https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/statement-on-new-york-times-article There was recently a negative article about me and my blog in the New York Times . Most of you already know the history behind this, but for anyone referred here by NYT, this is where I give my side and defend myself. Like many people in the early 2000s, I started a blog when I was in college. To stay anonymous, I wrote it under my first and middle names – Scott Alexander – while leaving out my last name. I continued writi...
Feb 14, 2021•14 min•Ep. 429
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-precision-of-sensory-evidence In earlier posts, I've expressed confusion about two competing models of depression. In one - supported by an analogy to mania and various forms of sensory and motor disturbance - it's inappropriately low neural confidence levels . In the other - supported by common sense - it's a highly-confident global prior on negative perceptions and events - a bias to interpret incoming information in a threat-related way. Both of these...
Feb 14, 2021•14 min•Ep. 428
[previously in sequence: List Of Fictional Drugs Banned By The FDA , More Fictional Drugs Banned By The FDA ] VatiCoin: After a thousand years, the Catholic Church discovered how to do indulgences right: as tradable digital tokens. Not only does an initial coin offering provide better price discovery than the Pope picking a random number, but sinners who do good deeds later can sell their coins to someone else. Subject of several court cases about whether someone's VatiCoins go to their heirs up...
Feb 12, 2021•7 min•Ep. 427
[previously in sequence: Taxometrics , Dynamical Systems . Epistemic status: speculative . This should go without saying, but when I talk about “failures” in this post, I mean failures of biological processes, as in the term “congestive heart failure”; I don’t mean to accuse people with psychiatric conditions of being failures.] I. Most psychiatric disorders are at least partly genetic. Some, like schizophrenia and ADHD, are very genetic, probably 80% plus. This is strange, because having psychi...
Feb 11, 2021•29 min•Ep. 426
I. Ezra Klein is great. I know a lot of people throw shade on him for founding Vox. But as Van Gogh said about God creating the world, "We must not hold it against Him; only a master could make such a mistake". Ezra is a master and I was happy to be able to read his Why We're Polarized . (Amazon recommended it to me as "Why We're Polarized By Ezra Klein", which I would also have been happy to read.) Did you know that seventy years ago, our grandparents were having an underpolarization crisis? Tr...
Feb 11, 2021•36 min•Ep. 425
Thanks to everyone who commented last week with prediction markets I missed. Two of them seemed to be especially interesting. Polymarket is another cryptocurrency-based prediction market. It's got about two dozen contracts open, and some of them are pretty big - $5 million plus! With that kind of money, we ought to be seeing some really good predicting! We're...not. Either there's a 6% chance that Donald Trump will be president again by March 31, or something's gone wrong. Probably it's the seco...
Feb 08, 2021•15 min•Ep. 424
I heard from a journalist yesterday after writing yesterday's post on WebMD . They've been trying to write a coronavirus article worthy of Zvi or any of the other illegibly smart people writing on the pandemic. Apparently the bottleneck is sources. In most journalistic settings, you can't just write "here's what I think". You have to write "here's what my source, a recognized expert, said when I interviewed them". And the experts are pretty sparing with their interviews for contrarian stories. T...
Feb 08, 2021•6 min•Ep. 423
I started a small database of psychiatry information. It's going well. I'm grateful for all your emails suggesting changes and corrections. Sort of. Here are some of the kinds of emails I get: "You said this drug is occasionally mildly addictive but the risk/benefit calculation is worth it for most people. But my cousin's friend took it and became really addicted and it ruined his life. Maybe you should warn readers about it more emphatically." The particular example I'm thinking of is something...
Feb 06, 2021•29 min•Ep. 422
Thanks to everyone who has waited patiently for more information on this. I planned a book review contest for last summer, which I didn’t get to do because of my unexpected hiatus. I currently have 31 entries, none of which I've read yet. My plan is to give the rest of you until March 1 to send in reviews. Send them to scott[at]slatestarcodex[dot]com. I originally wanted ones that you hadn't already posted somewhere else first, but if you posted it over the last ~year because you didn't know if ...
Feb 05, 2021•3 min•Ep. 421
[Previously in sequence: Taxometrics ] I. Imagine Alice has a chronic disease. Luckily, as long as she has a job, she will have health insurance. And health insurance provides her with a treatment. Every day she takes the treatment, her health will go up one point on a 0-100 scale; every day she misses the treatment, it will go down one point. If her health ever gets below 75, she will be too ill to work. Mathematicians would call this a dynamical system with three variables : does she have a j ...
Feb 05, 2021•29 min•Ep. 420
I was driving down to LA when the cops pulled me over. "You have to turn back sir, the Sphinx here eats any traveler who can't answer her riddle." "I've trained my whole life for this" I said, and stepped on the gas. Soon I saw a Sphinx lounging in the middle of the road. When she spotted me, she asked: "What has braces, crowns, and retainers, but is not teeth?” "A medieval king in armor. My turn. What has pupils, irises, and whites, but is not an eye?" "A gardening class during apartheid. How i...
Feb 03, 2021•4 min•Ep. 419
Prediction markets are the future. They're a type of trustless, decentralized expertise that often equals or outperforms official sources. But they're not quite the present. Right now I only know of three prediction markets, and none of them live up to their potential. As usual, it’s the government’s fault: betting on prediction markets is technically gambling, which makes it mostly illegal (of course, you can still buy all the Gamestop stock you want). Each of the three big prediction markets t...
Feb 02, 2021•13 min•Ep. 418
Glen Weyl posted a reply to my post criticizing his essay on technocracy, and kindly agreed to let me elevate it into a top-level post. (consider this a standing offer to anyone else I write a post criticizing to do the same) I’ve very slightly edited some parts to adjust for differences in how the code works. You can read more from Glen Weyl on his website , his Twitter , or by buying his book . I am grateful for your taking the time to respond. There is a lot there to respond to and in general...
Jan 31, 2021•22 min•Ep. 417
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/contra-weyl-on-technocracy I. I am not defending technocracy. Nobody ever defends technocracy. It's like "elitism" or "statism". There is no Statist Party. Nobody holds rallies demanding more statism. There is no Citizens for Statism Facebook page with thousands of likes and followers. Yet for some reason libertarians don't win every single national election. Strange, isn't it? Maybe it’s one of those Russell conjugations - "I am firm, you are obstinate". I ...
Jan 30, 2021•36 min•Ep. 416
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ontology-of-psychiatric-conditions [reposted from here , with edits] I. Taxometrics is the study of whether psychiatric conditions are categorical or dimensional. Something is categorical if it neatly, objectively separates into different groups. For example, consider humans and rabbits. If we take a mixed group containing some humans and some rabbits, and graph them along some variable like weight, it would probably look like this: There’s one big obvious g...
Jan 28, 2021•34 min•Ep. 415
In the 1950s, a shady outfit called Obetrol Pharmaceuticals made a popular over-the-counter diet pill called Obetrol. If you're familiar with any of: the 1950s, shady pharma, or diet pills, your next question will be "did it contain amphetamines?" and the answer is yes, loads of them. Obetrol was a mix of four different amphetamine salts: racemic amphetamine sulfate, dextroamphetamine sulfate, methamphetamine saccharate, and methamphetamine hydrochloride. Why did they need four different kinds o...
Jan 26, 2021•23 min•Ep. 414
Logistics Don't worry, there will be real posts next week. Jan 22 Substack First, thanks for following me to Substack. I know some of you are skeptical. I was too at first, but Substack has gone above and beyond in allaying my concerns. They've let me test out a "no popup telling you to subscribe" feature. They've changed the comment section to be more like WordPress. We've agreed I'm here for a year, but if it goes badly I can leave in 2022 with no hard feelings. And I know some of you are conc...
Jan 25, 2021•8 min•Ep. 413
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/youre-probably-wondering-why-ive Welcome to Astral Codex Ten! Some of you are probably veterans of my old blog, Slate Star Codex. Others may be newbies wondering what this is all about. I'm happy to finally be able to give a clear answer: this is a blog about ṛta. Ṛta is a Sanskrit word, so ancient that it brushes up against the origin of Indo-European languages. It's related to English "rationality" and "arithmetic", but also "art" and "harmony". And "right...
Jan 22, 2021•6 min•Ep. 412
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/still-alive I. This was a triumph I'm making a note here, huge success No, seriously, it was awful. I deleted my blog of 1,557 posts. I wanted to protect my privacy, but I ended up with articles about me in New Yorker , Reason , and The Daily Beast . I wanted to protect my anonymity, but I Streisand-Effected myself, and a bunch of trolls went around posting my real name everywhere they could find. I wanted to avoid losing my day job, but ended up quitting so...
Jan 22, 2021•39 min•Ep. 411
Mark Twain: There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact. If this is true of all science, it is doubly true of social psychology. At its best, social psychology is an unmatched window into human motivations, a “look under the hood” of the way people talk and act. The best research in social psychology is as well-supported as anything in physics or biology, and much more intuitively comprehensible. This is wh...
Jan 17, 2021•23 min•Ep. 410
https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and-reptilian-muslim-climatologists-from-mars/ Beware of Phantom Lizardmen I have only done a little bit of social science research, but it was enough to make me hate people. One study I helped with analyzed whether people from different countries had different answers on a certain psychological test. So we put up a website where people answered some questions about themselves (like “what country are you from?”) and then took the psycholog...
Jan 10, 2021•12 min•Ep. 409
https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/12/23/we-are-all-msscribe/ AskReddit asked recently: If you could only give an alien one thing to help them understand the human race, what would you give them? At the time I had no good answer. Now I do. I would give them Charlotte Lennox’s write-up of how MsScribe took over Harry Potter fandom (warning: super-long but super-worth-it). Ozy informs me that everyone else in the world read this story five years ago. Maybe I am hopelessly behind the times? Maybe all ...
Dec 28, 2020•14 min•Ep. 408
https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/28/why-were-early-psychedelicists-so-weird/ [Epistemic status: very speculative, asserted with only ~30% confidence. On the other hand, even though psychiatrists don’t really talk about this it’s possible other groups know this all already] A few weeks ago I gave a presentation on the history of early psychedelic research. Since I had a tough crowd, I focused on the fascinating biographies of some of the early psychedelicists. Timothy Leary was a Harvard profes...
Dec 20, 2020•13 min•Ep. 407
https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/13/evil-is-anti-inductive/ I. A recent Cracked piece: Five Everyday Groups Society Says It’s Okay To Mock . It begins: There’s a rule in comedy that says you shouldn’t punch down. It’s okay to make fun of someone rich and famous, because they’re too busy molesting groupies with 100-dollar bills to notice, but if you make a joke at the expense of a homeless person, you’re just an asshole. That said, we as a society have somehow decided on a few arbitrary excepti...
Dec 13, 2020•11 min•Ep. 406
Stuart Russell is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of California at Berkeley, holder of the Smith-Zadeh Chair in Engineering, and Director of the Center for Human-Compatible AI. His book "Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach" (with Peter Norvig) is the standard text in AI, used in 1500 universities in 135 countries. His research covers a wide range of topics in artificial intelligence, with an emphasis on the long-term future of artificial intelligence and its relation to ...
Dec 08, 2020•1 hr 35 min•Ep. 405
Reporter Degrees Of Freedom I. A sample of Thursday’s talk at Yale These are four headlines describing the same study, Milkie, Nomaguchi and Denny (2015) . The study found that of twenty or so outcomes, only three of them – all measuring delinquent behavior among teenagers – show significant effect from time spent with parents (and this result remains after Bonferroni correction). So Vox has a great argument for their headline. The National Post has an okay argument for their headline even thoug...
Dec 06, 2020•16 min•Ep. 403
https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/07/25/how-the-west-was-won/ I. Someone recently linked me to Bryan Caplan’s post A Hardy Weed: How Traditionalists Underestimate Western Civ . He argues that “western civilization”‘s supposed defenders don’t give it enough credit. They’re always worrying about it being threatened by Islam or China or Degeneracy or whatever, but in fact western civilization can not only hold its own against these threats but actively outcompetes them: The fragility thesis is flat w...
Nov 30, 2020•34 min•Ep. 402
https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/08/29/reverse-voxsplaining-drugs-vs-chairs/ [Content note: this is pretty much a rehash of things I’ve said before , and that other people have addressed much more eloquently . My only excuse for wasting your time with it again is that SOMEHOW THE MESSAGE STILL HASN’T SUNK IN. Pitching this as “market” vs. “government” is overly simplistic, but maybe if I am overly simplistic sometimes then it will sink in better.] EpiPens, useful medical devices which reverse pot...
Nov 23, 2020•11 min•Ep. 401
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/27/a-modern-myth/ 1. Eris A middle-aged man, James, had come on stage believing it was an audition for American Idol . It wasn’t. Out ran his ex-lover, Terri. “You said you loved me!” she said. “And then when I got pregnant, you disappeared! Twenty years, and you never even sent me a letter!” The crowd booed. As James tried to sputter a response, his wife ran onto the stage. “You cheating jerk!” she shouted at James. “You lying, cheating jerk! Twenty-five years...
Nov 16, 2020•1 hr 31 min•Ep. 400
https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/08/a-theory-of-religion/ Related to Monday’s post but spun off for length reasons: my crazy theory about where religion comes from. The near-universal existence of religion across cultures is surprising. Many people have speculated on what makes tribes around the world so fixated on believing in gods and propitiating them and so on. More recently people like Dawkins and Dennett have added their own contributions about parasitic memes and hyperactive agent-detec...
Nov 09, 2020•16 min•Ep. 399
