Astral Codex Ten Podcast
922 episodes - English - Latest episode: 21 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.
Homepage Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
Episodes
Book Review: The Gervais Principle
May 11, 2022 14:25 - 53 minutes - 61.3 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-the-gervais-principle I. The Gervais Principle, by postrationalist heresiarch Venkatesh Rao, claims to be a business book. It claims a lot of things, actually. According to its introduction: By my estimate, the material in this book has already triggered . . . hazardous reflection for thousands of people over the past four years. It has triggered significant (and not always positive) career moves for dozens of people that I know of. ...
Mantic Monday 5/9/22
May 10, 2022 11:54 - 22 minutes - 25.5 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-5922 The future of abortion, plus a valiant attempt at market manipulation Warcasting Changes in Ukraine prediction markets since my last post April 18: Will at least three of six big cities fall by June 1?: 5% → 2% Will World War III happen before 2050?: 22% →25% Will Russia invade any other country in 2022?: 5% →10% Will Putin still be president of Russia next February?: 85% → 80% Peace or cease-fire before 2023?: 65% → 52% Wi...
Why Do People Prefer My Old Blog's Layout To Substack's?
May 06, 2022 11:49 - 10 minutes - 11.9 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/why-do-people-prefer-my-old-blogs This keeps coming up. When I was first considering moving to Substack, I asked my readers what they thought. They thought various things, but one of them was they hated the layout. At some point I turned this into a formal survey, and:
Every Bay Area House Party
May 04, 2022 13:17 - 26 minutes - 30.4 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/every-bay-area-house-party You walk in. The wall decorations vaguely suggest psychedelia. The music is pounding, head-splitting, amelodious. Everyone is struggling to speak over it. Everyone assumes everyone else likes it. You flee to the room furthest from the music source. Three or four guys are sitting in a circle, talking. Two girls are standing by a weird lamp, drinks in hand. You see Bob. “Hi, Bob!” “Hey, good to see you again!” “What’s new...
Highlights From The Comments On Xi Jinping
April 29, 2022 12:29 - 27 minutes - 31.9 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-xi I: Xi’s Rise To Power II: Censorship III: Anti-Corruption And Centralization IV: Miscellaneous I. Rise To Power — Erusian on Xi’s rise: > “Why did Xi succeed at gathering power, where others didn’t?” Communist leaderships choose their leaders for ideological reasons. You're reducing it to cynical power politics. But this isn't how the the Soviet premier got or the Chinese paramount leader gets selec...
Book Review: A Clinical Introduction To Lacanian Psychoanalysis
April 27, 2022 22:24 - 40 minutes - 46.4 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-a-clinical-introduction [epistemic status: I didn’t understand this book. Think of this review as detailing the ways I didn’t understand it and hypothesizing what certain parts might mean, and not as an attempt to summarize/re-explain something I understand well] I. Remember that AI? From the mesa-optimizers post a few weeks ago? It was trained to pick strawberries. The programmers rewarded it whenever it got a strawberry in its bucket...
Initial Conditions
April 23, 2022 22:00 - 4 minutes - 5.33 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/initial-conditions Consider people who go by their first and middle initials, eg John Q Smith introduces himself as “Hi, I’m J.Q.” Authors who use their initials on their books (eg J.K. Rowling) don’t count, unless they also go by their initials in everyday life. Is there any pattern to who does this - ie which initials lead people to initialize their names? Think about this for a second before you continue: . . . In my experience it’s about 5...
Contra Hoffman On Vitamin D Dosing
April 22, 2022 11:55 - 27 minutes - 31.4 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/contra-hoffman-on-vitamin-d-dosing [epistemic status: pretty uncertain about each individual fact, moderate confidence in general overview] I. Hoffman Contra Me I’ve said many times that (to a first approximation) Vitamin D is a boring bone-related chemical. Most claims that it does exciting things outside of bones - cure COVID! prevent cancer! decrease cardiovascular risk! - are hype, and have failed to stand up to replication. Ben Hoffman disa...
Highlights From The Comments On "Sadly, Porn"
April 20, 2022 13:30 - 53 minutes - 61.1 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-sadly I. The Duality Of Man Kalimac: If you write more stuff like this, I think I will just gradually stop reading this blog. Logan Strohl: For the record this is my favorite Scott essay in years. Leo Yankovic: Reading this for the first time in a long time of reading [ACX] felt like a giant waste of time. John Slow: For what it's worth, this was my favorite ACX post. Meh: You read through an ENTIRE BOOK of tha...
Mantic Monday 4/18/22
April 19, 2022 15:33 - 20 minutes - 23 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-41822 Nuclear risk, AI risk, Musk-acquiring-Twitter risk Warcasting Changes in Ukraine prediction markets since my last post March 21: Will at least three of six big cities fall by June 1?: 53% → 5% Will World War III happen before 2050?: 20% →22% Will Russia invade any other country in 2022?: 7% →5% Will Putin still be president of Russia next February?: 80% → 85% Will 50,000 civilians die in any single Ukrainian city?: 10% → 10...
Irvine Meetup This Monday
April 16, 2022 11:55 - 1 minute - 1.9 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/irvine-meetup-this-monday I’ll be in Irvine this week visiting family. I know the local meetup group already came up with a different Schelling meetup time, but I hope they don’t mind me imposing on them and trying to meet people this Monday too. When: Monday, April 18, 7:15 PM. Where: Underneath this mysterious hexagonal sigil at the University Center food court in Irvine, California. Who: Anyone who wants. Please feel free to come even if you fe...
Obscure Pregnancy Interventions: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
April 13, 2022 15:35 - 1 hour - 106 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/obscure-pregnancy-interventions-much This is intended as a sequel to my old Biodeterminist’s Guide To Parenting. It’s less ambitious, in that it focuses only on pregnancy; but also more ambitious, in that it tries to be right. I wrote Biodeterminist’s Guide in 2012, before the replication crisis was well understood, and I had too low a bar for including random crazy hypotheses. On the other hand, everyone else has too high a bar for including random...
Men Will Literally Have Completely Different Mental Processes Instead Of Going To Therapy
April 12, 2022 21:29 - 7 minutes - 8.62 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/men-will-literally-have-completely People are debating “therapy: good or bad?” again: There are dozens of kinds of therapy: reliving your traumas, practicing mindfulness, analyzing dreams, uncovering your latent desire to have sex with your mother. But most people on both sides of this debate are talking about what psychiatrists call “supportive therapy” - unstructured talking about your feelings and what’s going on in your life. I know the responsi...
Deceptively Aligned Mesa-Optimizers: It's Not Funny If I Have To Explain It
April 12, 2022 21:28 - 26 minutes - 31.1 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/deceptively-aligned-mesa-optimizers A Machine Alignment Monday post, 4/11/22 I. Our goal here is to popularize obscure and hard-to-understand areas of AI alignment, and surely this meme (retweeted by Eliezer last week) qualifies: So let’s try to understand the incomprehensible meme! Our main source will be Hubinger et al 2019, Risks From Learned Optimization In Advanced Machine Learning Systems. Mesa- is a Greek prefix which means the opposite o...
Spring Meetups In Seventy Cities
April 12, 2022 21:27 - 32 minutes - 37 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/spring-meetups-in-seventy-cities Lots of people only want to go to meetups a few times a year. And they all want to go to the same big meetups as all the other people who only go a few times a year. In 2022, we set up one big well-telegraphed meetup in the fall as a Schelling point for these people. This year, we’re setting up two. We’ll have the fall meetup as usual. If you only want to go to one meetup a year, go to that one. But we’ll also have...
Dictator Book Club: Xi Jinping
April 12, 2022 21:26 - 47 minutes - 55.3 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/dictator-book-club-xi-jinping [Previous entries: Erdogan, Modi, Orban] The Third Revolution, by Elizabeth Economy, promises to explain “the transformative changes underway in China today”. But like her namesake, Dr. Economy doesn’t always allocate resources the way I would like. I came to the book with questions like: How did the pre-Xi Chinese government work? How was it different from dictatorship? What safeguards did it have against it? Why hadn’...
Highlights From The Comments On Self-Determination
April 12, 2022 21:25 - 24 minutes - 27.9 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-self 1: Rosemary (writes Parallel Republic) says: I think a preference for the status quo has to weigh in to some extent. All else being equal, sure, I agree with the “any group large enough that it isn’t ludicrous on its face has a right to self-determination” standard. But all else is almost never equal. Someone wants to secede and someone else wants to conquer—and all of that is enormously disruptive to many othe...
Yudkowsky Contra Christiano On AI Takeoff Speeds
April 05, 2022 14:15 - 1 hour - 72.1 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/yudkowsky-contra-christiano-on-ai Previously in series: Yudkowsky Contra Ngo On Agents, Yudkowsky Contra Cotra On Biological Anchors Prelude: Yudkowsky Contra Hanson In 2008, thousands of blog readers - including yours truly, who had discovered the rationality community just a few months before - watched Robin Hanson debate Eliezer Yudkowsky on the future of AI. Robin thought the AI revolution would be a gradual affair, like the Agricultural or ...
The Low-Hanging Fruit Argument: Models And Predictions
April 02, 2022 21:09 - 15 minutes - 17.6 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-low-hanging-fruit-argument-models A followup to Contra Hoel On Aristocratic Tutoring: Imagine scientists venturing off in some research direction. At the dawn of history, they don’t need to venture very far before discovering a new truth. As time goes on, they need to go further and further. Actually, scratch that, nobody has good intuitions for truth-space. Imagine some foragers who have just set up a new camp. The first day, they forage in t...
Idol Words
April 01, 2022 22:06 - 33 minutes - 38.5 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/idol-words The woman was wearing sunglasses, a visor, a little too much lipstick, and a camera around her neck. “Excuse me,” she asked. “Is this the temple with the three omniscient idols? Where one always tells the truth, one always lies, and one answers randomly?” The center idol’s eyes glowed red, and it spoke with a voice from everywhere and nowhere, a voice like the whoosh of falling waters or the flash of falling stars. “No!” the great voice ...
Who Gets Self-Determination?
March 30, 2022 20:41 - 22 minutes - 25.9 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/who-gets-self-determination I. LSE: Fact-Checking The Kremlin’s Version Of Russian History: The notion that Ukraine is not a country in its own right, but a historical part of Russia, appears to be deeply ingrained in the minds of many in the Russian leadership. Already long before the Ukraine crisis, at an April 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest, Vladimir Putin reportedly claimed that “Ukraine is not even a state! What is Ukraine? A part of its territ...
Information Markets, Decision Markets, Attention Markets, Action Markets
March 29, 2022 12:07 - 25 minutes - 29.3 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/information-markets-decision-markets [thumbnail image credit: excellent nature photographer Eco Suparman, which is a great name for an excellent nature photographer!] Information Markets Niels Bohr supposedly said that “prediction is very difficult, especially about the future”. So why not predict the past and present instead? Here’s a recent market on Manifold (click image for link). Taylor Hawkins is a famous drummer who died last weekend unde...
Highlights From The Comments On Justice Creep
March 25, 2022 12:21 - 39 minutes - 45.2 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-justice A lot of comments on Justice Creep fell into three categories: First, people who thought some variety of: yes, all this stuff is definitely a justice issue, and it’s good that language is starting to reflect that more. For example, Adnamanil: So... as someone who actually does use "___" Justice, quite frequently, I'd like to say that I think it's a good thing to reframe "helping the poor" or "saving the poor"...
Contra Hoel On Aristocratic Tutoring
March 23, 2022 12:27 - 19 minutes - 22.2 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/contra-hoel-on-aristocratic-tutoring I. Erik Hoel has an interesting new essay, Why We Stopped Making Einsteins. It argues that an apparent decline in great minds is caused by the replacement of aristocratic tutoring by ordinary education. Hoel worries we’re running out of geniuses: Consider how rare true world-historic geniuses are now-a-days, and how different it was in the past. In “Where Have All the Great Books Gone?” Tanner Greer uses Oswal...
Mantic Monday 3/21/22
March 22, 2022 10:51 - 21 minutes - 24.5 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-32122 Warcasting Changes in Ukraine prediction markets since my last post March 14: Will Kiev fall to Russian forces by April 2022?: 14% —→ 2% Will at least three of six big cities fall by June 1?: 70% —→ 53% Will World War III happen before 2050?: 21% —→20% Will Russia invade any other country in 2022?: 10% —→7% Will Putin still be president of Russia next February?: 80% —→ 80% Will 50,000 civilians die in any single Ukrainian ci...
Highlights From The Comments On Zulresso
March 18, 2022 08:01 - 13 minutes - 15.4 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-zulresso Thanks to everyone who commented on Zounds! It’s Zulresso and Zuranolone and on the followup Progesterone Megadoses Might Be A Cheap Zulresso Substitute. I’m constantly impressed by the expertise of commenters here and on how much better the biomedical comment threads are compared to some of the others. Among the things I learned: — Metacelsus (who writes the blog De Novo) doubts the price estimates I posted:...
Justice Creep
March 17, 2022 11:56 - 8 minutes - 9.84 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/justice-creep Freddie deBoer says we’re a planet of cops. Maybe that’s why justice is eating the world. Helping the poor becomes economic justice. If they’re minorities, then it’s racial justice, itself a subspecies of social justice. Saving the environment becomes environmental justice, except when it’s about climate change in which case it’s climate justice. Caring about young people is actually about fighting for intergenerational justice. The ver...
Mantic Monday 3/14/22
March 15, 2022 19:27 - 22 minutes - 25.9 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-31422 Changes in Ukraine prediction markets since my last post February 28: Will Kiev fall to Russian forces by April 2022?: 69% —→ 14% Will at least three of six big cities fall by June 1?: 71% —→ 70% Will World War III happen before 2050?: 20% —→21% Will Russia invade any other country in 2022?: 12% —→10% Will Putin still be president of Russia next February?: 71% —→ 80% Will 50,000 civilians die in any single Ukrainian city?: 8% ...
Ukraine Thoughts And Links
March 12, 2022 12:35 - 33 minutes - 38.3 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ukraine-thoughts-and-links?s=r Disclaimer: I am not an expert in international relations or military strategy, which is fine. In democracies, it’s normal and correct for ordinary citizens to have opinions on important world issues, and demands that they not do so are ahistorical and dangerous. Still, take anything I say with a grain of salt. 1: This isn’t “history restarting” . . . yet Whatever Francis Fukuyama meant by “the end of history”, it pr...
Progesterone Megadoses Might Be A Cheap Zulresso Substitute
March 11, 2022 20:42 - 7 minutes - 8.33 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/progesterone-megadoses-might-be-a Earlier this week we talked about Zulresso, a new medication for post-partum depression. It works well, but it can only be administered at a few special hospitals, and costs $35,000 per treatment. But Zulresso is a natural metabolite of the female hormone progesterone. What’s stopping people from taking progesterone, waiting for their bodies to metabolize it into Zulresso, and saving $35,000 and a hospital stay? A...
Advice For Unwoke Academic?
March 11, 2022 12:28 - 12 minutes - 14.2 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/advice-for-unwoke-academic An academic recently asked me for advice. A lucky career development has now made him almost un-fire-able, and he wants to join the fight for academic freedom. We talked about two different strategies: Fabian Strategy: Become a beloved pillar of his college community. Volunteer for all those committees everyone always tries to weasel out of. When some wokeness-related issue comes up - merit vs. diversity hiring, wokeness stu...
Zounds! It's Zulresso and Zuranolone!
March 09, 2022 12:36 - 29 minutes - 34.6 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/zounds-its-zulresso-and-zuranolone How excited should we be about the latest class of antidepressants? 1: What is Zulresso? Wikipedia describes Zulresso as “A bat-winged, armless toad with tentacles instead of a face... ” - no! sorry! That’s Zvilpogghua, one of the Great Old Ones from the Lovecraft mythos. Zulresso is the brand name of allopregnanolone (aka brexanolone), a new medication for post-partum depression. It’s interesting as a potentia...
What Are We Arguing About When We Argue About Rationality?
March 04, 2022 21:29 - 23 minutes - 27.3 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/what-are-we-arguing-about-when-we The backstory: Steven Pinker wrote a book about rationality. The book concludes it is good. People should learn how to be more rational, and then we will have fewer problems. Howard Gardner, well-known wrong person, sort of criticized the book. The criticism was facile, a bunch of stuff like “rationality is important, but relationships are also important, so there”. Pinker’s counterargument is dubious: Gardner’s e...
Microaddictions
March 03, 2022 14:09 - 5 minutes - 6.32 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/microaddictions Everyone always says you should “eat mindfully”. I tried this once and it was weird. For example, I noticed that only the first few bites of a tasty food actually tasted good. After that I habituated and lost it. Not only that, but there was a brief period when I finished eating the food which was below hedonic baseline. This seems pretty analogous to addiction, tolerance, and withdrawal. If you use eg heroin, I’m told it feels very g...
Ukraine Warcasting
March 01, 2022 13:12 - 57 minutes - 66.1 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ukraine-warcasting Yeah, I know you’re saturated with Ukraine content. Yeah, I know everyone wants to relate their hobbyhorse to Ukraine. But I think it’s genuinely useful to talk about prediction markets right now. Current conventional wisdom is that the invasion was a miscalculation on Putin’s part, after he surrounded himself with so many yes-men that he lost touch with reality. But Ukraine miscalculated too; until almost the day of the invasion, ...
Austin Meetup Correction
February 26, 2022 13:33 - 1 minute - 1.47 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/austin-meetup-correction?utm_source=url Austin meetup is still this Sunday, 2/27, 12-3. But the location has been switched to Moontower Cider Company at 1916 Tillery St. The organizer is still [email protected] , and you can still contact him if you have any questions. As per usual procedure, everyone is invited. Please feel free to come even if you feel awkward about it, even if you’re not “the typical ACX reader”, even if you’re worried peop...
Biological Anchors: A Trick That Might Or Might Not Work
February 24, 2022 20:10 - 1 hour - 81.9 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/biological-anchors-a-trick-that-might?utm_source=url Introduction I've been trying to review and summarize Eliezer Yudkowksy's recent dialogues on AI safety. Previously in sequence: Yudkowsky Contra Ngo On Agents. Now we’re up to Yudkowsky contra Cotra on biological anchors, but before we get there we need to figure out what Cotra's talking about and what's going on. The Open Philanthropy Project ("Open Phil") is a big effective altruist foundatio...
Links For February
February 23, 2022 13:50 - 31 minutes - 36.5 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-february?utm_source=url [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 newest studies don’t find evidence that extracurriculars like chess...
Play Money And Reputation Systems
February 22, 2022 14:00 - 18 minutes - 20.9 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/play-money-and-reputation-systems?utm_source=url For now, US-based prediction markets can’t use real money without clearing near-impossible regulatory hurdles. So smaller and more innovative projects will have to stick with some kind of play money or reputation-based system. I used to be really skeptical here, but Metaculus and Manifold have softened my stance. So let’s look closer at how and whether these kinds of systems work. Any play money or ...
Austin Meetup Next Sunday
February 19, 2022 21:48 - 1 minute - 2.16 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/austin-meetup-next-sunday?utm_source=url I’ll be in Austin on Sunday, 2/27, and the meetup group there has kindly agreed to host me and anyone else who wants to show up. We’ll be at RichesArt (an art gallery with an outdoor space) at 2511 E 6th St Unit A from noon to 3. The organizer is [email protected] , you can contact him if you have any questions. As per usual procedure, everyone is invited. Please feel free to come even if you feel awkward...
The Gods Only Have Power Because We Believe In Them
February 18, 2022 14:53 - 11 minutes - 13.4 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-gods-only-have-power-because?utm_source=url [with apologies to Terry Pratchett and TVTropes] “Is it true,” asked the student, “that the gods only have power because we believe in them?” “Yes,” said the sage. “Then why not appear openly? How many more people would believe in the Thunderer if, upon first gaining enough worshipers to cast lightning at all, he struck all of the worst criminals and tyrants?” “Because,” said the sage, “the gods ...
Book Review: Sadly, Porn
February 18, 2022 14:48 - 1 hour - 87.2 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-sadly-porn I. Freshman English class says all books need a conflict. Man vs. Man, Man vs. Self, whatever. The conflict in Sadly, Porn is Author vs. Reader. The author - the pseudonymous “Edward Teach, MD” - is a spectacular writer. Your exact assessment of his skill will depend on where you draw the line between writing ability and other virtues - but where he’s good, he’s amazing. Nobody else takes you for quite the same kind of ride....
Mantic Monday: Ukraine Cube Manifold
February 15, 2022 11:52 - 20 minutes - 23.8 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-ukraine-cube-manifold?r=fm577 Ukraine Thanks to Clay Graubard for doing my work for me: These run from about 48% to 60%, but I think the differences are justified by the slightly different wordings of the question and definitions of “invasion”. You see a big jump last Friday when the US government increased the urgency of their own warnings. I ignored this on Friday because I couldn’t figure out what their evidence was, but it looks ...
Highlights From The Comments On Motivated Reasoning And Reinforcement Learning
February 13, 2022 14:28 - 23 minutes - 27 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-motivated I. Comments From People Who Actually Know What They’re Talking About Gabriel writes: The brain trains on magnitude and acts on sign. That is to say, there are two different kinds of "module" that are relevant to this problem as you described, but they're not RL and other; they're both other. The learning parts are not precisely speaking reinforcement learning, at least not by the algorithm you described. ...
ACX Grants ++: The Second Half
February 11, 2022 12:41 - 1 hour - 101 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/acx-grants-the-second-half This is the closing part of ACX Grants. Projects that I couldn’t fully fund myself were invited to submit a brief description so I could at least give them free advertising here. You can look them over and decide if any seem worth donating your money, time, or some other resource to. I’ve removed obvious trolls, a few for-profit businesses without charitable value who tried to sneak in under the radar, and a few that violat...
So You Want To Run A Microgrants Program
February 10, 2022 12:35 - 50 minutes - 58.2 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/so-you-want-to-run-a-microgrants I. Medical training is a wild ride. You do four years of undergrad in some bio subject, ace your MCATs, think you’re pretty hot stuff. Then you do your med school preclinicals, study umpteen hours a day, ace your shelf exams, and it seems like you're pretty much there. Then you start your clinical rotations, get a real patient in front of you, and you realize - oh god, I know absolutely nothing about medicine. This...
Heuristics That Almost Always Work
February 09, 2022 12:02 - 17 minutes - 19.5 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/heuristics-that-almost-always-work The Security Guard He works in a very boring building. It basically never gets robbed. He sits in his security guard booth doing the crossword. Every so often, there’s a noise, and he checks to see if it’s robbers, or just the wind. It’s the wind. It is always the wind. It’s never robbers. Nobody wants to rob the Pillow Mart in Topeka, Ohio. If a building on average gets robbed once every decade or two, he might ...
Two Small Corrections And Updates
February 09, 2022 12:00 - 2 minutes - 2.78 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/two-small-corrections-and-updates 1: I titled part of my post yesterday “RIP Polymarket”, which was a mistake. Polymarket would like to remind everyone that they are very much alive, with a real-money market available to anyone outside the US, and some kind of compliant US product (maybe a play-money market) in the works. 2: Sam M and Eric N want to remind you that you have until the end of next week to get your 2022 prediction contest entries in. ...
The Passage Of Polymarket
February 08, 2022 10:59 - 19 minutes - 22.2 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-passage-of-polymarket RIP Polymarket, Long Live Polymarket Polymarket got fined $1.4 million by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and was ordered to cease noncompliant trading in the US. Polymarket is probably the biggest prediction market currently available. US law considers unlicensed prediction markets to be somewhere between illegal gambling and illegal futures trading, ie definitely illegal. Polymarket and a few peers had survived ...
Book Review Contest Rules 2022
February 05, 2022 11:41 - 4 minutes - 4.62 MBhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-contest-rules-2022 Okay, we’re officially doing this again. Write a review of a book. There’s no official word count requirement, but last year’s finalists and winners were often between 2,000 and 10,000 words. There’s no official recommended style, but check the style of last year’s finalists and winners or my ACX book reviews (1, 2, 3) if you need inspiration. Please limit yourself to one entry per person or team. Then send me your re...