Astral Codex Ten Podcast

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-phrase-no-evidence-is-a-red-flag https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-phrase-no-evidence-is-a-red-flag Related to: Doctor, There Are Two Types Of No Evidence; A Failure, But Not Of Prediction. I. Click to enlarge Every single one of these statements that had "no evidence" is currently considered true or at least pretty plausible. In an extremely nitpicky sense, these headlines are accurate. Officials were simply describing the then-current state of knowledge. In medicine, anecdotes or hunches aren't considered "real" evidence. So if there hasn't been a study showing something, then there's "no evidence". In early 2020, there hadn't yet been a study proving that COVID could be airborne, so there was "no evidence" for it. On the other hand, here is a recent headline: No Evidence That 45,000 People Died Of Vaccine-Related Complications. Here's another: No Evidence Vaccines Cause Miscarriage. I don't think the scientists and journalists involved in these stories meant to shrug and say that no study has ever been done so we can't be sure either way. I think they meant to express strong confidence these things are false.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ancient-plagues During our recent discussion of climate change, someone linked me to this New York Magazine piece making the case for doomism. I disagree with it pretty intensely, but most of my complaints are already listed in the sidebar (some scientists also complained, so they had to add a lot of sidebar caveats in) and I don't want to belabor them. The section I find interesting is the one called Climate Plagues: There are now, trapped in Arctic ice, diseases that have not circulated in the air for millions of years — in some cases, since before humans were around to encounter them. Which means our immune systems would have no idea how to fight back when those prehistoric plagues emerge from the ice. The Arctic also stores terrifying bugs from more recent times. In Alaska, already, researchers have discovered remnants of the 1918 flu. They actually extracted it from the cadaver of a frozen woman. that infected as many as 500 million and killed as many as 100 million — about 5 percent of the world's population and almost six times as many as had died in the world war for which the pandemic served as a kind of gruesome capstone. As the BBC reported in May, scientists suspect smallpox and the bubonic plague are trapped in Siberian ice, too — an abridged history of devastating human sickness, left out like egg salad in the Arctic sun. Experts caution that many of these organisms won't actually survive the thaw and point to the fastidious lab conditions under which they have already reanimated several of them - the 32,000 year old "extremophile" bacteria revived in 2005, an 8 million-year-old bug brought back to life in 2007, the 3.5 million-year-old one that a Russian scientist self-injected just out of curiosity - to suggest that those are necessary conditions for the return of such ancient plagues. But already last year, a boy was killed and 20 others infected by anthrax released when retreating permafrost exposed the frozen carcass of a reindeer killed by the bacteria at least 75 years earlier; 2,000 present-day reindeer were infected too, carrying and spreading the disease beyond the tundra.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/does-georgism-work-part-3-can-unimproved [Lars Doucet won this year's Book Review Contest with his review of Henry George's Progress and Poverty. Since then, he's been researching Georgism in more depth, and wants to follow up with what he's learned. I'll be posting three of his Georgism essays here this week, and you can read his other work at Fortress Of Doors] Hi, my name's Lars Doucet (not Scott Alexander), and this is a guest post in an ongoing series that assesses the empirical basis for the economic philosophy of Georgism.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/does-georgism-work-part-2-can-landlords [Lars Doucet won this year's Book Review Contest with his review of Henry George's Progress and Poverty. Since then, he's been researching Georgism in more depth, and wants to follow up with what he's learned. I'll be posting three of his Georgism essays here this week, and you can read his other work at Fortress Of Doors] Hi, my name's Lars Doucet (not Scott Alexander), and this is a guest post in an ongoing series that assesses the empirical basis for the economic philosophy of Georgism. Part 0 - Book Review: Progress & Poverty Part I - Is Land Really a Big Deal? Part II - Can Land Value Tax be passed on to Tenants? 👈 (You are here) Part III - Can Unimproved Land Value be Accurately Assessed Separately from Buildings? There were a lot of great comments to Part I. Most zeroed in on the practical aspects of implementing Georgism, such as how to deal with what Gordon Tullock calls The Transitional Gains Trap. Others brought up various perceived political obstacles and a few other topics (yes, I know about zoning, which is also a big deal). With a few exceptions, I didn't see much pushback on the core thesis of Part I, that land is a really big deal. In fact, many of the strongest opponents of LVT seem opposed precisely because they agree that land is a big deal.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/does-georgism-work-is-land-really [Lars Doucet won this year's Book Review Contest with his review of Henry George's Progress and Poverty. Since then, he's been researching Georgism in more depth, and wants to follow up with what he's learned. I'll be posting three of his Georgism essays here this week, and you can read his other work at Fortress Of Doors] Hi, my name's Lars Doucet (not Scott Alexander) and this is a guest post in an ongoing series that assesses the empirical basis for the economic philosophy of Georgism. Part 0 - Book Review: Progress & Poverty Part I - Is Land Really a Big Deal? 👈 (You are here) Part II - Can Land Value Tax be Passed on to Tenants? Part III - Can Unimproved Land Value be Accurately Assessed Separately from Buildings? Extremely special thanks to Count Bla and Alexandra Elbakyan

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/diseasonality [epistemic status: conjecture and speculation in something that isn't really my field] I. It's still not totally clear why some diseases are seasonal. Seasonal diseases usually peak in late winter - so around January/February in the Northern Hemisphere and July/August in the Southern. Around the equator, which lacks seasons, they're less predictable and happen throughout the year. The best known seasonal diseases are flu and colds. But viral diarrhea and chickenpox also qualify, as do older mostly-eradicated diseases like measles and diphtheria. The seasonal flu (source) The novel coronavirus is probably seasonal-ish, although it's hard to tell since so much stuff keeps happening to make it better (vaccines) or worse (new variants). The most common theories for disease seasonality are: Pathogens like the cold Pathogens like low humidity People are cramped indoors during the winter People have low vitamin D during the winter, and vitamin D helps fight pathogens None of these are really satisfactory on their own. Cold and humidity are definitely important - scientists can make flu spread faster or slower in guinea pigs just by altering the temperature and humidity of their cages. But it can't just be cold and humidity. But if it was just cold, you would expect flu to track temperature instead of seasonality. Alaska is colder in the summer than Florida in the winter, so you might expect more summer flu in Alaska than winter flu in Florida. But Alaska and Florida both have lots of flu in the winter and little flu in the summer. (if it was just humidity, same argument, but change the place names to Arizona and Florida.)

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/model-city-monday-12621 Tegucigalpa, Honduras The socialist opposition has won Honduras' election and pledges to fight against charter cities there. "Immediately upon assuming the presidency, we are going to send the National Congress an initiative for the repeal of the ZEDE law," incoming president Xiomara Castro said. This was what everyone was afraid of. But the last party tried pretty hard to protect ZEDEs from trigger-happy successors, and the constitution currently says that the only way to get rid of them is to win two consecutive 2/3 votes to do so, then give the existing projects ten years to wind down. Can the socialists get a 2/3 majority? Wikipedia predicts the incoming Honduran Congress will look like this:

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-lifespan [epistemic status: non-expert review of a book on a highly technical subject, sorry. If you are involved in biochemistry or anti-aging, feel free to correct my mistakes] David Sinclair - Harvard professor, celebrity biologist, and author of Lifespan - thinks solving aging will be easy. "Aging is going to be remarkably easy to tackle. Easier than cancer" are his exact words, which is maybe less encouraging than he thinks. There are lots of ways that solving aging could be hard. What if humans worked like cars? To restore an old car, you need to fiddle with hundreds of little parts, individually fixing everything from engine parts to chipping paint. Fixing humans to such a standard would be way beyond current technology. Or what if the DNA damage theory of aging was true? This says that as cells divide (or experience normal wear and tear) they don't copy their DNA exactly correctly. As you grow older, more and more errors creep in, and your cells become worse and worse at their jobs. If this were true, there's not much to do either: you'd have to correct the DNA in every cell in the body (using what template? even if you'd saved a copy of your DNA from childhood, how do you get it into all 30 trillion cells?) This is another nonstarter.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mm-omicron-variant Noah Smith has a good summary of the Omicron evidence here, including a lot of quotes from experts. But experts say a lot of stuff like "well, it could be bad, but we can't be sure", plus sometimes they disagree. This is the kind of situation where prediction markets are useful, so let's look at them. (source: Metaculus) R0 is a measure of how quickly a disease spreads under certain ideal conditions. The original Wuhan strain was probably around 2.5, and the Delta variant was probably around 5. So if this number is higher than 5, it's more transmissible than Delta. The community prediction is 7.31, so Metaculus predicts it will be significantly more transmissible than Delta. (source: Metaculus) Metaculus didn't want to wade in to precise lethality statistics, so they just asked for a yes-or-no answer on whether it would be deadlier than Delta. Forecasters say there's a 34% chance it will be. The specific resolution criteria is if at least 3 of the first 4 studies find a statistically significant difference "favoring" Omicron. That feels pretty strict to me, so you should think of this as the probability that it will be really noticeably deadlier than Delta.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/06/14/the-virtue-of-silence/ Leah Libresco writes a couple of essays (1, 2) on an ethical dilemma reported in the New York Times. In the course of a confidential medical history, a doctor hears her patient is suffering from stress-related complaints after having sent an innocent man to prison. The doctor wants to know whether it is ethical to report the matter to the police. The Times' columnist says yes – it would save the poor prisoner. Leah says no – violating medical confidentiality creates an expectation that medical confidentiality will be violated in the future, thus dooming patients who are too afraid to talk about drug use or gay sex or other potentially embarrassing but important medical risk factors.