Astral Codex Ten Podcast

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-online-culture [Followup to: New Atheism: The Godlessness That Failed] I. Introduction You've probably seen these graphs before: They tell a familiar story: America is becoming increasingly obsessed with racism and sexism. Identity issues are dominating our politics more and more with no end in sight. But what does Google Trends have to say? I chose these as especially obvious terms. But other gender-related terms

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-years-of-lyndon [This is the ninth of many finalists in the book review contest. It's not by me - it's by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. I'll be posting about two of these a week for several months. When you've read all of them, I'll ask you to vote for your favorite, so remember which ones you liked. If you like reading these reviews, check out point 3 here for a way you can help move the contest forward by reading lots more of them - SA] Despite appearances, this is not a biography. It's actually an epic fantasy series that happens to be true. A young man grows up on the edge of civilization, decides to fix his father's mistakes, turns to the dark side for power, wins victories despite the odds, betrays his mentors, and smashes the oppressive status quo. There's even a Bilbo. (Instead of Bilbo Baggins, it's Senator Bilbo, a white supremacist who says things like "the pure and undefiled Caucasian strain" while he's on the Senate floor.) 1: Memorable characters Sam Rayburn: Speaker of the House. He had so much integrity that he scared other members of Congress. Alvin Wirtz: LBJ's evil lawyer. (For non-Americans, Lyndon Baines Johnson was often abbreviated as LBJ.) "Wirtz was the kind of lawyer who would slip into a contract a sentence---a sentence that changed the contract's meaning---in the hope that the opposing lawyer would not notice it."

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-through-the-eye [This is the eighth of many finalists in the book review contest. It's not by me - it's by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. I'll be posting about two of these a week for several months. When you've read all of them, I'll ask you to vote for your favorite, so remember which ones you liked. If you like reading these reviews, check out point 3 here for a way you can help move the contest forward by reading lots more of them - SA] Rome, 401 AD. The great pagan Roman senator, Symmachus, sponsors games to celebrate his eighteen year old son becoming praetor. Romans who witness the pageantry were still talking about it a generation later. There were theatrical displays in a flooded amphitheater. Symmachus brought crocodiles from the Nile, bears from the Balkans, great Irish wolfhounds from Britain, lions from the southern mountains of north Africa, antelopes and gazelles trapped along the edges of the Sahara, Saxon prisoners of war to serve as gladiators (all twenty of whom, frustratingly for Symmachus, committed suicide before the games, strangling each other with their own hands in their prison cells). Powerful Romans had displayed their wealth and civic love in the same way for the greater part of a millennium. Within a generation, much of the wealth of great senators like Symmachus was lost or slipped into the Christian church. Goths sacked the city of Rome. Vandals conquered wealthy north Africa and the great city of Carthage. Over the next hundred years, western Europe and north Africa completed their transformation from a classical pagan society to a medieval Christian one. It was not only a political revolution. "It was in this world that the conglomerate of ideas that medieval persons took for granted was first formed." This period rivals the Enlightenment as the most dramatic transformation of the West. Background on the Author Peter Brown, is an English historian and the Rollins Professor of History Emeritus at Princeton. He's one of the great scholars of "Late Antiquity." He is sometimes regarded as the inventor of the field (per Wikipedia). I'm not a historian, but I am interested in the world of classical Rome and Greece. I'm interested in men and women struggling to maintain systems and hold off collapse. The end of the Roman society is probably the best documented and most accessible example. Thus I first came across Peter Brown's work in the extremely readable "The World of Late Antiquity" from 1971. The short, introductory work got me hooked, so I read Brown's 2014 book "Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD."

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/why-is-it-hard-to-acknowledge-preferences I recently stayed at a B&B owned by a nice elderly couple. Very, very nice. The moment I stepped in the door, they asked how my flight was, where I was from, what I did, how I'd enjoyed my three minutes of visiting their city so far, what kind of food I liked, what my favorite color was, et cetera. I played along - no point in offending people - but I warned that my friend, who would be arriving a little later, was much more introverted, and would appreciate being efficiently directed to her room without the welcome committee. A little later, my friend arrived. From my room, I could hear them start welcoming her, ask her how her flight had been, start trying to get to know her - until I ran out and rescued her, for which she reports gratitude. For the rest of our stay, they continued to talk both of our ears off, with my friend growing increasingly annoyed and uncomfortable.

Explore how the global economy shifted dramatically around 1970, leading to the rise of neoliberalism. Discover the socioeconomic turmoil of New York City during that era, driven by financial mismanagement. Delve into the tensions between corporate interests and public welfare, alongside the global dimensions of neoliberalism, including foreign ownership and national debt concerns. The podcast also contemplates the potential resurgence of social democratic movements in response to historical neoliberal practices.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/if-you-can-be-bad-you-can-also-be Support the author Scott Alexander on Substack. https://astralcodexten.substack.com/ Spotted on Reddit about the rationalist community: I like the culture while hating a lot of the specifics...however[,] there is no such thing as "rationality" that is free from ideology. I've got to admit, I hate this argument. Also related ones, like: "They say we're politicizing this scientific field. But no science is inherently apolitical. There are political assumptions wrapped up with everything we do." Or: "They say we're 'biased', but there's no such thing as a view-from-nowhere objectivity that doesn't import any assumptions. Everyone's biased, we're just not trying to deny it like they are."

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-wizard-and-the [This is the seventh of many finalists in the book review contest. It's not by me - it's by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. I'll be posting about two of these a week for several months. When you've read all of them, I'll ask you to vote for your favorite, so remember which ones you liked. If you like reading these reviews, check out point 3 here for a way you can help move the contest forward by reading lots more of them - SA] Some books really stick with me. Like, literally, stick with me: I'm one of those people with pretentious literary tattoos. So far, just two books have been meaningful enough for me to permanently etch their totem on my skin: the glyph of the underground postal service from The Crying of Lot 49, and the line "Everything Is Permitted," Jean-Paul Sartre's misquoting of Dostoevsky's take on atheism from The Brothers Karamazov. (I wasn't kidding about pretentious!) People have all sorts of reasons for getting tattoos – mine are there for some of the standard superficial ones (looking cool and tough, obviously), but also to act as little daily mantras for how I want to live and think about the world. To this very short list of inked paragons, I'm thinking of adding a new one: a few stylized stalks of wheat in honor of Charles Mann's The Wizard and the Prophet. According to the instructions on the tin, The Wizard and the Prophet is meant to outline the origin of two opposing attitudes toward the relationship between humans and nature through their genesis in the work and thought of two men: William Vogt, the "Prophet" polemicist who founded modern-day environmentalism, and Norman Borlaug, the "Wizard" agronomist who spearheaded the Green Revolution. Roughly speaking, Wizards want continual growth in human numbers and quality of life, and to use

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-double-fold [This is the sixth of many finalists in the book review contest. It's not by me - it's by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. I'll be posting about two of these a week for several months. When you've read all of them, I'll ask you to vote for your favorite, so remember which ones you liked. If you like reading these reviews, check out point 3 here for a way you can help move the contest forward by reading lots more of them - SA] If you enter a major research library in the US today and request to see a century-old issue of a major American newspaper, such as Chicago Tribune, The Wall Street Journal, or major-but-defunct newspapers such as the New York "World," odds are that you will be directed to a computer or a microfilm reader. There, you'll get to see black-and-white images of the desired issue, with individual numbers of the newspaper often missing and much of the text, let alone pictures, barely decipherable. The libraries in question mostly once had bound issues of these newspapers, but between the 1950s and the 1990s, one after another, they ditched the originals in favor of expensive microfilmed copies of inferior quality. They continued doing this even while the originals became perilously rare; the newspapers themselves were mostly trashed, or occasionally sold to dealers who cut them up and dispersed them. As a consequence, many of these publications are now rarer than the Gutenberg Bible, and some 19th and 20th century newspapers have ceased to exist in a physical copy anywhere in the world.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/nootropics-survey-2020-results Thanks to the 852 of you who took the 2020 SSC nootropics survey. I asked people to rate various nootropics on whether they "worked" or not, deliberately leaving the question kind of vague. This is using a broad definition of "nootropics" - any supplement or taken-outside-the-usual-medical-system drug that's purported to have mental health effects. Most of the chemicals I asked about were supposed stimulants, anxiolytics, or antidepressants. I'll start with the headline results, then go into details: Nootropic (sample size in parentheses), adjusted mean rating 1-10 (note truncated axis!), and 95% confidence interval. Click to expand. I tried to include a mix of common and well-studied nootropics as a baseline, plus some newer rarer substances nobody had looked into before. Predictably, the common substances got large sample sizes, and the rare substances got small ones. I excluded etifoxene, RGPU-95, and white jelly mushrooms from the graph because the sample was so small that the confidence interval would have covered the entire displayed range. A few substances on there are based off only 5 - 10 data points. I did a sort of ad hoc Bayesian adjustment where I assumed a prior of "average" for every substance and let the data try to push it away from that, which helped the numbers swing around a little less wildly.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-predictions-for-2021 At the beginning of every year, I make predictions. At the end of every year, I score them. This year I'm really late. So here are a hundred plus for 2021. Rules: unless otherwise stated, all predictions are about what will be true on/by January 1, 2022. Some predictions about my personal life, or that refer to the personal lives of other people, have been redacted to protect their privacy. I've tried to avoid doing specific research or looking at prediction markets when I made these, though some of them I already knew what the markets said. This isn't about me being an expert on these topics and getting them exactly right, it's about me calibrating my ability to tell how much I know about things and how certain I am. I'm also moving towards trying to learn to predict shorter-term and more specific events as they happen - you can see my log here. US/WORLD1. Biden approval rating (as per 538) is greater than 50%: 80% 2. Court packing is clearly going to happen (new justices don't have to be appointed by end of year): 5% 3. Yang is New York mayor: 80% 4. Newsom recalled as CA governor: 5% 5. At least $250 million in damage from BLM protests this year: 30% 6. Significant capital gains tax hike (above 30% for highest bracket): 20% 7. Trump is allowed back on Twitter: 20% 8. Tokyo Olympics happen on schedule: 70% 9. Major flare-up (significantly worse than anything in past 5 years) in Russia/Ukraine war: 20% 10. Major flare-up (significantly worse than anything in past 10 years) in Israel/Palestine conflict: 5% 11. Major flare-up (significantly worse than anything in past 50 years) in China/Taiwan conflict: 5% 12. Netanyahu is still Israeli PM: 40% 13. Prospera has at least 1000 residents: 30%