wearing a golden robe....
The Life Cycle of Medical Ideas [Classic]
02 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/09/12/the-life-cycle-of-medical-ideas/ I. About five years ago, an Italian surgeon with the unlikely name of...
New Atheism: The Godlessness That Failed
01 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/30/new-atheism-the-godlessness-that-failed/ Thucydides predicted that future generations would underest...
Financial Incentives Are Weaker Than Social Incentives but Very Important Anyway
01 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/28/financial-incentives-are-weaker-than-social-incentives-but-very-important-anyway/ NYT: Economic Incen...
Highlights from the Comments on PNSE
28 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/24/highlights-from-the-comments-on-pnse/ (original post) Alex M writes: I think one of the main proble...
Indian Economic Reform: Much More Than You Wanted to Know
25 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/23/indian-economic-reform-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/ From a recent Charter Cities Institute rep...
The PNSE Paper
25 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/21/the-pnse-paper/ I've mentioned this a few times, but it's worth going over in detail. The full title i...
Is Enlightenment Compatible With Sex Scandals?
22 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/16/is-enlightenment-compatible-with-sex-scandals/ Last year I reviewed The Mind Illuminated, a meditatio...
The Control Group Is Out of Control [Classic]
19 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/28/the-control-group-is-out-of-control/ I. Allan Crossman calls parapsychology the control group for sci...
Book Review: Against the Grain
17 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/14/book-review-against-the-grain/ Someone on SSC Discord summarized James Scott's Against The Grain as ...
Beware Isolated Demands for Rigor [Classic]
05 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demands-for-rigor/ I. From Identity, Personal Identity, and the Self by John Perry: ...
Too Much Dark Money in Almonds
22 Sep 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/18/too-much-dark-money-in-almonds/ Everyone always talks about how much money there is in politics. This is ...
Against Tulip Subsidies [Classic]
21 Sep 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/06/06/against-tulip-subsidies/ I. Imagine a little kingdom with a quaint custom: when a man likes a woman, he o...
Against Against Pseudoaddiction
18 Sep 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/16/against-against-pseudoaddiction/ I. "Pseudoaddiction" is one of the standard beats every article on the...
SSC Meetups 2019: Times and Places
15 Sep 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Thanks to everyone who offered to host a meetup. Full list of cities, times, and places is below. If you're reading this, you're invited. Please don't...
Lots of People Going Around With Mild Hallucinations All the Time
15 Sep 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/11/lots-of-people-going-around-with-mild-hallucinations-all-the-time/ [Related to: Relaxed Beliefs Under Ps...
SSC Journal Club: Relaxed Beliefs Under Psychedelics and the Anarchic Brain
14 Sep 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/10/ssc-journal-club-relaxed-beliefs-under-psychedelics-and-the-anarchic-brain/ Thanks to Sarah H. and the pe...
[Partial Retraction] Age Gaps and Birth Order Effects
14 Sep 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/09/partial-retraction-age-and-birth-order-effects/ On Less Wrong, Bucky tries to replicate my results o...
Book Review: Seeing Like a State [Classic]
07 Sep 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/16/book-review-seeing-like-a-state/ I. Seeing Like A State is the book G.K. Chesterton would have written ...
List of Passages I Highlighted in My Copy of Ages of Discord
05 Sep 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/04/list-of-passages-i-highlighted-in-my-copy-of-ages-of-discord/ Turchin has some great stories about uni...
Book Review: Ages of Discord
03 Sep 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/02/book-review-ages-of-discord/ I. I recently reviewed Secular Cycles, which presents a demographic-stru...
Meetups Everywhere 2019
30 Aug 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Last autumn we organized meetups in 85 different cities (and one ship!) around the world. Some of the meetup groups stuck around or reported permanent...
Book Review: Reframing Superintelligence
30 Aug 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Ten years ago, everyone was talking about superintelligence, the singularity, the robot apocalypse. What happened? I think the main answer is: the fie...
A Thrive/Survive Theory of the Political Spectrum
24 Aug 2019
Contributed by Lukas
I admitted in my last post on Reaction that I devoted insufficient space to the question of why society does seem to be drifting gradually leftwa...
Don't Fear the Simulators
23 Aug 2019
Contributed by Lukas
From the New York Times: Are We Living In A Computer Simulation? Let's Not Find Out. It lists the standard reasons for thinking we might be in a sim...
Maybe Your Zoloft Stopped Working Because a Liver Fluke Tried to Turn Your Nth-Great-Grandmother Into a Zombie
23 Aug 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Or at least this is the theory proposed in Brain Evolution Through The Lens Of Parasite Manipulation by Marco del Giudice. The paper starts with an ...
Attempted Replication: Does Beef Jerky Cause Manic Episodes?
18 Aug 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Last year, a study came out showing that beef jerky and other cured meats, could trigger mania in bipolar disorder (paper, popular article). It was a...
Book Review: Secular Cycles
15 Aug 2019
Contributed by Lukas
There is a tide in the affairs of men. It cycles with a period of about three hundred years. During its flood, farms and businesses prosper, and great...
All Debates Are Bravery Debates [Classic]
10 Aug 2019
Contributed by Lukas
"I don't practice what I preach because I'm not the kind of person I'm preaching to." — J. R. "Bob" Dobbs I. I read Atlas Shrugged probably about a ...
Against Bravery Debates [Classic]
10 Aug 2019
Contributed by Lukas
There's a tradition on Reddit that when somebody repeats some cliche in a tone that makes it sound like she believes she is bringing some brilliant an...
Highlights from the Comments on Billionaire Philanthropy
10 Aug 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Thanks to everyone who commented on Against Against Billionaire Philanthropy. For whatever reason, the comments there were exceptionally good. In par...
Squareallworthy on UBI Plans
06 Aug 2019
Contributed by Lukas
I want to signal-boost Tumblr user squareallworthy's analysis of various UBI plans: 1. Jensen et al's plan 2. Healy et al's plan 3. Andrew Yang's ...
Against Against Billionaire Philanthropy
06 Aug 2019
Contributed by Lukas
[Conflict of interest notice: I've volunteered for both private and public charities, but more often private. I received a small amount of money for w...
Who By Very Slow Decay [Classic]
01 Aug 2019
Contributed by Lukas
[Trigger warning: Death, pain, suffering, sadness] I. Some people, having completed the traditional forms of empty speculation – "What do you want t...
The Categories Were Made for Man, Not Man for the Categories [Classic]
27 Jul 2019
Contributed by Lukas
I. "Silliest internet atheist argument" is a hotly contested title, but I have a special place in my heart for the people who occasionally try to prov...
Adversarial Collaboration Contest 2019
27 Jul 2019
Contributed by Lukas
[self plagiarism notice: this is mostly copied from last year's contest announcement] 1. Announcing the second annual Adversarial Collaboration Contes...
Book Review: The Electric Kool-aid Acid Test
25 Jul 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Ken Kesey, graduating college in Oregon with several wrestling championships and a creative writing degree, made a classic mistake: he moved to the Sa...
Know Your Gabapentinoids
21 Jul 2019
Contributed by Lukas
The gabapentinoids are a class of drugs vaguely resembling the neurotransmitter GABA. Although they were developed to imitate GABA's action, later res...
Caution on Bias Arguments
21 Jul 2019
Contributed by Lukas
"You say it's important to overcome biases. So isn't it hypocritical that you're not trying to overcome whichever bias prevents you from realizing yo...
Against Lie Inflation
18 Jul 2019
Contributed by Lukas
[Related to: The Whole City Is Center] I. I got into an argument recently with somebody who used the word "lie" to refer to a person honestly repor...
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...