Astral Codex Ten Podcast
922 episodes - English - Latest episode: about 1 month ago - ★★★★★ - 63 ratingsThe official audio version of Astral Codex Ten, with an archive of posts from Slate Star Codex. It's just me reading Scott Alexander's blog posts.
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Episodes
[LINK] Unifying Predictive Coding With Backpropagation
April 14, 2021 21:51 - 4 minutes - 6.83 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/link-unifying-predictive-coding-with [epistemic status: I know a little about the predictive coding side of this, but almost nothing about backpropagation or the math behind the unification. I am posting this mostly as a link to people who know more.] This is a link to / ad for a great recent Less Wrong post by lsusr, Predictive Coding Has Been Unified With Backpropagation, itself about a recent paper Predictive Coding Approximates Backprop Alon...
Links For April
April 14, 2021 00:39 - 16 minutes - 20.1 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-april [Remember, I haven’t independently verified each link. On average, commenters will end up spotting evidence that around two or three of the links in each links post are wrong or misleading. I correct these as I see them, and will highlight important corrections later, but I can’t guarantee I will have caught them all by the time you read this.] 1: A link between childhood “screen time” and attention problems has - say it with me -...
Your Book Review: On The Natural Faculties
April 11, 2021 00:28 - 48 minutes - 67.5 MB[This is the second of many finalists in the book review contest. It’s not by me - it’s by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. I’ll be posting about two of these a week for the next few months. When you’ve read all of them, I’ll ask you to vote for your favorite, so remember which ones you liked. - SA] I. If you’re looking for the whipping boy for all of medicine, and most of science, look no furth...
Your Book Review: Order Without Law
April 10, 2021 03:04 - 1 hour - 127 MB[This is the first of many finalists in the book review contest. It’s not by me - it’s by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. I’ll be posting about two of these a week for the next few months. When you’ve read all of them, I’ll ask you to vote for your favorite, so remember which ones you liked. The broken footnotes in this one are either my fault or Substack’s, so please don’t hold it against this ent...
Metis And Bodybuilders
April 09, 2021 00:07 - 15 minutes - 21.3 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/metis-and-bodybuilders Fitness researcher Menno Henselmans writes about optimal program design for bodybuilders. His thesis is that peer-reviewed studies prove bodybuilder lore is wrong in lots of places. For example: Traditional bro wisdom holds short rest periods of 1-3 minutes are optimal for bodybuilding. There never seemed to be much of a formal argument for why other than that people traditionally trained this way. The real reason was probably t...
Two Unexpected Multiple Hypothesis Testing Problems
April 07, 2021 22:49 - 14 minutes - 21.3 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/two-unexpected-multiple-hypothesis I. Start with Lior Pachter's Mathematical analysis of "mathematical analysis of a vitamin D COVID-19 trial". The story so far: some people in Cordoba did a randomized controlled trial of Vitamin D for coronavirus. The people who got the Vitamin D seemed to do much better than those who didn’t. But there was some controversy over the randomization, which looked like this Remember, we want to randomly create tw...
2020 Predictions: Calibration Results
April 07, 2021 00:01 - 16 minutes - 23.7 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/2020-predictions-calibration-results At the beginning of every year, I make predictions. At the end of every year, I score them (this year I’m very late). Here are 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019. And here are the predictions I made for 2020. Some predictions are redacted because they involve my private life or the lives of people close to me. Usually I use strikethrough for things that didn’t happen, but since Substack doesn’t let me str...
Ambidexterity And Cognitive Closure
April 04, 2021 03:45 - 15 minutes - 22.2 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ambidexterity-and-cognitive-closure Back in a more superstitious time, people believed left-handers were in league with the Devil. Now, in this age of Science, we realize that was unfair. Yes, left-handers are statistically more likely to be in league with the Devil. But so are right-handers! It's only the ambidextrous who are truly pure! At least this is the conclusion I take from Lyle & Grillo (2020) Why Are Consistently-Handed Individuals Mor...
[Classic] The Parable Of The Talents
April 03, 2021 07:51 - 34 minutes - 48.8 MBhttps://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/31/the-parable-of-the-talents/ [Content note: scrupulosity and self-esteem triggers, IQ, brief discussion of weight and dieting. Not good for growth mindset.] I. I sometimes blog about research into IQ and human intelligence. I think most readers of this blog already know IQ is 50% to 80% heritable, and that it’s so important for intellectual pursuits that eminent scientists in some fields have average IQs around 150 to 160. Since IQ this high on...
Oh, The Places You'll Go When Trying To Figure Out The Right Dose Of Escitalopram
April 01, 2021 02:53 - 17 minutes - 25.1 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/oh-the-places-youll-go-when-trying I. What is the right dose of Lexapro (escitalopram)? The official FDA packet insert recommends a usual dose of 10 mg, and a maximum safe dose of 20 mg. It says studies fail to show 20 mg works any better than 10, but you can use 20 if you really want to. But Jakubovski et al's Dose-Response Relationship Of Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors tries to figure out which doses of which antidepressants are e...
Toward A Bayesian Theory Of Willpower
March 26, 2021 23:31 - 14 minutes - 21.1 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/towards-a-bayesian-theory-of-willpower I. What is willpower? Five years ago, I reviewed Baumeister and Tierney's book on the subject. They tentatively concluded it's a way of rationing brain glucose. But their key results have failed to replicate, and people who know more about glucose physiology say it makes no theoretical sense. Robert Kurzban, one of the most on-point critics of the glucose theory, gives his own model of willpower: it's a...
More Antifragile, Diversity Libertarianism, And Corporate Censorship
March 26, 2021 22:00 - 13 minutes - 19.3 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/more-antifragile-diversity-libertarianism In yesterday's review of Antifragile, I tried to stick to something close to Taleb's own words. But here's how I eventually found myself understanding an important kind of antifragility. I feel bad about this, because Taleb hates bell curves and tells people to stop using them as examples, but sorry, this is what I’ve got. Suppose that Distribution 1 represents nuclear plants. It has low variance, so all t...
Book Review: Antifragile
March 25, 2021 00:25 - 35 minutes - 49.5 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-antifragile Nassim Taleb summarizes the thesis of Antifragile as: Everything gains or loses from volatility. Fragility is what loses from volatility and uncertainty [and antifragility is what gains from it]. The glass on the table is short volatility. The glass is fragile: the less you disrupt it, the better it does. A rock is “robust” - neither fragile nor antifragile - it will do about equally well whether you disrupt it or not. Wha...
Adding My Data Point To The Discussion Of Substack Advances
March 24, 2021 23:31 - 6 minutes - 9.83 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/adding-my-data-point-to-the-discussion [warning: boring inside baseball post] From The Hypothesis: Here's Why Substack's Scam Worked So Well. It summarizes a common Twitter argument that Substack is doing something sinister by offering some writers big advances. The sinister thing differs depending on who's making the argument - in this case, it's making people think they could organically make lots of money on Substack (because they see other w...
Book Review: The New Sultan
March 20, 2021 04:47 - 49 minutes - 68.5 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-the-new-sultan I. If you only learn one thing from this post: it's pronounced "air-do-wan". If you learn two things from this post, learn that, plus how a country which starts out as a flawed but somewhat-liberal democracy can lapse into near-dictatorship over the course of a few years. I got The New Sultan: Erdogan And The Crisis Of Modern Turkey because, as a libertarian, I spend a lot of time worrying about the risk that my cou...
Sleep Is The Mate Of Death
March 18, 2021 02:42 - 16 minutes - 24 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/sleep-is-the-mate-of-death Melancholic depressive patients report that they feel worst in the morning, just after waking up, get better as the day goes on, and feel least affected in the evening just before bed. Continue the trend, and you might wonder how depressed people would feel after spending 24 or 36 or 48 hours awake. Some scientists made them stay awake to check, and the answer is: they feel great! About 70% of cases of treatment-resistant...
Mantic Monday: Mantic Matt Y
March 15, 2021 23:58 - 15 minutes - 22.4 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-mantic-matt-y The current interest in forecasting grew out of Iraq-War-era exasperation with the pundit class. Pundits were constantly saying stuff, like "Saddam definitely has WMDs, trust me, I'm an expert", then getting proven wrong, then continuing to get treated as authorities and thought leaders. Occasionally they would apologize, but they'd be back to telling us what we Had To Believe the next week. You don't want a rule that...
Richard Nixon Vs. Cool
March 13, 2021 20:41 - 5 minutes - 8.61 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/richard-nixon-vs-cool In the highlights post on class, I wrote: When I was in middle school, I used to wonder - there are cool kids and uncool kids, right? But suppose all the uncool kids agreed to think of themselves as cool, and to make fun of the currently-cool kids. Then you would just have two groups of kids, each considering themselves superior and looking down on the other. And the currently-uncool-kid group would be bigger and probably wi...
[Classic] Contra Grant On Exaggerated Differences
March 13, 2021 00:52 - 1 hour - 95.1 MBhttps://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exaggerated-differences/ Contra Grant On Exaggerated Differences I. An article by Adam Grant called Differences Between Men And Women Are Vastly Exaggerated is going viral, thanks in part to a share by Facebook exec Sheryl Sandberg. It’s a response to an email by a Google employee saying that he thought Google’s low female representation wasn’t a result of sexism, but a result of men and women having different interests long bef...
Trapped Priors As A Basic Problem Of Rationality
March 11, 2021 03:52 - 29 minutes - 41 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/trapped-priors-as-a-basic-problem Introduction and review Last month I talked about van der Bergh et al’s work on the precision of sensory evidence, which introduced the idea of a trapped prior. I think this concept has far-reaching implications for the rationalist project as a whole. I want to re-derive it, explain it more intuitively, then talk about why it might be relevant for things like intellectual, political and religious biases. To re...
The Consequences Of Radical Reform
March 10, 2021 23:28 - 12 minutes - 17.5 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-consequences-of-radical-reform The thread that runs from Edmund Burke to James Scott and Seeing Like A State goes: systems that evolve organically are well-adapted to their purpose. Cultures, ancient traditions, and long-lasting institutions contain irreplaceable wisdom. If some reformer or technocrat who thinks he's the smartest guy in the room sweeps them aside and replaces them with some clever theory he just came up with, he'll make everyt...
Highlights From The Comments On Class
March 07, 2021 01:34 - 21 minutes - 30.9 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-class To my surprise, we have some genuine upper-class people reading this blog. Here’s what they thought, starting with Cabayun: While I hardly grew up in the upper-upper world Fussell is describing (though my grandparents and to a lesser extend parents surely did), a lot of the particulars stood out to me as right on the money (the food, names, boring social scene almost by design, locations, house/furniture desc...
Highlights From The Comments On March Links
March 05, 2021 23:41 - 17 minutes - 25.3 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-march [link back to the original links post: here] On the article about privateers, local naval expert Bean writes: It's time for the standard disclaimer any time Proceedings comes up: Proceedings is intended as a forum for discussion of matters of interest to naval officers, and it is not peer reviewed. Often very not peer reviewed. Like in this case. Please don't judge the USNI on the basis of this stuff. They ...
Links For March
March 04, 2021 23:00 - 20 minutes - 29.3 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-march Warning: 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, so you may want to read this online instead of in an email, to catch the edits. Some of these are from my six-month backlog and may be outdated. 1: From a colonel writing for the US Naval Institute - Unleash The Pri...
Shilling For Big Mitochondria
March 03, 2021 11:17 - 17 minutes - 25.6 MBhttps://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 ...
Mantic Monday: Scoring Rule Controversy
March 02, 2021 11:26 - 12 minutes - 17.5 MBhttps://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 co...
Bay Area Plant-Based Meat Reviews
February 26, 2021 23:36 - 19 minutes - 27.5 MBhttps://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...
A Modest Proposal For Republicans: Use The Word "Class"
February 26, 2021 23:30 - 23 minutes - 33.8 MBhttps://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 per...
Book Review: Fussell On Class
February 25, 2021 23:24 - 35 minutes - 49.5 MBhttps://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 soc...
Mantic Monday: Judging April COVID Predictions
February 24, 2021 21:04 - 17 minutes - 25.1 MBhttps://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 peop...
A Look Down Track B
February 22, 2021 22:22 - 17 minutes - 25.6 MBhttps://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 m...
Ezra Klein On Vetocracy
February 20, 2021 23:16 - 10 minutes - 15.4 MBhttps://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’...
Highlights From The Comments On Cult Of Smart
February 20, 2021 02:49 - 48 minutes - 67.3 MBhttps://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 remot...
Book Review: The Cult Of Smart
February 20, 2021 02:40 - 52 minutes - 73.3 MBhttps://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 O...
COVID/Vitamin D: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
February 17, 2021 23:15 - 17 minutes - 25.4 MBhttps://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'l...
Coronavirus: Links, Discussion, Open Thread
February 16, 2021 20:18 - 20 minutes - 29.4 MBhttps://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...
Statement on New York Times Article
February 14, 2021 11:15 - 13 minutes - 20.1 MBhttps://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 con...
The Precision Of Sensory Evidence
February 14, 2021 11:08 - 14 minutes - 20.5 MBhttps://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. Bot...
List Of Fictional Cryptocurrencies Banned By The SEC
February 12, 2021 05:26 - 7 minutes - 11 MB[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 heir...
Ontology Of Psychiatric Conditions: Tradeoffs And Failures
February 11, 2021 03:47 - 29 minutes - 41.1 MB[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 p...
Book Review: Why We're Polarized
February 11, 2021 01:06 - 35 minutes - 50.2 MBI. 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 c...
Metaculus Monday 2/8/21
February 08, 2021 23:39 - 14 minutes - 20.9 MBThanks 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 ...
Journalism and Legible Expertise
February 08, 2021 23:32 - 5 minutes - 8.71 MBI 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 stori...
WebMD, And The Tragedy Of Legible Expertise
February 06, 2021 12:05 - 29 minutes - 41.2 MBI 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 s...
Book Review Contest Final Rules
February 05, 2021 01:32 - 3 minutes - 5.68 MBThanks 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 ...
Ontology Of Psychiatric Conditions: Dynamical Systems
February 05, 2021 01:17 - 29 minutes - 41.1 MB[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 h...
Riddle Of The Sphinx II: Sustained Release Riddlin'
February 03, 2021 21:25 - 3 minutes - 6.16 MBI 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 apart...
Metaculus Monday
February 02, 2021 10:24 - 12 minutes - 18.7 MBPrediction 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 m...
Weyl Contra Me On Technocracy
January 31, 2021 10:05 - 21 minutes - 30.4 MBGlen 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 g...
Contra Weyl On Technocracy
January 30, 2021 13:38 - 36 minutes - 50.9 MBhttps://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 ar...