Astral Codex Ten Podcast

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/shilling-for-big-mitochondria In the 1930s, a shady outfit called Isabella Laboratories made a popular over-the-counter diet pill called Formula 281 (slogan: "281 for the too weighty one"). If you're familiar with any of: the 1930s, shady pharma, or diet pills, your next question will be "did it contain amphetamines?". Actually, no! It contained 2,4-dinitrophenol, a mitochondrial uncoupling agent. DNP is that rarest of birds: a weight-loss pill which really works, no diet or exercise required. About 100,000 people used it in the mid-1930s. On average, they lost about 2 to 5 pounds per week, for however many weeks they wanted to keep losing it. The formula stayed popular until it was banned by the FDA in 1938, about one second after Congress passed the law saying the FDA could ban things. What was the catch? Well, several catches, really. Many users went blind. Others got rashes, liver problems, kidney problems, or peripheral neuropathy. A few died horribly, apparently burning to death from the inside. Occasionally the DNP would just explode - the "di-nitro" of DNP is pretty similar to the "tri-nitro" of TNT, and it turns out that's not a coincidence. As far as I know, DNP is the only substance to be banned by both the FDA and the Department of Homeland Security for unrelated reasons.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-scoring-rule-controversy Metaculus scoring rule controversy Zvi considered using some Metaculus markets for his weekly coronavirus roundup, but was turned off by the scoring rules. Ross Rheingans-Yoo writes about the issue here. Everyone agrees Metaculus' scoring rule is "proper", a technical term meaning that it correctly incentivizes you to choose the probability you think is true. Zvi and Ross's objection is that it doesn't correctly incentivize you about whether to bet at all, or how much effort to put into betting. For example, on many questions, you can make guaranteed-positive bets - you'll gain points on the prediction even if you were maximally wrong. If you were trying to maximize your Metaculus points, you would bet on all of these questions. If you were trying to maximize your Metaculus points in a limited amount of time, you might even bet on them without investigating at all. The person who spends one second picking a random number on a thousand questions will get more points than someone who spends an hour researching a really good answer to one question.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/bay-area-plant-based-meat-reviews By this point you've probably tried Impossible Burgers, and you know that restaurants can do some pretty impressive things with them. But there are so many interesting meat dishes - what if you want something other than a burger? This market is still developing, but I live in the Bay Area, which is probably its epicenter. And I'm mostly-vegetarian, so I have no choice but to try it out. I tried eight restaurants which offered unusual plant-based meat dishes. Here are my reviews. Unlike many other food critics, I freely admit I have no taste. There's nothing about subtle flavors or quality ingredients in here, because I would get that stuff wrong. This is just about whether I, a mostly-vegetarian person who likes the taste of meat, felt like these plant-based meat options succeeded at resembling animal products. (yes, I'm deliberately mocking myself by publishing this the day after the post on classism)

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/a-modest-proposal-for-republicans Read this first: Book Review: Fussell On Class Dear Republican Party: I hear you're having a post-Trump identity crisis. Your old platform of capitalism and liberty and whatever no longer excites people. Trump managed to excite people, but you don't know how to turn his personal appeal into a new platform. Most of what he said was offensive, blatantly false, or alienated more people than it won; absent his personal magic it seems like a losing combination. You seem to have picked up a few minority voters here and there, but you're not sure why, and you don't know how to build on this success. I hate you and you hate me. But maybe I would hate you less if you didn't suck. Also, the more confused you are, the more you flail around sabotaging everything. All else being equal, I'd rather you have a coherent interesting message, and make Democrats shape up to compete with you. So here's my recommendation: use the word "class". Pivot from mindless populist rage to a thoughtful campaign to fight classism. Yeah, yeah, "class" sounds Marxist, class warfare and all that, you're supposed to be against that kind of thing, right? Wrong. Economic class warfare is Marxist, but here in the US class isn't a purely economic concept. Class is also about culture. You're already doing class warfare, you're just doing it blindly and confusedly. Instead, do it openly, while using the words "class" and "classism".

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-fussell-on-class I. Paul Fussell wants to talk about class. (well, wanted, past tense, it's a 1983 book, we'll come back to that later) He recognizes this might not be the most popular topic. When he tells people he's writing a book on class in America, "it is as if I had said I am working on a book urging the beating to death of baby whales using the dead bodies of baby seals." America likes to think of itself as a classless society. Sure, there may be vast wealth inequality, but at least there's no nobility; beggars and billionaires are the same type of citizen. Paul Fussell will have none of it. He believes America has one of the most hypertrophied class systems in the world, that its formal equality has left a niche that an informal class system expanded to fill - and expanded, and expanded, until it surpassed the more-legible systems of Europe and became its own sort of homegrown monstrosity. He says he prefers the term "caste system" to "class system" when describing America, conveying as it does a more rigid and inescapable distinction, and that he uses "class" only out of respect for conventional usage.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-judging-april-covid Since this is getting broader than just Metaculus, I'm changing the name to Mantic Monday, after an obscure word for "oracular" (and changing the preview image to a mantis, since I don't know how else to visually represent "mantic". And posting it early Tuesday morning because I'm late). In April 2020, I made my yearly predictions, and many of them were about the (then new) coronavirus pandemic. Two other people on Less Wrong, Zvi and Bucky, decided to test themselves against me by trying to predict the same questions. Zvi saw my answers beforehand; Bucky didn't. Here's how we did (except where otherwise stated, all predictions are for 12/31/20): Black statements are those judged true, red statements false. The numbers on the left are our predictions, so for example I said there was a 60% chance that Bay Area lockdowns would extend beyond June 15. You can see a list of the full questions and why I graded them the way I did in the appendix at the bottom. I scored these using a logarthmic scoring rule, adjusted so that guessing 50-50 always gave zero points. It's not very intuitive. Getting everything maximally right gives a score of about 14; guessing 50-50 for everything gives a score of 0, getting everything maximally wrong gives a score of negative infinity.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/a-look-down-track-b I. Depression probably has something to do with decreased synaptogenesis in the brain, maybe the hippocampus in particular. Neurons are less likely to respond to stimuli by connecting to other neurons. The whole network becomes sparser than usual, and dysfunctional thought-loops that thrive in sparse network conditions start taking over. We understand parts of the pathways that regulate synaptic growth. When the body wants more synapses, it releases neurotrophic hormones like BDNF (brain-derived neurotrophic factor). These activate various receptors including tropomyosin receptor kinase B (TrkB, affectionately pronounced "track B" because it's one of two related pathways for these signals). TrkB then something Ras mTORC something something synaptogenesis now you're not depressed anymore hooray. Pictured: BDNF binds to TrkB. The IRS confiscates 1/2 of it as taxes, which radicalizes the receptor and makes it join Gab (see footnote 1), where it tweets out an SOS message to the Ras of Ethiopia. But the left wing of the receptor joins the Palestine Liberation Council and moves to California (see footnotes 2+). California has sunshine and good beaches, so you stop feeling depressed. This part sort of makes sense. But it coexists uneasily with other puzzle pieces in our knowledge of depression. For example, we give people SSRIs, their serotonin levels go up, and this makes them feel better. Why? Because of BDNF something TrkB something mTORC something? Probably; mice with dysregulated BDNF/TrkB systems don't benefit from antidepressants. But why does more serotonin cause BDNF something TrkB something? I've looked for years for a paper that says something like "by the way, serotonin makes cells release more BDNF". But despite a few suggestive links I don't see anyone strongly asserting that they understand this.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ezra-klein-on-vetocracy In my review last week of Ezra Klein's Why We're Polarized, I linked to a related Vox article on vetocracy: In a viral essay, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen makes a simple exhortation: It's time to build. Behind the coronavirus crisis, he writes, lies "our widespread inability to build." America has been unable to create enough coronavirus tests, or even enough cotton swabs to fully utilize the tests we do have. We don't have enough ventilators, ICU beds, personal protection equipment. The government hasn't built the capacity to quickly get money to people or businesses who need it. And it's not just the coronavirus. The US could be building our way out of the housing crisis and the climate crisis. We could be building a better education system, more advanced infrastructure. We could have more and better factories, supersonic aircraft, delivery drones, flying cars [...] I think Andreessen is uncharacteristically underestimating the appetite for building. The absence of creation doesn't reflect an absence of desire — even in that epicenter of supposed stagnation, Washington, DC. I've covered Congress for almost 20 years. The place is littered with proposals to construct universal pre-K and reimagine the health system, to decarbonize the US economy and incentivize drug development through prizes and solve the housing crisis. They just don't pass. It's become a running joke in Washington that every week is "infrastructure week." But we're not rebuilding American infrastructure

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-cult DeBoer argued that charter schools succeed through selection effects: they only take the best students. Several commenters pointed out this was illegal. It is, but they've found loopholes. Here's Alexander H: I attended a charter school all 4 years quite recently. Admissions was entirely by lottery, open to everyone in the district. I can tell you that even in freshman year, the student body was not even remotely close to representative of normal kids; it was basically an entire school of the kids who would normally be in gifted / accelerated programs. And by graduation, it was even more refined to super talented & smart people, because the students who left to go back to their local normal schools were mostly from the rear of the pack. I think that I got a lot better of an education there than I would have at my local school, and I would attribute more of that to the quality of my classmates than to the teachers or curriculum , though both of which were also better [...] [Despite the lottery, admission was selected by] whose parents were involved enough, interested enough in education, valued education enough. Simple as that, I think. Michael Pershan recommends his own review of a book on Success Academy. A key quote:

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-the-cult-of-smart Oscar Wilde supposedly said George Bernard Shaw "has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends". Socialist blogger Freddie DeBoer is the opposite: few allies, but deeply respected by his enemies. I disagree with him about everything, so naturally I am a big fan of his work - which meant I was happy to read his latest book, The Cult Of Smart. DeBoer starts with the standard narrative of The Failing State Of American Education. Students aren't learning. The country is falling behind. Only tough no-excuses policies, standardization, and innovative reforms like charter schools can save it, as shown by their stellar performance improving test scores and graduation rates. He argues that every word of it is a lie. American education isn't getting worse by absolute standards: students match or outperform their peers from 20 or 50 years ago. It's not getting worse by international standards: America's PISA rankings are mediocre, but the country has always scored near the bottom of international rankings, even back in the 50s and 60s when we were kicking Soviet ass and landing men on the moon. Race and gender gaps are stable or decreasing. American education is doing much as it's always done - about as well as possible, given the crushing poverty, single parent-families, violence, and racism holding back the kids it's charged with shepherding to adulthood.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/covidvitamin-d-much-more-than-you Most health articles ask you to act on their opinions. I am specifically asking you not to act on mine. In a moment, I'll tell you whether or not I think Vitamin D prevents or treats coronavirus. But I'll give you a free spoiler: I am less than 100% certain of what I'm about to say. So if you want to take Vitamin D, take it. If it does prevent or cure coronavirus, great. If not, the worst that will happen is you'll have slightly better bone health. I can't stress how much I don't want to be those people who said they couldn't prove face masks helped so you must not use face masks. Just ignore everything I'm saying, do a quick cost-benefit calculation, and take Vitamin D. That having been said: Lots of people think Vitamin D treats coronavirus, and some of them have good evidence. For example, infection rate from coronavirus seems latitude dependent; in general, the further north an area, the worse it's been hit. Northern areas get less sunlight, and sunlight helps produce Vitamin D, so whenever you see a disease that's worse at high latitudes, Vitamin D should be on your short list of potential causes. Also - in the US, COVID seemed to remit with the summer and worsen over the winter. It's hard to distinguish this from general exponential growth and from the effect of playing ping-pong with gradually loosening/ tightening lockdowns, but the US spike this winter was pretty dramatic. Most Northern Hemisphere countries show such a pattern, most equatorial countries don't, and some Southern Hemisphere countries arguably show the opposite. Whenever you see a disease that's better in summer and worse in winter, Vitamin D is one of the possible culprits.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/coronavirus-links-discussion-open So far there have been three waves of coronavirus cases in the US. The first wave was the beginning, when it caught us unprepared. The second wave was in July, when we got sloppy and lifted lockdowns too soon. The third wave was November through January, because the coronavirus is seasonal and winter is its season (also probably the holidays). From Johns Hopkins CRC: A fourth wave may hit in March, when the more contagious B117 strain from the UK takes over. Expect more shelter-in-place orders, school shutdowns, and a spike in cases at least the size of July's, maybe December's. That will last until May-ish, when the usual control system (more virus -> stricter lockdowns -> less virus -> looser lockdowns -> more virus) moves back into the "less virus" stage. Also coronavirus is seasonal and summer isn't its season. Also by that time a decent chunk of the population will be vaccinated. The worst consequences of the UK strain should burn themselves out by late spring.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/statement-on-new-york-times-article There was recently a negative article about me and my blog in the New York Times. Most of you already know the history behind this, but for anyone referred here by NYT, this is where I give my side and defend myself. Like many people in the early 2000s, I started a blog when I was in college. To stay anonymous, I wrote it under my first and middle names – Scott Alexander – while leaving out my last name. I continued writing in it through medical school, residency, and until the present. Although I've never personally been involved in the tech industry, my blog became very popular among people in tech because it discussed ideas centering around scientific and technological progress, especially artificial intelligence. In early 2020, I learned the New York Times wanted to write an article about me. They had discovered my real name and wanted to reveal it to the world. Their original pitch – and I don't know if it was true or not – was that they were interested in how I warned about the coronavirus pandemic very early and urged people to wear face masks before this was standard advice.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-precision-of-sensory-evidence In earlier posts, I've expressed confusion about two competing models of depression. In one - supported by an analogy to mania and various forms of sensory and motor disturbance - it's inappropriately low neural confidence levels. In the other - supported by common sense - it's a highly-confident global prior on negative perceptions and events - a bias to interpret incoming information in a threat-related way. Both of these models had a lot going for them. But they didn't really fit together. Van der Bergh et al's Better Safe Than Sorry: A Common Signature Of General Vulnerability For Psychopathology, in the October issue of Perspectives In Psychological Science, tries to tie the pieces together into a more ambitious theory of negative emotionality, including depression, anxiety and trauma. Its solution is that these conditions are marked by a processing style that assigns unusually low precision to sensory evidence. All perception and cognition is the combination of evidence and priors. But in depression and otherwise neurotic people, the evidence is only a weak signal and the priors are a much stronger one.

[previously in sequence: List Of Fictional Drugs Banned By The FDA, More Fictional Drugs Banned By The FDA] VatiCoin: After a thousand years, the Catholic Church discovered how to do indulgences right: as tradable digital tokens. Not only does an initial coin offering provide better price discovery than the Pope picking a random number, but sinners who do good deeds later can sell their coins to someone else. Subject of several court cases about whether someone's VatiCoins go to their heirs upon their deaths or whether this would defeat the point; current holders are advised to avoid the problem by not disclosing the password to their wallet. Banned because: Frequently used as a hedge against other cryptocurrencies involved in crime and pornography. Driverify: Developed by Tesla's self-driving-car division. Cars mine Driverify with spare computing power while idling, and spend it bidding against each other for right-of-way if they arrive at a four-way stop sign at the same time (users can preprogram how aggressively their cars bid in these auctions). Compatible Teslas would also have fenders that send electrical pulses, transmitting data into the receiver fender of another car. If two Teslas got in a fender-bender, they could use their now-connected fenders to have the at-fault car recompense the victim by transferring an appropriate amount of Driverify.

[previously in sequence: Taxometrics, Dynamical Systems. Epistemic status: speculative. This should go without saying, but when I talk about "failures" in this post, I mean failures of biological processes, as in the term "congestive heart failure"; I don't mean to accuse people with psychiatric conditions of being failures.] I. Most psychiatric disorders are at least partly genetic. Some, like schizophrenia and ADHD, are very genetic, probably 80% plus. This is strange, because having psychiatric disorders seems bad, so you would expect evolution to have eliminated those genes. Researchers looking into this question argue between two hypotheses. First, a failure. Evolution is imperfect, so some bad genes manage to slip through. This sounds dismissive, but it's definitely true to some degree. Thousands of different genes contribute to risk for conditions like ADHD and schizophrenia, with each adding only a tiny amount of risk. When a gene is only very slightly bad, it takes evolution millennia to get rid of it, and during those millennia people are getting new very-slightly-bad mutations, so it all balances out at a certain level of bad genes per generation. Those bad genes are sufficient to explain the existing amount of ADHD and schizophrenia; they're just evolution not working as well as we'd hope.

I. Ezra Klein is great. I know a lot of people throw shade on him for founding Vox. But as Van Gogh said about God creating the world, "We must not hold it against Him; only a master could make such a mistake". Ezra is a master and I was happy to be able to read his Why We're Polarized. (Amazon recommended it to me as "Why We're Polarized By Ezra Klein", which I would also have been happy to read.) Did you know that seventy years ago, our grandparents were having an underpolarization crisis? True! In 1950, the American Political Science Association "released a call to arms...pleading for a more polarized political system". The report argued that "the parties contain too much diversity of opinion and work together too easily, leaving voters confused about who to vote for and why". Everyone agreed with each other so much, and compromised so readily, that supporting one party over the other seemed almost pointless.

Thanks to everyone who commented last week with prediction markets I missed. Two of them seemed to be especially interesting. Polymarket is another cryptocurrency-based prediction market. It's got about two dozen contracts open, and some of them are pretty big - $5 million plus! With that kind of money, we ought to be seeing some really good predicting! We're...not. Either there's a 6% chance that Donald Trump will be president again by March 31, or something's gone wrong. Probably it's the second one. I tried to bet against Trump, but getting money into the market was pretty hard. You need USDCoins, a stablecoin related to Ethereum. Polymarket tries to let you buy them directly, but their app wanted me to give them a security code which never showed up, so I gave up on this. Instead I bought some USDC at Coinbase and tried to send them over. But along with the usual Ethereum gas fees, they have something called a relayer, which is supposed to collect my money and put it in my account. And it's apparently heavily backed up, and after two days my money is nowhere to be seen (though I believe them when they say that they're trying their hardest and it will probably percolate through the Ethereum network someday). Maybe everyone's having these kinds of issues and this is why the Trump contract hasn't adjusted? I'm not sure. I will keep you updated if my money ever materializes.

I heard from a journalist yesterday after writing yesterday's post on WebMD. They've been trying to write a coronavirus article worthy of Zvi or any of the other illegibly smart people writing on the pandemic. Apparently the bottleneck is sources. In most journalistic settings, you can't just write "here's what I think". You have to write "here's what my source, a recognized expert, said when I interviewed them". And the experts are pretty sparing with their interviews for contrarian stories. The way my correspondent described it: sources don't usually get to approve the way they're quoted in an article, or to see it before it gets published. So they're really cagey about saying anything that might get misinterpreted. Maybe their real opinion is that X is a hard question, there are good points on both sides, but overall they think it probably isn't true. But if a reporter wants to write "X Is Dumb And All Epidemiologists Are Idiots For Believing It", they can slice and dice your interview until your cautiously-skeptical-of-X statement sounds like you're backing them up. So experts end up paranoid about saying potentially-controversial-sounding things to reporters. And since reporters can't write without sources, it's hard for them to write anything controversial about epidemiology.

I started a small database of psychiatry information. It's going well. I'm grateful for all your emails suggesting changes and corrections. Sort of. Here are some of the kinds of emails I get: "You said this drug is occasionally mildly addictive but the risk/benefit calculation is worth it for most people. But my cousin's friend took it and became really addicted and it ruined his life. Maybe you should warn readers about it more emphatically." The particular example I'm thinking of is something exotic, but alcohol or Adderall could equally well be in this category. Still, I get nervous whenever I get emails like this. What if I do ruin somebody's life? Maybe I should just change the wording to "this drug has some benefits but is often addictive, be careful with it"? "You listed three major side effects of this drug, but I got a side effect that isn't on your list. Maybe you should add it in." All drugs have an infinite number of possible side effects. One in a zillion people who use Naproxen ("Aleve") becomes red-green colorblind. Capecitabine ("Xeloda") can sometimes make you lose your fingerprints, which sucks if your computer has biometric security. If listed all side effects of anything, we would be here all day. Still, I get nervous when I get emails like this.

Thanks to everyone who has waited patiently for more information on this. I planned a book review contest for last summer, which I didn't get to do because of my unexpected hiatus. I currently have 31 entries, none of which I've read yet. My plan is to give the rest of you until March 1 to send in reviews. Send them to scott[at]slatestarcodex[dot]com. I originally wanted ones that you hadn't already posted somewhere else first, but if you posted it over the last ~year because you didn't know if I was coming back, I guess that's fair and I'll make an exception this time. Sometime after March 1 I'll read all of them, publish the top ~5 as posts here, and let people vote on the winners using some method that combines and weighs their votes and mine. First place will get at least $1000, second place $500, third place $250 - I might increase these numbers later on. Some winners may also get an invitation to pitch me any other pieces they have that they think would make good SSC posts. I may also release non-finalist entries somewhere else so people can read them – if you strongly object to me making your entry public, let me know. I previously said to send me entries in .txt format with hand-written HTML. If you've already done that, you're fine and don't need to change. If you're submitting a new entry, you can either do that or send me a normal Word/Google document type thing - I think Substack's interface should be able to handle it.

[Previously in sequence: Taxometrics] I. Imagine Alice has a chronic disease. Luckily, as long as she has a job, she will have health insurance. And health insurance provides her with a treatment. Every day she takes the treatment, her health will go up one point on a 0-100 scale; every day she misses the treatment, it will go down one point. If her health ever gets below 75, she will be too ill to work. Mathematicians would call this a dynamical system with three variables: does she have a job or not, does she have insurance or not, and her health level. We know from the rules above that j always equals i, and that j is 1 as long has h is 75 or higher. And every day i = 1, h goes up one; every day i = 0, h goes down 1. Alice starts with a job and health of 100. Since j = 1 and i = 1, health goes up one each day, but it's maxed out at 100 so it just says there. This state is perfectly stable; as long as the system follows the rules above, it will never change. Suppose Alice gets a mild cold which knocks her health down to 90. She keeps working, her health keeps going up 1 each day, and she eventually gets back to 100. Suppose Alice gets a medium flu which knocks her health down to 80. She keeps working, her health keeps going up 1 each day, and she eventually gets back to 100. But suppose Alice gets a serious pneumonia which knocks her health down to 70. Now she can't work, she loses insurance, her health starts going down 1 each day, and she eventually goes down to 0. This is another stable state; as long as the system keeps evolving according to the rules, it will never change.

I was driving down to LA when the cops pulled me over. "You have to turn back sir, the Sphinx here eats any traveler who can't answer her riddle." "I've trained my whole life for this" I said, and stepped on the gas. Soon I saw a Sphinx lounging in the middle of the road. When she spotted me, she asked: "What has braces, crowns, and retainers, but is not teeth?" "A medieval king in armor. My turn. What has pupils, irises, and whites, but is not an eye?" "A gardening class during apartheid. How is a river like the Federal Reserve?" "It maintains liquidity despite rushes on the banks. What has wings, but cannot fly - fins, but cannot swim - and heels, but cannot walk?" "Helsinki General Hospital." The Sphinx licked her lips. "But tell me, how is Lord Nelson like a cigar?" "They both have one I and won sea. How is Mary Mary Quite Contrary like the Norse god Odin?"

Prediction markets are the future. They're a type of trustless, decentralized expertise that often equals or outperforms official sources. But they're not quite the present. Right now I only know of three prediction markets, and none of them live up to their potential. As usual, it's the government's fault: betting on prediction markets is technically gambling, which makes it mostly illegal (of course, you can still buy all the Gamestop stock you want). Each of the three big prediction markets tries to solve this in a different way. PredictIt struck a special deal with the government where they can run a limited number of predictions as long as nobody is allowed to bet very much. They probably have the most users, but most of them are dumb money, and the restrictions prevent smart money from coming in and replacing them. Also, the market fritters away its limited number of predictions on dumb political horse race stuff. I think of this as a missed opportunity. Augur is a decentralized Ethereum-based prediction market. Since it's crypto, it ought to be able to violate laws with impunity, and in theory this should make it the leader of the pack. In practice it's either nonfunctional or so minimally functional as to be useless. The team involved seems pretty dedicated and competent, and I assume they have some good reason for pretending their product currently exists instead of replacing the whole thing with a COMING SOON banner. I hope this will one day be our savior. But like the real Messiah, it's taking its sweet time. Metaculus solves the regulatory problem by using fake Internet points instead of money. This is a disappointing solution; it limits the user base to Internet obsessives instead of (say) investment bankers. Still, there are a lot of Internet obsessives. And the team running it is really top-notch, interested in pushing the limits of what prediction markets can do, and trying to focus on some of the most important questions. I want to raise awareness of prediction markets, and right now Metaculus seem like the best people to raise awareness of. So welcome to Metaculus Mondays, where I make you listen to reports of how the prediction markets did this week and what they're predicting for later.

Glen Weyl posted a reply to my post criticizing his essay on technocracy, and kindly agreed to let me elevate it into a top-level post. (consider this a standing offer to anyone else I write a post criticizing to do the same) I've very slightly edited some parts to adjust for differences in how the code works. You can read more from Glen Weyl on his website, his Twitter, or by buying his book. I am grateful for your taking the time to respond. There is a lot there to respond to and in general I think the exchange speaks for itself. However, I think there are few points where clarification is important for the exchange to be productive, which I'll briefly address here. 1. Let me start with concessions. There are many points where @slatestarcodex correctly highlights various areas where my grasp of beliefs and facts are limited or wrong, especially in the depth of my grasp of the views of the rationalist community. I freely admit that there are serious limits to how much I've been able to research the views of people in this community and I certainly hope they are not as I characterized them, though as I will point out below many elements of Scott's response confirm my concerns.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/contra-weyl-on-technocracy I. I am not defending technocracy. Nobody ever defends technocracy. It's like "elitism" or "statism". There is no Statist Party. Nobody holds rallies demanding more statism. There is no Citizens for Statism Facebook page with thousands of likes and followers. Yet for some reason libertarians don't win every single national election. Strange, isn't it? Maybe it's one of those Russell conjugations - "I am firm, you are obstinate". I support rule of law, you're a statist. I want checks and balances on mob rule, you're an elitist. I like evidence-based policy, you're a technocrat. I am not defending technocracy. But I do like evidence-based policy. So I read with interest Glen Weyl's Why I Am Not A Technocrat. It starts with a short summary of Seeing Like A State. It ties this into modern "evidence-based policy" and "mechanism design". It talks about how technocrats will always have their own insular culture and biases and paradigms, which prevent them from seeing the real world in its full complexity. Therefore, we should be careful about supposedly "objective" policies, and make sure they are always heavily informed by real people's real knowledge. Then it draws on vague rumors of the "rationalist community" and a shadowy figure named "Eliezer Yudkowsky" to create a completely fictional reimagination of us as a group of benighted people who don't understand any of these things, and just go around saying "hurr durr top-down systems are great, no way there could possibly be anything our models don't capture."

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ontology-of-psychiatric-conditions [reposted from here, with edits] I. Taxometrics is the study of whether psychiatric conditions are categorical or dimensional. Something is categorical if it neatly, objectively separates into different groups. For example, consider humans and rabbits. If we take a mixed group containing some humans and some rabbits, and graph them along some variable like weight, it would probably look like this: There's one big obvious group around 3 lbs (weight of the average rabbit) and another around 140 lbs (weight of the average human). Not a lot of subtletly here. If we used some other graphable variable – height, lifespan, IQ – we'd probably get something similar. Maybe the biggest rabbit in the world is bigger than the smallest human. That doesn't mean they're not two obvious categories. It just means they're two obvious categories with a tiny overlap. It happens. If we wanted to be clever, we could create a multivariate distance measure that combines weight, height, lifespan, IQ, and lots of other ways humans and rabbits could differ, into a 0 – 1 variable where 0 is "most rabbity" and 1 is "most humanish". Probably these scores wouldn't overlap at all – if they did, it would mean there's some human who's more like a rabbit than some rabbit is, which would be pretty surprising. But even if this were true, it wouldn't change the fundamental finding that humans and rabbits are pretty different. Or to put it some other way, there's a fundamental hidden generator producing differences between humans and rabbits (in this case, the species difference). By contrast, something is dimensional if it's just a spectrum and there's no obvious place to separate it into different groups. For example, consider tall people vs. short people. We take a general cross-section of the population, and graph them by height, and it would probably look like this: There's no clear point where short people stop and tall people begin. Some people are a little taller than others, and other people taller still, and so on until you're at Yao Ming.

In the 1950s, a shady outfit called Obetrol Pharmaceuticals made a popular over-the-counter diet pill called Obetrol. If you're familiar with any of: the 1950s, shady pharma, or diet pills, your next question will be "did it contain amphetamines?" and the answer is yes, loads of them. Obetrol was a mix of four different amphetamine salts: racemic amphetamine sulfate, dextroamphetamine sulfate, methamphetamine saccharate, and methamphetamine hydrochloride. Why did they need four different kinds of speed? I'm not sure. The uncharitable explanation is: for the same reason Dr. Nick's Cure-All Home Remedy has twelve different herbs, ie customers think things with more ingredients are better. By the 1970s, people figured out meth was bad, so Obetrol replaced their two methamphetamine salts with two more kinds of non-methylated amphetamine. But the FDA continued to crack down, and although the historical paper trail goes kind of dark, it looks like Obetrol had disappeared by the 1980s.

Logistics Don't worry, there will be real posts next week. Jan 22 Substack First, thanks for following me to Substack. I know some of you are skeptical. I was too at first, but Substack has gone above and beyond in allaying my concerns. They've let me test out a "no popup telling you to subscribe" feature. They've changed the comment section to be more like WordPress. We've agreed I'm here for a year, but if it goes badly I can leave in 2022 with no hard feelings. And I know some of you are concerned about the risk of corporate deplatforming. My weak answer is that so far Substack has been great at resisting calls for this, I think it's worth rewarding them with my business, and I'm proud to contribute to companies that share my values. My strong answer is that if I start feeling too constrained, I'll leave. The past six months weren't fun, but at least I credibly signaled willingness to destroy everything and start over when needed. I'm saving the Substack mailing list regularly to my hard drive, and if I go somewhere else I'll let you all know. And I know Substack is supposed to be an email newsletter thing, but consider reading it online instead so you can participate in the comments. If you miss the old layout, the anonymous author of Applied Divinity Studies has made a Chrome extension thing you can use to convert the Substack layout to the older one.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/youre-probably-wondering-why-ive Welcome to Astral Codex Ten! Some of you are probably veterans of my old blog, Slate Star Codex. Others may be newbies wondering what this is all about. I'm happy to finally be able to give a clear answer: this is a blog about ṛta. Ṛta is a Sanskrit word, so ancient that it brushes up against the origin of Indo-European languages. It's related to English "rationality" and "arithmetic", but also "art" and "harmony". And "right", both in the senses of "natural rights" and "the right answer". And "order". And "arete" and "aristos" and all those other Greek words about morality. And "artificial", as in eg artificial intelligence. More speculatively "reign" and related words about rulership, and "rich" and related words about money. (also "arthropod", but insects creep me out so I'll be skipping this one)

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/still-alive I. This was a triumph I'm making a note here, huge success No, seriously, it was awful. I deleted my blog of 1,557 posts. I wanted to protect my privacy, but I ended up with articles about me in New Yorker, Reason, and The Daily Beast. I wanted to protect my anonymity, but I Streisand-Effected myself, and a bunch of trolls went around posting my real name everywhere they could find. I wanted to avoid losing my day job, but ended up quitting so they wouldn't be affected by the fallout. I lost a five-digit sum in advertising and Patreon fees. I accidentally sent about three hundred emails to each of five thousand people in the process of trying to put my blog back up. I had, not to mince words about it, a really weird year. 513,000 people read my blog post complaining about the New York Times' attempt to dox me (for comparison, there are 366,000 people in Iceland). So many people cancelled their subscription that the Times' exasperated customer service agents started pre-empting callers with "Is this about that blog thing?" A friend of a friend reports her grandmother in Slovakia heard a story about me on Slovak-language radio.

Mark Twain: There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact. If this is true of all science, it is doubly true of social psychology. At its best, social psychology is an unmatched window into human motivations, a "look under the hood" of the way people talk and act. The best research in social psychology is as well-supported as anything in physics or biology, and much more intuitively comprehensible. This is why it's one of my favorite scientific fields. But at its worst, social psychology is a flamethrower. People grab hold of it to try to fry their political opponents, then end up lighting their own hair on fire or burning down half a city. Because social psych is really hard to do right.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and-reptilian-muslim-climatologists-from-mars/ Beware of Phantom Lizardmen I have only done a little bit of social science research, but it was enough to make me hate people. One study I helped with analyzed whether people from different countries had different answers on a certain psychological test. So we put up a website where people answered some questions about themselves (like "what country are you from?") and then took the psychological test. And so of course people screwed it up in every conceivable way. There were the merely dumb, like the guy who put "male" as his nationality and "American" as his gender. But there were also the actively malicious or at least annoying, like the people (yes, more than one) who wrote in "Martian".

https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/12/23/we-are-all-msscribe/ AskReddit asked recently: If you could only give an alien one thing to help them understand the human race, what would you give them? At the time I had no good answer. Now I do. I would give them Charlotte Lennox's write-up of how MsScribe took over Harry Potter fandom (warning: super-long but super-worth-it). Ozy informs me that everyone else in the world read this story five years ago. Maybe I am hopelessly behind the times? Maybe all my blog readers are intimately familiar with it? If not, read it. Read it like an anthropological text. Read it like you would a study of the Yanomamo. No, read it even better than that. Read it like you would a study of the Yanomamo if you knew that, statistically, some of your friends and co-workers covertly become Yanomamo after getting home every evening.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/28/why-were-early-psychedelicists-so-weird/ [Epistemic status: very speculative, asserted with only ~30% confidence. On the other hand, even though psychiatrists don't really talk about this it's possible other groups know this all already] A few weeks ago I gave a presentation on the history of early psychedelic research. Since I had a tough crowd, I focused on the fascinating biographies of some of the early psychedelicists. Timothy Leary was a Harvard professor and former NIMH researcher who made well-regarded contributions to psychotherapy and psychometrics. He started the Harvard Psilocybin Project and several other Harvard-based experiments to test the effects of psychedelics on normal and mentally ill subjects. He was later fired from Harvard and arrested; later he accomplished a spectacular break out of prison and fled to Algeria. During his later life, he wrote books about how the human brain had hidden circuits of consciousness that would allow us to live in space, including a quantum overmind which could control reality and break the speed of light. He eventually fell so deep into madness that he started hanging out with Robert Anton Wilson and participating in Ron Paul fundraisers.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/13/evil-is-anti-inductive/ I. A recent Cracked piece: Five Everyday Groups Society Says It's Okay To Mock. It begins: There's a rule in comedy that says you shouldn't punch down. It's okay to make fun of someone rich and famous, because they're too busy molesting groupies with 100-dollar bills to notice, but if you make a joke at the expense of a homeless person, you're just an asshole. That said, we as a society have somehow decided on a few arbitrary exceptions to this rule. "Somehow decided on a few arbitrary exceptions" isn't very technical. Let's see if we can do better. Earlier this week, I wrote about things that are anti-inductive. Something is anti-inductive if it fights back against your attempts to understand it. The classic example is the stock market. If someone learns that the stock market is always low on Tuesdays, then they'll buy lots of stocks on Tuesdays to profit from the anomaly. But this raises the demand for stocks on Tuesdays, and therefore stocks won't be low on Tuesdays anymore. To detect a pattern is to destroy the pattern.

Stuart Russell is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of California at Berkeley, holder of the Smith-Zadeh Chair in Engineering, and Director of the Center for Human-Compatible AI. His book "Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach" (with Peter Norvig) is the standard text in AI, used in 1500 universities in 135 countries. His research covers a wide range of topics in artificial intelligence, with an emphasis on the long-term future of artificial intelligence and its relation to humanity. Professor Stuart Russell speaks briefly on his book "Human Compatible", and then takes questions.

Reporter Degrees Of Freedom I. A sample of Thursday's talk at Yale These are four headlines describing the same study, Milkie, Nomaguchi and Denny (2015). The study found that of twenty or so outcomes, only three of them – all measuring delinquent behavior among teenagers – show significant effect from time spent with parents (and this result remains after Bonferroni correction). So Vox has a great argument for their headline. The National Post has an okay argument for their headline even though it's kind of cherry-picked. The Washington Post just sort of reads between the lines and figures that if it's not quantity of time that helps kids, it must be quality. And FOX also reads between the lines and figures that if moms spending time with their kids has no effect, the argument from opportunity costs suggests mothers are spending too much time with their kids. None of them are completely outright lying. And indeed, most of the articles eventually explain what I just said, halfway down the article, in one or two short sentences that most readers will skim over. But the rest of the article uses the study to support whatever the news source involved wants it to support, and so people will come up with four diametrically opposed conclusions from this one study depending on which source they read. II. Here's a study that I wasn't able to include in the presentation because it just came out recently. As per the Rice University press release: Overweight Men Just As Likely As Overweight Women To Face Discrimination.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/07/25/how-the-west-was-won/ I. Someone recently linked me to Bryan Caplan's post A Hardy Weed: How Traditionalists Underestimate Western Civ. He argues that "western civilization"'s supposed defenders don't give it enough credit. They're always worrying about it being threatened by Islam or China or Degeneracy or whatever, but in fact western civilization can not only hold its own against these threats but actively outcompetes them: The fragility thesis is flat wrong. There is absolutely no reason to think that Western civilization is more fragile than Asian civilization, Islamic civilization, or any other prominent rivals. At minimum, Western civilization can and does perpetuate itself the standard way: sheer conformity and status quo bias.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/08/29/reverse-voxsplaining-drugs-vs-chairs/ [Content note: this is pretty much a rehash of things I've said before, and that other people have addressed much more eloquently. My only excuse for wasting your time with it again is that SOMEHOW THE MESSAGE STILL HASN'T SUNK IN. Pitching this as "market" vs. "government" is overly simplistic, but maybe if I am overly simplistic sometimes then it will sink in better.] EpiPens, useful medical devices which reverse potentially fatal allergic reactions, have recently quadrupled in price, putting pressure on allergy sufferers and those who care for them. Vox writes that this "tells us a lot about what's wrong with American health care" – namely that we don't regulate it enough: The story of Mylan's giant EpiPen price increase is, more fundamentally, a story about America's unique drug pricing policies. We are the only developed nation that lets drugmakers set their own prices, maximizing profits the same way sellers of chairs, mugs, shoes, or any other manufactured goods would.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/27/a-modern-myth/ 1. Eris A middle-aged man, James, had come on stage believing it was an audition for American Idol. It wasn't. Out ran his ex-lover, Terri. "You said you loved me!" she said. "And then when I got pregnant, you disappeared! Twenty years, and you never even sent me a letter!" The crowd booed. As James tried to sputter a response, his wife ran onto the stage. "You cheating jerk!" she shouted at James. "You lying, cheating jerk! Twenty-five years we've been married, and I never…" She picked up a folding chair, tried to swing it at James. "Stop!" cried James' teenage daughter Katie, joining in the fray. "Mom, Dad, stop it!"

https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/08/a-theory-of-religion/ Related to Monday's post but spun off for length reasons: my crazy theory about where religion comes from. The near-universal existence of religion across cultures is surprising. Many people have speculated on what makes tribes around the world so fixated on believing in gods and propitiating them and so on. More recently people like Dawkins and Dennett have added their own contributions about parasitic memes and hyperactive agent-detection. But I think a lot of these explanations are too focused on a modern idea of religion. I find ancient religion much more enlightening. I'm no historian, but from the little I know ancient religion seems to bleed seamlessly into every other aspect of the ancient way of life. For example, the Roman religion was a combination of mythology, larger-than-life history, patriotism, holidays, customs, superstitions, rules about the government, beliefs about virtue, and attempts to read the future off the livers of pigs. And aside from the pig livers, this seems entirely typical.

Link: https://slatestarscratchpad.tumblr.com/post/633822178059730944/here-are-the-nine-ways-the-election-could-end You are Joseph R. Biden Jr. You sit in a convention center in Delaware, surrounded by advisors and confidantes. You are acutely aware that the hopes of a hundred million people are with you. You feel like they should be more tangible, like being the focus of a hundred million minds should at least make your skin tingle a tiny bit - like being a vessel for so much power should make your skin crack and burst. It does not. You feel nothing at all. Maybe it's because they don't really love you. You're the compromise candidate, you've never lied about that to yourself.

I. Why is there such a strong Sunni/Shia divide? I know the Comparative Religion 101 answer. The early Muslims were debating who was the rightful caliph. Some of them said Abu Bakr, others said Ali, and the dispute has been going on ever since. On the other hand, that was fourteen hundred years ago, both candidates are long dead, and there's no more caliphate. You'd think maybe they'd let the matter rest. Sure, the two groups have slightly different hadith and schools of jurisprudence, but how many Muslims even know which school of jurisprudence they're supposed to be following? It seems like a pretty minor thing to have centuries of animus over. And so we return again to Robbers' Cave:

This week the SSC Meetup features guest speaker Jason Crawford, author the blog The Roots of Progress, discussing 'the non-linear model of innovation.' "Innovation is often described with a "linear" model from discovery to invention to distribution. There is an element of truth in this, but a naive interpretation of the model does not match the reality of science and invention. In this talk, I'll show the feedback mechanisms between discovery and invention and how they are intertwined, using examples including the transistor at Bell Labs and the career of Louis Pasteur."

I. There was an argument on Tumblr which, like so many arguments on Tumblr, was terrible. I will rephrase it just a little to make a point. Alice said something along the lines of "I hate people who frivolously diagnose themselves with autism without knowing anything about the disorder. They should stop thinking they're 'so speshul' and go see a competent doctor." Beth answered something along the lines of "I diagnosed myself with autism, but only after a lot of careful research. I don't have the opportunity to go see a doctor. I think what you're saying is overly strict and hurtful to many people with autism." Alice then proceeded to tell Beth she disagreed, in that special way only Tumblr users can. I believe the word "cunt" was used. I notice two things about the exchange. First, why did Beth take the bait? Alice said she hated people who frivolously self-diagnosed without knowing anything about the disorder. Beth clearly was not such a person. Why didn't she just say "Yes, please continue hating these hypothetical bad people who are not me"? Second, why did Alice take the bait? Why didn't she just say "I think you'll find I wasn't talking about you?"

I. One of the most interesting responses I got to my post supporting the junior doctors strike was by Salem, who said that this situation was (ethically) little different than that around adjunct professors, who also become overworked and miserable trying to break into a high-status profession. Salem very kindly didn't directly accuse me of hypocrisy, but maybe he should have. While I sympathize with adjuncts' terrible conditions, my natural instinct is to say feedback mechanisms should keep doing their work. You can probably trace the argument- imagine a simplified toy model where the only two jobs are professor and salesperson, and being a professor is fun and high-status but being a salesperson is boring and low-status. Everyone will become a professor, and this will decrease the demand for professors and increase the demand for salespeople until the employers involved change their policies accordingly. Eventually it will stabilize where the nonmonetary advantages of being a professor are perfectly compensated by the monetary advantages of being a salesperson. If professors are getting paid shockingly little, it means the system is sending a signal that the nonmonetary advantages of being a professor are shockingly high, or else why would people keep trying? If we demand that professors get paid more, then we're letting them keep all their nonmonetary advantages over salespeople but demanding they have monetary advantages as well. It destroys the system's incentives to have people go into less fun but nevertheless necessary fields.

David Friedman on Legal Systems Very Different from Ours: A brief survey of a range of legal system, past and present, from Imperial China and Periclean Athens to modern Amish and Romany. David Friedman is an academic economist with a doctorate in physics recently retired from spending the previous twenty-three years teaching in a law school. His first book, The Machinery of Freedom: Guide to a Radical Capitalism, was published in 1973 and includes a description of how a society with property rights and without government might function. There as elsewhere, he offers a consequentialist defense of libertarianism. His most recent non-fiction book is Legal Systems Very Different from Ours, covering systems from Periclean Athens through modern Amish and Romany. He is also the author of three novels, one commercially published and two self-published, and, with his wife, a self-published medieval and renaissance cookbook and a larger self-published book related to their hobby of historical recreation. Much of his published work, including journal articles, essays, drafts of forthcoming work and the full text of several books, can be read on his web page: https://www.daviddfriedman.com

[Epistemic status: not very serious] [Content note: May make you feel overly scrutinized] Sometimes I hear people talking about how nobody notices them or cares about anything they do. And I want to say…well… Okay. The Survey of Earned Doctorates tells us that the United States awards about a hundred classics PhDs per year. I get the impression classics is more popular in Europe, so let's say a world total of five hundred. If the average classicist has a fifty year career, that's 25,000 classicists at any given time. Some classicists work on Rome, so let's say there are 10,000 classicists who focus solely on ancient Greece. Estimates of the population of classical Greece center around a million people, but classical Greece lasted for several generations, so let's say there were ten million classical Greeks total. That gives us a classicist-to-Greek ratio of 1:1000.

I. Suppose I were to come out tomorrow as gay. I have amazing and wonderful friends, and I certainly wouldn't expect them to hate me forever or tell me to burn in Hell or anything like that. But even more than that, I think they would understand and accept the decision. There would be a lot of not-so-obvious failure modes they could fall into, but wouldn't. For example, I don't think any of them would say something like "Oh, obviously you just haven't met the right woman. I know this really cute girl Alanna, a friend of my sister's. I'll introduce you next time she's around." Or "You must have just had a bad experience with women growing up. Maybe you always got into fights with your mother as a child. But there's no reason to let that control you now."