https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-accidental-superpower [ This is the eleventh of many finalists in the 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 two of these a week for several months. When you’ve read all of them, I’ll ask you to vote for your favorite, so remember which ones you liked. If you like reading these review...
May 23, 2021•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 489
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-may [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: Apparently one important step on the way to healing partisan divides in America is implementing pr...
May 21, 2021•28 min•Ep. 488
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-culture Some of the best comments were on the history of 4Chan. Mr. Doolittle writes : The rise of 4chan is actually an interesting story of its own. A large chunk of the early user base came from another site called somethingawful.com. As you may expect from the name, somethingawful was a place where a mixture of ironic and maybe-not-ironic terrible things could be said for comedy sake. If you're immature and like edgy humor,...
May 20, 2021•36 min•Ep. 487
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-addiction-by-design [ This is the tenth of many finalists in the 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 two of these a week for several months. When you’ve read all of them, I’ll ask you to vote for your favorite, so remember which ones you liked. If you like reading these reviews, check ...
May 15, 2021•36 min•Ep. 486
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-cbt Several people in the comments pointed out existing lower-cost CBT-i apps! This was news to me - I'd searched pretty comprehensively and hadn't found any besides the VA's CBT-i Coach, which is not intended for individual use. They were: 1: Night Owl , seems good but only available for iOS 2: Sleepedy is more of a service than an app, and involves consultations and coaches. When I tried to sign up, it made me take an annoyi...
May 15, 2021•8 min•Ep. 485
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/welcome-to-the-terrible-world-of Trouble falling asleep? You could take sleeping pills, but they've got side effects. Guidelines recommend you try Cognitive Behavioral Therapy For Insomnia (CBT-i), a medication-free process where you train yourself to fall asleep by altering your schedule and sleep conditions. The journals are full of articles begging doctors to use CBT-i instead of potentially-dangerous sleeping pills. Doctors rarely comply: getting patient...
May 13, 2021•18 min•Ep. 484
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/theses-on-the-current-moment [followup to The Rise And Fall Of Online Culture Wars ] 1. The Salem Witch Hunts might not be the right metaphor We usually stick to the same stock examples of repression and retaliation against nonconformists - the Salem Witch Trials, the Red Scare, the Cultural Revolution. These are rightly remembered as awful, and reminders of them make good rallying cries. But they were also short and abnormal - brief orgies of violence, afte...
May 13, 2021•17 min•Ep. 483
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-online-culture [Followup to: New Atheism: The Godlessness That Failed] I. Introduction You've probably seen these graphs before: They tell a familiar story: America is becoming increasingly obsessed with racism and sexism. Identity issues are dominating our politics more and more with no end in sight. But what does Google Trends have to say? I chose these as especially obvious terms. But other gender-related terms...
May 11, 2021•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 482
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-years-of-lyndon [ This is the ninth of many finalists in the 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 two of these a week for several months. When you’ve read all of them, I’ll ask you to vote for your favorite, so remember which ones you liked. If you like reading these reviews, check ...
May 08, 2021•18 min•Ep. 481
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-through-the-eye [ This is the eighth of many finalists in the 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 two of these a week for several months. When you’ve read all of them, I’ll ask you to vote for your favorite, so remember which ones you liked. If you like reading these reviews, check out...
May 08, 2021•38 min•Ep. 480
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/why-is-it-hard-to-acknowledge-preferences I recently stayed at a B&B owned by a nice elderly couple. Very, very nice. The moment I stepped in the door, they asked how my flight was, where I was from, what I did, how I'd enjoyed my three minutes of visiting their city so far, what kind of food I liked, what my favorite color was, et cetera. I played along - no point in offending people - but I warned that my friend, who would be arriving a little later, w...
May 06, 2021•9 min•Ep. 479
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-a-brief-history-of-neoliberalism I. Around 1970, something went wrong. The global economy, after twenty-five years of good post-war growth, suddenly blipped. The post-WWII-but-pre-1970 economic world - the world of “embedded liberalism” - was a pleasant place. There were corporations, but they didn't do anything garish like compete with each other. Executive pay was taxed so heavily that nobody had much incentive to try to increase their profit m...
May 06, 2021•53 min•Ep. 478
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/if-you-can-be-bad-you-can-also-be Support the author Scott Alexander on Substack. https://astralcodexten.substack.com/ Spotted on Reddit about the rationalist community: I like the culture while hating a lot of the specifics...however[,] there is no such thing as "rationality" that is free from ideology. I’ve got to admit, I hate this argument. Also related ones, like: “They say we’re politicizing this scientific field. But no science is inherently apolitica...
May 04, 2021•7 min•Ep. 477
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-wizard-and-the [ This is the seventh of many finalists in the 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 two of these a week for several months. When you’ve read all of them, I’ll ask you to vote for your favorite, so remember which ones you liked. If you like reading these reviews, check...
May 01, 2021•38 min•Ep. 476
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-double-fold [ This is the sixth of many finalists in the 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 two of these a week for several months. When you’ve read all of them, I’ll ask you to vote for your favorite, so remember which ones you liked. If you like reading these reviews, check out poin...
May 01, 2021•45 min•Ep. 475
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/nootropics-survey-2020-results Thanks to the 852 of you who took the 2020 SSC nootropics survey. I asked people to rate various nootropics on whether they “worked” or not, deliberately leaving the question kind of vague. This is using a broad definition of “nootropics” - any supplement or taken-outside-the-usual-medical-system drug that’s purported to have mental health effects. Most of the chemicals I asked about were supposed stimulants, anxiolytics, or an...
Apr 29, 2021•15 min•Ep. 474
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-predictions-for-2021 At the beginning of every year, I make predictions . At the end of every year, I score them . This year I’m really late. So here are a hundred plus for 2021. Rules: unless otherwise stated, all predictions are about what will be true on/by January 1, 2022. Some predictions about my personal life, or that refer to the personal lives of other people, have been redacted to protect their privacy. I’ve tried to avoid doing speci...
Apr 28, 2021•13 min•Ep. 473
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-why-buddhism-is [ This is the fifth of many finalists in the 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 two of these a week for several months. When you’ve read all of them, I’ll ask you to vote for your favorite, so remember which ones you liked. - SA ] The dark side of enlightenment The mai...
Apr 24, 2021•32 min•Ep. 472
[ This is the fourth of many finalists in the 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 two of these a week for several months. When you’ve read all of them, I’ll ask you to vote for your favorite, so remember which ones you liked. - SA ] Book Review - Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animal...
Apr 23, 2021•36 min•Ep. 471
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-global-economic-history This book is subtitled "A Very Short Introduction" and is one of the smallest books I've ever seen, about three ounces. Three ounces is exactly the amount of global economic history that my brain can absorb before turning to mush, so I was glad to find it. Why is the West richer than the rest of the world? Why have some non-Western countries (Japan, China) come from behind and mostly caught up? Why have others failed to re...
Apr 23, 2021•21 min•Ep. 470
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/no-really-why-are-so-many-christians I enjoyed reading a recent Washington Post article, subtitled Why Are So Many Christians In [Colombia] Converting To Orthodox Judaism? It had good interviews and beautiful photos. The only thing it lacked was any explanation of why so many Christians in Colombia were converting to Orthodox Judaism, unless you count explanations like these: “I wanted to find the truth,” Rivka Espinosa (formerly Loida Espinosa), who convert...
Apr 21, 2021•23 min•Ep. 469
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-grading-my-trump-predictions I had many opinions on Donald Trump. I tried to back some of those opinions up with predictions about what would happen during his administration. Now that the dust has cleared, it's time to see how I did. The summary: Of 48 specific predictions about Trump, I got 37 directionally right, although this is kind of meaningless. I got an average log error score of -0.48 (where getting everything right is 0 and guessing ...
Apr 20, 2021•1 hr•Ep. 468
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-progress-and-poverty [ This is the third of many finalists in the 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 two of these a week for several months. When you’ve read all of them, I’ll ask you to vote for your favorite, so remember which ones you liked. - SA ] In 1879, a man asked "How come al...
Apr 17, 2021•2 hr 12 min•Ep. 467
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/prospectus-on-prospera Who among us hasn't looked out at the great edifice of human civilization in all its complexity, and thought "Yeah okay but I could do it better"? Centuries of utopian communes, micronations, and seasteads have dreamed of rebuilding society from first principles, free from entrenched interests and the debris of the past. If you got all the laws and values just right, maybe you could prevent poverty and corruption from finding their fir...
Apr 16, 2021•1 hr 19 min•Ep. 466
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/link-unifying-predictive-coding-with [epistemic status: I know a little about the predictive coding side of this, but almost nothing about backpropagation or the math behind the unification. I am posting this mostly as a link to people who know more.] This is a link to / ad for a great recent Less Wrong post by lsusr, Predictive Coding Has Been Unified With Backpropagation , itself about a recent paper Predictive Coding Approximates Backprop Along Arbitrary ...
Apr 14, 2021•4 min•Ep. 465
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-april [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: A link between childhood “screen time” and attention problems has - say it with me - failed to r...
Apr 14, 2021•17 min•Ep. 464
[ This is the second of many finalists in the 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 two of these a week for the next few months. When you’ve read all of them, I’ll ask you to vote for your favorite, so remember which ones you liked. - SA ] I. If you’re looking for the whipping boy for all of medicine, and most of science, look no further tha...
Apr 11, 2021•48 min•Ep. 463
[ This is the first of many finalists in the 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 two of these a week for the next few months. When you’ve read all of them, I’ll ask you to vote for your favorite, so remember which ones you liked. The broken footnotes in this one are either my fault or Substack’s, so please don’t hold it against this entry....
Apr 10, 2021•1 hr 32 min•Ep. 462
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/metis-and-bodybuilders Fitness researcher Menno Henselmans writes about optimal program design for bodybuilders . His thesis is that peer-reviewed studies prove bodybuilder lore is wrong in lots of places. For example: Traditional bro wisdom holds short rest periods of 1-3 minutes are optimal for bodybuilding. There never seemed to be much of a formal argument for why other than that people traditionally trained this way. The real reason was probably that bo...
Apr 09, 2021•16 min•Ep. 461
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/two-unexpected-multiple-hypothesis I. Start with Lior Pachter's Mathematical analysis of "mathematical analysis of a vitamin D COVID-19 trial" . The story so far: some people in Cordoba did a randomized controlled trial of Vitamin D for coronavirus. The people who got the Vitamin D seemed to do much better than those who didn’t. But there was some controversy over the randomization, which looked like this Remember, we want to randomly create two groups of si...
Apr 07, 2021•15 min•Ep. 460
