Astral Codex Ten Podcast

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-march Warning: 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, so you may want to read this online instead of in an email, to catch the edits. Some of these are from my six-month backlog and may be outdated. 1: From a colonel writing for the US Naval Institute - Unleash The Privateers! "The United States should issue letters of marque to fight Chinese aggression at sea." 2: Elizabeth (AcesoUnderGlass) on what she learned by studying the recession of 1973. "My best guess is that something was going wrong in the US and world economy well before 1971, but the market was not being allowed to adjust. Breaking Bretton Woods took the finger out of the dyke and everything fluctuated wildly for a few years until the world reached a new equilibrium." 3: There's been a lot of anecdotal evidence that hurricanes have gotten stronger in recent years; a new study confirms that the rate at which hurricanes qualify as "major" (winds above 100 knots) goes up by about 8% per decade. 4: Honduras is working on the charter city of Prospera, a "semi-autonomous" "hub for sustainable economic development" on the island of Roatan. See their goals here - eg it takes 17 steps, 32 days, and $12,000 to get a business permit elsewhere in Honduras, but should take only one step, one day, and $200 to get it in Prospera. Some locals seem skeptical and concerned, though the project denies it will use eminent domain. 5: The Ghetto Tarot is an artist's attempt to replicate Tarot cards in the slums of Port-au-Prince, Haiti. EG:

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/shilling-for-big-mitochondria In the 1930s, a shady outfit called Isabella Laboratories made a popular over-the-counter diet pill called Formula 281 (slogan: "281 for the too weighty one"). If you're familiar with any of: the 1930s, shady pharma, or diet pills, your next question will be "did it contain amphetamines?". Actually, no! It contained 2,4-dinitrophenol, a mitochondrial uncoupling agent. DNP is that rarest of birds: a weight-loss pill which really works, no diet or exercise required. About 100,000 people used it in the mid-1930s. On average, they lost about 2 to 5 pounds per week, for however many weeks they wanted to keep losing it. The formula stayed popular until it was banned by the FDA in 1938, about one second after Congress passed the law saying the FDA could ban things. What was the catch? Well, several catches, really. Many users went blind. Others got rashes, liver problems, kidney problems, or peripheral neuropathy. A few died horribly, apparently burning to death from the inside. Occasionally the DNP would just explode - the "di-nitro" of DNP is pretty similar to the "tri-nitro" of TNT, and it turns out that's not a coincidence. As far as I know, DNP is the only substance to be banned by both the FDA and the Department of Homeland Security for unrelated reasons.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-scoring-rule-controversy Metaculus scoring rule controversy Zvi considered using some Metaculus markets for his weekly coronavirus roundup, but was turned off by the scoring rules. Ross Rheingans-Yoo writes about the issue here. Everyone agrees Metaculus' scoring rule is "proper", a technical term meaning that it correctly incentivizes you to choose the probability you think is true. Zvi and Ross's objection is that it doesn't correctly incentivize you about whether to bet at all, or how much effort to put into betting. For example, on many questions, you can make guaranteed-positive bets - you'll gain points on the prediction even if you were maximally wrong. If you were trying to maximize your Metaculus points, you would bet on all of these questions. If you were trying to maximize your Metaculus points in a limited amount of time, you might even bet on them without investigating at all. The person who spends one second picking a random number on a thousand questions will get more points than someone who spends an hour researching a really good answer to one question.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/bay-area-plant-based-meat-reviews By this point you've probably tried Impossible Burgers, and you know that restaurants can do some pretty impressive things with them. But there are so many interesting meat dishes - what if you want something other than a burger? This market is still developing, but I live in the Bay Area, which is probably its epicenter. And I'm mostly-vegetarian, so I have no choice but to try it out. I tried eight restaurants which offered unusual plant-based meat dishes. Here are my reviews. Unlike many other food critics, I freely admit I have no taste. There's nothing about subtle flavors or quality ingredients in here, because I would get that stuff wrong. This is just about whether I, a mostly-vegetarian person who likes the taste of meat, felt like these plant-based meat options succeeded at resembling animal products. (yes, I'm deliberately mocking myself by publishing this the day after the post on classism)

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/a-modest-proposal-for-republicans Read this first: Book Review: Fussell On Class Dear Republican Party: I hear you're having a post-Trump identity crisis. Your old platform of capitalism and liberty and whatever no longer excites people. Trump managed to excite people, but you don't know how to turn his personal appeal into a new platform. Most of what he said was offensive, blatantly false, or alienated more people than it won; absent his personal magic it seems like a losing combination. You seem to have picked up a few minority voters here and there, but you're not sure why, and you don't know how to build on this success. I hate you and you hate me. But maybe I would hate you less if you didn't suck. Also, the more confused you are, the more you flail around sabotaging everything. All else being equal, I'd rather you have a coherent interesting message, and make Democrats shape up to compete with you. So here's my recommendation: use the word "class". Pivot from mindless populist rage to a thoughtful campaign to fight classism. Yeah, yeah, "class" sounds Marxist, class warfare and all that, you're supposed to be against that kind of thing, right? Wrong. Economic class warfare is Marxist, but here in the US class isn't a purely economic concept. Class is also about culture. You're already doing class warfare, you're just doing it blindly and confusedly. Instead, do it openly, while using the words "class" and "classism".

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-fussell-on-class I. Paul Fussell wants to talk about class. (well, wanted, past tense, it's a 1983 book, we'll come back to that later) He recognizes this might not be the most popular topic. When he tells people he's writing a book on class in America, "it is as if I had said I am working on a book urging the beating to death of baby whales using the dead bodies of baby seals." America likes to think of itself as a classless society. Sure, there may be vast wealth inequality, but at least there's no nobility; beggars and billionaires are the same type of citizen. Paul Fussell will have none of it. He believes America has one of the most hypertrophied class systems in the world, that its formal equality has left a niche that an informal class system expanded to fill - and expanded, and expanded, until it surpassed the more-legible systems of Europe and became its own sort of homegrown monstrosity. He says he prefers the term "caste system" to "class system" when describing America, conveying as it does a more rigid and inescapable distinction, and that he uses "class" only out of respect for conventional usage.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-judging-april-covid Since this is getting broader than just Metaculus, I'm changing the name to Mantic Monday, after an obscure word for "oracular" (and changing the preview image to a mantis, since I don't know how else to visually represent "mantic". And posting it early Tuesday morning because I'm late). In April 2020, I made my yearly predictions, and many of them were about the (then new) coronavirus pandemic. Two other people on Less Wrong, Zvi and Bucky, decided to test themselves against me by trying to predict the same questions. Zvi saw my answers beforehand; Bucky didn't. Here's how we did (except where otherwise stated, all predictions are for 12/31/20): Black statements are those judged true, red statements false. The numbers on the left are our predictions, so for example I said there was a 60% chance that Bay Area lockdowns would extend beyond June 15. You can see a list of the full questions and why I graded them the way I did in the appendix at the bottom. I scored these using a logarthmic scoring rule, adjusted so that guessing 50-50 always gave zero points. It's not very intuitive. Getting everything maximally right gives a score of about 14; guessing 50-50 for everything gives a score of 0, getting everything maximally wrong gives a score of negative infinity.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/a-look-down-track-b I. Depression probably has something to do with decreased synaptogenesis in the brain, maybe the hippocampus in particular. Neurons are less likely to respond to stimuli by connecting to other neurons. The whole network becomes sparser than usual, and dysfunctional thought-loops that thrive in sparse network conditions start taking over. We understand parts of the pathways that regulate synaptic growth. When the body wants more synapses, it releases neurotrophic hormones like BDNF (brain-derived neurotrophic factor). These activate various receptors including tropomyosin receptor kinase B (TrkB, affectionately pronounced "track B" because it's one of two related pathways for these signals). TrkB then something Ras mTORC something something synaptogenesis now you're not depressed anymore hooray. Pictured: BDNF binds to TrkB. The IRS confiscates 1/2 of it as taxes, which radicalizes the receptor and makes it join Gab (see footnote 1), where it tweets out an SOS message to the Ras of Ethiopia. But the left wing of the receptor joins the Palestine Liberation Council and moves to California (see footnotes 2+). California has sunshine and good beaches, so you stop feeling depressed. This part sort of makes sense. But it coexists uneasily with other puzzle pieces in our knowledge of depression. For example, we give people SSRIs, their serotonin levels go up, and this makes them feel better. Why? Because of BDNF something TrkB something mTORC something? Probably; mice with dysregulated BDNF/TrkB systems don't benefit from antidepressants. But why does more serotonin cause BDNF something TrkB something? I've looked for years for a paper that says something like "by the way, serotonin makes cells release more BDNF". But despite a few suggestive links I don't see anyone strongly asserting that they understand this.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ezra-klein-on-vetocracy In my review last week of Ezra Klein's Why We're Polarized, I linked to a related Vox article on vetocracy: In a viral essay, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen makes a simple exhortation: It's time to build. Behind the coronavirus crisis, he writes, lies "our widespread inability to build." America has been unable to create enough coronavirus tests, or even enough cotton swabs to fully utilize the tests we do have. We don't have enough ventilators, ICU beds, personal protection equipment. The government hasn't built the capacity to quickly get money to people or businesses who need it. And it's not just the coronavirus. The US could be building our way out of the housing crisis and the climate crisis. We could be building a better education system, more advanced infrastructure. We could have more and better factories, supersonic aircraft, delivery drones, flying cars [...] I think Andreessen is uncharacteristically underestimating the appetite for building. The absence of creation doesn't reflect an absence of desire — even in that epicenter of supposed stagnation, Washington, DC. I've covered Congress for almost 20 years. The place is littered with proposals to construct universal pre-K and reimagine the health system, to decarbonize the US economy and incentivize drug development through prizes and solve the housing crisis. They just don't pass. It's become a running joke in Washington that every week is "infrastructure week." But we're not rebuilding American infrastructure

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-cult DeBoer argued that charter schools succeed through selection effects: they only take the best students. Several commenters pointed out this was illegal. It is, but they've found loopholes. Here's Alexander H: I attended a charter school all 4 years quite recently. Admissions was entirely by lottery, open to everyone in the district. I can tell you that even in freshman year, the student body was not even remotely close to representative of normal kids; it was basically an entire school of the kids who would normally be in gifted / accelerated programs. And by graduation, it was even more refined to super talented & smart people, because the students who left to go back to their local normal schools were mostly from the rear of the pack. I think that I got a lot better of an education there than I would have at my local school, and I would attribute more of that to the quality of my classmates than to the teachers or curriculum , though both of which were also better [...] [Despite the lottery, admission was selected by] whose parents were involved enough, interested enough in education, valued education enough. Simple as that, I think. Michael Pershan recommends his own review of a book on Success Academy. A key quote: