https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/boston-meetup-this-sunday When: Sunday, 9/5, 5 PM Where: area.bricks.tribune , aka John F Kennedy Park in Cambridge, near the picnic tables. Who: Anyone who wants. Please feel free to come even if you feel awkward about it, even if you’re not “the typical ACX reader”, even if you’re worried people won’t like you, etc. Also, me! I’ll be there on my meetups tour and hope to meet many of you. Some rationalist/EA leaders are focusing on Boston right now as a pro...
Sep 04, 2021•2 min•Ep. 549
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/long-covid-much-more-than-you-wanted Like everyone else, I'm trying to figure out how cautious I should be around COVID. It seems like the most important concern for young vaccinated people like myself is the risk of Long COVID symptoms, so I spent a while trying to figure out what those were. My basic conclusion is that everyone else is right, that news stories on this phenomenon seem remarkably good, and that there's not much we know for sure beyond the si...
Sep 03, 2021•56 min•Ep. 548
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/on-hreha-on-behavioral-economics Jason Hreha’s article on The Death Of Behavioral Economics has been going around lately, after an experiment by behavioral econ guru Dan Ariely was discovered to be fraudulent. The article argues that this is the tip of the iceberg - looking back on the last few years of replication crisis, behavioral economics has been undermined almost to the point of irrelevance. The article itself mostly just urges behavioral economists t...
Sep 01, 2021•45 min•Ep. 547
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/berkeley-meetup-this-saturday When: Saturday, August 28, at 1 PM Where: deflection.jump.puppy , aka the lawn where West Circle meets Free Speech Bikeway near the UC Berkeley parking lot. Who: Anyone who wants. Please feel free to come even if you feel awkward about it, even if you’re not “the typical SSC reader”, even if you’re worried people won’t like you, etc. Also, me! I’m starting my meetups tour there. I’ll be announcing the meetups on the tour (about ...
Aug 27, 2021•1 min•Ep. 546
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-missing [Original article: Kids Can Recover From Missing Even A Lot Of School ] I. Many commenters shared their own stories of missing lots of school and bouncing back from it. For example, Rachel E : I was unschooled until I was 15, I'm pursuing a PhD now. Catching up on the basics wasn't easy but only took a few months. There are still a bunch of random general knowledge things I don't know, but at most it's caused a moment ...
Aug 27, 2021•36 min•Ep. 545
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/if-youre-so-smart-why-arent-you-governor Californians love long-shot bets. Actors trying to make it big in LA, tech founders chasing unicorns in San Francisco, cult leaders trying to found religions in Pasadena. In Silicon Valley, VCs turn the long-shot bet into an art: if some new startup has a 5% chance of making a billion, that's $50 million in expectation. Just a whole state full of people looking for weird opportunities. ...which makes it extra funny th...
Aug 27, 2021•14 min•Ep. 544
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/carbon-costs-quantified This post tries to quantify how much carbon is produced by various activities, lifestyle changes, and actors. can’t stress enough how approximate and unreliable these numbers are. The reason I made this chart and other people didn’t isn’t because I’m smarter or harder-working than they are. It’s because I’m less responsible, and more willing to use numbers that are kind of grounded in wild guesses, and technically shouldn’t be compare...
Aug 26, 2021•37 min•Ep. 543
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/meetups-everywhere-2021-times-and https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1QFbM5B9KfsiwqO6DvJ4D05dQitBtZ6kYDwXZ3Hj6SEc/edit#gid=1585750313 Thanks to everyone who respond to my request for ACX outdoor meetup organizers. Volunteers have arranged meetups in 170 cities around the world, including beautiful Lusk, Wyoming (population: 1,526). You can see the full list here , and I’ll also have it below in case you can’t access the spreadsheet for some reason. I’ll ...
Aug 25, 2021•57 min•Ep. 542
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-aducanumab These are highlights from the comments of Adumbrations Of Aducanumab , Details Of The Infant Fish Oil Story , and discussion of those posts elsewhere. C_B writes : I agree with this post's overall point that the FDA is not, on average, too lax, and that the Atlantic article's take that the aducanumab approval is a sign of them being too lax is a bad take. That said, I think the beginning of this article really under...
Aug 22, 2021•38 min•Ep. 541
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-august [Remember, I haven’t independently verified each link. On average, commenters will end up spotting evidence that around two or three of the links in each links post are wrong or misleading. I correct these as I see them, and will highlight important corrections later, but I can’t guarantee I will have caught them all by the time you read this.] 1: Ever wonder what happened to the Borgias after the Renaissance? Apparently they’re still around...
Aug 19, 2021•23 min•Ep. 540
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/kids-can-recover-from-missing-even I. Introduction Back when the public schools were closed or online, someone I know burned themselves out working overtime to get the money to send their kid to a private school. They figured that all the other parents would do it, their kid would fall hopelessly behind, and then they’d be doomed to whatever sort of horrible fate awaits people who don’t get into the right colleges. I hear this is happening again now, with mo...
Aug 19, 2021•29 min•Ep. 539
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/blindness-schizophrenia-and-autism Some weird psychiatric trivia: no congenitally blind person ever gets schizophrenia ( journal article , popular article ). “Trivia” is exactly the right word for this fact; it’s undeniably interesting, but what do you do with it? So far nobody has done anything, other than remark “hmm, that’s funny”. I was thinking about this recently in the context of the diametrical model of autism vs. schizophrenia. This is itself pretty...
Aug 15, 2021•6 min•Ep. 538
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/contra-hanania-on-partisanship Support the author on Substack: astralcodexten.substack.com Then support the podcast: www.patreon.com/sscpodcast Richard Hanania of the Center For The Study Of Partisanship And Ideology asks " why is everything liberal ?" Given that there are approximately equal numbers of Trump voters and Biden voters in elections, how come we have "woke capital" celebrating Pride Month, instead of unwoke capital celebrating some conservative ...
Aug 14, 2021•31 min•Ep. 537
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/outdoor-careful-meetups-everywhere Support the author on Substack: astralcodexten.substack.com Then support the podcast: www.patreon.com/sscpodcast https://forms.gle/mvueraFmq2hSqdH27 There are ACX-affiliated meetup groups all over the world. Lots of people are vaguely interested, but don't try them out until I make a big deal about it on the blog. Since learning that, I've tried to make a big deal about it on the blog once annually, and it's that time of ye...
Aug 12, 2021•10 min•Ep. 536
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/eight-hundred-slightly-poisoned-word Support the author on Substack: astralcodexten.substack.com Then support the podcast: www.patreon.com/sscpodcast In 2012, a Berkeley team found that indoor carbon dioxide had dramatic negative effects on cognition ( paper , popular article ). Subjects in poorly ventilated environments did up to 50% worse on a test of reasoning and decision-making. This is potentially pretty important, because lots of office buildings (and...
Aug 11, 2021•8 min•Ep. 535
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/contra-drum-on-the-fish-oil-story Support the author on Substack: astralcodexten.substack.com Then support the podcast: www.patreon.com/sscpodcast I. Kevin Drum questions my interpretation of the infant fish oil story . (it's actually more complicated - I posted a shorter version, later corrected it with a longer version based on the account of one of the doctors involved but said it basically supported my shorter version, he also found the longer version an...
Aug 10, 2021•23 min•Ep. 534
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/details-of-the-infant-fish-oil-story I. In my recent post on the FDA, I mentioned a story about a fish-oil-based infant nutritional fluid called Omegaven. The FDA took too long to approve it, and lots of infants died. I plucked that from the anti-FDA blogosphere, where it had been floating around for a while in various incarnations. I tried to check it before publishing, but only enough to confirm the basic outline. A concerned reader sent me a Cochrane pape...
Aug 08, 2021•24 min•Ep. 533
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-acemoglu Eugene Norman writes: This… “People have said climate change could cause mass famine and global instability by 2100. But actually, climate change is contributing to hurricanes and wildfires right now! So obviously those alarmists are wrong and nobody needs to worry about future famine and global instability at all.” …isn’t a good analogy at all. Because nobody is arguing that climate change now doesn’t lead to increas...
Aug 07, 2021•34 min•Ep. 532
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/adumbrations-of-aducanumab Lots of people have been writing about aducanumab, but this Atlantic article in particular bothers me. Backing up: aducanumab, aka Aduhelm, is a new “Alzheimers drug” recently approved by the FDA. I use the scare quotes because it’s pretty unclear whether it actually treats Alzheimers. It definitely treats beta-amyloid plaques, and beta-amyloid plaques are kind of nasty-looking brain structures that seem to be related to Alzheimers...
Aug 06, 2021•34 min•Ep. 531
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/what-should-we-make-of-sasha-chapins I. Substack blogger Sasha Chapin writes that COVID-19 Took My Sense Of Smell, LSD Brought It Back . He got coronavirus, and like many people lost his sense of smell (medical term: dysosmia or anosmia ). Ten days after recovery, he still couldn’t smell anything. He looked on Twitter and found some anecdotal reports that psychedelics had helped with this, so he took LSD and tried to smell some stuff while tripping. He says ...
Aug 05, 2021•24 min•Ep. 530
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/model-city-monday-8221 Support the author here: astralcodexten.substack.com Then, you can support this podcast at: www.patreon.com/sscpodcast Greenhouse Effect Honduras remains the country to watch in the charter city sphere, with its ZEDE law allowing unprecedented levels of freedom and protection. I’d previously written about two Honduran projects, the high-tech island hub of Prospera and the industrial heartland project of Ciudad Morazan. Now there’s a th...
Aug 04, 2021•21 min•Ep. 529
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/updated-look-at-long-term-ai-risks The last couple of posts here talked about long-term risks from AI, so I thought I’d highlight the results of a new expert survey on exactly what they are. There have been a lot of these surveys recently, but this one is a little different. Starting from the beginning: in 2012-2014, Muller and Bostrom surveyed 550 people with various levels of claim to the title "AI expert" on the future of AI. People in philosophy of AI or...
Aug 02, 2021•11 min•Ep. 528
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/when-does-worrying-about-things-trade On yesterday’s post , some people tried to steelman Acemoglu’s argument into something like this: There’s a limited amount of public interest in AI. The more gets used up on the long-term risk of superintelligent AI, the less is left for near-term AI risks like unemployment or autonomous weapons. Sure, maybe Acemoglu didn’t explain his dismissal of long-term risks very well. But given that he thinks near-term risks are b...
Jul 30, 2021•13 min•Ep. 527
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/contra-acemoglu-onoh-god-were-doing The Washington Post has published yet another "luminary in unrelated field discovers AI risk, pronounces it stupid" article. This time it's Daron Acemoglu. I respect Daron Acemoglu and appreciate the many things his work has revealed about economics. In particular, I respect him so much that I wish he would stop embarrassing himself by writing this kind of article (I feel the same way about Steven Pinker and Ted Chiang ). ...
Jul 29, 2021•19 min•Ep. 526
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-726 This Week In Markets PredictIt remains easy to use, high-volume, and focused almost entirely on horse-race political questions. At least we might get rid of Cuomo. Polymarket remains a fun alternative way to learn about the news. I only heard about the monkeypox issue a few days ago, and hearing “22% chance of it spreading” is both faster and more useful than some article that dithers for a few paragraphs and finally concludes that “health ...
Jul 28, 2021•21 min•Ep. 525
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-july [Remember, I haven’t independently verified each link. On average, commenters will end up spotting evidence that around two or three of the links in each links post are wrong or misleading. I correct these as I see them, and will highlight important corrections later, but I can’t guarantee I will have caught them all by the time you read this.] 1: Previous research had suggested that you might be able to treat depression by using Botox to lite...
Jul 25, 2021•24 min•Ep. 524
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/things-i-learned-writing-the-lockdown Lockdown Effectiveness: Much More Than You Wanted To Know is the most ambitious post I've tried to write since starting the new blog. I posted an early draft for subscribers only and tried crowdsourcing opinions. Most of the comments I got on Substack weren't too helpful, but several people sent me private emails that were very helpful. I had expected that anti-lockdown academics would want to remain anonymous so nobody ...
Jul 23, 2021•24 min•Ep. 523
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-crazy Some good discussion of PTSD, culminating in a link to the ACOUP blog, which says : I cannot speak for all pre-modern, ancient or medieval armies. But for the periods where I have read a wide chunk of the primary source material, I’d say there is vanishingly little evidence that people in the ancient Mediterranean or medieval Europe experienced PTSD from combat experience in the way that modern soldiers do . That is ofte...
Jul 22, 2021•34 min•Ep. 522
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/peer-review-request-ketamine I'm trying to build up a database of mental health resources on my other website, Lorien Psychiatry . Whenever I post something here, people have had good comments, so I want to try using you all as peer review. This is a rough draft of my page on depression. I'm interested in any feedback you can give, including: 1. Typos 2. Places where you disagree with my recommendations / assessment of the evidence 3. Extra things you think ...
Jul 21, 2021•54 min•Ep. 521
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/please-take-the-reader-survey All right, here goes. This is a project to support studies by ACX community members, by getting readers to fill out research surveys. You’ll fill out the General Demographic Information survey first, then however many additional surveys you have the patience for. Please start with Survey #0 (general demographics). After that, in order to prevent a scenario where the first few surveys get lots of responses and the last few get no...
Jul 17, 2021•5 min•Ep. 520
