https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-crazy-like-us We talk a lot about falling biodiversity. Sometimes we apply the same metaphor to the human world, eg “falling linguistic biodiversity" when minority languages get replaced by English or whatever. In Crazy Like Us , Ethan Watters sounds the alarm about falling psychiatric biodiversity. Along with all the usual effects of globalization, everyone is starting to have the same mental illnesses, and to understand them in the same way. Th...
Jul 16, 2021•45 min•Ep. 519
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/reader-survey-final-check-in I accidentally missed some Book Review Contest entries, so I want to make sure I have everything lined up right for the Reader Survey. Below is a list of surveys I’m currently planning to include. If you sent me an email before the deadline, please confirm that your name is there. If it’s not, please don’t email me about it - we’ve already established that I don’t get your emails for some reason. Instead, leave a comment below wi...
Jul 15, 2021•4 min•Ep. 518
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/use-prediction-markets-to-fund-investigative Support the author: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/subscribe Then support the creation of the pocast: www.patreon.com/sscpodcast Hindenburg Research has a great business model: 1. Investigate companies 2. ...until they find one that is committing fraud 3. Short the fraudulent company 4. Publicly reveal the fraud 5. Company's stock goes down 6. Profit! I've been thinking about them recently because of the deba...
Jul 13, 2021•10 min•Ep. 517
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xexFJ7h0vULMDE7N77q_MIzXoerexfe_CqqGEL6hEoQ/edit#heading=h.qi8yp2d9wbt2 Podcast note: This reader-written review was included because it won the Readers' Choice Award from among all the runners-up. What does the future look like? We are living through a transition between epochs. Whether marked by COVID-19, the election of Donald Trump or earlier by the global sub-prime crisis, the golden age of post-Cold War prosperity is ending. With the era defined by US po...
Jul 12, 2021•59 min•Ep. 516
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-contest-winners Thanks to everyone who participated or voted in the Book Review Contest. The winners are: FIRST PLACE : Progress and Poverty , reviewed by Lars Doucet Lars is a Norwegian-Texan game designer, and you can read his game design blog here . He's a pretty serious Georgist and posts regularly in the Georgism subreddit . SECOND PLACE : Down And Out In Paris And London , reviewed by Whimsi Whimsi blogs here , but otherwise asks to remain ...
Jul 10, 2021•6 min•Ep. 515
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/lockdown-effectiveness-much-more Back when everyone was debating lockdowns, I promised I'd come back to it after there was more data. God willing, the pandemic is over enough that we've got all the data we're going to get. So: did lockdowns work? There’s no way to answer this completely and taking into account every relevant factor, so I’m necessarily going to be simplifying things and focusing on some aspects of the question more than others. Sorry. Prelimi...
Jul 08, 2021•1 hr 26 min•Ep. 514
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/model-city-monday Support the author: astralcodexten.substack.com/subscribe Then support the podcast: patreon.com/sscpodcast Happy belated Fourth of July! This potentially-recurring column is about modern-day independence-seekers: charter cities, utopian communes, secessionist movements, and the like. I’ve always found these fascinating, and finally remembered that nobody can prevent me from talking about them. I want to start by making it clear that, as the...
Jul 07, 2021•24 min•Ep. 513
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-how Support the author: astralcodexten.substack.com/subscribe Then support the podcast: patreon.com/sscpodcast I made a mistake in the email notifications, so if you didn’t know I wrote a review of Joe Studwell’s How Asia Works earlier this week - well, now you know. Erusian writes : 1.) Three things stick out here. Firstly, Studwell vastly overstates how damaging land reform has to be to landlords. Taiwan and Japan both bough...
Jul 03, 2021•36 min•Ep. 512
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/welcome-polygenically-screened-babies Another thing I missed during my hiatus last year: the birth of the first polygenically-screened baby . [ conflict of interest notice: LifeView , the company that handled the screening, was co-founded by Steve Hsu . I’ve known Steve for many years now, he is very nice to me, always patiently answers my genetics questions, and sometimes comes to SSC/ACX meetups] During in vitro fertilization, a woman takes drugs that make...
Jul 02, 2021•12 min•Ep. 511
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-how-asia-works What was the best thing that ever happened? From a very zoomed-out, by-the-numbers perspective, it has to be China's sudden lurch from Third World basketcase to dynamic modern economy. A billion people went from starving peasants to the middle class. In the 1960s, sixty million people died of famine in the Chinese countryside; by the 2010s, that same countryside was criss-crossed with the world's most advanced high-speed rail netwo...
Jun 30, 2021•1 hr•Ep. 510
Now that the book review contest is winding down, I want to start another big project: the ACX Reader Research Survey. I used to do regular December surveys with questions I was interested in. Some people would ask me to include questions for their own research projects. I always declined, because if I said yes to everyone it would take a whole new survey to fit all the questions on. Eventually I realized I should actually just do the whole new survey, so this is that. This blog has a lot of rea...
Jun 27, 2021•6 min•Ep. 509
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-june [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: Zoologists search for the Higgs Bison 2: “The cult deficit” is the theory that we don’t have as m...
Jun 23, 2021•31 min•Ep. 508
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-62121 Among this month’s interesting Metaculus predictions: If Puerto Rico gets statehood, will their first two senators both be Democrats? 50% . I’d seen accusations that the Democrats want Puerto Rican statehood to seize a Senate advantage, and counterarguments that no, PR isn’t as solid-blue as people like to think, but this is the first time I’ve ever seen the “risk” of a PR Republican Senator quantified. Higher than I thought! Will Jeff Be...
Jun 22, 2021•14 min•Ep. 507
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/16/fear-and-loathing-at-effective-altruism-global-2017/ San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run – but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world….There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. And that, I...
Jun 22, 2021•32 min•Ep. 506
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/vote-in-the-book-review-contest Thanks for reading the entries in this very delayed (and then very protracted) book review contest. Please vote for your favorites here , using approval voting (ie vote for however many you want). I’ll probably keep voting open until the end of June in case you want a chance to go back and re-read your favorites. In case you’ve forgotten, the finalists are: 1: Order Without Law 2: On The Natural Faculties 3: Progress And Pover...
Jun 19, 2021•2 min•Ep. 505
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-plagues-and-peoples [ This is the seventeenth of seventeen finalists in the book review contest. This one was chosen out of the reviews I somehow missed the first time around. There were four other such essays, which you can see in a supplementary runners-up packet here . I’ll make a post about how to vote tomorrow. - SA ] Biological evolution was hijacked by cultural evolution; tools and language allowed humankind to upset the ecological ba...
Jun 19, 2021•37 min•Ep. 504
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/on-cerebralab-on-nuttcarhart-harris [ epistemic status: extremely speculative ] George at CerebraLab has a new review of Nutt and Carhart-Harris's paper on serotonin receptors (I previously reviewed it here ). Two points stood out that I had previously missed: First of all - predictive coding identifies suffering with prediction error. This conflicts with common sense. Suppose I tell you I'm going to stab you in the arm, you agree that I'm going to stab you ...
Jun 16, 2021•11 min•Ep. 503
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/contra-smith-on-jewish-selective Noah Smith asks whether Jews are really disproportionately successful . (in case it shapes the way you read any of this, both he and I are Jewish) By the numbers, it would seem they are. US Jews have a median household income about 50% higher than US Christians, a net worth about 6x that of Christians , and are about twice as likely as Christians to make more than $100K/year. They're about twice as likely as Christians to get...
Jun 15, 2021•28 min•Ep. 502
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-how-children-fail [ This is the sixteenth of seventeen 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. This entry was promoted to finalist status by readers; thanks to everyone who voted! - SA ] 1: Why are all children so bad at learning in school? Seriously, they’re terrible at it, and nobody ever cal...
Jun 12, 2021•30 min•Ep. 501
[ This is the fifteenth of seventeen 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. This entry was promoted to finalist status by readers; thanks to everyone who voted! - SA ] George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London is at least three things; a highly entertaining, almost picaresque tale of rough-and-tumble living in Europe, a serious attempt to c...
Jun 11, 2021•1 hr 24 min•Ep. 500
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/drug-users-use-a-lot-of-drugs I. If you look at any list of side effects for the FDA-approved version of s-ketamine (Spravato), you see things like urinary tract problems, bladder problems, pain on urination, feeling of urgency to urinate. You can find a bunch of papers like Ketamine: An Important Drug With A Serious Adverse Effect , where they say that ketamine is potentially great for depression, but that the risk of bladder injury needs to be taken really...
Jun 11, 2021•9 min•Ep. 499
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/i-will-not-eat-the-bugs From the comments on Moral Costs Of Chicken Vs. Beef : As far as moral concern goes, I think it's right to act your rational conviction, but I can't honestly surmount my own doubt that it makes sense to care about animal well-being...if I really am to say that chickens have moral worth, I don't see any easy spot to get off that train between chickens and insects. Don't worry, you're not getting off the train. The train has already lef...
Jun 10, 2021•12 min•Ep. 498
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/instead-of-pledging-to-change-the In April, Joe Biden pledged to halve US emissions (from their 2005 max) by 2030. This is nice, but I can't help but remember eg Australia's 2009 Copenhagen summit pledge to decrease emissions 5% by 2020 (in fact, they increased 17%). Or Brazil's pledge at the same summit to cut emissions 38% by 2020 (in fact, they increased 45%). Or Canada's pledge for -20% (they got +1%). I'm not cherry-picking bad actors here, I'm just goi...
Jun 08, 2021•7 min•Ep. 497
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-wheres-my-flying [ This is the fourteenth 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, chec...
Jun 05, 2021•23 min•Ep. 496
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-collapse-of [ This is the thirteenth 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...
Jun 04, 2021•47 min•Ep. 495
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/moral-costs-of-chicken-vs-beef Support Scott Alexander's blogging: astralcodexten.substack.com/subscribe Podcast patreon: patreon.com/sscpodcast I. I've previously argued that meat-eaters concerned about animal welfare should try to eat beef, not chicken. The logic goes: the average cow is very big and makes 405,000 calories of beef. The average chicken is very small and makes 3000 calories of chicken. If you eat the US average of 250,000 calories of meat pe...
Jun 03, 2021•13 min•Ep. 494
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/what-do-treatments-for-accelerated Progeria is a rare disease that makes people age unnaturally quickly. Babies born with progeria can lose their hair in toddlerhood, get wrinkles by grade school age, and die - apparently of old age - in their early teens. You can see a picture of a progeroid child here , though I don't recommend it. There's been a lot of research on one important form - Hutchinson-Gilford Syndrome - and just last year, the FDA approved the ...
Jun 01, 2021•8 min•Ep. 493
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-humankind [ This is the twelfth 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 29, 2021•50 min•Ep. 492
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/peer-review-request-depression 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. 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 t...
May 27, 2021•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 491
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-arabian-nights I. One Thousand And One Nights is a book about love, wonder, magic, and morality. About genies, ape-people, and rhinoceroses who run around with elephants impaled on their horns. About how to use indexical uncertainty to hack the simulation running the universe to return the outcome you want. But most of all, it's a book about how your wife is cheating on you with a black man. Nights stretches from Morocco to China, across at least...
May 25, 2021•28 min•Ep. 490
