Astral Codex Ten Podcast
922 episodes - English - Latest episode: 6 days 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
Can This AI Save Teenage Spy Alex Rider From A Terrible Fate?
November 30, 2022 04:24 - 38 minutes - 54.2 MBWe’re showcasing a hot new totally bopping, popping musical track called “bromancer era? bromancer era?? bromancer era???“ His subtle sublime thoughts raced, making his eyes literally explode. https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/can-this-ai-save-teenage-spy-alex “He peacefully enjoyed the light and flowers with his love,” she said quietly, as he knelt down gently and silently. “I also would like to walk once more into the garden if I only could,” he said, watching her. “I w...
Semaglutidonomics
November 25, 2022 13:19 - 29 minutes - 40.4 MB140 million obese Americans x $15,000/year for obesity drugs = . . . uh oh, that can't be right. https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/semaglutidonomics Semaglutide started off as a diabetes medication. Pharma company Novo Nordisk developed it in the early 2010s, and the FDA approved it under the brand names Ozempic® (for the injectable) and Rybelsus® (for the pill). I think “Ozempic” sounds like one of those unsinkable ocean liners, and “Rybelsus” sounds like a benevolent mytholog...
"Is Wine Fake?" In Asterisk Magazine
November 23, 2022 01:06 - 5 minutes - 7.12 MBI wrote an article on whether wine is fake. It's not here, it's at asteriskmag.com, the new rationalist / effective altruist magazine. Congratulations to my friend Clara for making it happen. Stories include: Modeling The End Of Monkeypox: I’m especially excited about this one. The top forecaster (of 7,000) in the 2021 Good Judgment competition explains his predictions for monkeypox. If you’ve ever rolled your eyes at a column by some overconfident pundit, this is maybe the most opposite-of...
Mantic Monday: Twitter Chaos Edition
November 22, 2022 05:48 - 28 minutes - 40.1 MBPlus FTX charges, scandal markets - and oh yeah, wasn't there some kind of midterm recently? https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-twitter-chaos-edition Twitter! This is all going to be so, so obsolete by the time I finish writing it and hit the “send post” button. But here goes: 395 traders on this, so one of Manifold’s biggest markets, probably representative. The small print defines a major outage as one that lasts more than an hour. See here for a good explanation ...
The Psychopharmacology Of The FTX Crash
November 18, 2022 15:25 - 46 minutes - 64.1 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-psychopharmacology-of-the-ftx Must not blog about FTX . . . must not blog about . . . ah, $#@% it Tyler Cowen linked Milky Eggs’ excellent overview of the FTX crash. I’m unqualified to comment on any of the financial or regulatory aspects. But it turns out there’s a psychopharmacology angle, which I am qualified to talk about, so let’s go. I wrote this pretty rushed because it’s an evolving news story. Sorry if it’s less polished th...
Contra Resident Contrarian On Unfalsifiable Internal States
November 13, 2022 13:46 - 34 minutes - 48 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/contra-resident-contrarian-on-unfalsifiable I. Contra Resident Contrarian . . . Resident Contrarian writes On Unfalsifiable Internal States, where he defends his skepticism of jhana and other widely-claimed hard-to-falsify internal states. It’s long, but I’ll quote a part that seemed especially important to me: I don’t really want to do the part of this article that’s about how it’s reasonable to doubt people in some contexts. But to get to the par...
Can People Be Honestly Wrong About Their Own Experiences?
November 10, 2022 13:05 - 12 minutes - 16.8 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/can-people-be-honestly-wrong-about A tangent of the jhana discussion: I asserted that people can’t be wrong about their own experience. That is, if someone says they don’t feel hungry, maybe they’re telling the truth, and they don’t feel hungry. Or maybe they’re lying: saying they don’t feel hungry even though they know they really do (eg they’re fasting, and they want to impress their friends with how easy it is for them). But there isn’t some thir...
Highlights From The Comments On Brain Waves
November 09, 2022 13:44 - 26 minutes - 36.4 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-brain [original post here] On What Kind Of Thing Brain Waves Are: Loweren writes: In my undergrad biology program we visited a brain research lab near Moscow. The brain scientist gave us a brief intro to Fourier transforms, which made me understand how beautiful they are - something that 2 years of undergrad math classes didn't manage to do. Then he explained the brain waves to us like this: "Imagine you are sta...
Highlights From The Comments On My California Ballot
November 06, 2022 07:20 - 17 minutes - 24.7 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-my [Original post here] I know I don’t usually publish on Saturdays, but I wanted to get this out before people filled in their mail-in ballots. So: Is Prop 31 Another Attack On Vaping? Maximum Limelihood Estimator is concerned that Prop 31 (against flavored tobacco products) is meant to target vaping: The flavored tobacco ban is mostly a ban on vaping; the vast majority of vape products are flavored, while mos...
ACX Grants: Project Updates
November 06, 2022 07:14 - 26 minutes - 36.9 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/acx-grants-project-updates Thanks to everyone who got ACX Grants (see original grants here) and sent me a one-year update. Below are short summaries of the updates everyone sent. If for some reason you want one of the full updates, which are longer and more technical, let me know and I‘ll see if I have permission to send them to you. I’ve also included each grantee’s assessment on a scale of 1-10 for how well they’re doing, where 5/10 is “...
My California Ballot 2022
November 06, 2022 07:06 - 28 minutes - 39.4 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/my-california-ballot-2022 Previously: 2018, 2020 General Philosophy Of Voting This is California, so the Democrats always win. When I vote, I mean to send a signal somewhere in between “you are the candidate I really prefer for this office” and “I will vote for the Democrat if I approve of her and want her to have a mandate; otherwise I will vote for the Republican as a protest”. I try to have a weak bias towards voting “NO” on state constituti...
Moderation Is Different From Censorship
November 03, 2022 11:41 - 7 minutes - 10.1 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/moderation-is-different-from-censorship This is a point I keep seeing people miss in the debate about social media. Moderation is the normal business activity of ensuring that your customers like using your product. If a customer doesn’t want to receive harassing messages, or to be exposed to disinformation, then a business can provide them the service of a harassment-and-disinformation-free platform. Censorship is the abnormal activity ensuring t...
Highlights From The Comments On Jhanas
November 02, 2022 06:32 - 42 minutes - 58.4 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-jhanas "I think it’s the first time half the commenters accused the other half of lying" I. Is Jhana Real? This was a fun one. I think it’s the first time half the commenters accused the other half of lying. Okay, “half” is an exaggeration. But by my count we had 21 people who claimed to have experienced jhanas (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21), and 7 who said they were p...
Book Review: Malleus Maleficarum
October 29, 2022 13:13 - 50 minutes - 69.7 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-malleus-maleficarum I. To The Republic, For Witches Stand Did you know you can just buy the Malleus Maleficarum? You can go into a bookstore and say “I would like the legendary manual of witch-hunters everywhere, the one that’s a plot device in dozens of tired fantasy novels”. They will sell it to you and you can read it. I recommend the Montague Summers translation. Not because it’s good (it isn’t), but because it’s by an slightly cra...
Nick Cammarata On Jhana
October 29, 2022 13:04 - 7 minutes - 10.6 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/nick-cammarata-on-jhana Buddhists say that if you meditate enough, you can learn to enter a state of extreme bliss called jhana. (there are many different jhana states - there’s a discussion of the distinctions here - but I’m lumping them together for simplicity. For attempted explanations of why jhana should exist, see here and here.) Jhana is different from enlightenment. Enlightenment changes you forever. Jhana is just a state you can enter duri...
Highlights From The Comments On Supplement Labeling
October 27, 2022 12:59 - 24 minutes - 33.2 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-supplement [Original post here: How Trustworthy Are Supplements?] 1: AvalancheGenesis writes: I think the bigger issue is that the industry as a whole sort of exists as solutions-in-search-of-problems...deficiencies really aren't that common, or even meaningfully health-affecting unless dire. (Fairly-arbitrary worldwide differences in target levels of IUs also remains puzzling.) Discerning customers can benefit from ...
From The Mailbag
October 26, 2022 13:36 - 15 minutes - 21.9 MBAnswers to the questions I get most often at meetup Q&As https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/from-the-mailbag DEAR SCOTT: When are you going to publish Unsong? — Erik from Uruk Dear Erik, Aaargh. I have an offer from a publisher to publish it if I run it by their editor who will ask me to edit lots of things, and I’ve been so stressed about this that I’ve spent a year putting it off. I could self-publish, but that also sounds like work and what if this is the only book I ever write a...
Book Review: Rhythms Of The Brain
October 23, 2022 12:00 - 30 minutes - 41.3 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-rhythms-of-the-brain Brain waves have always felt like a mystery. You learn some psychology, some neuroscience, a bit of neuroanatomy. And then totally separate from all of this, you know that there are things called “brain waves” that get measured with an EEG. Why should the brain have waves? Are they involved in thinking or feeling or something? How do you do computation when your processors are firing in a rhythmic pattern dozens of tim...
Another Bay Area House Party
October 21, 2022 13:33 - 24 minutes - 34 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/another-bay-area-house-party [Previously: Every Bay Area House Party] Blaise Pascal said all human evil comes from inability to sit alone in a room. Your better nature - your rational soul - tells you that nothing good has ever come from attending large social events. But against that better nature stands the Devil, wielding a stick marked “FOMO”. If you don’t go to social events, maybe other people will go and have great times and live fuller lives...
Mantic Monday 10/17/22
October 20, 2022 04:05 - 22 minutes - 31.2 MBWhat do Sam Altman, Matt Bruenig, and the Sacramento Kings have in common? -- Are the polls wrong? -- CFTC vs. Everybody https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-101722 Midterm Examination Polls this year look bad for Senate Republicans. Pollsters’ simulations give them a 22% chance (Economist), 34% chance (538), or 37% chance (RaceToTheWH) of taking power. Even Mitch McConnell has admitted he has only “a 50-50 proposition” of winning. But polls did pretty badly last ele...
Highlights From The Comments On The Central Valley
October 16, 2022 07:06 - 40 minutes - 55 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-the-3b1 Original post: Why Is The Central Valley So Bad? 1: Several Valley residents commented with their perspectives. Some were pretty grim. For example, 21st Century Salonniere (writes The 21st Century Salon) writes: It is horrible. It’s been horrible since at least 1996 when I got trapped here by my spouse’s job. We were going to stay two years tops and go back East. (Long boring story about what went wrong.)...
Links For October 2022
October 13, 2022 07:05 - 23 minutes - 32.9 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-october-397 [Remember, I haven’t independently verified each link. On average, commenters will end up spotting evidence that around two or three of the links in each links post are wrong or misleading. I correct these as I see them, and will highlight important corrections later, but I can’t guarantee I will have caught them all by the time you read this.] 1: The history of the exocentric compound noun: although English usually combines ver...
Highlights From The Comments On Columbus Day
October 11, 2022 13:10 - 41 minutes - 56.5 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-columbus [Original post: A Columbian Exchange] 1: The most popular comments were those objecting to my paragraph about holidays replacing older holidays: All of our best holidays have begun as anti-holidays to neutralize older rites. Jesus was born in the spring; they moved Christmas to December to neutralize the pagan Solstice celebration. Easter got its name because it neutralized the rites of the spring goddess Eo...
A Columbian Exchange
October 10, 2022 10:49 - 23 minutes - 32.5 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/a-columbian-exchange Adraste: Happy Indigenous People’s Day! Beroe: Happy Columbus Day! Adraste: …okay, surely we can both sketch out the form of the argument we’re about to have. Genocide, political correctness, moral progress, trying to destroy cherished American traditions, etc, etc, would you like to just pretend we hit all of the usual beats, rather than actually doing it? Beroe: Does “Columbus Day was originally intended as a woke holiday c...
[Classic] You’re Probably Wondering Why I’ve Called You Here Today
October 09, 2022 07:06 - 6 minutes - 7.21 MBDue to an oversight by the ancient Greeks, there is no Muse of blogging. Denied the ability to begin with a proper Invocation To The Muse, I will compensate with some relatively boring introductions. The name of this blog is Slate Star Codex. It is almost an anagram of my own name, Scott S Alexander. It is unfortunately missing an “n”, because anagramming is hard. I have placed an extra “n” in the header image, to restore cosmic balance. This blog does not have a subject, but it has an...
LA and San Diego Meetups This Weekend
October 08, 2022 02:01 - 2 minutes - 2.35 MBAlso Austin, Seattle, Tokyo, Rome, Mumbai, etc. We have two Southern California meetups this weekend: Los Angeles at 6:30 PM Saturday October 8 at 11841 Wagner St, Culver City. San Diego at 3 PM on Sunday, October 9, at Bird Park, these coordinates. See here for more details. I think I’ll be able to make it to both; if for some reason that changes I’ll try to update you by Open Thread beforehand. Feel free to come even if you’ve never been to a meetup before, even if you only recentl...
How Trustworthy Are Supplements?
October 06, 2022 08:25 - 47 minutes - 65.8 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/how-trustworthy-are-supplements [EDIT: LabDoor responds here] [Epistemic status: not totally sure of any of this, I welcome comments by people who know more.] Not as in “do supplements work?”. As in “if you buy a bottle of ginseng from your local store, will it really contain parts of the ginseng plant? Or will it just be sugar and sawdust and maybe meth?” There are lots of stories going around that 30% or 80% or some other very high percent of ...
CHAI, Assistance Games, And Fully-Updated Deference
October 05, 2022 00:39 - 41 minutes - 57.2 MBMachine Alignment Monday 10/3/22 https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/chai-assistance-games-and-fully-updated I. This Machine Alignment Monday post will focus on this imposing-looking article (source): Problem Of Fully-Updated Deference is a response by MIRI (eg Eliezer Yudkowsky’s organization) to CHAI (Stuart Russell’s AI alignment organization at University of California, Berkeley), trying to convince them that their preferred AI safety agenda won’t work. I beat my head a...
Universe-Hopping Through Substack
October 02, 2022 00:15 - 47 minutes - 67.4 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/universe-hopping-through-substack RandomTweet is a service that will show you exactly that - a randomly selected tweet from the whole history of Twitter. It describes itself as “a live demo that most people on twitter are not like you.” I feel the same way about Substack. Everyone I know reads a sample of the same set of Substacks - mine, Matt Yglesias’, maybe Freddie de Boer’s or Stuart Ritchie’s. But then I use the Discover feature on the site itse...
Highlights From The Comments On Unpredictable Reward
October 01, 2022 14:25 - 37 minutes - 51.9 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-unpredictable [Original post: Unpredictable Reward, Predictable Happiness] 1: Okay, I mostly wanted to highlight this one by Grognoscente: I think really digging into the neural nitty gritty may prove illuminative here. Dopamine release in nucleus accumbens (which is what drives reward learning and thus the updating of our predictions) is influenced by at least three independent factors: 1. A "state prediction erro...
From Nostradamus To Fukuyama
September 29, 2022 09:54 - 28 minutes - 38.7 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/from-nostradamus-to-fukuyama I. Nostradamus was a 16th century French physician who claimed to be able to see the future. (never trust doctors who dabble in futurology, that’s my advice) His method was: read books of other people’s prophecies and calculate some astrological charts, until he felt like he had a pretty good idea what would happen in the future. Then write it down in the form of obscure allusions and multilingual semi-gibberish, to ...
Highlights From The Comments On Billionaire Replaceability
September 23, 2022 13:15 - 41 minutes - 57.2 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-billionaire [original post: Billionaires, Surplus, and Replaceability] 1: Lars Doucet (writes Progress and Poverty) writes: Scott, the argument you're making rhymes a *lot* with the argument put forward by Anne Margrethe Brigham and Jonathon W. Moses in their article "Den Nye Oljen" (Norwegian for "The New Oil") I translated it a few months ago and Slime Mold Time Mold graciously hosted it on their blog, where I pos...
Why Is The Central Valley So Bad?
September 22, 2022 02:36 - 29 minutes - 29.1 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/why-is-the-central-valley-so-bad I. Here’s a topographic map of California (source): You might notice it has a big valley in the center. This is called “The Central Valley”. Sometimes it also gets called the San Joaquin Valley in the south, or the the Sacramento Valley in the north. The Central Valley is mostly farms - a little piece of the Midwest in the middle of California. If the Midwest is flyover country, the Central Valley is drive-throug...
Janus' GPT Wrangling
September 20, 2022 16:01 - 26 minutes - 36.6 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/janus-gpt-wrangling Janus (pseudonym by request) works at AI alignment startup Conjecture. Their hobby, which is suspiciously similar to their work, is getting GPT-3 to do interesting things. For example, with the right prompts, you can get stories where the characters become gradually more aware that they are characters being written by some sort of fiction engine, speculate on what’s going on, and sometimes even make pretty good guesses about the na...
Bay Area Meetups This Weekend (September 17-18 2022)
September 17, 2022 08:26 - 2 minutes - 3.28 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/bay-area-meetups-this-weekend We have three Bay Area meetups this weekend: Berkeley, at 1 PM on Sunday 9/18, at the Rose Garden Inn (2740 Telegraph Ave) San Francisco, at 11 AM on Sunday 9/18, “in the Panhandle, between Ashbury and Masonic, with an ACX sign” San Jose, at 2 PM on Saturday 9/17, at 3806 Williams Rd. Please RSVP to David Friedman (ddfr[at]daviddfriedman[dot]com) so he knows how many people are coming. I will be at the Berkeley one. ...
Unpredictable Reward, Predictable Happiness
September 15, 2022 00:20 - 25 minutes - 35.7 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/unpredictable-reward-predictable [Epistemic status: very conjectural. I am not a neuroscientist and they should feel free to tell me if any of this is totally wrong.] I. Seen on the subreddit: You Seek Serotonin, But Dopamine Can’t Deliver. Commenters correctly ripped apart its neuroscience; for one thing, there’s no evidence people actually “seek serotonin”, or that serotonin is involved in good mood at all. Sure, it seems to have some antidepres...
I Won My Three Year AI Progress Bet In Three Months
September 13, 2022 22:44 - 12 minutes - 13.2 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/i-won-my-three-year-ai-progress-bet I. DALL-E2 is bad at “compositionality”, ie combining different pieces accurately. For example, here’s its response to “a red sphere on a blue cube, with a yellow pyramid on the right, all on top of a green table”. Most of the elements - cubes, spheres, redness, yellowness, etc - are there. It even does better than chance at getting the sphere on top of the cube. But it’s not able to track how all of the words re...
Links For September 2022
September 08, 2022 23:37 - 22 minutes - 21 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-september-2022 [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: Fiber Arts, Mysterious Dodecahedrons, and Waiting On Eureka. Why did it take so...
Book Review Contest 2022 Winners
September 04, 2022 11:39 - 14 minutes - 13.2 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-contest-2022-winners Thanks to everyone who entered or voted in the book review contest. The winners are: 1st: The Dawn Of Everything, reviewed by Erik Hoel. Erik is a neuroscientist and author of the recent novel The Revelations. He writes at his Substack The Intrinsic Perspective. 2nd: 1587, A Year Of No Significance, reviewed by occasional ACX commenter McClain. =3rd: The Castrato, reviewed by Roger’s Bacon. RB is a teacher b...
The Prophet And Caesar's Wife
September 04, 2022 07:51 - 18 minutes - 17 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-prophet-and-caesars-wife I. The Prophet in his wanderings came to Cragmacnois, and found the Bishop living in a golden palace and drinking fine wines, when all around him was bitter poverty. The Bishop spent so long feasting each day that he had grown almost too fat for his fine silk robes. “Woe unto you!” said the Prophet, “The people of Cragmacnois are poor and hard-working, and they loathe the rich and the corrupt. Rightly do they hate you ...
Billionaires, Surplus, And Replaceability
August 31, 2022 10:53 - 12 minutes - 11.7 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/billionaires-surplus-and-replaceability The typical neoliberal defense of self-made billionaires goes: entrepreneurs and other businesspeople create a lot of value. EG an entrepreneur who invents/produces/markets a better car has helped people get where they’re going faster, more safely, with less pollution, etc. People value that some amount, represented by them being willing to spend money on the car. The entrepreneur should get to keep some of that...
Your Book Review: Kora In Hell
August 28, 2022 12:54 - 23 minutes - 27.3 MBFinalist #16 in the Book Review Contest https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-kora-in-hell [This is one of the finalists in the 2022 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 one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked.] Th...
Meetups Everywhere 2022: Times & Places
August 27, 2022 13:15 - 12 minutes - 17.2 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/meetups-everywhere-2022-times-and Thanks to everyone who responded to my request for ACX meetup organizers. Volunteers have arranged meetups in 205 cities around the world, including Penryn, Cornwall and Baghdad, Iraq. You can find the list below, in the following order: Africa & Middle East Asia-Pacific (including Australia) Canada Europe (including UK) Latin America United States You can see a map of all the events on the LessWrong communit...
Highlights From The Comments On The Repugnant Conclusion And WWOTF
August 27, 2022 12:26 - 39 minutes - 36.1 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-the-909 (Original post here) 1: Petey writes: When I think of happiness 0.01, I don't think of someone on the edge of suicide. I shudder at the thought of living the sorts of lives the vast majority of people have lived historically, yet almost all of them have wanted and tried to prolong their lives. Given how evolution shaped us, it makes sense that we are wired to care about our survival and hope for things to be ...
Effective Altruism As A Tower Of Assumptions
August 24, 2022 13:17 - 11 minutes - 10.5 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/effective-altruism-as-a-tower-of I have an essay that my friends won’t let me post because it’s too spicy. It would be called something like How To Respond To Common Criticisms Of Effective Altruism (In Your Head Only, Definitely Never Do This In Real Life), and it starts: Q: I don’t approve of how effective altruists keep donating to weird sci-fi charities. A: Are you donating 10% of your income to normal, down-to-earth charities? Q: Long-termism...
Book Review: What We Owe The Future
August 23, 2022 13:22 - 53 minutes - 62.2 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-what-we-owe-the-future I. An academic once asked me if I was writing a book. I said no, I was able to communicate just fine by blogging. He looked at me like I was a moron, and explained that writing a book isn’t about communicating ideas. Writing a book is an excuse to have a public relations campaign. If you write a book, you can hire a publicist. They can pitch you to talk shows as So-And-So, Author Of An Upcoming Book. Or to journa...
Your Book Review: 1587, A Year Of No Significance
August 22, 2022 16:24 - 1 hour - 71.1 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-1587-a-year-of-no Finalist #15 in the Book Review Contest [This is one of the finalists in the 2022 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 one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked.] ...
Highlights From The Comments On Subcultures
August 19, 2022 06:12 - 28 minutes - 12.8 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-subcultures 1: Maximum Limelihood Estimator writes: I firmly believe that cycles don't exist and never have existed. This is my shitposting way of saying "I have never, once, in my years of experience modeling human behavioral time series, come across an honest-to-god cyclical pattern (excluding time of year/month/week/day effects)." And yet for some reason, every time I show a time series to anyone ever, people swear ...
Skills Plateau Because Of Decay And Interference
August 18, 2022 11:03 - 13 minutes - 18 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/skills-plateau-because-of-decay-and Followup to: Why Do Test Scores Plateau; Ritalin Works But School Isn’t Worth Paying Attention To Why Do Skills Plateau? Economist Philip Frances finds that creative artists, on average, do their best work in their late 30s. Isn’t this strange? However good a writer is at age 35, they should be even better at 55 with twenty more years of practice. Sure, middle age might bring some mild proto-cognitive-impairme...
Meetups Everywhere 2022 - Call For Organizers
August 18, 2022 10:39 - 9 minutes - 12.3 MBPlease volunteer to host a meetup in your city! https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/meetups-everywhere-2022-call-for 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 at least once annually, and it's that time of year again. If you're willing to organize a meetup for your city, please fill out the...