https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-the-man-from-the-future John von Neumann invented the digital computer. The fields of game theory and cellular automata. Important pieces of modern economics, set theory, and particle physics. A substantial part of the technology behind the atom and hydrogen bombs. Several whole fields of mathematics I hadn’t previously heard of, like “operator algebras”, “continuous geometry”, and “ergodic theory”. The Man From The Future , by Ananyo Bhattachary...
Jul 14, 2022•38 min•Ep. 689
New star forecasting team -- Musk vs. Twitter -- Donald Trump wriggling his way out of things https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-71122 Curtains For Trump? The original case for formal forecasting grew out of pundits often being confident and wrong. And nowhere have pundits been wrong more often than when they predict that the newest scandal will end Donald Trump’s career once and for all. Source: KnowYourMeme I thought of this last week while reading Is Conservative Media Breaki...
Jul 13, 2022•14 min•Ep. 688
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-outlier [ This is one of the finalists in the 2022 book review contest. It’s not by me - it’s by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked - SA ] I. I decided to read a 600-page book about Jimmy Ca...
Jul 10, 2022•41 min•Ep. 687
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-the-bb9 Thanks to the 750 of you who commented on the homicide spike post (as of last weekend when I collated these highlights). I don’t have enough space here to address everything, but here are some general themes: Was It Guns? Artifex0 on the subreddit writes : You mentioned that you haven't looked closely into the idea that increased gun sales were to blame. I haven't either, but that hypothesis immediately seems more plau...
Jul 08, 2022•32 min•Ep. 686
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/nobody-knows-how-well-homework-works Yesterday I wrote about bottlenecks to learning . I wanted to discuss the effectiveness of homework. If it works well, that would suggest students are bottlenecked on examples and repetition. If it works poorly, it would have to be something else. Unfortunately, all the research on this (showcased in eg Cooper 2006 ) is terrible. Most studies cited by both sides use “time spent doing homework” as the independent variable,...
Jul 07, 2022•7 min•Ep. 685
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/study-ritalin-works-but-school-isnt Recent study, Pelham et al: The Effect Of Stimulant Medication On The Learning Of Academic Curricula In Children With ADHD . It’s gotten popular buzz as “scientists have found medication has no detectable impact on how much children with ADHD learn in the classroom ” and “ Medication alone has no impact on learning ”. This probably comes as a surprise if you’ve ever worked with stimulants, ADHD patients, or classrooms, so ...
Jul 07, 2022•12 min•Ep. 684
Finalist #8 in the Book Review Contest https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-internationalists [ This is one of the finalists in the 2022 book review contest. It’s not by me - it’s by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked - SA ] In...
Jul 04, 2022•57 min•Ep. 683
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-june-1e7 [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: Did you know: seven countries in East Africa plan to merge into a single state sometime in th...
Jul 03, 2022•31 min•Ep. 682
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-san [Original post here ] 1: Nifty775 writes : This doesn't address allegations that many of California's homeless are from elsewhere, but deliberately moved to a few metro areas due to nice weather and generous social services. (Or, I've heard stories that their local town put them on a bus to SF). If .2% of the population everywhere is basically OK with a lifestyle of camping on the street and doing drugs, and then they all ...
Jul 02, 2022•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 681
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/what-caused-the-2020-homicide-spike In my review of San Fransicko , I mentioned that it was hard to separate the effect of San Francisco’s local policies from the general 2020 spike in homicides, which I attributed to the Black Lives Matter protests and subsequent police pullback. The nationwide 2020 spike in homicides ( source ). The spike is small compared to the secular trend from the 1960s through 2000, but large by the standards of the past twenty years...
Jul 02, 2022•33 min•Ep. 680
ZEDE update, Afropolitan, and we're going to Disney World! https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/model-city-monday-62722 Goodbye, ZEDE Law The story so far: in the mid 2010s, Honduras passed a first-in-the-world law saying that private actors could apply to run charter cities / special economic zones (ZEDEs) on Honduran territory. Three groups took them up on the offer and designed various interesting projects. In January, Honduras kicked out the right-wing government that passed the ZEDE law an...
Jul 01, 2022•25 min•Ep. 679
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-public-choice-theory Finalist #7 In The Book Review Contest [ This is one of the finalists in the 2022 book review contest. It’s not by me - it’s by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked - SA ] [up...
Jun 29, 2022•56 min•Ep. 678
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-san-fransicko Last month I discussed the platforms of twenty-six candidates for California governor. One candidate, author and activist Michael Shellenberger, objected to my characterization of him, so I read his book San Fransicko to learn more and decide whether I owed him an apology. San Fransicko is subtitled “Why Progressives Ruin Cities”. It builds off the kind of stories familiar to most Bay Area residents: In the spring of 2021 two collea...
Jun 28, 2022•2 hr 58 min•Ep. 677
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-future-of-fusion [ This is one of the finalists in the 2022 book review contest. It’s not by me - it’s by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked - SA ] Introduction Fusion is the power which lig...
Jun 18, 2022•49 min•Ep. 676
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/peer-review-nightmares I'm trying to build up a database of mental health resources on my other website, Lorien Psychiatry . Every time I post something, people here have made good comments, so I want to try using you all as peer review. Please give me comments on typos, places where you disagree with my recommendations, extra things you think I should add, your personal stories about your own experiences, and comments on the overall organization and tone of...
Jun 16, 2022•18 min•Ep. 675
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-61422 Mantic Monday 6/13/22 It’s been a while since we’ve done one of these, hopefully no major new crises started while we were . . . oh. Darn. Mantic Monkey Metaculus predicts 17000 cases and 400 deaths from monkeypox this year. But as usual, it’s all about the distribution 90% chance of fewer than 400,000 cases. 95% chance of fewer than 2.2 million cases. 98% chance of fewer than 500 million cases. This is encouraging, but a 2% chance of >...
Jun 14, 2022•17 min•Ep. 674
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-dawn-of-everything [ This is one of the finalists in the 2022 book review contest. It’s not by me - it’s by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked - SA ] ON ROUSSEAU, ESSAY CONTESTS, POLITICAL M...
Jun 12, 2022•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 673
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/somewhat-contra-marcus-on-ai-scaling I. Previously: I predicted that DALL-E’s many flaws would be fixed quickly in future updates. As evidence, I cited Gary Marcus’ lists of GPT’s flaws, most of which got fixed quickly in future updates. Marcus responded with a post on his own Substack , arguing . . . well, arguing enough things that I’m nervous quoting one part as the thesis, and you should read the whole post, but if I had to do it, it would be: Now it is ...
Jun 11, 2022•33 min•Ep. 672
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/against-there-are-two-x-wing-parties One of my least favorite political tropes is the claim that "America has two left-wing parties" or "America has two right-wing parties" or "both major parties are socialist" or however else you want frame this. The argument goes that even the Democrats aren't truly left (or even the Republicans aren't truly right), and so one side of the political spectrum completely controls discourse. Taken as an absolute claim, it's me...
Jun 10, 2022•8 min•Ep. 671
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/which-party-has-gotten-more-extreme Matt Yglesias has written a couple of posts ( 1 , 2 ) on the subject of this meme (originally by Colin Wright, recently signal-boosted by Elon Musk): He concludes that, contra the image where the Right stays in the same place and the Left moves, both Republicans and Democrats have “changed a lot” since 2008. He wisely avoids speculating on whether one party has moved further or faster than the other. I’m less wise, so I’ve...
Jun 09, 2022•29 min•Ep. 670
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/my-bet-ai-size-solves-flubs?s=r On A Guide To Asking Robots To Design Stained Glass Windows , I described how DALL-E gets confused easily and makes silly mistakes. But I also wrote that: I’m not going to make the mistake of saying these problems are inherent to AI art. My guess is a slightly better language model would solve most of them...For all I know, some of the larger image models have already fixed these issues. These are the sorts of problems I expec...
Jun 08, 2022•25 min•Ep. 669
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-castrato [ This is one of the finalists in the 2022 book review contest. It’s not by me - it’s by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked - SA ] Morning of the Mutants “ CASTRATO, a musician, who...
Jun 06, 2022•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 668
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/birth-order-effects-nature-vs-nurture Introduction Thanks to everyone who waited two years for me to get around to this. In 2018, thanks to the 8,000 of you who filled out the Slate Star Codex Reader Survey, I discovered that higher birth order siblings were much more likely to read this blog than later-borns: Source here ; thanks to Emile for the graph That is, of people with exactly one sibling who read this blog, about 72% of those are the older of the tw...
Jun 01, 2022•21 min•Ep. 667
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/a-guide-to-asking-robots-to-design I love stained glass. Not so much your usual suburban house stained glass with a picture of lilies. The good stuff. Cathedral windows, Art Nouveau, Art Deco. Why did we stop doing that? I blame the conspiracy . Recently I’ve been experimenting with small-scale alternatives. You can get custom-printed window film from these people . If you print out a picture of a stained glass scene and stick it on a window, it looks pretty...
May 31, 2022•38 min•Ep. 666
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-anti-politics [ This is one of the finalists in the 2022 book review contest. It’s not by me - it’s by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked - SA ] Everyone familiar with Effective Altruism kno...
May 28, 2022•33 min•Ep. 665
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/in-partial-grudging-defense-of-the 1: The New York Times has an article out on the Hearing Voices Movement - ie people with hallucinations and delusions who want this to be treated as normal and okay rather than medicalized. Freddie deBoer has a pretty passionate response here. Other people have differently passionate responses: I’ve met some Hearing Voices members. My impression is that everyone on every side of this discussion is a good person trying to ma...
May 26, 2022•30 min•Ep. 664
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/california-gubernatorial-candidates California is the home of Alphabet Inc, so it’s symbolically appropriate that we have twenty-six candidates in this year’s gubernatorial primary. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will get bored after looking into two or three. Not us! We are going to do our civic duty and evaluate them all, in the order they’re listed on the ballot. Starting with:...
May 25, 2022•1 hr 24 min•Ep. 663
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/willpower-human-and-machine Two paragraphs from the mesa-optimizers post , which I quoted again in the adaptation-executors post: Consider evolution, optimizing the fitness of animals. For a long time, it did so very mechanically, inserting behaviors like “use this cell to detect light, then grow toward the light” or “if something has a red dot on its back, it might be a female of your species, you should mate with it”. As animals became more complicated, th...
May 24, 2022•7 min•Ep. 662
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-making-nature [ This is one of the finalists in the 2022 book review contest. It’s not by me - it’s by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked - SA ] The world of scientific publishing is organized a...
May 22, 2022•51 min•Ep. 661
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/lavenders-game-silexan-for-anxiety 1: What is silexan? There are dozens of natural supplements that purport to treat anxiety. Most have a few small sketchy studies backing them up. Together, they form a big amorphous mass of claims that nobody has the patience to sift through or care about. But recently silexan (derived from lavender) has started to stand out of the crowd. Daily Mail had an interview with psychiatry professor Hans Peter-Volz, who said that s...
May 19, 2022•18 min•Ep. 660
