Astral Codex Ten Podcast

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-modi-a-political-biography   I. I have a friend who studied the history of fascism. She gets angry when people call Trump (or some other villain du jour) fascist. "Words have meanings! Fascism isn't just any right-winger you dislike!" Maybe she takes this a little too far; by a strict definition, she's not even sure Franco qualifies. Anyway, I mention this because she says Narendra Modi, the current prime minister of India, is absolutely, literally, a fascist. This is a strong claim, but Balakrishna Moonje helped found the precursor to Modi’s party. He went on a fact-finding trip to fascist Italy, met Mussolini, decided he had the right idea, and told the Indian papers that he wanted to: "...imitate the youth movement of Germany and the Balilla and Fascist organisations of Italy. I think they are eminently suited for introduction in India, adapting them to suit the special conditions. I have been very much impressed by these movements and I have seen their activities with my own eyes in all details." So let's at least say this isn't the least fascist-inspired group around. It’s not that there aren’t extenuating circumstances. Indian independence movements of the time were fighting Britain, which made the fascist powers natural allies. And in 1934 when Moonje met Mussolini nobody had seen just how badly fascism could go. Still, not the sort of pedigree you want for your country's ruling party.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/washington-dc-meetup-this-saturday   When: Saturday, September 11th, 5 PM Where: decent.search.hurls, aka the patio and lot around 1002 N St. NW. Who: Anyone who wants. 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 people won’t like you, etc. Also, me! I’ll be there on my meetups tour and hope to meet many of you. If you’re somewhere other than DC, check the spreadsheet to find the closest meetup to you.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-unbearable-semiheaviness-of-being   I hear that Google tests prospective employees with weird vaguely-science-related riddles. If I were in charge of this, here's what I would ask: You're an American spy in Cuba. The CIA has gotten you a position refilling the water coolers in Castro's presidential palace, hoping you can poison him. But Castro's security is pretty good. Every time you enter the palace, they search you so exhaustively that you're sure you can't smuggle anything in. And you're sure you can't access any poisons within the palace. And every time he drinks water, Castro calls in a chemist to test it for any impurity first; the tests can detect any contaminant at any concentration. On the plus side, you're completely unsupervised within the palace, and have access to a kitchen with all the usual kitchen appliances. And the CIA has given you a time manipulation gizmo, so you can take literally as long as you want, even if it’s thousands of years. How do you kill Castro? One answer: Start with an amount of water several thousand times Castro's usual daily consumption. Put it in the freezer until it's half frozen. Dump out the unfrozen half, melt the frozen half, then repeat this process with the meltwater. After some very large number of cycles, put the result in Castro's water cooler every day. He'll be dead within a year. The hydrogen in water is a combination of normal hydrogen (only a proton in the nucleus) and deuterium (a proton and neutron in the nucleus). These have slightly different chemical properties, so you can do various types of distillation to enrich for one or the other, including repeated freezing (realistically freezing works very slowly; our hypothetical spy would need an unrealistic amount of time, water, and patience). Normal water is about 99.9% H2O, 0.1% HDO, and negligible amounts of D2O. Water with more D2O than normal is called heavy water, water with more HDO than normal is called semiheavy water, and water with more H2O than normal (ie not even the usual tiny amounts of the other two constituents) is called light water.  

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/too-good-to-check-a-play-in-three I. Seen on Twitter: In case you find this hard to follow: ivermectin is an antiparasitic drug that looked promising against COVID in early studies. Later it started looking less promising, and investigators found that a major supporting study was fraudulent. But by this point it had gotten popular among conspiracy theorists as a suppressed coronavirus cure that They Don’t Want You To Know. The media has tried to spread the word that the scientific consensus remains skeptical. In the process, they may have gone a little overboard and portrayed it as the world’s deadliest toxin that will definitely kill you and it will all somehow be Donald Trump’s fault. It turned into the latest culture war issue, and now there’s a whole discourse on (for example) how supposedly-sober fact-checkers keep calling it "a horse dewormer” (it is used to deworm horses, but it’s also FDA-approved for humans, but lots of the people using it are buying the horse version), and probably this is hypocritical in some way. Enter the article above. A doctor named Jason McElyea apparently told local broadcaster KFOR that Oklahoma hospitals are “overwhelmed” with ivermectin poisoning cases, so much so that “gunshot victims” are “left waiting”. Some of the world’s biggest news outlets heard the story and ran with it. The tweet mentions the Rolling Stone version, but the same story, with the same doctor’s testimony, got picked up by The Guardian, the BBC, Yahoo News, etc.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/new-york-meetup-this-monday   When: Monday, 9/6. I’ll be arriving at 5 PM but some other people might get there earlier, around 3. Where: swung.shape.shows, aka Teardrop Park in Lower Manhattan Who: Anyone who wants. 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 people won’t like you, etc. Also, me! I’ll be there on my meetups tour and hope to meet many of you. The New York organizers have asked me to link their LW event page and their meetup group’s Google Group for organizing future events. If you’re somewhere other than New York, check the spreadsheet to find the closest meetup to you.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/boston-meetup-this-sunday When: Sunday, 9/5, 5 PM Where: area.bricks.tribune, aka John F Kennedy Park in Cambridge, near the picnic tables. Who: Anyone who wants. 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 people won’t like you, etc. Also, me! I’ll be there on my meetups tour and hope to meet many of you. Some rationalist/EA leaders are focusing on Boston right now as a promising place to community-build. They’re especially trying to expand the student groups at Harvard and MIT. If you live in Boston and/or attend either of those colleges, then - whether or not you can make it Sunday - consider giving them your name through this form so they can help get you connected. If you’re somewhere other than Boston, check the spreadsheet to find the closest meetup to you.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/long-covid-much-more-than-you-wanted Like everyone else, I'm trying to figure out how cautious I should be around COVID. It seems like the most important concern for young vaccinated people like myself is the risk of Long COVID symptoms, so I spent a while trying to figure out what those were. My basic conclusion is that everyone else is right, that news stories on this phenomenon seem remarkably good, and that there's not much we know for sure beyond the simple summary you've probably already heard. Insofar as anything surprised me, it was how bad the worst-case scenario would be. Here are some of the basic things I found: 1. Long COVID is probably a lot of different things, some of which are boring and obvious, others of which are still kind of mysterious. First, people with severe COVID that lands them in the ICU have long-lasting symptoms in multiple organ systems. This isn't surprising, and should be considered in the context of post-ICU syndrome. Basically, if anything makes you sick enough to land in the ICU, your body is going to be pretty scarred by the illness (and maybe also by the inevitable side effects of intensive care), and this will last a long time and cause many problems. EG if you’re bedridden for many weeks, your muscles waste away, and then it takes a long time for them to recover and you feel weak and fragile until you do. Or if your lungs stop working and you need mechanical ventilation, your lungs might be pretty weak for a while, and other parts of your body might not get quite the amount of oxygen they’re used to and might get damaged in a way that takes a long time to recover. There’s a similar problem where if you are sufficiently old and frail, any illness will take you down a level of functioning and you might not be able to get up a level again. See for example this article discussing how about 1/5 of elderly flu patients have “persistent functional decline” and may never regain their pre-flu level of functioning. Second, even in young people with milder cases, COVID can sometimes cause lung damage. If you get lung damage, you’ll have at least breathing problems, and maybe other problems. Your lungs will probably heal eventually, but some kinds of lung healing cause permanent scarring; this can present as shortness of breath on exertion, or become a problem later after other lung injuries.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/on-hreha-on-behavioral-economics   Jason Hreha’s article on The Death Of Behavioral Economics has been going around lately, after an experiment by behavioral econ guru Dan Ariely was discovered to be fraudulent. The article argues that this is the tip of the iceberg - looking back on the last few years of replication crisis, behavioral economics has been undermined almost to the point of irrelevance. The article itself mostly just urges behavioral economists to do better, which is always good advice for everyone. But as usual, it’s the inflammatory title that’s gone viral. I think a strong interpretation of behavioral economics as dead or debunked is unjustified. I. My medical school had final exams made of true-false questions, with an option to answer “don’t know”. They were scored like so: if you got it right, +1 point; wrong, -0.5 points; don’t know, 0. You can easily confirm that it’s always worth guessing even if you genuinely don’t know the answer (+0.25 points on average instead of 0). On average people probably had to guess on ~30% of questions (don’t ask; it’s an Irish education system thing), so you could increase your test score 7.5% with the right strategy here. I knew all this, but it was still really hard to guess. I did it, but I had to fight my natural inclinations. And when I talked about this with friends - smart people, the sort of people who got into medical school! - none of them guessed, and no matter how much I argued with them they refused to start. The average medical student would sell their soul for 7.5% higher grades on standardized tests - but this was a step too far.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/berkeley-meetup-this-saturday When: Saturday, August 28, at 1 PM Where: deflection.jump.puppy, aka the lawn where West Circle meets Free Speech Bikeway near the UC Berkeley parking lot. Who: Anyone who wants. Please feel free to come even if you feel awkward about it, even if you’re not “the typical SSC reader”, even if you’re worried people won’t like you, etc. Also, me! I’m starting my meetups tour there. I’ll be announcing the meetups on the tour (about 15 of them) on this blog a day or two before they happen. Sorry for the potential spam emails if none of them are relevant to you. If you’re somewhere other than Berkeley, check the spreadsheet to find the closest meetup to you.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-missing   [Original article: Kids Can Recover From Missing Even A Lot Of School] I. Many commenters shared their own stories of missing lots of school and bouncing back from it. For example, Rachel E: I was unschooled until I was 15, I'm pursuing a PhD now. Catching up on the basics wasn't easy but only took a few months. There are still a bunch of random general knowledge things I don't know, but at most it's caused a moment of embarrassment in social situations (e.g., when I genuinely thought dinosaurs were mythical creatures). BUT I was motivated to catch up, which I think makes a big difference. I'd say most kids probably don't care too much about their education, so for them, missing school might matter more And ral: Hear, hear. I had serious medical problems in grade 5, needed a major surgery in grade 6, and was told I'd have to miss a year. My parents tried homeschooling, rigorously followed a bunch of curricula, and discovered I could finish *all* the assigned coursework in 2 hours/day and spend the rest of the time reading my favorite books. We were so unimpressed by the time wasted in "regular school" that we kept homeschooling another 2 years. I now have a PhD, but those were among the best days of my life. And Pepe: If you are interested in an anecdote: I did not go to high school (well, attended for two or three months) and now I have a PhD from a very good university. Not receiving any formal education between the ages of 16 and 23 does not seem to have affected my ability to do college (and later grad school) level work.