https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-zulresso Thanks to everyone who commented on Zounds! It’s Zulresso and Zuranolone and on the followup Progesterone Megadoses Might Be A Cheap Zulresso Substitute . I’m constantly impressed by the expertise of commenters here and on how much better the biomedical comment threads are compared to some of the others. Among the things I learned: — Metacelsus (who writes the blog De Novo ) doubts the price estimates I posted: There'...
Mar 18, 2022•13 min•Ep. 639
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/justice-creep Freddie deBoer says we’re a planet of cops . Maybe that’s why justice is eating the world. Helping the poor becomes economic justice . If they’re minorities, then it’s racial justice , itself a subspecies of social justice . Saving the environment becomes environmental justice , except when it’s about climate change in which case it’s climate justice . Caring about young people is actually about fighting for intergenerational justice . The very...
Mar 17, 2022•9 min•Ep. 638
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-31422 Changes in Ukraine prediction markets since my last post February 28: Will Kiev fall to Russian forces by April 2022 ?: 69% —→ 14% Will at least three of six big cities fall by June 1? : 71% —→ 70% Will World War III happen before 2050? : 20% —→21% Will Russia invade any other country in 2022? : 12% —→10% Will Putin still be president of Russia next February? : 71% —→ 80% Will 50,000 civilians die in any single Ukrainian city? : 8% —→ 12%...
Mar 15, 2022•23 min•Ep. 637
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ukraine-thoughts-and-links?s=r Disclaimer: I am not an expert in international relations or military strategy, which is fine. In democracies, it’s normal and correct for ordinary citizens to have opinions on important world issues, and demands that they not do so are ahistorical and dangerous. Still, take anything I say with a grain of salt. 1: This isn’t “history restarting” . . . yet Whatever Francis Fukuyama meant by “the end of history”, it probably wasn...
Mar 12, 2022•33 min•Ep. 636
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/progesterone-megadoses-might-be-a Earlier this week we talked about Zulresso , a new medication for post-partum depression. It works well, but it can only be administered at a few special hospitals, and costs $35,000 per treatment. But Zulresso is a natural metabolite of the female hormone progesterone. What’s stopping people from taking progesterone, waiting for their bodies to metabolize it into Zulresso, and saving $35,000 and a hospital stay? As far as I...
Mar 11, 2022•7 min•Ep. 635
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/advice-for-unwoke-academic An academic recently asked me for advice. A lucky career development has now made him almost un-fire-able, and he wants to join the fight for academic freedom. We talked about two different strategies: Fabian Strategy: Become a beloved pillar of his college community. Volunteer for all those committees everyone always tries to weasel out of. When some wokeness-related issue comes up - merit vs. diversity hiring, wokeness study clas...
Mar 11, 2022•12 min•Ep. 634
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/zounds-its-zulresso-and-zuranolone How excited should we be about the latest class of antidepressants? 1: What is Zulresso? Wikipedia describes Zulresso as “A bat-winged, armless toad with tentacles instead of a face... ” - no! sorry! That’s Zvilpogghua, one of the Great Old Ones from the Lovecraft mythos. Zulresso is the brand name of allopregnanolone (aka brexanolone), a new medication for post-partum depression. It’s interesting as a potential missing lin...
Mar 09, 2022•30 min•Ep. 633
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/what-are-we-arguing-about-when-we The backstory: Steven Pinker wrote a book about rationality. The book concludes it is good. People should learn how to be more rational, and then we will have fewer problems. Howard Gardner, well-known wrong person , sort of criticized the book. The criticism was facile, a bunch of stuff like “rationality is important, but relationships are also important, so there”. Pinker’s counterargument is dubious: Gardner’s essay avoid...
Mar 04, 2022•24 min•Ep. 632
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/microaddictions Everyone always says you should “eat mindfully”. I tried this once and it was weird. For example, I noticed that only the first few bites of a tasty food actually tasted good. After that I habituated and lost it. Not only that, but there was a brief period when I finished eating the food which was below hedonic baseline. This seems pretty analogous to addiction, tolerance, and withdrawal. If you use eg heroin, I’m told it feels very good the ...
Mar 03, 2022•6 min•Ep. 631
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ukraine-warcasting Yeah, I know you’re saturated with Ukraine content. Yeah, I know everyone wants to relate their hobbyhorse to Ukraine. But I think it’s genuinely useful to talk about prediction markets right now. Current conventional wisdom is that the invasion was a miscalculation on Putin’s part, after he surrounded himself with so many yes-men that he lost touch with reality. But Ukraine miscalculated too; until almost the day of the invasion, Zelensky...
Mar 01, 2022•58 min•Ep. 630
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/austin-meetup-correction?utm_source=url Austin meetup is still this Sunday, 2/27, 12-3. But the location has been switched to Moontower Cider Company at 1916 Tillery St . The organizer is still sbarta@gmail.com , and you can still contact him if you have any questions. As per usual procedure, everyone is invited. 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 y...
Feb 26, 2022•1 min•Ep. 629
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/biological-anchors-a-trick-that-might?utm_source=url Introduction I've been trying to review and summarize Eliezer Yudkowksy's recent dialogues on AI safety. Previously in sequence: Yudkowsky Contra Ngo On Agents . Now we’re up to Yudkowsky contra Cotra on biological anchors, but before we get there we need to figure out what Cotra's talking about and what's going on. The Open Philanthropy Project ("Open Phil") is a big effective altruist foundation interest...
Feb 24, 2022•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 628
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-february?utm_source=url [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: The newest studies don’t find evidence that extracurriculars like chess, secon...
Feb 23, 2022•31 min•Ep. 627
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/play-money-and-reputation-systems?utm_source=url For now, US-based prediction markets can’t use real money without clearing near-impossible regulatory hurdles. So smaller and more innovative projects will have to stick with some kind of play money or reputation-based system. I used to be really skeptical here, but Metaculus and Manifold have softened my stance. So let’s look closer at how and whether these kinds of systems work. Any play money or reputation ...
Feb 22, 2022•18 min•Ep. 626
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/austin-meetup-next-sunday?utm_source=url I’ll be in Austin on Sunday, 2/27, and the meetup group there has kindly agreed to host me and anyone else who wants to show up. We’ll be at RichesArt (an art gallery with an outdoor space) at 2511 E 6th St Unit A from noon to 3. The organizer is sbarta@gmail.com , you can contact him if you have any questions. As per usual procedure, everyone is invited. Please feel free to come even if you feel awkward about it, eve...
Feb 19, 2022•2 min•Ep. 625
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-gods-only-have-power-because?utm_source=url [with apologies to Terry Pratchett and TVTropes ] “Is it true,” asked the student, “that the gods only have power because we believe in them?” “Yes,” said the sage. “Then why not appear openly? How many more people would believe in the Thunderer if, upon first gaining enough worshipers to cast lightning at all, he struck all of the worst criminals and tyrants?” “Because,” said the sage, “the gods only gain powe...
Feb 18, 2022•12 min•Ep. 624
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-sadly-porn I. Freshman English class says all books need a conflict. Man vs. Man, Man vs. Self, whatever. The conflict in Sadly, Porn is Author vs. Reader. The author - the pseudonymous “Edward Teach, MD” - is a spectacular writer. Your exact assessment of his skill will depend on where you draw the line between writing ability and other virtues - but where he’s good, he’s amazing. Nobody else takes you for quite the same kind of ride. He’s also ...
Feb 18, 2022•1 hr 16 min•Ep. 623
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-ukraine-cube-manifold?r=fm577 Ukraine Thanks to Clay Graubard for doing my work for me: These run from about 48% to 60%, but I think the differences are justified by the slightly different wordings of the question and definitions of “invasion”. You see a big jump last Friday when the US government increased the urgency of their own warnings. I ignored this on Friday because I couldn’t figure out what their evidence was, but it looks like the sm...
Feb 15, 2022•21 min•Ep. 622
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-motivated I. Comments From People Who Actually Know What They’re Talking About Gabriel writes : The brain trains on magnitude and acts on sign. That is to say, there are two different kinds of "module" that are relevant to this problem as you described, but they're not RL and other; they're both other. The learning parts are not precisely speaking reinforcement learning, at least not by the algorithm you described. They're lea...
Feb 13, 2022•24 min•Ep. 621
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/acx-grants-the-second-half This is the closing part of ACX Grants . Projects that I couldn’t fully fund myself were invited to submit a brief description so I could at least give them free advertising here. You can look them over and decide if any seem worth donating your money, time, or some other resource to. I’ve removed obvious trolls, a few for-profit businesses without charitable value who tried to sneak in under the radar, and a few that violated my s...
Feb 11, 2022•1 hr 28 min•Ep. 620
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/so-you-want-to-run-a-microgrants I. Medical training is a wild ride. You do four years of undergrad in some bio subject, ace your MCATs, think you’re pretty hot stuff. Then you do your med school preclinicals, study umpteen hours a day, ace your shelf exams, and it seems like you're pretty much there. Then you start your clinical rotations, get a real patient in front of you, and you realize - oh god, I know absolutely nothing about medicine. This is also ho...
Feb 10, 2022•51 min•Ep. 619
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/heuristics-that-almost-always-work The Security Guard He works in a very boring building. It basically never gets robbed. He sits in his security guard booth doing the crossword. Every so often, there’s a noise, and he checks to see if it’s robbers, or just the wind. It’s the wind. It is always the wind. It’s never robbers. Nobody wants to rob the Pillow Mart in Topeka, Ohio. If a building on average gets robbed once every decade or two, he might go his enti...
Feb 09, 2022•17 min•Ep. 618
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/two-small-corrections-and-updates 1: I titled part of my post yesterday “RIP Polymarket”, which was a mistake. Polymarket would like to remind everyone that they are very much alive, with a real-money market available to anyone outside the US, and some kind of compliant US product (maybe a play-money market) in the works. 2: Sam M and Eric N want to remind you that you have until the end of next week to get your 2022 prediction contest entries in . Also: We ...
Feb 09, 2022•2 min•Ep. 617
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-passage-of-polymarket RIP Polymarket, Long Live Polymarket Polymarket got fined $1.4 million by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and was ordered to cease noncompliant trading in the US. Polymarket is probably the biggest prediction market currently available. US law considers unlicensed prediction markets to be somewhere between illegal gambling and illegal futures trading, ie definitely illegal. Polymarket and a few peers had survived anyway, th...
Feb 08, 2022•19 min•Ep. 616
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-contest-rules-2022 Okay, we’re officially doing this again. Write a review of a book. There’s no official word count requirement, but last year’s finalists and winners were often between 2,000 and 10,000 words. There’s no official recommended style, but check the style of last year’s finalists and winners or my ACX book reviews ( 1 , 2 , 3 ) if you need inspiration. Please limit yourself to one entry per person or team. Then send me your review t...
Feb 05, 2022•4 min•Ep. 615
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/acx-grants-the-first-half This is the closing part of ACX Grants . Projects that I couldn’t fully fund myself were invited to submit a brief description so I could at least give them free advertising here. You can look them over and decide if any seem worth donating your money, time, or some other resource to. I’ve removed obvious trolls, a few for-profit businesses without charitable value who tried to sneak in under the radar, and a few that violated my se...
Feb 04, 2022•1 hr 30 min•Ep. 614
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/why-do-i-suck I recently ran a subscriber-only AMA, and one of the most frequent questions was some version of “why do you suck?” My commenters were very nice about it. They didn’t use those exact words. It was more like “I loved your articles from about 2013 - 2016 so much! Why don’t you write articles like that any more?” Or “Do you feel like you’ve shifted to less ambitious forms of writing with the new Substack? It feels like there was something in your ...
Feb 03, 2022•23 min•Ep. 613
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/motivated-reasoning-as-mis-applied Here’s something else I got from the first Yudkowsky-Ngo dialogue : Suppose you go to Lion Country and get mauled by lions. You want the part of your brain that generates plans like “go to Lion Country” to get downgraded in your decision-making algorithms. This is basic reinforcement learning: plan → lower-than-expected hedonic state → do plan less. Plan → higher-than-expected hedonic state → do plan more. Lots of brain mod...
Feb 02, 2022•6 min•Ep. 612
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/predictions-for-2022-contest - Read the contest description/rules here - Give feedback on the contest here - And once again, the form where you take the contest is here I didn’t let myself check prediction markets when making these forecasts since that would spoil the fun. I also only permitted myself at most five minutes of research on any one question. See the bottom of the post for a contest/survey. US/WORLD 1. Biden approval rating (as per 538) is greate...
Feb 01, 2022•23 min•Ep. 611
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-health I’m experimenting with making this more structured this time, so: Section I: Collection of comments on US health care Section II: Drug pricing, and does the US subsidize the rest of the world? Section III: Why are health economics so unlike other economics? Section IV: Giant pile of comments by readers who live in different countries explaining their own countries’ health systems, and their experiences with them. I. Gum...
Jan 28, 2022•1 hr•Ep. 610
