https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/against-that-poverty-and-infant-eegs A recent paper claims to have found an Impact Of A Poverty Reduction Intervention On Infant Brain Activity . It’s doing the rounds of the usual media sites, like Vox and the New York Times : The New York Times @nytimes Breaking News: Cash payments for low-income mothers increased brain function in babies, a study found, with potential implications for U.S. safety net policy. Cash Aid to Poor Mothers Increases Brain Activi...
Jan 27, 2022•22 min•Ep. 609
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/bounded-distrust I. Suppose you're a liberal who doesn't trust FOX News. One day you're at the airport, waiting for a plane, ambiently watching the TV at the gate. It's FOX News, and they're saying that a mass shooter just shot twenty people in Yankee Stadium. There’s live footage from the stadium with lots of people running and screaming. Do you believe this? I'm a liberal who doesn't trust FOX News, and sure, I believe it. The level on which FOX News is ba...
Jan 27, 2022•21 min•Ep. 608
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/grading-my-2021-predictions At the beginning of every year, I make predictions. At the end of every year, I score them. Here are 2014 , 2015 , 2016 , 2017 , 2018 , 2019 , and 2020 . And here are the predictions I made for 2021 (in April; I was really late). Bolded statements happened, italicized statements did not happen (as of 1/1/22). Neither-bold-nor-italic resolved ambiguous. We have a debate every year over whether 50% predictions are meaningful in this...
Jan 26, 2022•16 min•Ep. 607
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/resubmit-and-summarize-your-proposals https://forms.gle/xhVTebsZgSEQ7BpeA I promised you all that once I was done with the main round of ACX Grants , I would run Grants ++, where I publish the proposals that didn't get funded here, so readers could look at them, see if they’re interesting, and maybe get in touch and offer funding. Two things have made this harder than expected. First, a lot of people gave pretty unclear instructions about whether they wanted...
Jan 22, 2022•6 min•Ep. 606
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-which-country-has-the I. If you’re like me, all you’ve heard about international health care systems is “America sucks and should feel bad, everyone else is probably fine or whatever”. Is there more we can learn? Our guide to this question will be Which Country Has The World’s Best Health Care , by Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel. Emanuel is a professor of bioethics, but I’ve been told to be less reflexively hostile to bioethicists. He got in trouble a few y...
Jan 20, 2022•26 min•Ep. 605
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/practically-a-book-review-yudkowsky I. The story thus far: AI safety, which started as the hobbyhorse of a few weird transhumanists in the early 2000s, has grown into a medium-sized respectable field. OpenAI, the people responsible for GPT-3 and other marvels, have a safety team. So do DeepMind, the people responsible for AlphaGo, AlphaFold, and AlphaWorldConquest (last one as yet unreleased). So do Stanford, Cambridge, UC Berkeley, etc, etc. Thanks to donat...
Jan 19, 2022•37 min•Ep. 604
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/theres-a-time-for-everyone Last week I got married. I met her two years ago, at one of (our mutual friend) Aella’s weird parties. Not this one, a different one. I was at this one too though. It was great. Our first date, we talked about Singapore’s child tax credits, which gave me advanced notice of where her mind was at. Our second date, we talked about category formation in borderline personality disorder, which later became this post. Our third date, we t...
Jan 13, 2022•20 min•Ep. 603
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-dont Lots of people thought I was being unfair to the movie. G. Retriever writes: I TOTALLY disagree with your reading of the movie. To me it was a description of a social dynamic that makes even very straightforward problems impossible to focus on collectively, a tragedy of the commons where "the commons" is basically "attention". Even the experts get sucked into the vortex, nobody comes out clean, and in the end everyone get...
Jan 07, 2022•21 min•Ep. 602
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/movie-review-dont-look-up I. Don’t Look Up is primarily a movie about existential risk, and many great people have already reviewed it as such. I’m going to be less virtuous and use it as a springboard to talk about politics. But first, the plot in a nutshell: Male Scientist and Female Scientist discover a comet will hit Earth in six months. They contact the relevant authorities, Black Scientist and Asian Scientist, and go to meet the President (who, despite...
Jan 05, 2022•25 min•Ep. 601
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/lewis-carroll-invented-retroactive Retroactive public goods funding is one of those ideas that’s so great people can’t stop reinventing it. I know of at least five independent inventions under five different names: “social impact bonds” by a New Zealand economist in 1988, “certificates of impact” by Paul Christiano in 2014, “retroactive public goods funding” by Vitalik Buterin a few years ago, “EA loans” by a blogger who prefers to remain anonymous, and “ven...
Jan 04, 2022•7 min•Ep. 600
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-december [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: List Of Games That Buddha Would Not Play . 2: Claim via NPR: When Brazil had high inflation i...
Dec 31, 2021•21 min•Ep. 599
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/acx-grants-results Thanks to everyone who participated in ACX Grants, whether as an applicant, an evaluator, or a funder. Before I announce awardees, a caveat: this was hard in lots of ways I didn't expect. I got 656 applications addressing different problems and requiring different skills to judge. I'll write a long post on it later, but the part I want to emphasize now is: if I didn't grant you money, it doesn't mean I didn't like your project. Sometimes i...
Dec 29, 2021•43 min•Ep. 598
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-dogs-in-wizard-hats I found this YouTube explainer about prediction markets on the subreddit. It’s pretty good! My small nitpicks are that it overestimates their accuracy relative to traditional forecasters (it focuses on markets beating forecasters in 2008, but I don’t think this is consistent) and underestimates their resilience against bad actors trying to skew the probabilities. Still, this will be my go-to source when someone wants a short...
Dec 28, 2021•24 min•Ep. 597
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-diseasonality The main highlight was an email I got from a reader who prefers to remain anonymous, linking me to Projecting The Transmission Dynamics Of SARS-CoV2 . This paper is head and shoulders above anything I found during my own literature review and just comes out and says everything painfully tried to piece together. Either my research skills suck, the epidemiology literature is a bunch of disparate subthreads with wil...
Dec 24, 2021•16 min•Ep. 596
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/addendum-to-no-evidence-post The day after I wrote The Phrase “No Evidence” Is A Red Flag For Bad Science Communication, FT published this article: Like many uses of “no evidence”, they meant that one particular study of this complicated question had failed to reject the null hypothesis. Here’s what happened to Metaculus’ prediction tournament when the same study came out: The consensus prediction dropped from 72% chance that it was less lethal, to 63% chanc...
Dec 23, 2021•3 min•Ep. 595
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/addendum-to-luvox-post In my post yesterday, I quoted a Vox article describing work by Dr. Ed Mills and others to get the FDA to approve Luvox for COVID. As of that point, the FDA didn’t know how to process an application without a sponsoring drug company: [Professor Ed] Mills, who thinks that fluvoxamine and budesonide are both appropriate to prescribe to patients sick with Covid-19, compares public messaging on fluvoxamine to communications about Merck’s d...
Dec 23, 2021•5 min•Ep. 594
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-fda-has-punted-decisions-about I. Here’s my pitch for fluvoxamine (Luvox) for COVID. In the midst of all the hype about ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, scientists put together the giant 4,000-person TOGETHER trial, intended to test all these exciting COVID early treatments. You know what happened next: ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine crashed and burned. But a different drug, the SSRI antidepressant fluvoxamine, actually did really well! It decreased...
Dec 23, 2021•21 min•Ep. 593
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-let-me-google-that Let Me Google That For You New from Google this month: Creating A Prediction Market On Google Cloud. Google announces that they’ve been running an internal prediction market for the past year, with “over 175,000 predictions from over 10,000 Google employees”. 1 Predictive analytics.jpg Most of it’s classified because they’re predicting stuff about Google’s corporate secrets, but some friendly Googlers were at least willing to...
Dec 21, 2021•22 min•Ep. 592
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-phrase-no-evidence-is-a-red-flag https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-phrase-no-evidence-is-a-red-flag Related to: Doctor, There Are Two Types Of No Evidence; A Failure, But Not Of Prediction. I. Click to enlarge Every single one of these statements that had “no evidence” is currently considered true or at least pretty plausible. In an extremely nitpicky sense, these headlines are accurate. Officials were simply describing the then-current state of ...
Dec 18, 2021•14 min•Ep. 591
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ancient-plagues During our recent discussion of climate change, someone linked me to this New York Magazine piece making the case for doomism. I disagree with it pretty intensely, but most of my complaints are already listed in the sidebar (some scientists also complained, so they had to add a lot of sidebar caveats in) and I don't want to belabor them. The section I find interesting is the one called Climate Plagues: There are now, trapped in Arctic ice, di...
Dec 15, 2021•13 min•Ep. 590
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/does-georgism-work-part-3-can-unimproved [Lars Doucet won this year’s Book Review Contest with his review of Henry George’s Progress and Poverty . Since then, he’s been researching Georgism in more depth, and wants to follow up with what he’s learned. I’ll be posting three of his Georgism essays here this week, and you can read his other work at Fortress Of Doors ] Hi, my name's Lars Doucet (not Scott Alexander), and this is a guest post in an ongoing series...
Dec 12, 2021•1 hr 21 min•Ep. 589
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/does-georgism-work-part-2-can-landlords [Lars Doucet won this year’s Book Review Contest with his review of Henry George’s Progress and Poverty . Since then, he’s been researching Georgism in more depth, and wants to follow up with what he’s learned. I’ll be posting three of his Georgism essays here this week, and you can read his other work at Fortress Of Doors ] Hi, my name's Lars Doucet (not Scott Alexander), and this is a guest post in an ongoing series ...
Dec 10, 2021•47 min•Ep. 588
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/does-georgism-work-is-land-really [Lars Doucet won this year’s Book Review Contest with his review of Henry George’s Progress and Poverty . Since then, he’s been researching Georgism in more depth, and wants to follow up with what he’s learned. I’ll be posting three of his Georgism essays here this week, and you can read his other work at Fortress Of Doors ] Hi, my name's Lars Doucet (not Scott Alexander) and this is a guest post in an ongoing series that as...
Dec 09, 2021•1 hr 50 min•Ep. 587
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/diseasonality [ epistemic status: conjecture and speculation in something that isn’t really my field ] I. It’s still not totally clear why some diseases are seasonal. Seasonal diseases usually peak in late winter - so around January/February in the Northern Hemisphere and July/August in the Southern. Around the equator, which lacks seasons, they’re less predictable and happen throughout the year. The best known seasonal diseases are flu and colds. But viral ...
Dec 08, 2021•29 min•Ep. 586
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/model-city-monday-12621 Tegucigalpa, Honduras The socialist opposition has won Honduras’ election and pledges to fight against charter cities there. "Immediately upon assuming the presidency, we are going to send the National Congress an initiative for the repeal of the ZEDE law," incoming president Xiomara Castro said . This was what everyone was afraid of. But the last party tried pretty hard to protect ZEDEs from trigger-happy successors, and the constitu...
Dec 07, 2021•26 min•Ep. 585
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-lifespan [epistemic status: non-expert review of a book on a highly technical subject, sorry. If you are involved in biochemistry or anti-aging, feel free to correct my mistakes] David Sinclair - Harvard professor, celebrity biologist, and author of Lifespan - thinks solving aging will be easy. “Aging is going to be remarkably easy to tackle. Easier than cancer” are his exact words, which is maybe less encouraging than he thinks. There are lots o...
Dec 03, 2021•32 min•Ep. 584
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mm-omicron-variant Noah Smith has a good summary of the Omicron evidence here , including a lot of quotes from experts. But experts say a lot of stuff like “well, it could be bad, but we can’t be sure”, plus sometimes they disagree. This is the kind of situation where prediction markets are useful, so let’s look at them. (source: Metaculus ) R0 is a measure of how quickly a disease spreads under certain ideal conditions. The original Wuhan strain was probabl...
Nov 30, 2021•5 min•Ep. 583
https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/06/14/the-virtue-of-silence/ Leah Libresco writes a couple of essays ( 1 , 2 ) on an ethical dilemma reported in the New York Times. In the course of a confidential medical history, a doctor hears her patient is suffering from stress-related complaints after having sent an innocent man to prison. The doctor wants to know whether it is ethical to report the matter to the police. The Times’ columnist says yes – it would save the poor prisoner. Leah says no – violati...
Nov 28, 2021•9 min•Ep. 582
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-november [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. PS: Happy Thanksgiving!] 1: The story of Jeff Bezos’ biological father , a former circus performe...
Nov 26, 2021•30 min•Ep. 581
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/pascalian-medicine I. When I reviewed Vitamin D, I said I was about 75% sure it didn’t work against COVID. When I reviewed ivermectin, I said I was about 90% sure. Another way of looking at this is that I must think there’s a 25% chance Vitamin D works, and a 10% chance ivermectin does. Both substances are generally safe with few side effects. So (as many commenters brought up) there’s a Pascal’s Wager like argument that someone with COVID should take both. ...
Nov 25, 2021•18 min•Ep. 580
