Link: https://slatestarscratchpad.tumblr.com/post/633822178059730944/here-are-the-nine-ways-the-election-could-end You are Joseph R. Biden Jr. You sit in a convention center in Delaware, surrounded by advisors and confidantes. You are acutely aware that the hopes of a hundred million people are with you. You feel like they should be more tangible, like being the focus of a hundred million minds should at least make your skin tingle a tiny bit - like being a vessel for so much power should make y...
Nov 04, 2020•12 min•Ep. 398
I. Why is there such a strong Sunni/Shia divide? I know the Comparative Religion 101 answer. The early Muslims were debating who was the rightful caliph. Some of them said Abu Bakr, others said Ali, and the dispute has been going on ever since. On the other hand, that was fourteen hundred years ago, both candidates are long dead, and there’s no more caliphate. You’d think maybe they’d let the matter rest. Sure, the two groups have slightly different hadith and schools of jurisprudence, but how m...
Nov 02, 2020•46 min•Ep. 397
This week the SSC Meetup features guest speaker Jason Crawford, author the blog The Roots of Progress, discussing 't he non-linear model of innovation.' "Innovation is often described with a “linear” model from discovery to invention to distribution. There is an element of truth in this, but a naive interpretation of the model does not match the reality of science and invention. In this talk, I’ll show the feedback mechanisms between discovery and invention and how they are intertwined, using ex...
Oct 28, 2020•1 hr 15 min•Ep. 396
I. There was an argument on Tumblr which, like so many arguments on Tumblr, was terrible. I will rephrase it just a little to make a point. Alice said something along the lines of “I hate people who frivolously diagnose themselves with autism without knowing anything about the disorder. They should stop thinking they’re ‘so speshul’ and go see a competent doctor.” Beth answered something along the lines of “I diagnosed myself with autism, but only after a lot of careful research. I don’t have th...
Oct 26, 2020•20 min•Ep. 395
I. One of the most interesting responses I got to my post supporting the junior doctors strike was by Salem, who said that this situation was (ethically) little different than that around adjunct professors, who also become overworked and miserable trying to break into a high-status profession. Salem very kindly didn’t directly accuse me of hypocrisy, but maybe he should have. While I sympathize with adjuncts’ terrible conditions, my natural instinct is to say feedback mechanisms should keep doi...
Oct 19, 2020•24 min•Ep. 394
David Friedman on Legal Systems Very Different from Ours: A brief survey of a range of legal system, past and present, from Imperial China and Periclean Athens to modern Amish and Romany. David Friedman is an academic economist with a doctorate in physics recently retired from spending the previous twenty-three years teaching in a law school. His first book, The Machinery of Freedom: Guide to a Radical Capitalism, was published in 1973 and includes a description of how a society with property ri...
Oct 15, 2020•1 hr 12 min•Ep. 393
[Epistemic status: not very serious] [Content note: May make you feel overly scrutinized] Sometimes I hear people talking about how nobody notices them or cares about anything they do. And I want to say…well… Okay. The Survey of Earned Doctorates tells us that the United States awards about a hundred classics PhDs per year . I get the impression classics is more popular in Europe, so let’s say a world total of five hundred. If the average classicist has a fifty year career, that’s 25,000 classic...
Oct 12, 2020•12 min•Ep. 392
I. Suppose I were to come out tomorrow as gay. I have amazing and wonderful friends, and I certainly wouldn’t expect them to hate me forever or tell me to burn in Hell or anything like that. But even more than that, I think they would understand and accept the decision. There would be a lot of not-so-obvious failure modes they could fall into, but wouldn’t. For example, I don’t think any of them would say something like “Oh, obviously you just haven’t met the right woman. I know this really cute...
Oct 05, 2020•13 min•Ep. 391
Integrating Evolutionary Psychology and Behaviorism Summary - All of us want to change other people's behavior to align more closely with our goals. Over the last century, behaviorists have discovered how reward and punishment change the behavior of organisms. The central idea of this talk is that we are intuitive behaviorists and that our relationships, emotions, and mental health can be better understood if you consider how we evolved to change the behavior of others....
Sep 30, 2020•1 hr 20 min•Ep. 390
I. A lot of libertarians and anarcho-capitalists envision a future of small corporate states competing for migrants and capital by trying to have the best policies. But the Internet is about as close to that vision as we’re likely to find outside the pages of a political philosophy textbook. And I am far from convinced. Let’s back up. Internet communities – ranging from a personal blog like this one all the way up to Facebook and Reddit – share many features with real communities. They work out ...
Sep 28, 2020•24 min•Ep. 389
[Epistemic status: something I’ve been thinking about recently. There’s a lot of complication around these issues and this is more to start a discussion than to present any settled solution] There’s a scene in Fiddler on the Roof where Tevye is describing his peaceful little town. He says they never fight – except that one time about a horse some people thought was a mule. Someone interrupts him to say it was really a mule some people thought was a horse, and then everyone in town starts shoutin...
Sep 21, 2020•14 min•Ep. 388
Connor Leahy discusses the idea of an 'AGI Fire Alarm' and argues GPT-3 might be the last such warning we'll receive before it's too late to act.
Sep 17, 2020•1 hr 37 min•Ep. 387
Suppose a lot of that stuff about bravery debates is right. That lots of the advice people give is useful for some people, but that the opposite advice is useful for other people. For example, “You need to stop being so hard on yourself, remember you are your own worst critic” versus “Stop making excuses for yourself, you will never be able to change until you admit you’ve hit bottom.” Or “You need to remember that the government can’t solve all problems and that some regulations are counterprod...
Sep 13, 2020•11 min•Ep. 386
It’s been two and a half months since I deleted the blog, so I owe all of you an update on recent events . I haven’t heard anything from the New York Times one way or the other. Since nothing has been published, I’d assume they dropped the article, except that they approached an acquaintance for another interview last month. Overall I’m confused. But they definitely haven’t given me any explicit reassurance that they won’t reveal my private information. And now that I’ve publicly admitted privac...
Sep 13, 2020•7 min•Ep. 385
Trigger warning: deliberately provoking horror about graduates’ real-world post-college prospects. Epistemic status: intended as persuasive speech, may somewhat overstate case. Ladies and gentlemen, I am honored to have been invited to speak here at the great University of [mumble]. Go Wildcats, Spartans, or Eagles, as the case may be! I apologize if what I have to say to you sounds a little unpolished. I was called in on very short notice after your original choice for graduation speaker, Mr....
Sep 07, 2020•36 min•Ep. 328
[Related: Tyler Cowen on rationalists , Noah Smith on rationalists , Will Wilkinson on rationalists , etc] If I were an actor in an improv show, and my prompt was “annoying person who’s never read any economics, criticizing economists”, I think I could nail it. I’d say something like: Economists think that they can figure out everything by sitting in their armchairs and coming up with ‘models’ based on ideas like ‘the only motivation is greed’ or ‘everyone behaves perfectly rationally’. But they...
Sep 01, 2020•12 min•Ep. 327
So, I kind of deleted the blog. Sorry. Here’s my explanation. Last week I talked to a New York Times technology reporter who was planning to write a story on Slate Star Codex. He told me it would be a mostly positive piece about how we were an interesting gathering place for people in tech, and how we were ahead of the curve on some aspects of the coronavirus situation. It probably would have been a very nice article. Unfortunately, he told me he had discovered my real name and would reveal it i...
Jun 23, 2020•9 min•Ep. 326
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/17/slightly-skew-systems-of-government/ [ Related To: Legal Systems Very Different From Ours Because I Just Made Them Up , List Of Fictional Drugs Banned By The FDA ] I. Clamzoria is an acausal democracy. The problem with democracy is that elections happen before the winning candidate takes office. If somebody’s never been President, how are you supposed to judge how good a President they’d be? Clamzoria realized this was dumb, and moved elections to the last d...
Jun 18, 2020•10 min•Ep. 325
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/16/open-thread-156-25/ Normally this would be a hidden thread, but I wanted to signal boost this request for help by Professor Steve Hsu, vice president of research at Michigan State University. Hsu is a friend of the blog and was a guest speaker at one of our recent online meetups – some of you might also have gotten a chance to meet him at a Berkeley meetup last year. He and his blog Information Processing have also been instrumental in helping me and thousan...
Jun 18, 2020•5 min•Ep. 324
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/15/the-vision-of-vilazodone-and-vortioxetine/ I. One of psychiatry’s many embarrassments is how many of our drugs get discovered by accident. They come from random plants or shiny rocks or stuff Alexander Shulgin invented to get high . But every so often, somebody tries to do things the proper way. Go over decades of research into what makes psychiatric drugs work and how they could work better. Figure out the hypothetical properties of the ideal psych drug. Fi...
Jun 17, 2020•27 min•Ep. 323
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/11/wordy-wernickes/ There are two major brain areas involved in language. To oversimplify, Wernicke’s area in the superior temporal gyrus handles meaning; Broca’s area in the inferior frontal gyrus handles structure and flow. If a stroke or other brain injury damages Broca’s area but leaves Wernicke’s area intact, you get language which is meaningful, but not very structured or fluid. You sound like a caveman: “Want food!” If it damages Wernicke’s area but leav...
Jun 13, 2020•3 min•Ep. 322
https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/13/proving-too-much/ The fallacy of Proving Too Much is when you challenge an argument because, in addition to proving its intended conclusion, it also proves obviously false conclusions. For example, if someone says “You can’t be an atheist, because it’s impossible to disprove the existence of God”, you can answer “That argument proves too much. If we accept it, we must also accept that you can’t disbelieve in Bigfoot, since it’s impossible to disprove his exi...
Jun 13, 2020•6 min•Ep. 321
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/10/the-obligatory-gpt-3-post/ I. I would be failing my brand if I didn’t write something about GPT-3, but I’m not an expert and discussion is still in its early stages. Consider this a summary of some of the interesting questions I’ve heard posed elsewhere, especially comments by gwern and nostalgebraist . Both of them are smart people who I broadly trust on AI issues, and both have done great work with GPT-2. Gwern has gotten it to write poetry , compose music...
Jun 12, 2020•26 min•Ep. 320
A few years ago I surveyed nootropics users about their experiences with different substances and posted the results here. Since then lots of new nootropics have come out, so I’m doing it again. If you have nootropics experience, please take The 2020 SSC Nootropics Survey . Expected completion time is ~15 minutes. Thanks!
Jun 08, 2020•1 min•Ep. 319
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/04/problems-with-paywalls/ I. I hate paywalls on articles. Absolutely hate them. A standard pro-business argument: businesses can either make your life better (by providing deals you like) or keep your life the same (by providing deals you don’t like, which you don’t take). They can’t really make your life worse. There are some exceptions, like if they outcompete and destroy another business you liked better, or if they have some kind of externalities, or if th...
Jun 06, 2020•14 min•Ep. 318
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/01/book-review-origin-of-consciousness-in-the-breakdown-of-the-bicameral-mind/ I. Julian Jaynes’ The Origin Of Consciousness In The Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind is a brilliant book, with only two minor flaws. First, that it purports to explains the origin of consciousness. And second, that it posits a breakdown of the bicameral mind. I think it’s possible to route around these flaws while keeping the thesis otherwise intact. So I’m going to start by reviewin...
Jun 03, 2020•47 min•Ep. 317
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/05/28/bush-did-north-dakota/ Continuing yesterday’s discussion of fake news: Guess et al says that 46% percent of Trump voters endorsed the Pizzagate conspiracy theory. Does this mean fake news is very powerful? We can compare this to belief in various other conspiracy theories, as measured by the 2016 Chapman University Survey Of American Fears . About 24% believe there’s a government conspiracy to cover up the truth about the moon landing, 30% about Obama’s birt...
May 31, 2020•11 min•Ep. 316
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/24/guided-by-the-beauty-of-our-weapons/ [Content note: kind of talking around Trump supporters and similar groups as if they’re not there.] I. Tim Harford writes The Problem With Facts , which uses Brexit and Trump as jumping-off points to argue that people are mostly impervious to facts and resistant to logic: All this adds up to a depressing picture for those of us who aren’t ready to live in a post-truth world. Facts, it seems, are toothless. Trying to refut...
May 30, 2020•42 min•Ep. 315
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/05/28/creationism-unchallenged/ How much should responsible news organizations report on stupid things? If they don’t report at all, the stupid things go unchallenged. But if they report too much, then they signal-boost the stupid thing and give it free publicity (eg Donald Trump). Also, people who mistrust the media might reflexively support the stupid thing just because the media hates it (eg Donald Trump). Also, the more time you waste covering stupid things, t...
May 29, 2020•8 min•Ep. 314
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/05/26/my-immortal-as-alchemical-allegory/ I. From Vox: Solving The Mystery Of The Internet’s Most Beloved And Notorious Fanfic . The fanfic is “My Immortal” , a Harry Potter story so famous that it has its own Wikipedia page, and articles about it in Slate , Buzzfeed , and The Guardian . It’s famous for being really, really bad. Spectacularly bad. Worse than it should be possible for anything to be. You wouldn’t think you could get The Guardian to write an article...
May 28, 2020•55 min•Ep. 313
