Astral Codex Ten Podcast

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.