Astral Codex Ten Podcast

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/meetups-everywhere-2021-times-and https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1QFbM5B9KfsiwqO6DvJ4D05dQitBtZ6kYDwXZ3Hj6SEc/edit#gid=1585750313 Thanks to everyone who respond to my request for ACX outdoor meetup organizers. Volunteers have arranged meetups in 170 cities around the world, including beautiful Lusk, Wyoming (population: 1,526). You can see the full list here, and I'll also have it below in case you can't access the spreadsheet for some reason. I'll be trying to attend ~15 of the 170 meetups. Since I focused on the US last time, I'm going to focus on Europe this year (plus a few US cities on the way). My very preliminary itinerary (all dates in US month/day format) is: Berkeley: Saturday 8/28, 1 PM Boston: Sunday, 9/5, 5 PM New York: Monday, 9/6, 5 PM Washington DC: Saturday, 9/11, 5 PM Lisbon: Saturday, 9/18, 5 PM Madrid: TBD (late September?) Zurich: TBD (late September?) Vienna: TBD (late September?) Prague: TBD (early October?) Berlin: TBD (early October?) Paris: TBD (early October?) London: TBD (mid October?) Cambridge: TBD (mid October?) Oxford: TBD (mid October?) Edinburgh: TBD (mid October?) I don't want to make confident predictions about how quickly I can travel through Europe, so I'll post the rest of my schedule once I know more. If you gave me a schedule for the first five cities, I've unilaterally replaced it with what works for me, sorry. If you're trying to organize a meetup for the TBD cities, sorry I'm making your life confusing right now. Also, if COVID or something else comes up, I might have to drop some cities from my list, in which case I'll let you know and you can have a normal meetup at whatever time works for you.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-aducanumab These are highlights from the comments of Adumbrations Of Aducanumab, Details Of The Infant Fish Oil Story, and discussion of those posts elsewhere. C_B writes: I agree with this post's overall point that the FDA is not, on average, too lax, and that the Atlantic article's take that the aducanumab approval is a sign of them being too lax is a bad take. That said, I think the beginning of this article really undersells how uniquely bad the aducanumab approval is. It's not just "pretty unclear whether it actually treats Alzheimers." Nobody in the field thinks there's any serious possibility that it treats Alzheimers. - Here's Derek Lowe talking about it: https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/06/08/the-aducanumab-approval - The FDA's advisory committee doesn't think it treats Alzheimers: https://alzheimersnewstoday.com/2020/11/11/fda-committee-votes-aducanumab-trial-data-fail-support-alzhimers-treatment-benefit/ - The trial was halted for futility: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-biogen-alzheimers/biogen-eisai-scrap-alzheimer-drug-trials-idUSKCN1R213G - The details of the "positive results" are textbook p-hacking of exactly the sort that the whole replication crisis has been about. It's a post-hoc subgroup analysis where the subgroup was selected based on similarity to the patients who had the most positive results; i.e., trivially guaranteed to show "positive" results via group selection. You can read more details in the statistical reviewer's comments in the advisory committee's document (PDF, starting on p. 174): https://www.fda.gov/media/143502/download

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-august [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: Ever wonder what happened to the Borgias after the Renaissance? Apparently they're still around, and one of them - Rodrigo Borja Cevallos - was president of Ecuador back in the 90s. A lot of the Spanish branch of the family (who spell their name "Borja") seem to have ended up in Latin America, which makes me curious whether Cuban-American immigration economist George Borjas is related too. 2: It's long been a YIMBY talking point that building more luxury or market-rate houses will indirectly free up affordable housing, as richer people move out of cheaper houses into costlier ones. A new paper confirms and quantifies this effect: "Constructing a new market-rate building that houses 100 people ultimately leads 45 to 70 people to move out of below-median income neighborhoods, with most of the effect occurring within three years."

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/kids-can-recover-from-missing-even I. Introduction Back when the public schools were closed or online, someone I know burned themselves out working overtime to get the money to send their kid to a private school. They figured that all the other parents would do it, their kid would fall hopelessly behind, and then they'd be doomed to whatever sort of horrible fate awaits people who don't get into the right colleges. I hear this is happening again now, with more school closures, more frantic parents, and more people asking awful questions like "should I accept the risk of sending my immunocompromised kid to school, or should I accept him falling behind and never amounting to anything?" (see also this story) You can probably predict what side I'm on here. Like everyone else, I took a year of Spanish in middle school; like everyone else who did that, the sum total of what I remember is "no hablo Espanol" - and even there I'm pretty sure I forgot a curly thing over at least one of the letters. Like everyone else, I learned advanced math in high school; like everyone else, I can do up to basic algebra, the specific math I need for my job, and nothing else (my entire memory of Algebra II is that there is a thing called "Gaussian Elimination", and even there, I'm not sure this wasn't just the name of a video game). Like everyone else, I once knew the names and dates of many important Civil War battles; like everyone else - okay, fine, I remember all of these, but only because the Civil War is objectively fascinating.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/blindness-schizophrenia-and-autism Some weird psychiatric trivia: no congenitally blind person ever gets schizophrenia (journal article, popular article). "Trivia" is exactly the right word for this fact; it's undeniably interesting, but what do you do with it? So far nobody has done anything, other than remark "hmm, that's funny". I was thinking about this recently in the context of the diametrical model of autism vs. schizophrenia. This is itself pretty close to psychiatric trivia - a lot of features of schizophrenia and autism seem to be opposites of each other. As I put it here: Many of the genes that increase risk of autism decrease risk of schizophrenia, and vice versa. Autists have a smaller-than-normal corpus callosum; schizophrenics have a larger-than-normal one. Schizophrenics smoke so often that some researchers believe they have some kind of nicotine deficiency; autists have unusually low smoking rates. Schizophrenics are more susceptible to the rubber hand illusion and have weaker self-other boundaries in general; autists seem less susceptible and have stronger self-other boundaries. Autists can be pathologically rational but tend to be uncreative; schizophrenics can be pathologically creative but tend to be irrational. The list goes on.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/contra-hanania-on-partisanship Support the author on Substack: astralcodexten.substack.com Then support the podcast: www.patreon.com/sscpodcast Richard Hanania of the Center For The Study Of Partisanship And Ideology asks "why is everything liberal?" Given that there are approximately equal numbers of Trump voters and Biden voters in elections, how come we have "woke capital" celebrating Pride Month, instead of unwoke capital celebrating some conservative cause (as might have happened fifty years ago)? How come conservatives worry about censorship by liberal tech companies instead of vice versa? How come conservatives worry about college turning their kids liberal instead of vice versa?

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/outdoor-careful-meetups-everywhere Support the author on Substack: astralcodexten.substack.com Then support the podcast: www.patreon.com/sscpodcast https://forms.gle/mvueraFmq2hSqdH27 There are ACX-affiliated meetup groups all over the world. Lots of people are vaguely interested, but don't try them out until I make a big deal about it on the blog. Since learning that, I've tried to make a big deal about it on the blog once annually, and it's that time of year again. Given the COVID situation, I debated whether or not I should hold the meetups this year. I've decided yes, for a few reasons: According to the recent surveys, 97% of ACX readers in the US are vaccinated. Other developed countries have roughly similar numbers (except for Australia, where I am recommending no meetups for now). I will request that only vaccinated people attend these meetups - but knowing that I can't enforce this, it makes me reassured to learn that almost everyone is vaccinated anyway. Everyone liked outdoor meetups better last time, so we can just hold the meetups outdoors. My state (California) currently says small to medium outdoor gatherings are okay, with light restrictions starting once they have 10,000 people.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/eight-hundred-slightly-poisoned-word Support the author on Substack: astralcodexten.substack.com Then support the podcast: www.patreon.com/sscpodcast In 2012, a Berkeley team found that indoor carbon dioxide had dramatic negative effects on cognition (paper, popular article). Subjects in poorly ventilated environments did up to 50% worse on a test of reasoning and decision-making. This is potentially pretty important, because lots of office buildings (and private houses) count as poorly-ventilated environments, so a lot of decision-making might be happening while severely impaired. Since then people have debated this on and off, with some studies confirming the effect and others failing to find it. I personally am skeptical, partly because the effect is so big I would expect someone to have noticed, but also because submarines, spaceships, etc have orders of magnitude more carbon dioxide than any civilian environment, but people still seem to do pretty hard work in them pretty effectively. As part of my continuing effort to test this theory in my own life, I played a word game eight hundred times under varying ventilation conditions. …okay, fine, no, I admit it, I played a word game eight hundred times because I'm addicted to it. But since I was playing the word game eight hundred times anyway, I varied the ventilation conditions to see what would happen. The game was WordTwist, which you can find here (warning: potentially addictive). You get a 5x5 square of letters and you have to find as many words as possible (of four letters or more) within three minutes. You can move up, down, right, left, or diagonal, and get more points for harder words. A typical board looks like this:

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/contra-drum-on-the-fish-oil-story Support the author on Substack: astralcodexten.substack.com Then support the podcast: www.patreon.com/sscpodcast I. Kevin Drum questions my interpretation of the infant fish oil story. (it's actually more complicated - I posted a shorter version, later corrected it with a longer version based on the account of one of the doctors involved but said it basically supported my shorter version, he also found the longer version and was about to publish an article saying he had debunked my shorter version, then noticed I had seen the same article and thought it supported me, and he thinks I was wrong to believe this) He writes: This is headshakingly dense. As a hit on the FDA, his post wasn't right at all — not its basic structure and not anything else about it. He even admits that although Gura criticizes plenty of other actors, the FDA isn't one of them...I have no idea how you can write "they usually carry out their mandate well" in one place and then, in your main post, just go ahead and repeat your original belief—backed by an example you know is wrong—that the FDA does stupid and destructive things on practically a daily basis. This is why I'm automatically skeptical of anything on the web that's excessively critical of the FDA.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/details-of-the-infant-fish-oil-story I. In my recent post on the FDA, I mentioned a story about a fish-oil-based infant nutritional fluid called Omegaven. The FDA took too long to approve it, and lots of infants died. I plucked that from the anti-FDA blogosphere, where it had been floating around for a while in various incarnations. I tried to check it before publishing, but only enough to confirm the basic outline. A concerned reader sent me a Cochrane paper suggesting that the fluid was no better than previous treatments, which would potentially exonerate the FDA. This was concerning enough that I decided spend a longer time trying to figure out the specifics.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-acemoglu Eugene Norman writes: This… "People have said climate change could cause mass famine and global instability by 2100. But actually, climate change is contributing to hurricanes and wildfires right now! So obviously those alarmists are wrong and nobody needs to worry about future famine and global instability at all." …isn't a good analogy at all. Because nobody is arguing that climate change now doesn't lead to increased climate change in the future. They are the same thing but accelerated. However there's no certainty that narrow AI leads you a super intelligence. In fact it won't. There's no becoming self aware in the algorithms. I'm against this for two reasons. First, self-awareness is spooky. I honestly have no idea what self-awareness is or what it even potentially could be. I hate having this disc

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/adumbrations-of-aducanumab Lots of people have been writing about aducanumab, but this Atlantic article in particular bothers me. Backing up: aducanumab, aka Aduhelm, is a new "Alzheimers drug" recently approved by the FDA. I use the scare quotes because it's pretty unclear whether it actually treats Alzheimers. It definitely treats beta-amyloid plaques, and beta-amyloid plaques are kind of nasty-looking brain structures that seem to be related to Alzheimers somehow. But we're not sure exactly how they're related, they might not be related in a way where removing them treats Alzheimers, and the best studies don't find that the drug helps patients feel better or remember things more. Aducanumab doesn't meet normal FDA standards for approval, but the FDA approved it anyway under one of their many "fast track" programs for promising drugs. This has been pretty roundly criticized, because although aducanumab might or might not work, it definitely costs $50,000/year/patient. Even if it worked great, that would be a hard pill to swallow (no pun intended, Aduheim is an IV infusion), but it's especially galling since it might not work at all. Doctors will probably prescribe it despite its questionable value, and someone will end up paying the extraordinary price tag. (Who? Nobody knows. The patient? Insurance companies? Taxpayers? Unrelated patients at the same hospital? Could be anyone! The whole point of the US health insurance system is to make sure nobody ever figures out who bears any particular cost, so that there's no constituency for keeping prices low. If you check your bank account one day and find it's down $50,000 for no reason, I guess you were the guy who ended up on the hook for this one. Sorry!)

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/what-should-we-make-of-sasha-chapins I. Substack blogger Sasha Chapin writes that COVID-19 Took My Sense Of Smell, LSD Brought It Back. He got coronavirus, and like many people lost his sense of smell (medical term: dysosmia or anosmia). Ten days after recovery, he still couldn't smell anything. He looked on Twitter and found some anecdotal reports that psychedelics had helped with this, so he took LSD and tried to smell some stuff while tripping. He says it "totally worked. Fully and near-instantaneously. Like a light switch turning on." The details: My idea was that I'd do some scent training while on LSD, to—hand-wavey lay neuroscience incoming—stimulate whatever olfactory neurogenesis might occur. Before tripping, I laid out my fragrance collection, along with a few ingredients from the pantry. All-in-all, there were about fifty things to smell, and, as the LSD started kicking in, I started making my way through the selection. At that moment, my sense of smell was still somewhat there but mostly not. However, something odd was happening; I could detect some of the fragrances' nuances that I couldn't pick up earlier that day, and what I detected shifted from moment to moment. It was like I was listening to a piece of music with random instruments dropping in and out of the mix. This was still a kind of anosmia, but a different kind, and it almost felt as if my olfaction was re-negotiating reality in real time. And then another weird thing happened. For a couple of hours, I got acute short-term parosmia (distorted smell.) My nose felt dry, and a weird puke-y smell filled my mind. According to some research I'd done, in anosmic patients parosmia sometimes precedes recovery, so, though this was quite unpleasant, I felt hopeful that this was some part of the regeneration process. I cleaned the house, my wife took me shopping, we went to Home Depot, and then had dinner. We got home soon after, about seven hours after my trip began, and I returned to my fragrance collection. Cue triumphant music: all of them were now smellable, in high-definition. My anosmia was gone. Moreover, some were more pleasant than before; iris was more palatable to me than it ever had been. This was a moment I won't soon forget. Some fragrances—especially Dzing!—gave me full-body chills. The next day, my sense of smell was still there, but it fluctuated; it was partial in the morning, then full in the evening. Since then, it's been back basically 100%. (And the improved understanding of iris has persisted.) The number one explanation for incredible Internet medical stories is always "placebo effect". Number two is "coincidence", number three is "they made it up". All of these top the list for Sasha's experience too. Still, enough people have said something like this that I think it's worth trying to figure out if there's any plausible mechanism. II. Anosmia sucks worse than you would expect. For one thing, smell is linked to taste, so most things taste bad or weird or neutral. For another, it's correlated with much higher risk of depression, and some preliminary work suggests this could be causal (possible mechanism: the brain is getting fewer forms of stimulation?) Some studies find that exposing rats to very strong scents makes them less depressed; it would be funny if this was how aromatherapy worked in humans. So COVID induced anosmia is actually a serious problem. According to annoying people who refuse to provide useful information, between 3% and 98% of people who get coronavirus lose some sense of smell. A meta-analysis that pools all these studies gives a best estimate of around 40%. Lots of respiratory viruses cause some smell loss when they infect your nasal passages, but coronavirus is worse than usual. Milder cases cause more olfactory problems than more severe cases, suggesting that the immune response is at least as involved as the virus itself. The coronavirus cannot infect neurons directly, but might infect other cells in the nose, including cells which support neurons and help regenerate the olfactory epithelium. About half of COVID patients recover their smell in a few weeks, but some cases linger for up to a year. By the end of a year 95%+ have recovered; given that between 3% - 12% of people have random smell disturbances at any given time anyway, I interpret this latter figure less as "some people never recover" and more as "we reach the point where it's impossible to distinguish from background problems". Sasha says he was only ten days in when he took LSD, so this is well inside the window where we would expect him to eventually recover anyway. But it still doesn't make sense that he recovered within the space of a few hours, or that he felt his smell was stronger than before.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/model-city-monday-8221 Support the author here: astralcodexten.substack.com Then, you can support this podcast at: www.patreon.com/sscpodcast Greenhouse Effect Honduras remains the country to watch in the charter city sphere, with its ZEDE law allowing unprecedented levels of freedom and protection. I'd previously written about two Honduran projects, the high-tech island hub of Prospera and the industrial heartland project of Ciudad Morazan. Now there's a third: ZEDE Orquidea ("Orchid Zone"). I'm not really impressed with their publicity effort (my browser insists their website is a security hazard and won't let me access it). My only real source of information is this Reddit post by another charter city enthusiast, who writes:

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/updated-look-at-long-term-ai-risks The last couple of posts here talked about long-term risks from AI, so I thought I'd highlight the results of a new expert survey on exactly what they are. There have been a lot of these surveys recently, but this one is a little different. Starting from the beginning: in 2012-2014, Muller and Bostrom surveyed 550 people with various levels of claim to the title "AI expert" on the future of AI. People in philosophy of AI or other very speculative fields gave numbers around 20% chance of AI causing an "existential catastrophe" (eg human extinction); people in normal technical AI research gave numbers around 7%. In 2016-2017, Grace et al surveyed 1634 experts, 5% of whom predicted an extremely catastrophic outcome. Both of these surveys were vulnerable to response bias (eg the least speculative-minded people might think the whole issue was stupid and not even return the survey). The new paper - Carlier, Clarke, and Schuett (not currently public, sorry, but you can read the summary here) - isn't exactly continuing in this tradition. Instead of surveying all AI experts, it surveys people who work in "AI safety and governance", ie people who are already concerned with AI being potentially dangerous, and who have dedicated their careers to addressing this. As such, they were more concerned on average than the people in previous surveys, and gave a median ~10% chance of AI-related catastrophe (~5% in the next 50 years, rising to ~25% if we don't make a directed effort to prevent it; means were a bit higher than medians). Individual experts' probability estimates ranged from 0.1% to 100% (this is how you know you're doing good futurology). None of that is really surprising. What's new here is that they surveyed the experts on various ways AI could go wrong, to see which ones the experts were most concerned about. Going through each of them in a little more detail: 1. Superintelligence: This is the "classic" scenario that started the field, ably described by people like Nick Bostrom and Eliezer Yudkowsky. AI progress goes from human-level to vastly-above-human-level very quickly, maybe because slightly-above-human-level AIs themselves are speeding it along, or maybe because it turns out that if you can make an IQ 100 AI for $10,000 worth of compute, you can make an IQ 500 AI for $50,000. You end up with one (or a few) completely unexpected superintelligent AIs, which wield far-future technology and use it in unpredictable ways based on untested goal structures.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/when-does-worrying-about-things-trade On yesterday's post, some people tried to steelman Acemoglu's argument into something like this: There's a limited amount of public interest in AI. The more gets used up on the long-term risk of superintelligent AI, the less is left for near-term AI risks like unemployment or autonomous weapons. Sure, maybe Acemoglu didn't explain his dismissal of long-term risks very well. But given that he thinks near-term risks are bigger than long-term ones, it's fair to argue that we should shift our limited budget of risk awareness more towards the former at the expense of the latter. I agree this potentially makes sense. But how would you treat each of the following arguments?: (1): Instead of worrying about police brutality, we should worry about the police faking evidence to convict innocent people. (2): Instead of worrying about Republican obstructionism in Congress, we should worry about the potential for novel variants of COVID to wreak devastation in the Third World. (3): Instead of worrying about nuclear war, we should worry about the smaller conflicts going on today, like the deadly civil war in Ethiopia.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/contra-acemoglu-onoh-god-were-doing The Washington Post has published yet another "luminary in unrelated field discovers AI risk, pronounces it stupid" article. This time it's Daron Acemoglu. I respect Daron Acemoglu and appreciate the many things his work has revealed about economics. In particular, I respect him so much that I wish he would stop embarrassing himself by writing this kind of article (I feel the same way about Steven Pinker and Ted Chiang). In service of this goal, I want to discuss the piece briefly. I'll start with what I think is its main flaw, then nitpick a few other things: 1: The Main Flaw: "AI Is Dangerous Now, So It Can't Be Dangerous Later" This is the basic structure around which this article is written. It goes: 1. Some people say that AI might be dangerous in the future. 2. But AI is dangerous now! 3. So it can't possibly be dangerous in the future. 4. QED! I have no idea why Daron Acemoglu and every single other person who writes articles on AI for the popular media thinks this is such a knockdown argument. But here we are. He writes: AI detractors have focused on the potential danger to human civilization from a super-intelligence if it were to run amok. Such warnings have been sounded by tech entrepreneurs Bill Gates and Elon Musk, physicist Stephen Hawking and leading AI researcher Stuart Russell.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-726 This Week In Markets PredictIt remains easy to use, high-volume, and focused almost entirely on horse-race political questions. At least we might get rid of Cuomo. Polymarket remains a fun alternative way to learn about the news. I only heard about the monkeypox issue a few days ago, and hearing "22% chance of it spreading" is both faster and more useful than some article that dithers for a few paragraphs and finally concludes that "health officials warn Americans not to panic". I would count it a minor victory if one day news sources routinely included this in their articles, eg "Polymarket, a major prediction engine, estimates a 22% chance that at least one other person will catch the disease." Extra credit for the last market, which seems to be successfully predicting a scalar instead of a binary outcome - I've seen Metaculus experiment with this technology, but this is the first time I've spotted it at Polymarket using real money. Some of the more interesting new Metaculus markets. The space telescope one is especially interesting in the context of whether we could use prediction markets to predict (and maybe manage) government delays and cost overruns. The telescope is currently scheduled for launch in October 2025, so the market expects it to be about five years late. For context, the previous space telescope, James Webb, was originally scheduled for 2007 and (if everything goes well) will launch later this year. God Help Us, Let's Try Predicting The Coronavirus Some More Anxiety is growing about the new Delta variant of coronavirus. What do the prediction markets say? Here's Polymarket:

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-july [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: Previous research had suggested that you might be able to treat depression by using Botox to literally paralyze the facial muscles that make you frown. Two teams recently did meta-analyses of the research and came to different conclusions. Or rather, they came to the same conclusion - it has a really really big effect size - but they interpreted it differently: one team says it must be super great, another team said something must be wrong with the studies. Now the second team has responded to the first, in an article called (wait for it) Claims About The Effect Of Botulinum Toxin On Depression Should Raise Some Eyebrows. 2: Poll, seen here: surprisingly many Brits want a permanent lockdown regardless of COVID:

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/things-i-learned-writing-the-lockdown Lockdown Effectiveness: Much More Than You Wanted To Know is the most ambitious post I've tried to write since starting the new blog. I posted an early draft for subscribers only and tried crowdsourcing opinions. Most of the comments I got on Substack weren't too helpful, but several people sent me private emails that were very helpful. I had expected that anti-lockdown academics would want to remain anonymous so nobody gave them grief over their unpopular position. I actually found the opposite - the anti-lockdown people didn't care that much, but the pro-lockdown academics I talked to insisted on keeping their privacy. Apparently pro-lockdown academics who get too close to the public spotlight have been getting harassed by lockdown opponents, and this is a known problem that pro-lockdown academics are well aware of. I was depressed to hear that, though in retrospect it makes sense.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-crazy Some good discussion of PTSD, culminating in a link to the ACOUP blog, which says: I cannot speak for all pre-modern, ancient or medieval armies. But for the periods where I have read a wide chunk of the primary source material, I'd say there is vanishingly little evidence that people in the ancient Mediterranean or medieval Europe experienced PTSD from combat experience in the way that modern soldiers do. That is often not the impression that you would get from a quick google search (though it does seem to be the general consensus of the range of ancient military historians I know) and that goes back to arguments ex silentio. A quick google search will turn up any number of articles written by folks who are generally not professional historians declaring that PTSD was an observed phenomenon in the deep past, citing the same small handful of debatable examples. But one thing you learn very rapidly as a historian is that if you go into a large evidence-base looking for something, you will find it. […] I think the evidence strongly suggests that ancient combatants did not experience PTSD as we do now. The problem is that the evidence of silence leads us with few tools with which to answer why. One answer might be that it existed and they do not tell us – because it was considered shameful or cowardly, perhaps. Except that they do tell us about other cowardly or shameful things. And the loss and damage of war – death, captivity, refugees, wounds, the lot of it – are prominent motifs in Greek, Roman and European Medieval literature. War is not uniformly white-washed in these texts – not every medieval writer is Bertran. We can't rule out some lacuna in the tradition, but given just how many wails and moans of grief and loss there are in the corpus it seems profoundly unlikely. I think we have to assume that it isn't in the sources because they did not experience it or at least did not recognize the experience of it.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/peer-review-request-ketamine I'm trying to build up a database of mental health resources on my other website, Lorien Psychiatry. Whenever I post something here, people have had 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 know how to do that here so it might be harder to read. Here's the page:

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/please-take-the-reader-survey All right, here goes. This is a project to support studies by ACX community members, by getting readers to fill out research surveys. You'll fill out the General Demographic Information survey first, then however many additional surveys you have the patience for. Please start with Survey #0 (general demographics). After that, in order to prevent a scenario where the first few surveys get lots of responses and the last few get none, please jump to the survey corresponding to your date of birth. So if you were born on the 16th of the month, start with survey #16 ("Personality"), then when you're done move on to survey #17, and so on. Keep going until you're bored and don't want to take any more surveys. Since there are 24 surveys and 31 possible birth dates, numbers 25-31 are redirects to other numbers. I would be surprised if anyone had the patience to take all 24 surveys here, but if you do, feel free to boast about it in the comments so we can praise you / be concerned about you. Some surveys are targeted at specific populations, for example "psychedelic users". If you're not in the population, you can skip the survey. If you spot a survey targeted at you, consider skipping the usual order to take that one first.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-crazy-like-us We talk a lot about falling biodiversity. Sometimes we apply the same metaphor to the human world, eg "falling linguistic biodiversity" when minority languages get replaced by English or whatever. In Crazy Like Us, Ethan Watters sounds the alarm about falling psychiatric biodiversity. Along with all the usual effects of globalization, everyone is starting to have the same mental illnesses, and to understand them in the same way. This is bad insofar as greater diversity of mental illness could teach us something about the process that generates them, and greater diversity of frameworks and responses could teach us something about how to treat them. He makes his point through four case studies, starting with: I. Anorexia In Hong Kong Until the 1990s, there was almost no anorexia in Hong Kong. There were lots of patriarchal beauty standards, everyone was very obsessed with being thin, but anorexia as a disease was basically unknown. At least this is the claim of Sing Lee, a Hong Kong psychiatrist who studied in the West. He learned about anorexia during his training in Britain, then went back to Hong Kong prepared to treat it. He couldn't find anybody. He tried really hard! He put out feelers, asking if anyone knew anybody who was having some kind of psychiatric problem where they were starving themselves. With apologies for the unintended offensive pun - nobody bit.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/reader-survey-final-check-in I accidentally missed some Book Review Contest entries, so I want to make sure I have everything lined up right for the Reader Survey. Below is a list of surveys I'm currently planning to include. If you sent me an email before the deadline, please confirm that your name is there. If it's not, please don't email me about it - we've already established that I don't get your emails for some reason. Instead, leave a comment below with your information. The list: - A on biostasis/cryonics - T on male homosexuality *** - A on health-related quality of life - N on uniformity illusion *** - K on digital literacy - E on depression (targeted at depressives) - ...and on weight loss - S on political compressability - G on bullshit jobs - R on moral curiosity - T on autogynephilia (targeting trans women) - ...and sexual fantasies - C on psychedelics (targeting people who have tried them) - K on business (targeting people in tech) - D on incest *** - M on personality - D on meditation - R on gender identity - ...and rhymes (targeting non-native English speakers)

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/use-prediction-markets-to-fund-investigative Support the author: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/subscribe Then support the creation of the pocast: www.patreon.com/sscpodcast Hindenburg Research has a great business model: 1. Investigate companies 2. ...until they find one that is committing fraud 3. Short the fraudulent company 4. Publicly reveal the fraud 5. Company's stock goes down 6. Profit! I've been thinking about them recently because of the debate around funding investigative reporting. It goes something like: investigative reporting is a public good. Everyone benefits from knowing about Watergate. But it's hard for investigative reporters to capture the value they produce. Very few of the people who cared about Watergate bought subscriptions to the Washington Post. There's no reason to - you can let the Washington Post uncover Watergate at no cost to you, then hear about it for free on the nightly news. The traditional solution is bundled media. Newspapers have their profitable bread-and-butter in the form of easy things like commentary and sports, then do some unprofitable investigative reporting on the side to gain prestige.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xexFJ7h0vULMDE7N77q_MIzXoerexfe_CqqGEL6hEoQ/edit#heading=h.qi8yp2d9wbt2 Podcast note: This reader-written review was included because it won the Readers' Choice Award from among all the runners-up. What does the future look like? We are living through a transition between epochs. Whether marked by COVID-19, the election of Donald Trump or earlier by the global sub-prime crisis, the golden age of post-Cold War prosperity is ending. With the era defined by US political, cultural and economic hegemony, its decline is inextricably linked to the decline in US influence. Is the twenty first century really going to be the "Asian century" as China's growth continues unabated? Or perhaps African, given by far the largest forecast population growth? What will become of the US? Of China and Russia and Europe? Two thinkers have sought to define this future. I first came across Bruno Maçães in 2017 on Marginal Revolution where Tyler Cowen was effusive about Maçães' new book. I have enjoyed following his conversations and thoughts ever since, but it was only recently that I read Dawn of Eurasia. It is the first book of a career politician and diplomat clearly in love with his continent. Peter Zeihan I came across on Patrick O'Shaughnessy's excellent podcast. His brash prophesy and contrarian views on geopolitics are hypnotic and endlessly fascinating. Disunited Nations is his latest in a series that documents the rise and rise of US power. I found comparing them irresistible. Each lingers after reading. It's that wonderful feeling of discovering a new area of knowledge to mine. Not natural companions, and mesmerising in their own ways, each story has a different texture and plots a different path for the world. Where one sees pessimistic reversion to a historic state of conflict, the other sees hopeful evolution. Where one deterministically condemns nations to their geographic destinies, the other sees each nation's destiny as unwritten, yet to be informed by its history, literature and peoples. Both Peter Zeihan and Bruno Maçães see US influence receding. But they agree on little else. Zeihan is deeply pessimistic about a world that awaits a more isolationist US, with a crumbling world order leaving less room for prosperity and reverting to nation-states jostling for food, energy and military security. Maçães sees China's rise as

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-contest-winners Thanks to everyone who participated or voted in the Book Review Contest. The winners are: FIRST PLACE: Progress and Poverty, reviewed by Lars Doucet Lars is a Norwegian-Texan game designer, and you can read his game design blog here. He's a pretty serious Georgist and posts regularly in the Georgism subreddit. SECOND PLACE: Down And Out In Paris And London, reviewed by Whimsi Whimsi blogs here, but otherwise asks to remain mysterious. THIRD PLACE: On The Natural Faculties, reviewed by ELP. E is a researcher and an author of the blog Slime Mold Time Mold READERS' CHOICE AWARD: Disunited Nations vs. Dawn Of Eurasia, reviewed by Misha Saul Misha is an investor in Sydney, Australia, and blogs here. And congratulations to all other finalists (here listed in order of appearance), whose secret identities were: Order Without Law, reviewed by Phil Hazelden Are We Smart Enough To Know How Smart Animals Are, reviewed by Jeff Russell Why Buddhism Is True, reviewed by Eve Bigaj Double Fold, reviewed by Boštjan P The Wizard And The Prophet, reviewed by Maryana Through The Eye Of A Needle, reviewed by Tom Powell Years Of Lyndon Johnson, reviewed by Theodore Ehrenborg Addiction By Design, reviewed by Ketchup Duck The Accidental Superpower, reviewed by John B Humankind, reviewed by Neil R The Collapse Of Complex Societies, reviewed by Etirabys Where's My Flying Car, reviewed by Jonathan P How Children Fail, reviewed by HonoreDB Plagues And Peoples, reviewed by Joel Ferris (who is looking for a job, email here) All finalists win a permanent free subscription to Astral Codex Ten - since a subscription costs $10/month, this is technically an infinity dollar value! If you already have a subscription, you are now a Super Double Mega-Subscriber, which has no consequences in the material world, but several important metaphysical advantages. I should have already credited this to your email addresses; please let me know if it didn't go through or if I used the wrong address.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/lockdown-effectiveness-much-more Back when everyone was debating lockdowns, I promised I'd come back to it after there was more data. God willing, the pandemic is over enough that we've got all the data we're going to get. So: did lockdowns work? There's no way to answer this completely and taking into account every relevant factor, so I'm necessarily going to be simplifying things and focusing on some aspects of the question more than others. Sorry. Preliminary Theoretical Issues 1: What Is A "Lockdown"? Obviously "lockdown" is underspecified. There are many things you can do to reduce transmission of viruses. Researchers have taken two different approaches here. First, they've looked at the effects of specific policies (called "non-pharmaceutical interventions" or "NPIs"). A typical categorization system is the one used in Brauner et al, which looks at: - Banning gatherings > 1000 people - Banning gatherings > 100 people - Banning gatherings > 10 people - Closing schools - Closing universities - Closing some non-essential businesses - Closing most businesses - Stay at home orders

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/lockdown-effectiveness-much-more Back when everyone was debating lockdowns, I promised I'd come back to it after there was more data. God willing, the pandemic is over enough that we've got all the data we're going to get. So: did lockdowns work? There's no way to answer this completely and taking into account every relevant factor, so I'm necessarily going to be simplifying things and focusing on some aspects of the question more than others. Sorry. Preliminary Theoretical Issues 1: What Is A "Lockdown"? Obviously "lockdown" is underspecified. There are many things you can do to reduce transmission of viruses. Researchers have taken two different approaches here. First, they've looked at the effects of specific policies (called "non-pharmaceutical interventions" or "NPIs"). A typical categorization system is the one used in Brauner et al, which looks at: - Banning gatherings > 1000 people - Banning gatherings > 100 people - Banning gatherings > 10 people - Closing schools - Closing universities - Closing some non-essential businesses - Closing most businesses - Stay at home orders

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/model-city-monday Support the author: astralcodexten.substack.com/subscribe Then support the podcast: patreon.com/sscpodcast Happy belated Fourth of July! This potentially-recurring column is about modern-day independence-seekers: charter cities, utopian communes, secessionist movements, and the like. I've always found these fascinating, and finally remembered that nobody can prevent me from talking about them. I want to start by making it clear that, as the old saying goes, retweets ≠ endorsements. Some of these projects violate my ethical beliefs. Some of them are scams. Some of them are very nice, very earnest people, who will very earnestly all move to a godforsaken desert and then very earnestly starve to death. I'm trusting you all not to do the thing where you say "I saw it on a blog, so it has to be a good idea!"

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-how Support the author: astralcodexten.substack.com/subscribe Then support the podcast: patreon.com/sscpodcast I made a mistake in the email notifications, so if you didn't know I wrote a review of Joe Studwell's How Asia Works earlier this week - well, now you know. Erusian writes: 1.) Three things stick out here. Firstly, Studwell vastly overstates how damaging land reform has to be to landlords. Taiwan and Japan both bought out landlords with bonds. The bonds became worth less because since government bonds grew more slowly than the economy. But there are still a fair number of wealthy old families around in both countries. The important thing is not the destruction of landlords as a class: it's putting land into the hands of people (whether smallholding peasants or professional farmers) who own the land, have an incentive to improve it, and whose primary income is gained not by owning land but by producing agricultural products. The two are ultimately equivalent at equilibrium. How you get there is not especially important and paying off the landlords is fine if it works. Likewise, giving land to collectives or to peasant groups (as opposed to individual peasants) doesn't work very well because it keeps it out of the power of enterprising farmers. Secondly, he completely ignores the many times land reform failed. East Asia is not unique in its attempts at land reform. It was fairly common in Africa, Eastern Europe, etc. Ukraine and Romania had incredibly fertile soil and it's hard to think of regimes that eliminated their landlords harder. Yet they haven't really seen similar effects.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/welcome-polygenically-screened-babies Another thing I missed during my hiatus last year: the birth of the first polygenically-screened baby. [conflict of interest notice: LifeView, the company that handled the screening, was co-founded by Steve Hsu. I've known Steve for many years now, he is very nice to me, always patiently answers my genetics questions, and sometimes comes to SSC/ACX meetups] During in vitro fertilization, a woman takes drugs that make her produce lots of eggs. Doctors extract the eggs and fertilize them with sperm from a partner or donor, producing lots of embryos. Hopefully at least one of the embryos looks healthy, and then the doctors implant it in the woman or a surrogate parent. For a while now, if the process produces enough embryos, doctors have used some simple low-tech genetic tests to choose the healthiest. For example, they might look for Down syndrome or other obvious chromosomal abnormalities, or for very severe monogenic diseases like sickle cell anemia. All of this is routine.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-how-asia-works What was the best thing that ever happened? From a very zoomed-out, by-the-numbers perspective, it has to be China's sudden lurch from Third World basketcase to dynamic modern economy. A billion people went from starving peasants to the middle class. In the 1960s, sixty million people died of famine in the Chinese countryside; by the 2010s, that same countryside was criss-crossed with the world's most advanced high-speed rail network, and dotted with high-tech factories. And the best thing that ever happened kept happening, again and again. First it was Japan during the Meiji Restoration. Then it was Korea and Taiwan in the 1960s. Then China in the 90s. Now Vietnam and others seem poised to follow. (fun trivia question: ignoring sudden oil windfalls, what country has had the highest percent GDP growth over the past 30 years? Answer, as far as I can tell: the People's Democratic Republic of Laos.) There was nothing predetermined about this. These countries started with nothing. In 1950, South Korea and Taiwan were poorer than Honduras or the Congo. But they managed to break into the ranks of the First World even while dozens of similar countries stayed poor. Why? Joe Studwell claims this isn't mysterious at all. You don't have to bring in culture, genetics, or anything complicated like that. Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, etc, just practiced good economic policy. Any country that tries the same economic policy will get equally rich, as China and Vietnam are discovering. Unfortunately, most countries practice bad economic policy, partly because the IMF / World Bank / rich country economic advisors got things really wrong. They recommended free markets and open borders, which are good for rich countries, but bad for developing ones. Developing countries need to start with planned economies, then phase in free market policies gradually and in the right order. Since rich country economists kept leading everyone astray, the only countries that developed properly were weird nationalist dictatorships and communist states that ignored the Western establishment out of spite. But now the economic establishment is starting to admit its mistakes, giving other countries a chance to catch up. How Asia Works is Studwell's guide to good economic policy. He gives a three-part plan for national development. First, land reform. Second, industrial subsidies plus export discipline. Third, financial policy in service of the first two goals. 1. Land Reform Land reform means taking farmland away from landlords and giving it to peasant farmers. Undeveloped countries are mostly rural (for example, Korea was about 80% rural in 1950). Most people are farmers. Usually these countries are coming out of feudalism or colonialism or something and dominated by a few big landowners. In one region of the Philippines (Studwell's poster child for doing everything wrong) 17 families control 78% of farmland. Landowners hire peasants to work the land, then take most of the profit.

Now that the book review contest is winding down, I want to start another big project: the ACX Reader Research Survey. I used to do regular December surveys with questions I was interested in. Some people would ask me to include questions for their own research projects. I always declined, because if I said yes to everyone it would take a whole new survey to fit all the questions on. Eventually I realized I should actually just do the whole new survey, so this is that. This blog has a lot of readers in in specific demographics, like: - the tech industry - science - involved in meditation/drugs/biohacking - with unusual genders/sexualities - with psychiatric issues …so this would be a good way to learn about those demographics. The main inspiration for this project was that meditation researcher Daniel Ingram asked if he could piggyback on my yearly survey to ask people about their meditation experiences, and although I was excited about this I shut SSC down before we got a chance to make this happen. This is for him and everyone else with similar needs.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-june [Remember, I haven't independently verified each link. On average, commenters will end up spotting evidence that around two or three of the links in each links post are wrong or misleading. I correct these as I see them, and will highlight important corrections later, but I can't guarantee I will have caught them all by the time you read this.] 1: Zoologists search for the Higgs Bison 2: "The cult deficit" is the theory that we don't have as many cults as we used to and this says something important about our society. Here's some data, courtesy of the Secretum Secretorum Substack:

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-62121 Among this month's interesting Metaculus predictions: If Puerto Rico gets statehood, will their first two senators both be Democrats? 50%. I'd seen accusations that the Democrats want Puerto Rican statehood to seize a Senate advantage, and counterarguments that no, PR isn't as solid-blue as people like to think, but this is the first time I've ever seen the "risk" of a PR Republican Senator quantified. Higher than I thought! Will Jeff Bezos make a big investment in anti-aging this year? 25% Aubrey de Grey has hinted that somebody really big is about to get into the anti-aging/longevity field, and speculation has centered on a newly-retired and not-getting-any-younger (so far!) Jeff Bezos. This prediction resolves as true if Bezos puts at least $50 million into anti-aging. Will crypto sites default before 2023? Bitmex 26%, Binance 15%, Coinbase 5% Not many predictions here, so don't take these numbers too seriously. I also don't know what a "default" would mean in this sense - default to at least one customer, but everyone else is okay? Lose all its money to a hack? What will Prospera's population be in 2035? Approximately 0 Prospera is a charter city taking shape in Honduras; see here for more. They're planning to have 10,000 residents by 2025, and 100,000 by some unspecified point in the future. Metaculus doesn't think it will happen; more than half of forecasters say they'll have fewer than 100 residents in 2035 (presumably because they have failed and ceased to exist) and only 10% of forecasters think they'll have more than 10,000, which would be a bare minimum for partial success. So far

https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/16/fear-and-loathing-at-effective-altruism-global-2017/ San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run – but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world….There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. — Hunter S. Thompson Effective altruism is the movement devoted to finding the highest-impact ways to help other people and the world. Philosopher William MacAskill described it as "doing for the pursuit of good what the Scientific Revolution did for the pursuit of truth". They have an annual global conference to touch base and discuss strategy. This year it was in the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, and I got a chance to check it out. .The lake-fringed monumental neoclassical architecture represents 'utilitiarian distribution of limited resources' The official conference theme was "Doing Good Together". The official conference interaction style was "earnest". The official conference effectiveness level was "very". And it was impossible to walk away from some of the talks without being impressed. Saturday afternoon there was a talk by some senior research analysts at GiveWell, which researches global development charities. They've evaluated dozens of organizations and moved $260 million to the most effective, mostly ones fighting malaria and parasitic infections. Next were other senior research analysts from the Open Philanthropy Project, who have done their own detailed effectiveness investigations and moved about $200 million. The parade went on. More senior research analysts. More nine-digit sums of money. More organizations, all with names that kind of blended together. The Center for Effective Altruism. The Center For Effective Global Action. Raising For Effective Giving. Effecting Effective Effectiveness. Or maybe not, I think I was hallucinating pretty hard by the end.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/vote-in-the-book-review-contest Thanks for reading the entries in this very delayed (and then very protracted) book review contest. Please vote for your favorites here, using approval voting (ie vote for however many you want). I'll probably keep voting open until the end of June in case you want a chance to go back and re-read your favorites. In case you've forgotten, the finalists are: 1: Order Without Law 2: On The Natural Faculties 3: Progress And Poverty 4: Are We Smart Enough To Know How Smart Animals Are? 5: Why Buddhism Is True 6: Double Fold 7: The Wizard And The Prophet 8: Through The Eye Of A Needle 9: The Years Of Lyndon Johnson 10: Addiction By Design 11: The Accidental Superpower 12: Humankind 13: The Collapse Of Complex Societies 14: Where's My Flying Car? 15: Down And Out In Paris And London 16: How Children Fail 17: Plagues And Peoples

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.