Astral Codex Ten Podcast

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 balance in incredible ways. We should all know the story by now. Human grunts to other human and they agree to kill a wooly mammoth together and then grunt and agree to share the meat and then grunt and learn to make a spear and grunt and form a complex society and worldwide dominant species. Parasites and viruses are invisible and hard to grunt about. A lion, in contrast, is difficult not to grunt about. This book, Plagues and Peoples written by William H. McNeill in 1976, frames the entirety of human history and prehistory in the context of humankind's relationship with microparasites and viruses. Communication, culture, tools, clothes, and shelter allowed humans to hunt dominantly, live anywhere, and deal with most ecological challenges- but microparasites remained elusively hard to deal with until modern times. This uneasy relationship with the invisible unconsciously shapes where human's live, how civilizations form, and how societies are organized. At every step of humanity's evolution, McNeill sees microparasites and viruses being one of the 'fundamental parameters and determinants of human history.'

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 in the arm, and then I stab you in the arm, and it hurts a lot. You predicted what would happen correctly, but you still suffered. The theory resolves this with a distinction between common-sense-level and neurological predictions: your brain is "set" to expect normal neurological feedback from your arm, and when it gets pain signals instead, that's a violated prediction, and this is the level on which prediction error = suffering. But there are other cases where the common-sense and neurological sense of predictions are more congruent. When you first step into a cold shower, you feel suffering, but after you've been in it a while you adjust your "predictions" and it's no longer as unpleasant. If you unexpectedly lost $25,000 it would come as an extremely unpleasant shock, but when you predictably have to pay the taxman $25,000 each year you grumblingly put up with it. The theory of "active inference" adds another layer of complexity here; it posits that sometimes your brain automatically resolves prediction error through action. If you were expecting to be well-balanced, but actually you're off-balance, you'll reflexively right yourself until you're where you expected to be. At its limit, this theory says that all action takes place through the creation and resolution of prediction errors - I stand up by "predicting" on a neurological level that I will stand up, and then my motor cortex tries to resolve the "error" by making me actually stand. (one remaining problem here is why and how some prediction errors get interpreted as rewards. If you get $1 million one day because you're a CEO and it's payday and that's how much you make every payday, you will not be especially happy. If you get $1 million because you're an ordinary middle-class person and a crypto billionaire semi-randomly decides to give you $1 million one day, you will be very happy. This has been traced to reward being dopamine-based prediction error in the nucleus accumbens, and the CEO was predicting his windfall while the gift recipient wasn't. This suggests there's still something we don't understand about prediction error and suffering). So one question is: for some given prediction error, how much do I suffer vs. adjust my predictions and stop feeling it vs. take action to resolve it? George's take on Carhart-Harris & Nutt is that this is influenced by the balance of 5-HT1A vs. 5-HT2A receptors - two different kinds of serotonin receptor. 5-HT1A is (to vastly oversimplify) the main target of antidepressants. The more strongly it's stimulated, the more likely you are to resolve prediction error by adjusting your predictions - the equivalent of stepping into a freezing shower, but then acclimating so that it feels okay. Suppose you're depressed/anxious/upset because your boss keeps yelling at you. With enough 5-HT1A activation, you're better able to - on a neurological level - adjust your world-model to include a prediction that your boss will yell at you. Then when your boss does yell at you, there's less prediction error and less suffering. This is good insofar as you're suffering less, but bad insofar as you've adjusted to stop caring about a bad thing or thinking of it as something that needs solving - though it's more complicated than this, since suffering less can make you less depressed and being less depressed can put you in a more solution-oriented frame of mind. 5-HT2A receptors are (to vastly oversimplify) the main target of psychedelics. The more strongly it's stimulated, the more active your inference gets. George argues that this means psychedelics are more likely to get you to try to solve your problems. But is this really true? The average person on shrooms doesn't spend their trip contacting HR and reporting their abusive boss, they spend it staring at a flower marveling at how delicate the petals are or something. What problem is this solving? I think Carhart-Harris, Nutt, and maybe George think that this "active coping" isn't necessarily physical action per se, it's rejiggering your world model on a deeper level so that it's more creative and risky in generating strategies. It's a bias towards thinking of problems as solveable. This could potentially fit with the thing where people who do too much LSD become yogis or transhumanists or whatever; they're biased towards believing *all* problems are solveable, even the tough ones like suffering and mortality. (this mostly, but not completely, meshes with Carhart-Harris' other work on psy

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 college degrees, and about 15x more likely to win Nobel prizes. These numbers are of about the same magnitude as the gap between blacks and whites, so if you take those numbers seriously, you should probably take these ones seriously too. But Noah wonders if this really needs an interesting explanation, or if it's just a series of boring things on top of each other. He gives five reasons why maybe Jews could do unusually well. I'm going to concentrate on selective immigration, then briefly touch on the others.

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 calls them out as a group. We call out individual children as failing. We call out individual schools and school systems as bad. But the much more dramatic contrast is between learning in school and learning in any other context. In their first five years, kids learn to understand 25,000 words, even if nobody is actively helping them, at the same time as they're learning most of what they'll ever know about physics, psychology, and how to pilot a human body. They then struggle to match this vocabulary acquisition rate over their next ten years, despite expert attention, a wealth of resources, personal encouragement, and even prizes.

[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 catalogue the numerous humiliations and injustices impoverished people were exposed to in Orwell's time, and a stark comparison between life as a tramp who makes use of robust, if hellish and kafkaesque welfare resources, and as one who tries to get by working terrible jobs and living in disgusting places.

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 seriously. When I first considered prescribing ketamine, the bladder injury stories scared me so much that I asked a bunch of veteran ketamine prescribers how I should monitor it. They all gave me weird non-commital answers like "I've prescribed ketamine to thousands of patients and never had a problem with this, so I guess don't worry". But why not? There are all these papers saying we should worry, and all these reports in the literature of ketamine-induced bladder injury!

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 left the station and gotten halfway to Vladivostok. Last month the EU food safety regulator officially approved mealworms as safe for human consumption, sparking a bunch of articles on how bugs are the food of the future (see eg The Guardian: If We Want To Save The Planet, The Future Of Food Is Insects). And although it's not a massive groundswell of outrage or anything, it's also sparked a little bit of concern from animal welfare advocates.

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 going through the alphabet (pledges source, outcomes source) . For that matter, what about George W. Bush's pledge to return Americans to the moon by 2020? All of these pledges have one thing in common - they expire long after the relevant officials are out of power (and in Biden's case, probably dead). As hard as it is to hold politicians accountable in normal situations, it's even worse here. Sure enough, prediction aggregator Metaculus shows that forecasters only give a 15% chance that we reach Biden's emissions target by 2030. What if instead of pledging anything about emissions, Biden pledged to shift the prediction aggregator? No, seriously, hear me out. Biden pledges that by the end of his term, Metaculus will predict a 51%+ chance that emissions will be less than half their historic maximum by 2030. If Metaculus gives a lower number than this, we can consider Biden to have failed in his pledge, and we can hold it against him when he tries to get re-elected. In order to get Metaculus (or some alternative prediction market) to show a 51% chance of meeting emissions targets, Biden would have to pass a credible package of legislation that puts us on the path to achieving that goal, and makes everyone think it's more likely than not. Imagine Biden pledges that some prediction market will have a 51% chance of reaching his 2030 emissions target by the time he leaves office. He passes a carbon tax, and the market shoots up from 15% to 30%. Now he knows he's on the right track, but still has to do more. So he bans a bunch of coal power plants, and it goes up to 45%. He's still not quite there, so he gives big subsidies to solar panels a few days before the campaign season kicks off, the prediction market reaches 51%, and he's able to say he fulfilled his pledge.

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, check out point 3 here for a way you can help move the contest forward by reading lots more of them - SA] What went wrong in the 1970s? Since then, growth and productivity have slowed, average wages are stagnant, visible progress in the world of "atoms" has practically stopped - the Great Stagnation. About the only thing that has gone well are computers. How is it that we went from the typewriter to the smartphone, but we're still using practically the same cars and airplanes? "Where is my Flying Car?", by J. Storrs Hall, is an attempt to answer that question. His answer is: the Great Stagnation was caused by energy usage flatlining, which was caused by our failure to switch to nuclear energy, which was caused by excessive regulation, which was caused by "green fundamentalism". Three hundred years ago, we burned wood for energy. Then there was coal and the steam engine, which gave us the Industrial Revolution. Then there was oil and gas, giving us cars and airplanes. Then there should have been nuclear fission and nanotech, letting you fit a lifetime's worth of energy in your pocket. Instead, we still drive much the same cars and airplanes, and climate change threatens to boil the Earth.

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 out point 3 here for a way you can help move the contest forward by reading lots more of them - SA] Joseph Tainter's explanation for why complex societies collapse in one sentence: the collapse of a society is a response to declining marginal returns on investment in complexity. Tainter uses 'complexity' pretty loosely. He's referring to a broad set of things that include agriculture, fuel extraction, scientific research, education, and sociopolitical complexity. He notes that in any area that produces something good for a society, the lowest-hanging fruit is plucked first, and then value gets harder and harder to extract until there's little room for improvement. States are the biggest manifestation and driver of social complexity (and I'll talk mostly about states in the rest of the review) but he's talking about the abstract property of a society – how large it is, how many specialized social roles it has, how many mechanisms for organizing or doing things. In Tainter's model, states exist to solve problems. You can think of them as either solving collective social problems, like getting big irrigation systems to work ('integration theory'), working to placate / oppress the productive populace enough that the elite can keep extracting surplus from them ('conflict theory'). Either way, states tend to increase in complexity in order to deal with new challenges. That increased complexity imposes greater costs per capita. When the system hits some critical point on the return curve (highest point the graph below), the next stressor makes the state try to unlock the next stage of complexity, which demands more resources than the population can bear. Peasants revolt, republics break away, and the state falls apart.

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 per year, you can either eat 0.5 cows, or 80 chickens. If each animal raised for meat experiences some suffering, eating chicken exposes 160x more animals to that suffering than eating beef. Might cows be "more conscious" in a way that makes their suffering matter more than chickens? Hard to tell. But if we expect this to scale with neuron number, we find cows have 6x as many cortical neurons as chickens, and most people think of them as about 10x more morally valuable. If we massively round up and think of a cow as morally equivalent to 20 chickens, switching from an all-chicken diet to an all-beef diet saves 60 chicken-equivalents per year. But some people have argued that we also need to consider global warming. Cows produce methane, which is a powerful greenhouse gas. Chickens don't. How does this affect the calculations? According to Eshal et al 2014, chickens produce about 2 kg CO2 equivalent per 1000 calories of meat, and cows about 10 kg (here "CO2 equivalent" means a collection of greenhouse gases, especially methane, that produce as much global warming as that many kg CO2). Going back to the average person who eats 250,000 calories of meat per year, the person who eats all beef is producing 2500 kg CO2 per year; the person who eats all chicken is producing 500 kg. How much does this change things? The average US citizen produces 17.5 tons of CO2 per year. Suppose this average person was originally eating half beef and half chicken, in which case they would get 1250 kg CO2 from beef + 250 kg from chicken = 1.4 tons from beef + 0.3 tons from chicken. That leaves 15.8 tons coming from other things like cars and plane flights. So if this average person switched to eating only chicken, their yearly CO2 production would drop from 17.5 tons to 16.4 tons. If they switched to eating only beef, their yearly CO2 production would rise from 17.5 tons to 18.6 tons. So the CO2 difference between an all-beef and an all-chicken diet is 16.4 tons of CO2 yearly vs. 18.6 tons yearly, or about 10%. So switching from all-chicken to all-beef saves about 60 chickens per year, at the cost of 2.2 tons extra CO2, a 10% increase in your yearly production. Nobody agrees on exactly how much it costs to offset a ton of carbon. This site says "anywhere from $0.10 per tonne to $44.80 per tonne", but eventualy settles on $3.30. QZ says "between $4 and 13 per metric ton". Terrapass sells offsets for $10 a ton; let's stick with that for now, while admitting it's at best an order-of-magnitude estimate.

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 first treatment, a drug called lornafarnib. In the study, a few hundred children averaging around 7 years old took the drug for two years; 3% died during that time. In an ad hoc group of untreated comparison children, about 30% died during the same period. I'm a little confused by the methodology - it seems like the "comparison children" were chosen partly because they died too early to get into the trial, which sounds like a pretty major confounder - but everyone seems to treat this as reasonable so I will assume they adjusted for this in some way. If that's true, then lornafarnib cuts mortality by 90%. That's great for the 300 or so children worldwide with Hutchinson-Gilford progeria (it's a really rare disease). But none of the discussion about this answered the question I wanted to know: can lornafarnib also prevent normal aging? After looking into this more, I find some evidence the the answer is no, but also some reasons why maybe it's less clear cut than that? Hutchinson-Gilford progeria (I'll just say "progeria" from here on, even though that's kind of inaccurate) is what's called a laminopathy. It's a disease of the nuclear lamina, a weblike structure that helps support and give shape to the cell nucleus. The lamina is partly made of a protein called lamin A. Children with progeria have a mutation in the relevant gene; instead of producing lamin A, they produce a defective mutant protein called progerin. The cell tries to build the nuclear lamina out of defective progerin instead of normal lamin A, and as a result the cell nucleus is screwed up and can't maintain a normal shape.

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 point 3 here for a way you can help move the contest forward by reading lots more of them - SA] Human nature is usually said to be basically selfish and sinful, but Rutger Bregman begs to differ. In Humankind he argues that human nature is basically kind and decent. Unfortunately, his approach seems to have been inspired by Monty Python: in the introduction he builds a sparkling argument, then in section one he accidentally sets it on fire, knocks it over, and then watches it sink into the swamp. Then in section two he rebuilds it, only to douse it in petrol, and then leave the chip pan on in section three. By the end of this review we'll have unearthed some important truths. None of them will be "we can trust Bregman for logical consistency and factual accuracy". Introduction - Good arguments that crises bring out the best in peopleIf at first you don't succeed, call in an airstrike. Before the Blitz the consensus was that a little light bombing was all it took to make the wheels come off civilisation. This is based on veneer theory - our good behaviour is a thin veneer laid on our fundamentally selfish, violent nature, and that under pressure our true nature will out. This turned out not to be true. So spectacularly untrue that we still talk about the Blitz Spirit. With our trademark humility, the British concluded that this was due to our exceptional moral fibre and, with help from the Americans, set about bombing German civilians to hell and back. Regrettably the Germans too responded by pulling together, and working harder in the war effort. Literally no one thinks this was due to their exceptional moral fibre. Instead, it seemed that crisis led to teamwork. Bregman is able to quote similar behaviour on the Titanic, on September 11th and in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Despite this mountain of evidence, veneer theory is still overwhelmingly believed. In 1951 William Golding wrote Lord of the Flies - a book about how a group of British boys crash-landed on a Pacific island would really behave. They start with ideals of co-operation, but quickly descend to violence and anarchy. Weeks later when they're rescued half of them are dead. The book became a massive best seller, and a much-studied classic. For those who lived through World War I, World War II, and were now watching communism demonstrate that you didn't even need an enemy to slaughter tens of millions, you can see the appeal of a cynical view of human nature. However it is pure fiction. In 1966 Lord of the Flies happened for real - 6 teenagers went for a joy ride in a fishing boat, got swept out by a storm and washed up on an inhospitable island in the Pacific. When they were found 11 months later, they were all alive and healthy. They had survived by fortitude, resourcefulness and above all, teamwork. If you think people are screwed up, you will screw up You can do surveys asking people how they will behave in certain situations, and how they think people in general will behave, and the answers are very consistent: people say they will behave well, as will the people they know well, but they expect people in general to behave badly. When shown people behaving altruistically subjects assume they have ulterior motives. When shown data about how often humans are altruistic, they come up with increasingly elaborate theories about how the behaviour is cynical really. "Cynicism is a theory of everything" writes Bregman. We live in a world of people who pull together in a crisis, but we believe we live in a world where people turn nasty in a crisis. Bregman blames the media for this (but in case that wasn't original enough on the next page he will blame scientists and religion) - the news serves us up the sensational and appalling, and because it serves it up every day it's easy to mistake it for the representative. He goes on to share studies that find watching the news is addictive and bad for you (at least, that's my excuse next time I'm found ignorant of current affairs). 'Reality TV' turns out to involve massive manipulation to get the conte

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 think I should add 4. Your personal stories about what things have or haven't helped, or any extra insight that your experience with depression has given you 5. Comments on the organization of the piece. I don't know how to balance wanting this to be accessible and easy-to-read with having it be thorough and convincing. Right now I've gone for a kind of FAQ format where you can only read the parts you want, but I'm doubtful about this choice. 6. Comments on the level of scientific formality. I tried to get somewhere in between "so evidence-based that I won't admit parachutes prevent injury without an RCT" and "here's some random stuff that came to me in a dream", and signal which part was which, but tell me if I fell too far to one side or the other. Ignore the minor formatting issues inevitable in trying to copy-paste things into Substack, including the headings being too small and the spacing between words and before paragraphs being weird. In the real page, the table of contents will link to the subsections; I don't kn

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 four centuries - and throughout that whole panoply of times and places, your wife is always cheating on you with a black man (if you're black, don't worry; she is cheating on you with a different black man). It's a weird constant. Maybe it's the author's fetish. I realize that Nights includes folktales written over centuries by dozens of different people - from legends passed along in caravanserais, to stories getting collected and written down, to manuscripts brought to Europe, to Richard Burton writing the classic English translation, to the abridged and updated version of Burton I read. But somewhere in that process, probably multiple places, someone had a fetish about their wife cheating on them with a black man, and boy did they insert it into the story. Our tale begins in Samarkand.

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 reviews, check out point 3 here for a way you can help move the contest forward by reading lots more of them - SA] In The Accidental Superpower: The Next Generation of American Preeminence and the Coming Global Disorder (2014), Peter Zeihan predicts the future of world politics and economic development in a way that an ACX fan would appreciate. He puts a timeline on it. The book isn't about "some hazy distant future after we're all dead and gone, but the future we will all be living in for the next fifteen years of our lives." Zeihan's subtitle hints at his big and bold thesis, which predicts "the dissolution of the free trade order, the global demographic inversion, the collapse of Europe and China," which "is all just a fleeting transition" to a world largely abandoned by America. People have fun making predictions like this (and mocking those who get things spectacularly wrong). With money and fame available to people whose predictions turn out right, and the ease with which we fo

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 prophecy reform. "Yes, prophecy reform." 2: For the first time since 1797, someone has used the infamous Venetian doge selection process to select an officeholder - specifically, the new moderators of not-quite-officially-affiliated-with-ACX politics discussion subreddit r/TheMotte. I assume this is why dogecoin is up this month.

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, it was a great place to be. (The site probably exists still, but as a shadow of its former edgy hilarity, as internet culture caught up with its redeemable qualities and it became a cesspool). Up until 2008, there was a strong mix of both left and right posters, and the site didn't have much of an ideological slant. It was happy to make fun of the failings of both left and right culture. The Obama/McCain election ended up breaking that down, because a significant number of posters bet that they would accept permanent banning from the site if their candidate lost. Since Obama won, a big chunk of the conservative/right posters were banned. Many/most ended up on 4chan and set the seed for more right-leaning ironic humor, which is what the site became known for. I had never heard this story before and it sounds just ridiculous enough to potentially be true. And Fabian writes:

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 out point 3 here for a way you can help move the contest forward by reading lots more of them - SA] I was scrolling through TikTok videos a few weeks ago when I came across a TikTok-sponsored video telling me to stop scrolling and go outside. I was confused. Here I was, perfectly willing (nay, wanting) to spend hours watching dance routines and drawing tutorials I had no intention of copying, but TikTok wanted me to stop? Why? Shouldn't they have been taking advantage of me to maximize "eyeballs," "time per session," and "user engagement"? One explanation is that TikTok is a good corporate citizen that helps its users maintain responsible screen time habits. Another explanation comes from Natasha Dow Schüll's excellent book Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas (2012). Schüll talks about gambling machines, people who use them, and the addictions that develop between the two. I think the conclusions she draws are applicable not only to the gambling industry, but also to other peddlers of vice like TikTok. The Machine Sometimes employees at Netflix think, 'Oh my god, we're competing with FX, HBO, or Amazon' … [W]e actually compete with sleep. - Reed Hastings

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 annoying quiz, click through a bunch of testimonials, and then finally gave me a "Schedule your free call today!" page. Still probably less annoying than seeing an in-person therapist, I guess, and $29/month. 3: Dozy, seems potentially good but still in private beta. Will probably launch in a few months; expected $10 - $30 price point. Someone mentioned the founder of Dozy was an effective altruist and connected to me through the social graph, so I reached out. He says he's a CS student who dropped out to work on "creat[ing] more accessible & impactful mental health treatments, with insomnia as a starting point". He writes that he's looking for potential co-founders, fundraising help, and advisors in the field. If you're interested, please contact him at [email protected].

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 patients CBT-i is hard. The usual sound bite is that "there are 60 million people with insomnia in the US but only 75 licensed CBT-i therapists." What can you do? Not much. Until now! Late last year, Pear Therapeutics released a CBT-i app (formerly "SHUT-i", now "Somryst") which holds the patient's hand through the complicated CBT-i process. Studies show it works as well as a real therapist, which is very well indeed. There's only one catch: you need a doctor's prescription. Wait, you can prescription-gate an app? Yes! Although you can download Somryst off your normal App Store, it won't work until a doctor writes you a prescription to "activate" it. Until then, it just shows you ads for how great CBT-i would be if you could get it. And it's not just Somryst. I know of at least three other prescription apps. reSET and reSET-O are 12-week courses to help addiction and opioid addiction, respectively. EndeavourRx is a video game which is supposed to help manage ADHD in kids. I guarantee you there are a lot more of these in the pipeline. In theory, an app is a great solution to accessibility issues. Some people can't afford to see a professional. Or they have complicated schedules that make it hard to see a professional. Or they've been traumatized by the medical system and don't want to see a professional. Or they have executive function problems and can't schedule a appointment with a professional. Or they have bad insurance that doesn't have many professionals in-network, and all of them have six month wait lists. Freddie de Boer, who has more resources and know-how than most people, describes his experience trying to get a therapist here:

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, after which people mostly regretted what they had done. They were bizarre unstable extremes in the history of authoritarianism. If we zoom out a little, we find that most of human history involved enforced ideological conformity, censorship, and repression. Maybe the most available reference point for this sort of thing is the US in the 1950s. There were certain ideas everyone knew were off limits - atheism, communism, marijuana legalization, gay rights. If you supported those things, you might not go to jail, but you'd be excluded from most good careers and most of polite society. This system was very stable - everyone knew the limits, and people generally didn't push against them unless they really wanted to and knew what they were getting into.

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

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 out point 3 here for a way you can help move the contest forward by reading lots more of them - SA] Despite appearances, this is not a biography. It's actually an epic fantasy series that happens to be true. A young man grows up on the edge of civilization, decides to fix his father's mistakes, turns to the dark side for power, wins victories despite the odds, betrays his mentors, and smashes the oppressive status quo. There's even a Bilbo. (Instead of Bilbo Baggins, it's Senator Bilbo, a white supremacist who says things like "the pure and undefiled Caucasian strain" while he's on the Senate floor.) 1: Memorable characters Sam Rayburn: Speaker of the House. He had so much integrity that he scared other members of Congress. Alvin Wirtz: LBJ's evil lawyer. (For non-Americans, Lyndon Baines Johnson was often abbreviated as LBJ.) "Wirtz was the kind of lawyer who would slip into a contract a sentence---a sentence that changed the contract's meaning---in the hope that the opposing lawyer would not notice it."

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 point 3 here for a way you can help move the contest forward by reading lots more of them - SA] Rome, 401 AD. The great pagan Roman senator, Symmachus, sponsors games to celebrate his eighteen year old son becoming praetor. Romans who witness the pageantry were still talking about it a generation later. There were theatrical displays in a flooded amphitheater. Symmachus brought crocodiles from the Nile, bears from the Balkans, great Irish wolfhounds from Britain, lions from the southern mountains of north Africa, antelopes and gazelles trapped along the edges of the Sahara, Saxon prisoners of war to serve as gladiators (all twenty of whom, frustratingly for Symmachus, committed suicide before the games, strangling each other with their own hands in their prison cells). Powerful Romans had displayed their wealth and civic love in the same way for the greater part of a millennium. Within a generation, much of the wealth of great senators like Symmachus was lost or slipped into the Christian church. Goths sacked the city of Rome. Vandals conquered wealthy north Africa and the great city of Carthage. Over the next hundred years, western Europe and north Africa completed their transformation from a classical pagan society to a medieval Christian one. It was not only a political revolution. "It was in this world that the conglomerate of ideas that medieval persons took for granted was first formed." This period rivals the Enlightenment as the most dramatic transformation of the West. Background on the Author Peter Brown, is an English historian and the Rollins Professor of History Emeritus at Princeton. He's one of the great scholars of "Late Antiquity." He is sometimes regarded as the inventor of the field (per Wikipedia). I'm not a historian, but I am interested in the world of classical Rome and Greece. I'm interested in men and women struggling to maintain systems and hold off collapse. The end of the Roman society is probably the best documented and most accessible example. Thus I first came across Peter Brown's work in the extremely readable "The World of Late Antiquity" from 1971. The short, introductory work got me hooked, so I read Brown's 2014 book "Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD."

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, was much more introverted, and would appreciate being efficiently directed to her room without the welcome committee. A little later, my friend arrived. From my room, I could hear them start welcoming her, ask her how her flight had been, start trying to get to know her - until I ran out and rescued her, for which she reports gratitude. For the rest of our stay, they continued to talk both of our ears off, with my friend growing increasingly annoyed and uncomfortable.

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 margin; workforces were so heavily unionized that companies were nervous about any changes that might upset employees. As long as companies followed the script, the government embraced and protected them. Starting a new business was considered some bizarre act of alchemy, like discovering a new form of matter; normal people worked for the same giant company their whole life and got a nice gold watch as a reward when they retired. The government wasn't exactly socialist per se, but it kept starting and expanding programs like Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security, and every night you went to sleep knowing there would be probably be another uncontroversial, mostly-successful government welfare program tomorrow.

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 apolitical. There are political assumptions wrapped up with everything we do." Or: "They say we're 'biased', but there's no such thing as a view-from-nowhere objectivity that doesn't import any assumptions. Everyone's biased, we're just not trying to deny it like they are."

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 out point 3 here for a way you can help move the contest forward by reading lots more of them - SA] Some books really stick with me. Like, literally, stick with me: I'm one of those people with pretentious literary tattoos. So far, just two books have been meaningful enough for me to permanently etch their totem on my skin: the glyph of the underground postal service from The Crying of Lot 49, and the line "Everything Is Permitted," Jean-Paul Sartre's misquoting of Dostoevsky's take on atheism from The Brothers Karamazov. (I wasn't kidding about pretentious!) People have all sorts of reasons for getting tattoos – mine are there for some of the standard superficial ones (looking cool and tough, obviously), but also to act as little daily mantras for how I want to live and think about the world. To this very short list of inked paragons, I'm thinking of adding a new one: a few stylized stalks of wheat in honor of Charles Mann's The Wizard and the Prophet. According to the instructions on the tin, The Wizard and the Prophet is meant to outline the origin of two opposing attitudes toward the relationship between humans and nature through their genesis in the work and thought of two men: William Vogt, the "Prophet" polemicist who founded modern-day environmentalism, and Norman Borlaug, the "Wizard" agronomist who spearheaded the Green Revolution. Roughly speaking, Wizards want continual growth in human numbers and quality of life, and to use

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 point 3 here for a way you can help move the contest forward by reading lots more of them - SA] If you enter a major research library in the US today and request to see a century-old issue of a major American newspaper, such as Chicago Tribune, The Wall Street Journal, or major-but-defunct newspapers such as the New York "World," odds are that you will be directed to a computer or a microfilm reader. There, you'll get to see black-and-white images of the desired issue, with individual numbers of the newspaper often missing and much of the text, let alone pictures, barely decipherable. The libraries in question mostly once had bound issues of these newspapers, but between the 1950s and the 1990s, one after another, they ditched the originals in favor of expensive microfilmed copies of inferior quality. They continued doing this even while the originals became perilously rare; the newspapers themselves were mostly trashed, or occasionally sold to dealers who cut them up and dispersed them. As a consequence, many of these publications are now rarer than the Gutenberg Bible, and some 19th and 20th century newspapers have ceased to exist in a physical copy anywhere in the world.

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 antidepressants. I'll start with the headline results, then go into details: Nootropic (sample size in parentheses), adjusted mean rating 1-10 (note truncated axis!), and 95% confidence interval. Click to expand. I tried to include a mix of common and well-studied nootropics as a baseline, plus some newer rarer substances nobody had looked into before. Predictably, the common substances got large sample sizes, and the rare substances got small ones. I excluded etifoxene, RGPU-95, and white jelly mushrooms from the graph because the sample was so small that the confidence interval would have covered the entire displayed range. A few substances on there are based off only 5 - 10 data points. I did a sort of ad hoc Bayesian adjustment where I assumed a prior of "average" for every substance and let the data try to push it away from that, which helped the numbers swing around a little less wildly.

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 specific research or looking at prediction markets when I made these, though some of them I already knew what the markets said. This isn't about me being an expert on these topics and getting them exactly right, it's about me calibrating my ability to tell how much I know about things and how certain I am. I'm also moving towards trying to learn to predict shorter-term and more specific events as they happen - you can see my log here. US/WORLD1. Biden approval rating (as per 538) is greater than 50%: 80% 2. Court packing is clearly going to happen (new justices don't have to be appointed by end of year): 5% 3. Yang is New York mayor: 80% 4. Newsom recalled as CA governor: 5% 5. At least $250 million in damage from BLM protests this year: 30% 6. Significant capital gains tax hike (above 30% for highest bracket): 20% 7. Trump is allowed back on Twitter: 20% 8. Tokyo Olympics happen on schedule: 70% 9. Major flare-up (significantly worse than anything in past 5 years) in Russia/Ukraine war: 20% 10. Major flare-up (significantly worse than anything in past 10 years) in Israel/Palestine conflict: 5% 11. Major flare-up (significantly worse than anything in past 50 years) in China/Taiwan conflict: 5% 12. Netanyahu is still Israeli PM: 40% 13. Prospera has at least 1000 residents: 30%

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 main character of The Matrix, Neo, gets to choose whether to take the red or blue pill: whether to escape his dream world or remain inside it. Unlike Neo, we're (probably) not trapped in a virtual reality. Nevertheless, we may be living in something of a dream world. At least, that's what Robert Wright claims in Why Buddhism Is True. According to Wright, evolution has packed us full of illusions. They range from the relatively harmless falsehood "powdered sugar donuts are good for me" to the sweeping distortion "I have a self." These misperceptions are not only inaccurate; they are dangerous. They cause unhappiness by trapping us on the hedonic treadmill and immorality by (among other things) fanning the flames of tribalism. Wright thinks that mindfulness meditation is the real-world equivalent of the red pill. The book attempts to justify this claim, aiming for a grand synthesis of Buddhism and psychology. Wright argues that psychology vindicates two venerable Buddhist theses: not-self (our experience of an "I" is in some sense an illusion) and emptiness (the world is in some sense "empty" or devoid of "essence"). Furthermore, mindfulness meditation allows us to see the truth of these theses in an experiential way which frees us of our evolutionary bondage. Enlightenment, the end-goal of meditation, is the state of full liberation from this bondage.

[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 Animals Are is ostensibly a book about a subfield of ethology - animal cognition. It turns out to actually be about a lot more things than that, as "animal cognition" and the history of its study touches on a lot of different scientific fields and the various approaches, methodologies, and ideologies they've had in the past. Before we jump into talking about how the book is useful an

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 replicate the West's trajectory and stayed underdeveloped despite seemingly having enough time to catch up? GEH:VSI tries to answer these questions. It explicitly disavows explanations that lean too heavily on some populations being better (smarter, harder working, etc) than others, or on narratives of colonial exploitation - sorry if you were looking for anything too juicy. Given its brevity, it can only gesture at justifications for this choice. It's skeptical of the Protestant work ethic because, however much it matched experience in 18-whatever, today "Catholic Italy [is richer than] Protestant Britain" (is this true? Britain has higher GDP today, but Italy was higher when this book was written) It's skeptical of ideas that some countries are "traditionalist" and resistant to change because of [long list of those countries adopting various profitable innovations] - for example African farmers now mostly grow more productive New World crops (but couldn't countries be willing to change in some ways but traditionalist in others?). The reluctance to invoke colonialism too heavily is even less well-explained, but I think it relies on differences between never-colonized countries - for example, Russia and the Ottomans lagged behind the West in much the same way as Asia and Latin America, and even Austria lagged Britain (GEH:VSI does talk about particular problems with colonial policies when they come up, as part of its general policy survey). Overall I think of these exclusions more as a commitment to a paradigm: what would it look like to pursue a project of understanding global economic history without invoking either of these tempting but curiosity-stopping explanations?

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 converted from evangelicalism, told me. "I began to study, more and more, and ask myself deep questions: What was my mission in this world? Why was I here? And what did I need to do?" She said her father was the pastor of an evangelical church where she was a member. He also converted. "It was a calling of the soul," Devorah Guilah Koren, who converted from Catholicism with her husband and two children, told me. "More than a religion, [Orthodox Judaism] was a way of thinking and conduct that satisfied all of our needs." This is all very nice, but it doesn't seem like an explanation. Why are more people converting in Colombia than, say, Greece or Thailand? Don't Greek people sometimes want to find the truth? Don't Thais ever feel callings of the soul?

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 50-50 for everything is -0.69) although this is also kind of meaningless. I quadrupled my money on prediction markets, which I think is meaningful. In terms of my more qualitative/implied predictions, got at least one important trend right before anyone else, but also made some embarrassing unforced errors. Going through all my predictions post by post, and giving each a letter grade: 1: 10-23-2015: Trump's base is/will be surprisingly racially diverse (A-) As far as I know, the first post I wrote about Trump was this one, where I argued against the prevailing narrative that Trump was practicing "the politics of white insecurity" or had an unusually white base of support (for a Republican). I wrote that Trump seemed to be doing pretty well (for a Republican) among blacks and Hispanics, and concluded that: There are too few data to say anything for sure. But all of the data that exist suggest that if the Republican primary were held today and restricted to non-whites, Trump would still win. And if Trump were the Republican nominee, he could probably count on equal or greater support from minorities as Romney or McCain before him. In other words, the media narrative that Trump is doing some kind of special appeal-to-white-voters voodoo is unsupported by any polling data. I was right. In the general election a year later, Trump did better than Romney had among non-white voters. He made large gains among blacks, Asians, and Latinos. The only ethnic group where he didn't gain at least five percentage points over Romney's numbers was whites. As I pointed out at the time, the narrative that Trump was especially appealing to white voters was bizarre and not truth-based, motivated primarily by a demand for racist Republicans on the part of increasingly woke narrative-consumers.

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 all this new economic development and industrialized technology hasn't eliminated poverty and oppression?" That man was Henry George, his answer came in the form of a book called Progress & Poverty, and this is a review of that book. Henry George is variously known for leading an early movement that popularized Universal Basic Income, sporting a fancy beard while shouting "The Rent Is Too Damn High!" and inspiring a popular board game that was shamelessly ripped off and repackaged as Monopoly. But he didn't just write a book. He also ran for Mayor of New York city in 1886, beating out some rando Republican named "Theodore Roosevelt," but ultimately losing to the favored candidate of Tammany Hall, who saw George's radical economic ideas as a threat to their well-oiled political machine (Andrew Yang take note). He ran again in 1897 but died just 4 days before the election, prompting a national outpouring of mourning. According to Ralph Gabriel's Course of American Democratic Thought, in New York alone 200,000 people came to see his body lying in repose, half of which had to be turned away. For context, that one crowd was roughly the size of 1% of the entire population of New York at the time. I'm writing this book review for three reasons: George's arguments about land, labor, and capital present a fresh alternative to conventional ideas about "Capitalism" and "Socialism" (and whatever we mean by those on any given day) The book has timeless advice for navigating modern crises such as ever-rising rents, homelessness, and the NIMBY vs. YIMBY wars. This is a golden opportunity to shamelessly over-use the catchy phrase "By George!"

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 first footholds. Do the "liberty and justice for all" thing, but for real. And who among us, having had the dream, hasn't entered into multi-year negotiations with the government of Honduras? Taken advantage of a clause in the Honduras-Kuwait Treaty Of Reciprocal Investment guaranteeing them their right to pursue their vision unmolested? Raised millions in venture capital and bought land on a Caribbean island to turn it into a reality? Not Erick Brimen, and not Honduras Próspera Inc. You might have read about them last month in Bloomberg: A Private Tech City Opens For Business In Honduras. Or in NACLA: A Private Government In Honduras Moves Forward. Or FT: An Investor's Prosperity Vision For Honduras. I read all of this and still didn't feel like I quite understood what was going on. Then a fortuitious mistake led me to an email exchange with Trey Goff, Próspera's extremely open and thorough Chief of Staff, who kindly let me grill him on all the stuff I didn't understand. The result is this post. It's all the information I could collect on Próspera from basically every public source, plus some non-public ones. It's about a private tech city and a prosperity vision and all that. But it's also about - - - well, people talk a lot these days about "systemic change". But usually that means something like fiddling with tax rates or ending the filibuster. What if you could actually change the system? Say "this system we have, the one that's letting all these people starve and suffer violence and die of preventable diseases - I don't care for it. Let's try something else"? Yes, this is about startup governments and investment opportunities and blah blah blah, but it's also about trying to fight global poverty by radically changing the rules of the game that makes it possible.

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 Computation Graphs. Predictive coding is the most plausible current theory of how the brain works. I've written about it elsewhere, especially here.

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 replicate. The paper is especially interesting for using a "multiverse analysis": We evaluated 848 models, including logistic regression as per the original paper, plus linear regression and twoforms of propensity score analysis. Only 166 models (19.6%) yielded a statistically significant relationship between early TV exposure and later attention problems, with most of these employing problematic analytic choices. If I had the energy to look through 848 models and see which ones got significant findings and which ones didn't, I bet I would become enlightened by the end of it. 2: Seen on architecture Twitter:

[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 than Galen of Pergamon. As early as 1605, in The Advancement of Learning, Francis Bacon is taking aim at Galen for the "specious causes" that keep us from further advancement in science. He attacks Plato and Aristotle first, of course, but it's pretty interesting to see that Galen is the #3 man on his list after these two heavy-hitters. Centuries went by, but not much changed. Charles Richet, winner of the 1913 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, said that Galen and "all the physicians who followed [him] during sixteen centuries, describe humours which they had never seen, and which no one will ever see, for they do not exist." Some of the 'humors' exist, he says, like blood and bile. But of the "extraordinary phlegm or pituitary accretion" he says, "where is it? Who will ever see it? Who has ever seen it? What can we say of this fanciful classification of humours into four groups, of which two are absolutely imaginary?" And so on until the present day. In Scott's review of Superforecasting, he quotes Tetlock's comment on Galen:

[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. Oh, and I promise not all of them are this long. - SA] Shasta County Shasta County, northern California, is a rural area home to many cattle ranchers.1 It has an unusual legal feature: its rangeland can be designated as either open or closed. (Most places in the country pick one or the other.) The county board of supervisors has the power to close range, but not to open it. When a range closure petition is circulated, the cattlemen have strong opinions about it. They like their range open. If you ask why, they'll tell you it's because of what happens if a motorist hits one of their herd. In open range, the driver should have been more careful; "the motorist buys the cow". In closed range, the rancher should have been sure to fence his animals in; he compensates the motorist.

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 bodybuilders chased the pump and burn they get from shorter rest periods. Later the idea of chasing the pump was rationalized into the theory of metabolic stress. Yet there wasn't a single study to support that shorter rest periods actually benefit muscle growth.

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 similar people, then give Vitamin D to one group and see what happens. If the groups are different to start with, then we won't be able to tell if the Vitamin D did anything or if it was just the pre-existing difference. In this case, they checked for fifteen important ways that the groups could be different, and found they were only significantly different on one - blood pressure. Jungreis and Kellis, two scientists who support this study, say that shouldn't bother us too much. They point out that because of multiple testing (we checked fifteen hypotheses), we need a higher significance threshold before we care about significance in any of them, and once we apply this correction, the blood pressure result stops being significant. Pachter challenges their math - but even aside from that, come on! We found that there was actually a big difference between these groups! You can play around with statistics and show that ignoring this difference meets certain formal criteria for statistical good practice. But the difference is still there and it's real. For all we know it could be driving the Vitamin D results.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/2020-predictions-calibration-results At the beginning of every year, I make predictions. At the end of every year, I score them (this year I'm very late). Here are 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019. And here are the predictions I made for 2020. Some predictions are redacted because they involve my private life or the lives of people close to me. Usually I use strikethrough for things that didn't happen, but since Substack doesn't let me strikethrough text or change its color or do anything interesting, I've had to turn the ones that didn't happen into links. Italicized are getting thrown out because they were confusing or conditional on something that didn't happen. I can't decide if they're true or not. All of these judgments were as of December 31 2020, not as of now. (Remember, link means something that didn't happen, not something I was wrong about. We have a debate every year over whether 50% predictions are meaningful in this paradigm; feel free to continue it.)

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ambidexterity-and-cognitive-closure Back in a more superstitious time, people believed left-handers were in league with the Devil. Now, in this age of Science, we realize that was unfair. Yes, left-handers are statistically more likely to be in league with the Devil. But so are right-handers! It's only the ambidextrous who are truly pure! At least this is the conclusion I take from Lyle & Grillo (2020) Why Are Consistently-Handed Individuals More Authoritarian: The Role Of Need For Cognitive Closure. It discusses studies finding that consistently-handed people (ie people who are not ambidextrous) are more likely to support authoritarian governments, demonstrate prejudice against "immigrants, homosexuals, Muslims, Mexicans, atheists, and liberals", and support violations of the Geneva Conventions in hypothetical scenarios. The authors link this to a construct called "need for cognitive closure", ie being very sure you are right and unwilling to consider alternate perspectives. They argue that something about the interaction of brain hemispheres regulates cognitive closure, and that ambidextrous people, with their weak hemispheric dominance, get less of it. They study 235 undergraduates and find results that generally confirm this hypothesis: their ambidextrous subjects support less authoritarian and racist beliefs, and this is partly

https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/31/the-parable-of-the-talents/ [Content note: scrupulosity and self-esteem triggers, IQ, brief discussion of weight and dieting. Not good for growth mindset.] I. I sometimes blog about research into IQ and human intelligence. I think most readers of this blog already know IQ is 50% to 80% heritable, and that it's so important for intellectual pursuits that eminent scientists in some fields have average IQs around 150 to 160. Since IQ this high only appears in 1/10,000 people or so, it beggars coincidence to believe this represents anything but a very strong filter for IQ (or something correlated with it) in reaching that level. If you saw a group of dozens of people who were 7'0 tall on average, you'd assume it was a basketball team or some other group selected for height, not a bunch of botanists who were all very tall by coincidence. A lot of people find this pretty depressing. Some worry that taking it seriously might damage the "growth mindset" people need to fully actualize their potential. This is important and I want to discuss it eventually, but not now. What I want to discuss now is people who feel personally depressed. For example, a comment from last week: I'm sorry to leave self a self absorbed comment, but reading this really upset me and I just need to get this off my chest…How is a person supposed to stay sane in a culture that prizes intelligence above everything else – especially if, as Scott suggests, Human Intelligence Really Is the Key to the Future – when they themselves are not particularly intelligent and, apparently, have no potential to ever become intelligent? Right now I basically feel like pond scum.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/oh-the-places-youll-go-when-trying I. What is the right dose of Lexapro (escitalopram)? The official FDA packet insert recommends a usual dose of 10 mg, and a maximum safe dose of 20 mg. It says studies fail to show 20 mg works any better than 10, but you can use 20 if you really want to. But Jakubovski et al's Dose-Response Relationship Of Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors tries to figure out which doses of which antidepressants are equivalent to each other, and comes up with the following suggestion (ignore the graph, read the caption) 16.7 mg Lexapro equals 20 mg of paroxetine (Paxil) or fluoxetine (Prozac). But the maximum approved doses of those medications are 60 mg and 80 mg, respectively. If we convert these to mg imipramine equivalents like the study above uses, Prozac maxes out at 400, Paxil at 300, and Lexapro at 120. So Lexapro has a very low maximum dose compared to other similar antidepressants. Why? Because Lexapro (escitalopram) is a derivative of the older drug Celexa (citalopram). Sometime around 2011, the FDA freaked out that high doses of citalopram might cause a deadly heart condition called torsade de pointes, and lowered the maximum dose to prevent this. Since then it's been pretty conclusively shown that the FDA was mostly wrong about this and kind of bungled the whole process. But they forgot to ever unbungle it, so citalopram still has a lower maximum dose than every other antidepressant. When escitalopram was invented, it inherited its parent chemical's unusually-low maximum dose, and remains at that level today [edit: I got the timing messed up, see here]

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/towards-a-bayesian-theory-of-willpower I. What is willpower? Five years ago, I reviewed Baumeister and Tierney's book on the subject. They tentatively concluded it's a way of rationing brain glucose. But their key results have failed to replicate, and people who know more about glucose physiology say it makes no theoretical sense. Robert Kurzban, one of the most on-point critics of the glucose theory, gives his own model of willpower: it's a way of minimizing opportunity costs. But how come my brain is convinced that playing Civilization for ten hours has no opportunity cost, but spending five seconds putting away dishes has such immense opportunity costs that it will probably leave me permanently destitute? I can't find any correlation between the subjective phenomenon of willpower or effort-needingness and real opportunity costs at all.