https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/higlights-from-the-comments-on-ivermectin Thanks to everyone who commented on my recent post Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted To Know . Let’s start with the negative comments. Leading pro-ivermectin website ivmmeta.com understandably disagreed with my fisking of them. They have a section where they respond to critics (see responses to Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz , to the BBC , to the parasitic worm hypothesis , and to someone named AT who they won’t explain ...
Nov 24, 2021•43 min•Ep. 579
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-the Andrew writes : One word I don't see mentioned anywhere is "manufacturing." It's one thing to make enough drug for a clinical trial, it's another to make millions of commercial doses reliably. FDA approval requires inspection of and confidence in these commercial-scale manufacturing processes. Zutano adds : To expand on this more: the clinical trials only show that *that one particular batch* was safe and efficacious (the ...
Nov 24, 2021•11 min•Ep. 578
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/when-will-the-fda-approve-paxlovid https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/when-will-the-fda-approve-paxlovid I. You thought it wasn’t going to be a prediction market post, but surprise, it’s a prediction market post! Metaculus predicts January 1 as the median date for the FDA approving Paxlovid. They estimate a 92% chance it will get approved by March. For context: a recent study by Pfizer, the pharma company backing the drug, found Paxlovid decreased hospita...
Nov 23, 2021•10 min•Ep. 577
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-great Thanks to everyone who commented on last week’s post Secrets Of The Great Families . Some highlights: Many people knew of interesting families I’d missed. Stephen Frug brings up the Jameses: Any short list of the great families (or at least the great American families) should include the James's: Henry James is one of the perennial candidates for the greatest American novelist, and his brother William James is one of the...
Nov 19, 2021•42 min•Ep. 576
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ivermectin-much-more-than-you-wanted I know I’m two months late here. Everyone’s already made up their mind and moved on to other things. But here’s my pitch: this is one of the most carefully-pored-over scientific issues of our time. Dozens of teams published studies saying ivermectin definitely worked. Then most scientists concluded it didn’t. What a great opportunity to exercise our study-analyzing muscles! To learn stuff about how science works which we ...
Nov 18, 2021•2 hr 8 min•Ep. 575
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-1115 Reciprocal Scoring, Part II I talked about this last week as a potential solution to the problem of long-term forecasting. Instead of waiting a century to see what happens, get a bunch of teams, and incentivize each to predict what the others will guess. If they all expect the others to strive for accuracy, then the stable Schelling point is the most accurate answer. Now there’s a paper, by Karger, Monrad, Mellers, and Tetlock - Reciprocal...
Nov 16, 2021•27 min•Ep. 574
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/apply-for-an-acx-grant What is ACX Grants? I want to give grants to good research and good projects with a minimum of paperwork. Like an NIH grant or something, only a lot less money and prestige. How is this different from Marginal Revolution's Fast Grants , Nadia Eghbal's Helium Grants , or EA Funds ' grant rounds? Not different at all. It’s total 100% plagiarism of them. I'm doing it anyway because I think it’s a good idea, and I predict there are a lot o...
Nov 12, 2021•9 min•Ep. 573
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-orban Lyman Stone on Twitter: Twitter avatar for @lymanstonekyLyman Stone 石來民 🦬🦬🦬 @lymanstoneky Here's the @slatestarcodex piece: astralcodexten.substack.com/p/dictator-boo… Overall, I agree with a lot of his assessment of Orban. But I want to quibble on two points: 1) The relationship between dictatorship and democracy 2) "Why admire Orban?" Dictator Book Club: Orban...astralcodexten.substack.com November 5th 2021 7 Likes ...
Nov 11, 2021•54 min•Ep. 572
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/secrets-of-the-great-families I. Let's talk impressive families. Aldous Huxley was an author most famous for Brave New World , though his other stuff is also great and underappreciated. His brother Julian Huxley founded UNESCO and the World Wildlife Fund, was secretary of the Zoological Society of London and president of the British Eugenics Society, and coined the terms "ethnic group", "cline", and "transhumanism". Their half-brother Andrew Huxley won the N...
Nov 10, 2021•32 min•Ep. 571
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/model-city-monday-11821 Telosa, USA Bloomberg: The Diapers.com Guy Wants To Build A Utopian Megalopolis Marc Lore founded diapers.com, various other internet startups, served a stint as Wal-Mart’s e-commerce director, and made a few billion dollars. Now he wants to start a city with a new vision of socially responsible democracy. Why move to this city instead of one of the many existing cities which are not in deserts and, you know, actually exist? Lore’s pi...
Nov 09, 2021•32 min•Ep. 570
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/dictator-book-club-orban (previously: Erdogan , Modi ) I. Some are born great. Some achieve greatness. And some are Victor Orban's college roommates. Orban: Europe's New Strongman and Orbanland , my two sources for this installment of our Dictator Book Club, tell the story of a man who spent the last eleven years taking over Hungary and distributing it to guys he knew in college. Janos Ader, President of Hungary. Laszlo Kover, Speaker of the National Assembl...
Nov 05, 2021•38 min•Ep. 569
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/non-cognitive-skills-for-educational Suppose you want to study the genetics of intelligence. You probably want a sample size in the six digits, and you can't make a six digit number of people sit down and take IQ tests. Also, whenever you say "genetics" and "intelligence" in the same sentence, an angry mob shows up at your door. One solution is to switch to a more popular / less stressful line of work, like Mafia snitch or al-Qaeda second-in-command. But ano...
Nov 04, 2021•13 min•Ep. 568
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-11121 Keynesian Beauty Contests I have no source for this, someone told me about it at a meetup. Suppose you want to run a forecasting tournament on whether nuclear war will destroy civilization by 2100. But nobody cares how much money they have in eighty years, plus if civilization is destroyed you can’t collect your winnings. There are lots of kludgey solutions to this, but one possibility is a Keynesian beauty contest . Get a lot of isolated...
Nov 02, 2021•25 min•Ep. 567
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/jhanas-and-the-dark-room-problem The Dark Room Problem in neuroscience goes something like this: suppose the brain is minimizing prediction error, or free energy, or whatever. You can minimize lots of things by sitting quietly in a dark room. Everything will be very, very predictable. So how come people do other things? The usual workaround is inbuilt biological drives, considered as "set points". You "predict" that you will be well-fed, so getting hungry re...
Oct 29, 2021•6 min•Ep. 566
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/epistemic-minor-leagues [I’m traveling this week - here is an older essay I never previously got around to posting] Viral game designer Adrian Hon wrote an article about What Alternate Reality Games Can Teach Us About QAnon . It argues that people fall for QAnon because it gives them an interesting mystery. It's a place where new discoveries are always around the corner, where a few hours of research by an amateur like you can fill in one of the missing link...
Oct 26, 2021•11 min•Ep. 565
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/chilling-effects [Epistemic status: Extremely confused! Low confidence in all of this] I. On the recent global warming post , a commenter argued that at least fewer people would die of cold. I was prepared to dismiss this on the grounds that it couldn’t possibly be enough people to matter, but, um: There are only about sixty million deaths per year total, so if this is true then almost 10% of all deaths are due to cold. That sounds…extremely untrue, right? Y...
Oct 20, 2021•26 min•Ep. 564
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-october [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: Our World In Data - we are winning the war on oil spills: 2: @incunabula: “Cheese is one of th...
Oct 15, 2021•24 min•Ep. 563
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-kids Ramparen writes : No one really does it because of climate change imo, that is just a neat excuse to avoid the responsibility and limitations that being a parent brings into your life Of course, this was immediately followed by some people ( 1, 2 ) saying they were seriously considering not having kids because of climate change, and this article had caused them to rethink their stance (you can find more further down). I d...
Oct 14, 2021•36 min•Ep. 562
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/please-dont-give-up-on-having-kids Please Don't Give Up On Having Kids Because Of Climate Change It will probably make things worse, and there are better ways to contribute 22 hr ago 119 904 I. A recent poll finds that 39% of young people “feel uncertain” about having children because of climate change. And sure, people say a lot of things on polls, but people seem to be talking about this more and more. For example, from NPR: Should We Be Having Kids In The...
Oct 12, 2021•27 min•Ep. 561
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-modern Thanks to everyone who commented on Whither Tartaria (currently 1079 comments). Many of you really like modern architecture, and many others of you really hate it. I appreciate most of you being able to accept disagreement on that and move on to the bigger question of why there’s so much more of it now. The most interesting thing I got from the comments was Chaostician linking to Wikipedia’s page on the Great Male Renun...
Oct 05, 2021•1 hr 15 min•Ep. 560
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-the-scout-mindset I. You tried Carol Dweck’s Growth Mindset , but the replication crisis crushed your faith. You tried Mike Cernovich’s Gorilla Mindset , but your neighbors all took out restraining orders against you. And yet, without a mindset, what separates you from the beasts ? Just in time, Julia Galef brings us The Scout Mindset (subtitle: “Why Some People See Things Clearly And Others Don’t). Galef admits she’s a little behind the curve on...
Sep 29, 2021•38 min•Ep. 559
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/whither-tartaria Imagine a postapocalyptic world. Beside the ruined buildings of our own civilization - St. Peter’s Basilica, the Taj Mahal, those really great Art Deco skyscrapers - dwell savages in mud huts. The savages see the buildings every day, but they never compose legends about how they were built by the gods in a lost golden age. No, they say they themselves could totally build things just as good or better. They just choose to build mud huts inste...
Sep 24, 2021•26 min•Ep. 558
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-september [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 : My parents’ and grandparents’ generations had lots of weird rules about fashion like “never...
Sep 21, 2021•27 min•Ep. 557
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/lisbon-meetup-this-saturday When: Saturday, September 18th, 5 PM Where: g uitars.record.caps , aka a suspiciously ordinary-looking tree in Parque da Pedra, Monsanto Park. Our intrepid organizer writes: “Spot the tall white guy in pink pants. There's an adjacent road with street parking, and a clearing at that point that opens onto a trail that leads to the park.” Who: Anyone who wants. Please feel free to come even if you feel awkward about it, even if you’r...
Sep 18, 2021•2 min•Ep. 556
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-the-revolt-of-the-public I. Martin Gurri's The Revolt Of The Public is from 2014, which means you might as well read the Epic of Gilgamesh. It has a second-edition-update-chapter from 2017, which means it might as well be Beowulf . The book is about how social-media-connected masses are revolting against elites, but the revolt has moved forward so quickly that a lot of what Gurri considers wild speculation is now obvious fact. I picked up the boo...
Sep 17, 2021•33 min•Ep. 555
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-modi-a-political-biography I. I have a friend who studied the history of fascism. She gets angry when people call Trump (or some other villain du jour ) fascist. "Words have meanings! Fascism isn't just any right-winger you dislike!" Maybe she takes this a little too far; by a strict definition, she's not even sure Franco qualifies. Anyway, I mention this because she says Narendra Modi, the current prime minister of India, is absolutely, literall...
Sep 14, 2021•50 min•Ep. 554
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/washington-dc-meetup-this-saturday When: Saturday, September 11th, 5 PM Where: decent.search.hurls , aka the patio and lot around 1002 N St. NW. Who: Anyone who wants. Please feel free to come even if you feel awkward about it, even if you’re not “the typical ACX reader”, even if you’re worried people won’t like you, etc. Also, me! I’ll be there on my meetups tour and hope to meet many of you. If you’re somewhere other than DC, check the spreadsheet to find ...
Sep 11, 2021•1 min•Ep. 553
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-unbearable-semiheaviness-of-being I hear that Google tests prospective employees with weird vaguely-science-related riddles. If I were in charge of this, here's what I would ask: You're an American spy in Cuba. The CIA has gotten you a position refilling the water coolers in Castro's presidential palace, hoping you can poison him. But Castro's security is pretty good. Every time you enter the palace, they search you so exhaustively that you're sure you c...
Sep 09, 2021•13 min•Ep. 552
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/too-good-to-check-a-play-in-three I. Seen on Twitter: In case you find this hard to follow: ivermectin is an antiparasitic drug that looked promising against COVID in early studies. Later it started looking less promising, and investigators found that a major supporting study was fraudulent. But by this point it had gotten popular among conspiracy theorists as a suppressed coronavirus cure that They Don’t Want You To Know. The media has tried to spread the w...
Sep 07, 2021•18 min•Ep. 551
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/new-york-meetup-this-monday When: Monday, 9/6. I’ll be arriving at 5 PM but some other people might get there earlier, around 3. Where: swung.shape.shows , aka Teardrop Park in Lower Manhattan Who: Anyone who wants. Please feel free to come even if you feel awkward about it, even if you’re not “the typical ACX reader”, even if you’re worried people won’t like you, etc. Also, me! I’ll be there on my meetups tour and hope to meet many of you. The New York orga...
Sep 06, 2021•1 min•Ep. 550
