Episodes
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[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.]
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/links-for-may-2024
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There’s been renewed debate around Bryan Caplan’s The Case Against Education recently, so I want to discuss one way I think about this question.
Education isn’t just about facts. But it’s partly about facts. Facts are easy to measure, and they’re a useful signpost for deeper understanding. If someone has never heard of Chaucer, Dickens, Melville, Twain, or Joyce, they probably haven’t learned to appreciate great literature. If someone can’t identify Washington, Lincoln, or either Roosevelt, they probably don’t understand the ebb and flow of American history. So what facts does the average American know?
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/a-theoretical-case-against-education
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Missing episodes?
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In my book review of The Others Within Us, I wrote:
[An Internal Family Systems session] isn’t supposed to be just the therapist walking you through guided imagery, or you making up a story you tell yourself. The therapist asks you “Look inside until you find the part that’s sabotaging your relationship”, and you are supposed to discover - not invent, discover - that your unconscious gives it the form of a snake called Sabby. And you are supposed to hear as in a trance - again, not invent - Sabby telling you that she’s been protecting you from heartbreak since your last breakup. When you bargain with Sabby, it’s a two-way negotiation. You learn - not decide - whether or not Sabby agrees to any given bargain. According to Internal Family Systems (which descends from normal family systems, ie family therapy where the whole family is there at once and has to compromise with each other), all this stuff really is in your mind, waiting for an IFS therapist to discover it. When Carl Jung talked about interacting with the archetypes or whatever, he wasn’t being metaphorical. He literally meant “go into a trance that gives you a sort of waking lucid dream where you meet all this internal stuff”.
Some IFS therapists chimed in to say this was wrong. For example, DaystarEld:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/what-is-going-on-in-ifs
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Internal Family Systems, the hot new psychotherapy, has a secret.
“Hot new psychotherapy” might sound dismissive. It’s not. There’s always got to be one. The therapy that’s getting all the buzz, curing all the incurable patients, rocking those first few small studies. The therapy that was invented by a grizzled veteran therapist working with Patients Like You, not the out-of-touch elites behind all the other therapies. The therapy that Really Gets To The Root Of The Problem. There’s always got to be one, and now it’s IFS.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-others-within-us
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It's time to narrow the 150 entries in the Book Review Contest to about a dozen finalists. I can't read 150 reviews alone, so I need your help.
You'll find the entries in six Google Docs (thanks to a reader for collating them):
A - D
E - I
L - P
R - S
Th - The N
The O - Y
Please pick as many as you have time for, read them, and rate them using this form.
Don’t read them in order! If you read them in order, I’ll have 1,000 votes on the first review, 500 on the second, and so on to none in the second half. Either pick a random review (thanks to AlexanderTheGrand and Taymon for making a random-review-chooser script here) or pick whichever seems most interesting to you. List of all books reviewed below.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/choose-book-review-finalists-2024
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Suffering is part of the human condition, except when it isn't.
I met a man at an ACX meetup once who claimed he has never felt anxiety, not even the littlest bit. His father was the same way, so maybe it's genetic.
Some people feel more pain than others. The “more pain” category includes some big demographic groups like redheads, who seem to feel some types of pain more intensely and may need up to 20% more anaesthetic, though their exact processing differences are complicated. But there are also various lesser-known genetic conditions that can make bizarre things - water, light touch, mild temperature changes - excruciatingly painful. The most exotic cause of this syndrome has to be platypus venom, which is both painful in and of itself and also seems to increase the body’s overall capacity to feel pain; for years after a platypus scratch, every tiny scrape will hurt worse than usual.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/profile-the-far-out-initiative
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Manifold pivot || Lab leak hindcasting || CFTC extra-double-bans prediction markets
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/mantic-monday-51324
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Most recent post here.
Table Of Contents:
1: Comments From Robin
2: Comments About/From Goldin et al
3: Comments From The Rest Of You Yokelshttps://www.astralcodexten.com/p/mantic-monday-51324
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If you’re from a country that doesn’t have emotional support animals, here’s how it works.
Sometimes places ban or restrict animals. For example, an apartment building might not allow dogs. Or an airline might charge you money to transport your cat. But the law requires them to allow service animals, for example guide dogs for the blind. A newer law also requires some of these places to allow emotional support animals, ie animals that help people with mental health problems like depression or anxiety. So for example, if you’re depressed, but having your dog nearby makes you feel better, then a landlord has to let you keep your dog in the apartment. Or if you’re anxious, but petting your cat calms you down, then an airline has to take your cat free of charge.
Clinically and scientifically, this is great. Many studies show that pets help people with mental health problems. Depressed people really do benefit from a dog who loves them. Anxious people really do feel calmer when they hold a cute kitten.
Legally, it’s a racket.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-emotional-support-animal-racket
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California’s state senate is considering SB1047, a bill to regulate AI. Since OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta are all in California, this would affect most of the industry.
If the California state senate passed a bill saying that the sky was blue, I would start considering whether it might be green, or colorless, or maybe not exist at all. And people on Twitter have been saying that this bill would ban open-source AI - no, all AI! - no, all technology more complicated than a toaster! So I started out skeptical.
But Zvi Mowshowitz (summary article in Asterisk, long FAQ on his blog) has looked at it more closely and found:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/asteriskzvi-on-californias-ai-bill
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Original post here.
Table Of Contents:1: Response From The Author
2: Attempted Fact Checks
3: People With Personal Experience At Their Workplace
4: People With Personal Experience In Civil Rights
5: The Origins Of Modern Wokeness
6: Other Countries
7: EEOC Lawsuits
8: Other Good Comments
9: Conclusions And Updateshttps://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-the-cf9
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The Origins Of Woke, by Richard Hanania, has an ambitious thesis. And it argues for an ambitious thesis. But the thesis it has isn’t the one it argues for.
The claimed thesis is “the cultural package of wokeness is downstream of civil rights law”. It goes pretty hard on this. For example, there’s the title, The Origins Of Woke. Or the Amazon blurb: “The roots of the culture lie not in the culture itself, but laws and regulations enacted decades ago”. Or the banner ad:=
The other thesis, the one it actually argues for, is “US civil rights law is bad”. On its own, this is a fine thesis. A book called Civil Rights Law Is Bad would - okay, I admit that despite being a professional Internet writer I have no idea how the culture works anymore, or whether being outrageous is good or bad for sales these days. We’ll never know, because Richard chose to wrap his argument in a few pages on how maybe this is the origin of woke or something. Still, the book is on why civil rights law is bad.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke
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Robin Hanson replied here to my original post challenging him on health care here.
On Straw-ManningRobin thinks I’m straw-manning him. He says:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/response-to-hanson-on-health-care
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In November 2022, Aella posted this Twitter poll:
19% of women without pre-menstrual symptoms believed in the supernatural, compared to 39% of women with PMS. I can’t do chi-squared tests in my head, but with 1,074 votes this looks significant. Weird!
Here’s another one
Now 72% of people with PMS self-describe as neurotic, compared to only 45% without. Aella writes more about this here, and sebjenseb confirms here. I’m less weirded out by this one, because you can imagine that people feel neurotic because of PMS symptoms, but it’s still a surprisingly strong effect.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/survey-results-pms-symptoms
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One of the most common arguments against AI safety is:
Here’s an example of a time someone was worried about something, but it didn’t happen. Therefore, AI, which you are worried about, also won’t happen.
I always give the obvious answer: “Okay, but there are other examples of times someone was worried about something, and it did happen, right? How do we know AI isn’t more like those?” The people I’m arguing with always seem so surprised by this response, as if I’m committing some sort of betrayal by destroying their beautiful argument.
The first hundred times this happened, I thought I must be misunderstanding something. Surely “I can think of one thing that didn’t happen, therefore nothing happens” is such a dramatic logical fallacy that no human is dumb enough to fall for it. But people keep bringing it up, again and again. Very smart people, people who I otherwise respect, make this argument and genuinely expect it to convince people!
Usually the thing that didn’t happen is overpopulation, global cooling, etc. But most recently it was some kind of coffeepocalypse:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/desperately-trying-to-fathom-the
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Robin Hanson of Overcoming Bias more or less believes medicine doesn’t work [EDIT: see his response here, where he says this is an inaccurate summary of his position. Further chain of responses here and here]
This is a strong claim. It would be easy to round Hanson’s position off to something weaker, like “extra health care isn’t valuable on the margin”. This is how most people interpret the studies he cites. Still, I think his current, actual position is that medicine doesn’t work. For example, he writes:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/contra-hanson-on-medical-effectiveness
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[previously in series: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
When that April with his sunlight fierce
The rainy winter of the coast doth pierce
And filleth every spirit with such hale
As horniness engenders in the male
Then folk go out in crop tops and in shorts
Their bodies firm from exercise and sports
And men gaze at the tall girls and the shawties
And San Franciscans long to go to parties.https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/ye-olde-bay-area-house-party
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Lumina, the genetically modified anti-tooth-decay bacterium that I wrote about in December, is back in the news after lowering its price from $20,000 to $250 and getting endorsements from Yishan Wong, Cremieux, and Richard Hanania (as well as anti-endorsements from Saloni and Stuart Ritchie). A few points that have come up:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/updates-on-lumina-probiotic
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Original post here. Table of contents below. I want to especially highlight three things.
First, Saar wrote a response to my post (and to zoonosis arguments in general). I’ve put a summary and some my responses at 1.11, but you can read the full post on the Rootclaim blog.
Second, I kind of made fun of Peter for giving some very extreme odds, and I mentioned they were sort of trolling, but he’s convinced me they were 100% trolling. Many people held these poorly-done calculations against Peter, so I want to make it clear that’s my fault for mis-presenting it. See 3.1 for more details.
Third, in my original post, I failed to mention that Peter also has a blog, including a post summing up his COVID origins argument.
Thanks to some people who want to remain anonymous for helping me with this post. Any remaining errors are my own.
1: Comments Arguing Against Zoonosis
— 1.1: Is COVID different from other zoonoses?
— 1.2: Were the raccoon-dogs wild-caught?
— 1.3: 92 early cases
— 1.4: COVID in Brazilian wastewater
— 1.5 Biorealism’s 16 arguments
— 1.6: DrJayChou’s 7 arguments
— 1.7: How much should coverup worry us?
— 1.8: Have Worobey and Pekar been debunked?
— 1.9: Was there ascertainment bias in early cases
— 1.10: Connor Reed / Gwern on cats
— 1.11: Rootclaim’s response to my post2: Comments Arguing Against Lab Leak
— 2.1: Is the pandemic starting near WIV reverse correlation?3: Other Points That Came Up
— 3.1: Apology to Peter re: extreme odds
— 3.2: Tobias Schneider on Rootclaim’s Syria Analysis
— 3.3: Closing thoughts on Rootclaim4: Summary And Updates
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-the-5d7
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[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.]
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/links-for-april-2024
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