Astral Codex Ten Podcast

https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/24/guided-by-the-beauty-of-our-weapons/ [Content note: kind of talking around Trump supporters and similar groups as if they're not there.] I. Tim Harford writes The Problem With Facts, which uses Brexit and Trump as jumping-off points to argue that people are mostly impervious to facts and resistant to logic: All this adds up to a depressing picture for those of us who aren't ready to live in a post-truth world. Facts, it seems, are toothless. Trying to refute a bold, memorable lie with a fiddly set of facts can often serve to reinforce the myth. Important truths are often stale and dull, and it is easy to manufacture new, more engaging claims. And giving people more facts can backfire, as those facts provoke a defensive reaction in someone who badly wants to stick to their existing world view. "This is dark stuff," says Reifler. "We're in a pretty scary and dark time." He admits he has no easy answers, but cites some studies showing that "scientific curiosity" seems to help people become interested in facts again. He thinks maybe we can inspire scientific curiosity by linking scientific truths to human interest stories, by weaving compelling narratives, and by finding "a Carl Sagan or David Attenborough of social science".

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/05/28/creationism-unchallenged/ How much should responsible news organizations report on stupid things? If they don't report at all, the stupid things go unchallenged. But if they report too much, then they signal-boost the stupid thing and give it free publicity (eg Donald Trump). Also, people who mistrust the media might reflexively support the stupid thing just because the media hates it (eg Donald Trump). Also, the more time you waste covering stupid things, the less time you have for real news (eg Donald Trump). I recently read Causes And Consequences Of Mainstream Media Dissemination Of Fake News: Literature Review And Synthesis, which argues that the news might be covering too many stupid things right now. The authors note that "only 2.6% of visits to current affairs articles were to fake news websites" (though other sources suggest more) and that the mainstream press bears some responsibility for spreading inaccuracies beyond this small demographic. But they also understandably worry that maybe if the mainstream press wasn't so aggressive in covering and debunking fake news, then fake news would go uncorrected.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/05/26/my-immortal-as-alchemical-allegory/ I. From Vox: Solving The Mystery Of The Internet's Most Beloved And Notorious Fanfic. The fanfic is "My Immortal", a Harry Potter story so famous that it has its own Wikipedia page, and articles about it in Slate, Buzzfeed, and The Guardian. It's famous for being really, really bad. Spectacularly bad. Worse than it should be possible for anything to be. You wouldn't think you could get The Guardian to write an article about how bad your fanfiction was, but here we are. Everyone agrees that it must have taken a genius to make something so awful, but until recently nobody knew who had authored the pseudonymous work. The Vox article investigates and finds it was probably small-time author Theresa Christodoupolos, who goes by the pen name Rose Christo. But this leaves other mysteries unresolved. Like: what is going on with it? Its plot makes little sense – characters appear, disappear, change names, and merge into one another with no particular pattern. Even its language is fluid, somewhere between misspelled English and a gibberish that can at best produce associations suggestive of English words.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/05/18/coronalinks-5-18-20-when-all-you-have-is-a-hammer-everything-starts-looking-like-a-dance/ It is the sixty-first day of shelter-in-place. Anti-lockdown protesters have stormed your state capitol, chanting Nazi, Communist, ISIS, and pro-Jeffrey Epstein slogans to help you figure out they're the bad guys. Inside, the Governor has just finished announcing his 37 step plan to reopen the state over the next ten years. You kind of feel like he should be a little more proactive, but the protesters outside have just unfurled a Khmer Rouge flag, so you hold your tongue. Meanwhile, a band of renegade economists, tech billionaires, and MIT professors has just announced a bold disruptive Manhattan-Project-style moonshot: send a team of researchers to the swamps of Florida, where legends speak of a Fountain of Youth whose water can cure any malady. But disaster strikes when Florida's governor announces that exploration is not an essential activity, and threatens to release the quarantine enforcement lions. The nation looks to the White House to solve the growing conflict, but President Trump is too busy evangelizing his latest coronavirus cure: eating those little packets of silica gel in food that say DO NOT EAT. As the Western States Pact and the Eastern Bloc inch closer to war, all that the rest of us can do is strive to stay as well-informed as possible, trying to make sense out of an increasingly nonsensical situation. So:

https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/09/16/cardiologists-and-chinese-robbers/ I. It takes a special sort of person to be a cardiologist. This is not always a good thing. You may have read about one or another of the "cardiologist caught falsifying test results and performing dangerous unnecessary surgeries to make more money" stories, but you might not have realized just how common it really is. Maryland cardiologist performs over 500 dangerous unnecessary surgeries to make money. Unrelated Maryland cardiologist performs another 25 in a separate incident. California cardiologist does "several hundred" dangerous unnecessary surgeries and gets raided by the FBI. Philadelphia cardiologist, same. North Carolina cardiologist, same. 11 Kentucky cardiologists, same. Actually just a couple of miles from my own hospital, a Michigan cardiologist was found to have done $4 million worth of the same. Etc, etc, etc. My point is not just about the number of cardiologists who perform dangerous unnecessary surgeries for a quick buck. It's not even just about the cardiology insurance fraud, cardiology kickback schemes, or cardiology research data falsification conspiracies. That could all just be attributed to some distorted incentives in cardiology as a field. My point is that it takes a special sort of person to be a cardiologist.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/05/12/studies-on-slack/ I. Imagine a distant planet full of eyeless animals. Evolving eyes is hard: they need to evolve Eye Part 1, then Eye Part 2, then Eye Part 3, in that order. Each of these requires a separate series of rare mutations. Here on Earth, scientists believe each of these mutations must have had its own benefits – in the land of the blind, the man with only Eye Part 1 is king. But on this hypothetical alien planet, there is no such luck. You need all three Eye Parts or they're useless. Worse, each Eye Part is metabolically costly; the animal needs to eat 1% more food per Eye Part it has. An animal with a full eye would be much more fit than anything else around, but an animal with only one or two Eye Parts will be at a small disadvantage. So these animals will only evolve eyes in conditions of relatively weak evolutionary pressure. In a world of intense and perfect competition, where the fittest animal always survives to reproduce and the least fit always dies, the animal with Eye Part 1 will always die – it's less fit than its fully-eyeless peers. The weaker the competition, and the more randomness dominates over survival-of-the-fittest, the more likely an animal with Eye Part 1 can survive and reproduce long enough to eventually produce a descendant with Eye Part 2, and so on.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/05/05/book-review-contest-call-for-entries/ Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to write a book review and send it to me at scott[at]slatestarcodex[dot]com before August 5th 2020. Interested? Here's the small print (written in normal-sized print, for your convenience): Pick a book, then write a review similar to my SSC book reviews (examples). I'm mostly expecting reviews of nonfiction, but I guess you could review fiction if you really wanted and had something interesting to say beyond just "here's the plot and I thought it was good". I'll choose some number of finalists – probably around five, but maybe more or less depending on how many I get – and publish them on the blog, with full attribution, just like with the adversarial collaborations. Then readers will vote for the best, just like with the adversarial collaborations. First place will get at least $1000, second place $500, third place $250 – I might increase those numbers later on. Some winners may also get an invitation to pitch me any other pieces they have that they think would make good SSC posts. I may also release non-finalist entries somewhere else so people can read them – if you strongly object to me making your entry public, let me know.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/08/17/the-goddess-of-everything-else-2/ [Related to: Specific vs. General Foragers vs. Farmers and War In Heaven, but especially The Gift We Give To Tomorrow] They say only Good can create, whereas Evil is sterile. Think Tolkien, where Morgoth can't make things himself, so perverts Elves to Orcs for his armies. But I think this gets it entirely backwards; it's Good that just mutates and twists, and it's Evil that teems with fecundity. Imagine two principles, here in poetic personification. The first is the Goddess of Cancer, the second the Goddess of Everything Else. If visual representations would help, you can think of the first with the claws of a crab, and the second a dress made of feathers of peacocks. The Goddess of Cancer reached out a clawed hand over mudflats and tidepools. She said pretty much what she always says, "KILL CONSUME MULTIPLY CONQUER." Then everything burst into life, became miniature monsters engaged in a battle of all against all in their zeal to assuage their insatiable longings. And the swamps became orgies of hunger and fear and grew loud with the screams of a trillion amoebas.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/04/29/predictions-for-2020/ At the beginning of every year, I make predictions. At the end of every year, I score them. So here are a hundred more for 2020. Rules: all predictions are about what will be true on January 1, 2021. Some predictions about my personal life, or that refer to the personal lives of other people, have been redacted to protect their privacy. I'm using the full 0 – 100 range in making predictions this year, but they'll be flipped and judged as 50 – 100 in the rating stage, just like in previous years. 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. Feel free to get in a big fight over whether 50% predictions are meaningful. CORONAVIRUS: 1. Bay Area lockdown (eg restaurants closed) will be extended beyond June 15: 60% 2. …until Election Day: 10% 3. Fewer than 100,000 US coronavirus deaths: 10% 4. Fewer than 300,000 US coronavirus deaths: 50% 5. Fewer than 3 million US coronavirus deaths: 90% 6. US has highest official death toll of any country: 80% 7. US has highest death toll as per expert guesses of real numbers: 70% 8. NYC widely considered worst-hit US city: 90%

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/04/27/give-yourself-gout-for-fame-and-profit/ I. Actually, no. You should not do this. Most of you were probably already not doing this, and I support your decision. But if you want a 2000 word essay on some reasons to consider this, and then some other reasons why those reasons are wrong, keep reading. Gout is a disease caused by high levels of uric acid in the blood. Everyone has some uric acid in their blood, but when you get too much, it can form little crystals that get deposited around your body and cause various problems, most commonly joint pain. Some uric acid comes from chemicals found in certain foods (especially meat), so the first step for a gout patient is to change their diet. If that doesn't work, they can take various chemicals that affect uric acid metabolism or prevent inflammation. Gout is traditionally associated with kings, probably because they used to be the only people who ate enough meat to be affected. Veal, venison, duck, and beer are among the highest-risk foods; that list sounds a lot like a medieval king's dinner menu. But as kings faded from view, gout started affecting a new class of movers and shakers. King George III had gout, but so did many of his American enemies, including Franklin, Jefferson, and Hancock (beginning a long line of gout-stricken US politicians, most recently Bernie Sanders). Lists of other famous historical gout sufferers are contradictory and sometimes based on flimsy evidence, but frequently mentioned names include Alexander the Great, Charlemagne, Leonardo da Vinci, Martin Luther, John Milton, Isaac Newton, Ludwig von Beethoven, Karl Marx, Charles Dickens, and Mark Twain.