Astral Codex Ten Podcast

https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/08/29/reverse-voxsplaining-drugs-vs-chairs/ [Content note: this is pretty much a rehash of things I've said before, and that other people have addressed much more eloquently. My only excuse for wasting your time with it again is that SOMEHOW THE MESSAGE STILL HASN'T SUNK IN. Pitching this as "market" vs. "government" is overly simplistic, but maybe if I am overly simplistic sometimes then it will sink in better.] EpiPens, useful medical devices which reverse potentially fatal allergic reactions, have recently quadrupled in price, putting pressure on allergy sufferers and those who care for them. Vox writes that this "tells us a lot about what's wrong with American health care" – namely that we don't regulate it enough: The story of Mylan's giant EpiPen price increase is, more fundamentally, a story about America's unique drug pricing policies. We are the only developed nation that lets drugmakers set their own prices, maximizing profits the same way sellers of chairs, mugs, shoes, or any other manufactured goods would.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/27/a-modern-myth/ 1. Eris A middle-aged man, James, had come on stage believing it was an audition for American Idol. It wasn't. Out ran his ex-lover, Terri. "You said you loved me!" she said. "And then when I got pregnant, you disappeared! Twenty years, and you never even sent me a letter!" The crowd booed. As James tried to sputter a response, his wife ran onto the stage. "You cheating jerk!" she shouted at James. "You lying, cheating jerk! Twenty-five years we've been married, and I never…" She picked up a folding chair, tried to swing it at James. "Stop!" cried James' teenage daughter Katie, joining in the fray. "Mom, Dad, stop it!"

https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/08/a-theory-of-religion/ Related to Monday's post but spun off for length reasons: my crazy theory about where religion comes from. The near-universal existence of religion across cultures is surprising. Many people have speculated on what makes tribes around the world so fixated on believing in gods and propitiating them and so on. More recently people like Dawkins and Dennett have added their own contributions about parasitic memes and hyperactive agent-detection. But I think a lot of these explanations are too focused on a modern idea of religion. I find ancient religion much more enlightening. I'm no historian, but from the little I know ancient religion seems to bleed seamlessly into every other aspect of the ancient way of life. For example, the Roman religion was a combination of mythology, larger-than-life history, patriotism, holidays, customs, superstitions, rules about the government, beliefs about virtue, and attempts to read the future off the livers of pigs. And aside from the pig livers, this seems entirely typical.

Link: https://slatestarscratchpad.tumblr.com/post/633822178059730944/here-are-the-nine-ways-the-election-could-end You are Joseph R. Biden Jr. You sit in a convention center in Delaware, surrounded by advisors and confidantes. You are acutely aware that the hopes of a hundred million people are with you. You feel like they should be more tangible, like being the focus of a hundred million minds should at least make your skin tingle a tiny bit - like being a vessel for so much power should make your skin crack and burst. It does not. You feel nothing at all. Maybe it's because they don't really love you. You're the compromise candidate, you've never lied about that to yourself.

I. Why is there such a strong Sunni/Shia divide? I know the Comparative Religion 101 answer. The early Muslims were debating who was the rightful caliph. Some of them said Abu Bakr, others said Ali, and the dispute has been going on ever since. On the other hand, that was fourteen hundred years ago, both candidates are long dead, and there's no more caliphate. You'd think maybe they'd let the matter rest. Sure, the two groups have slightly different hadith and schools of jurisprudence, but how many Muslims even know which school of jurisprudence they're supposed to be following? It seems like a pretty minor thing to have centuries of animus over. And so we return again to Robbers' Cave:

This week the SSC Meetup features guest speaker Jason Crawford, author the blog The Roots of Progress, discussing 'the non-linear model of innovation.' "Innovation is often described with a "linear" model from discovery to invention to distribution. There is an element of truth in this, but a naive interpretation of the model does not match the reality of science and invention. In this talk, I'll show the feedback mechanisms between discovery and invention and how they are intertwined, using examples including the transistor at Bell Labs and the career of Louis Pasteur."

I. There was an argument on Tumblr which, like so many arguments on Tumblr, was terrible. I will rephrase it just a little to make a point. Alice said something along the lines of "I hate people who frivolously diagnose themselves with autism without knowing anything about the disorder. They should stop thinking they're 'so speshul' and go see a competent doctor." Beth answered something along the lines of "I diagnosed myself with autism, but only after a lot of careful research. I don't have the opportunity to go see a doctor. I think what you're saying is overly strict and hurtful to many people with autism." Alice then proceeded to tell Beth she disagreed, in that special way only Tumblr users can. I believe the word "cunt" was used. I notice two things about the exchange. First, why did Beth take the bait? Alice said she hated people who frivolously self-diagnosed without knowing anything about the disorder. Beth clearly was not such a person. Why didn't she just say "Yes, please continue hating these hypothetical bad people who are not me"? Second, why did Alice take the bait? Why didn't she just say "I think you'll find I wasn't talking about you?"

I. One of the most interesting responses I got to my post supporting the junior doctors strike was by Salem, who said that this situation was (ethically) little different than that around adjunct professors, who also become overworked and miserable trying to break into a high-status profession. Salem very kindly didn't directly accuse me of hypocrisy, but maybe he should have. While I sympathize with adjuncts' terrible conditions, my natural instinct is to say feedback mechanisms should keep doing their work. You can probably trace the argument- imagine a simplified toy model where the only two jobs are professor and salesperson, and being a professor is fun and high-status but being a salesperson is boring and low-status. Everyone will become a professor, and this will decrease the demand for professors and increase the demand for salespeople until the employers involved change their policies accordingly. Eventually it will stabilize where the nonmonetary advantages of being a professor are perfectly compensated by the monetary advantages of being a salesperson. If professors are getting paid shockingly little, it means the system is sending a signal that the nonmonetary advantages of being a professor are shockingly high, or else why would people keep trying? If we demand that professors get paid more, then we're letting them keep all their nonmonetary advantages over salespeople but demanding they have monetary advantages as well. It destroys the system's incentives to have people go into less fun but nevertheless necessary fields.

David Friedman on Legal Systems Very Different from Ours: A brief survey of a range of legal system, past and present, from Imperial China and Periclean Athens to modern Amish and Romany. David Friedman is an academic economist with a doctorate in physics recently retired from spending the previous twenty-three years teaching in a law school. His first book, The Machinery of Freedom: Guide to a Radical Capitalism, was published in 1973 and includes a description of how a society with property rights and without government might function. There as elsewhere, he offers a consequentialist defense of libertarianism. His most recent non-fiction book is Legal Systems Very Different from Ours, covering systems from Periclean Athens through modern Amish and Romany. He is also the author of three novels, one commercially published and two self-published, and, with his wife, a self-published medieval and renaissance cookbook and a larger self-published book related to their hobby of historical recreation. Much of his published work, including journal articles, essays, drafts of forthcoming work and the full text of several books, can be read on his web page: https://www.daviddfriedman.com

[Epistemic status: not very serious] [Content note: May make you feel overly scrutinized] Sometimes I hear people talking about how nobody notices them or cares about anything they do. And I want to say…well… Okay. The Survey of Earned Doctorates tells us that the United States awards about a hundred classics PhDs per year. I get the impression classics is more popular in Europe, so let's say a world total of five hundred. If the average classicist has a fifty year career, that's 25,000 classicists at any given time. Some classicists work on Rome, so let's say there are 10,000 classicists who focus solely on ancient Greece. Estimates of the population of classical Greece center around a million people, but classical Greece lasted for several generations, so let's say there were ten million classical Greeks total. That gives us a classicist-to-Greek ratio of 1:1000.