Astral Codex Ten Podcast

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/30/legal-systems-very-different-from-ours-because-i-just-made-them-up/ [with apologies to the real Legal Systems Very Different From Ours. See also the List Of Fictional Drugs Banned By The FDA] I. The Clamzorians are animists. They believe every rock and tree and river has its own spirit. And those spirits are legal people. This on its own is not unusual – even New Zealand gives rivers legal personhood. But in Clamzoria, if a flood destroys your home, you sue the river. If you win, then the river is in debt to you. The government can assign a guardian to the river to force it to pay off its debts, and that guardian gets temporary custody of all the river's property. He or she can collect a toll from boats, sell water to reservoirs, and charge rent to hydroelectric dams. Once the river has paid off its debt, the guardian is discharged, and the river becomes free to use once again. Clamzorian precedent governs when you may or may not sue objects. If you swim in the freezing river in the dead of winter, and catch cold, that's on you. But if a hurricane destroys your property, you can absolutely sue the wind for damages, and collect from windmills. Suits against earthquakes, volcanoes, and the like are dead common. Suits against diseases happen occasionally. Sometimes someone will sue something even more abstract – a custom, an emotion, a concept.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/27/coronalinks-3-27-20/ The United States now has more coronavirus cases than any other country, including China, marking a new stage in the epidemic. As before, feel free to treat this as an open thread for all coronavirus-related issues. Everything here is speculative and not intended as medical advice. Hammer and dance Most of the smart people I've been reading have converged on something like the ideas expressed in The Hammer And The Dance – see this Less Wrong post for more. Summary: Asian countries have managed to control the pandemic through mass testing, contact tracing, and travel bans, without economic shutdown. The West lost the chance for a clean win when it bungled its first month of response, but it can still recover its footing. We need a medium-term national shutdown to arrest the spread of the virus until authorities can get their act together – manufacture lots of tests and face masks, create a testing infrastructure, come up with policies for how to respond when people test positive, distribute the face masks to everyone, etc. With a lot of work, we can manage that in a month or so. After that, we can relax the national shutdown, start over with a clean slate, and pursue the Asian-style containment strategy we should have been doing since the beginning.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/23/face-masks-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/ There's been recent controversy about the use of face masks for protection against coronavirus. Mainstream sources, including the CDC and most of the media say masks are likely useless and not recommended. They've recently been challenged, for example by Professor Zeynep Tufekci in the New York Times and by Jim and Elizabeth on Less Wrong. There was also some debate in the comment section here last week, so I promised I'd look into it in more depth. As far as I can tell, both sides agree on some points. They agree that N95 respirators, when properly used by trained professionals, help prevent the wearer from getting infected. They agree that surgical masks help prevent sick people from infecting others. Since many sick people don't know they are sick, in an ideal world with unlimited mask supplies everyone would wear surgical masks just to prevent themselves from spreading disease. They also agree that there's currently a shortage of both surgical masks and respirators, so for altruistic reasons people should avoid hoarding them and give healthcare workers first dibs.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/19/coronalinks-3-19-20/ As before, feel free to treat this as an open thread for all coronavirus-related issues. Everything here is speculative and not intended as medical advice. How many real cases? As of today, the US has almost 10,000 official cases. How many real cases per official case? One epidemiologist says 8x. In this US News article, scientists estimate 9000 true cases back when the official count was 600, suggesting 15x, and BBC estimates 10,000 real cases in the UK to 500 official ones, suggesting 20x. A study in Science (article, paper) estimates 86% are undetected, for about 7x. So it seems like most people are converging around 5 – 20. Probably this number is different in every country, depending on their test rates. You're probably all already following the map of cases per country, but you can supplement with this map of how many tests each country is running per million people (h/t curryeater259 from the subreddit) What about the evidence from famous people? If only 100,000 Americans are infected, it's pretty weird that it would hit both Tom Hanks and Idris Elba (also, Tormund from Game of Thrones). The Atlantic makes this case more formally. Given that Iran's vice-president is affected, what are the chances that only 1/12,000 of Iranians had the virus? Some people calculated it out and found that hundreds of thousands of Iranians must be affected for the prevalence among politicians to make sense, suggesting ratios of 100x or even 1000x.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/17/book-review-hoover/ You probably remember Herbert Hoover as the guy who bungled the Great Depression. Maybe you shouldn't. Maybe you should remember him as a bold explorer looking for silver in the jungles of Burma. Or as the heroic defender of Tientsin during the Boxer Rebellion. Or as a dashing pirate-philanthropist, gallivanting around the world, saving millions of lives wherever he went. Or as the temporary dictator of Europe. Or as a geologist, or a bank tycoon, or author of the premier 1900s textbook on metallurgy. How did a backwards orphan son of a blacksmith, dropped in the middle of a forgotten spot in the Midwest, grow up to be a captain of industry and a US President? How did he become such a towering figure in the history of philanthropy that biographer Kenneth Whyte claims "the number of lives Hoover saved through his various humanitarian campaigns might exceed 100 million, a record of benevolence unlike anything in human history"? To find out, I picked up Whyte's Hoover: An Extraordinary Life In Extraordinary Times. Herbert Hoover was born in 1874 to poor parents in the tiny Quaker farming community of West Branch, Iowa. His father was a blacksmith, his mother a schoolteacher. His childhood was strict. Magazines and novels were banned; acceptable reading material included the Bible and Prohibitionist pamphlets. His hobby was collecting oddly shaped sticks. His father dies when he is 6, his mother when he is 10. The orphaned Hoover and his two siblings are shuttled from relative to relative. He spends one summer on the Osage Indian Reservation in Oklahoma, living with an uncle who worked for the Department of Indian Affairs. Another year passes on a pig farm with his Uncle Allen. In 1885, he is more permanently adopted by his Uncle John, a doctor and businessman helping found a Quaker colony in Oregon. Hoover's various guardians are dutiful but distant; they never abuse or neglect him, but treat him more as an extra pair of hands around the house than as someone to be loved and cherished. Hoover reciprocates in kind, doing what is expected of him but excelling neither in school nor anywhere else.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/10/for-then-against-high-saturated-fat-diets/ I. In the 1800s, the average US man weighed about 155 lbs. Today, he weighs about 195. The change is even starker at the extremes. Someone at the 90th percentile of weight back then weighed about 185 lbs; today, he would weigh 320 lbs. Back then, about 1% of men were obese. Today, about 25% are. This puts a lot of modern dietary advice into perspective. For example, lots of people think low-carb is the solution to everything. But people in the 1800s ate almost 50% more bread than we do today, and still had almost no obesity. Other people think paleo is the solution to everything, but Americans in the 1800s ate a diet heavy in bread, milk, potatoes, and vegetables, and relatively low in red meat and other more caveman-recognizable foods. Intermittent fasting – again, cool idea, but your great-grandfather wasn't doing that, and he had a 1% obesity risk. This isn't to say those diets can't work. Just that if they work, they're hacks. They treat the symptoms, not the underlying problem. Something went terribly wrong in US nutrition between 1900 and today, and all this talk about low-carb and intermittent fasting and so on are skew to that thing. Given that 1800s Americans seem to have effortlessly maintained near-zero obesity rates while eating foods a lot like the ones we eat today, maybe we should stop trying to figure out what cavemen were doing, and start trying to figure out what Great-Grandpa was doing, which sounds a lot easier.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/09/05/book-review-surfing-uncertainty/ [Related to: It's Bayes All The Way Up, Why Are Transgender People Immune To Optical Illusions?, Can We Link Perception And Cognition?] I. Sometimes I have the fantasy of being able to glut myself on Knowledge. I imagine meeting a time traveler from 2500, who takes pity on me and gives me a book from the future where all my questions have been answered, one after another. What's consciousness? That's in Chapter 5. How did something arise out of nothing? Chapter 7. It all makes perfect intuitive sense and is fully vouched by unimpeachable authorities. I assume something like this is how everyone spends their first couple of days in Heaven, whatever it is they do for the rest of Eternity. And every so often, my fantasy comes true. Not by time travel or divine intervention, but by failing so badly at paying attention to the literature that by the time I realize people are working on a problem it's already been investigated, experimented upon, organized into a paradigm, tested, and then placed in a nice package and wrapped up with a pretty pink bow so I can enjoy it all at once. The predictive processing model is one of these well-wrapped packages. Unbeknownst to me, over the past decade or so neuroscientists have come up with a real theory of how the brain works – a real unifying framework theory like Darwin's or Einstein's – and it's beautiful and it makes complete sense. Surfing Uncertainty isn't pop science and isn't easy reading. Sometimes it's on the

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/06/socratic-grilling/ Imagine an kid in school first hearing about germ theory. The conversation might go something like this: Teacher: Many diseases like the common cold are spread by germs, when one infected person contacts another. Student: But I got a cold a few weeks ago, and I never touch anyone except my family members. And none of them were sick. Teacher: You don't need to actually touch someone. Sometimes it can spread through mucus droplets in the air. Student: And one time I was camping in the woods for a month, and then I got a cold, even though I hadn't been around anybody. Teacher: If it was spring, you might have gotten allergies. Allergies can feel a lot like a cold, but they aren't spread by germs. Student: It was fall.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/02/coronavirus-links-speculation-open-thread/ [Epistemic status: Very weak – I'm still trying to figure all of this out. Some things in here will almost certainly be wrong. Please don't let this overrule what government agencies or your common sense are telling you. For a more careful guide to the coronavirus and what to do about it, see here.] Prepping For a description of why you might want to prep, see Putanumonit: Seeing The Smoke. For a description of how to prep, see this article by Kelsey. For a really intense guide by a professional prepper, see here. But there's such a thing as being too intense. You probably won't need to store water – the water kept running in Wuhan. You probably won't need a generator – Wuhan has electricity. The most important thing seems to be food (and toiletries, and other necessities). If the epidemic gets bad, you'll want food so you can avoid going out to coronavirus-filled supermarkets. And if you get the coronavirus and are feeling sick, you'll want food at home so you don't have to get too far out of bed.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/02/27/book-review-the-seven-principles-for-making-marriage-work/ I. John Gottman is a legendary figure, and the legend is told best by John Gottman. He describes wading into the field of marital counseling as a young psychology postdoc, only to find it was a total mess: When we began our research, the wide range of marital therapies based on conflict resolution shared a very high level of relapse. In fact, the best of this type of marital therapy, conducted by Neil Jacobson, had only a 35 to 50 percent success rate. In other words, his own studies showed that only 35 to 50 percent of couples saw a meaningful improvement in their marriages as a result of the therapy. A year later, less than half of that group — or just 18 to 25 percent of all couples who entered therapy — retained these benefits. A while ago, Consumer Reports surveyed a large sample of its members on their experience with all kinds of psychotherapists. Most therapists got very high customer-satisfaction marks—except for the marital ones, who received very poor ratings. Though this survey did not qualify as rigorous scientific research, it confirmed what most professionals in the field already knew: in the long run, marital therapy did not benefit the majority of couples. Gottman decided the field needed statistical rigor, and that he – a former MIT math major – was exactly the guy to enforce it. He set up a model apartment in his University of Washington research center – affectionately called "the Love Lab", and invited hundreds of couples to spend a few days there – observed, videotaped, and attached to electrodes collecting information on every detail of their physiology. While at the lab, the couples went through their ordinary lives. They experienced love, hatred, romantic dinners, screaming matches, and occasionally self-transformation. Then Gottman monitored them for years, seeing who made things work and who got divorced. Did you know that if a husband fails to acknowledge his wife's feelings during an argument, there is an 81% chance it will damage the marriage? Or that 69% of marital conflicts are about long-term problems rather than specific situations? John Gottman knows all of this and much, much more.