Astral Codex Ten Podcast

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Powerless Placebos Feb 01, 2018

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[All things that have been discussed here before, but some people wanted it all in a convenient place]

The most important study on the placebo effect is Hróbjartsson and Gøtzsche's Is The Placebo Powerless?, updated three years later by a systematic review and seven years later with a Cochrane review. All three looked at studies comparing a real drug, a placebo drug, and no drug (by the third, over 200 such studies) – and, in general, found little benefit of the placebo drug over no drug at all. There were some possible minor placebo effects in a few isolated conditions – mostly pain – but overall H&G concluded that the placebo effect was clinically insignificant. Despite a few half-hearted tries, no one has been able to produce much evidence they're wrong. This is kind of surprising, since everyone has been obsessing over placebos and saying they're super-important for the past fifty years.

The Invention of Moral Narrative Jan 31, 2018

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H/T Robin Hanson: Aeon's The Good Guy / Bad Guy Myth. "Pop culture today is obsessed with the battle between good and evil. Traditional folktales never were. What changed?"

The article claims almost every modern epic – superhero movies, Star Wars, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, etc – shares a similar plot. There are some good guys. There are some bad guys. They fight. The good guys win. The end.

The good guys are usually scrappy amateurs; the bad guys usually well-organized professionals with typical fascist precision. The good guys usually demonstrate a respect for human life and the bonds of friendship; the bad guys betray their citizens and their underlings with equal abandon. They gain their good guy or bad guy status by either following the universal law, or breaking it.

Highlights from the Comments on Conflict vs. Mistake Jan 30, 2018

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Thanks to everyone who commented on the posts about conflict and mistake theory.

aciddc writes:

I'm a leftist (and I guess a Marxist in the same sense I guess I'm a Darwinist despite knowing evolutionary theory has passed him by) fan of this blog. I've thought about this "conflict theory vs. mistake theory" dichotomy a lot, though I've been thinking of it as what distinguishes "leftists" from "liberals."

SSC Survey Data on Models of Political Conflict Jan 26, 2018

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There were a lot of good comments on yesterday's conflict vs. mistake post. Some were very appropriate challenges: for example, doesn't public choice theory itself assume conflict between special interests? And didn't Marxism start off with a dry incentive-based explanation for why capitalists have to do what they do and how the incentive landscape needs to change? I want to explore these questions further – but first, some data from the SSC survey showing that the distinction does capture something real and important.

No questions really matched the conflict/mistake theory distinction, but one of the closest was POLITICAL DISAGREEMENT I: "Which of these plays a bigger role in explaining why some people are wrong about politics – intellectual failure, or moral failure?" This isn't quite the way I would frame it now – but it'll do for our purposes.

Conflict Vs. Mistake Jan 25, 2018

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Jacobite – which is apparently still a real magazine and not a one-off gag making fun of Jacobin – summarizes their article Under-Theorizing Government as "You'll never hear the terms 'principal-agent problem,' 'rent-seeking,' or 'aligning incentives' from socialists. That's because they expect ideology to solve all practical considerations of governance."

There have been some really weird and poorly-informed socialist critiques of public choice theory lately, and this article generalizes from those to a claim that Marxists just don't like considering the hard technical question of how to design a good government. This would explain why their own governments so often fail. Also why, whenever existing governments are bad, Marxists immediately jump to the conclusion that they must be run by evil people who want them to be bad on purpose.

Practically-A-Book Review Luna Whitepaper Jan 18, 2018

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They say money can't buy love. But that was the bad old days of fiat money. Now there are dozens of love-based cryptocurrencies – LoveCoin, CupidCoin, Erosium, Nubilo – with market caps in the mid nine-figures. The 17-year-old genius behind CupidCoin just bought the state of Tennessee. You think I'm joking, but can you be sure? How weird is "too weird to be true" these days, and how confident are you in your answer?

Case in point: Luna, which bills itself as blockchain-optimized dating. They caught my attention by hiring Aella, previously featured on this blog for her adventures taking LSD megadoses weekly for a year. They kept it with their cutesy story about how the name "Luna" comes from founder Andre Ornish's first word – adorable, until you consider that any baby whose first word is in Latin is definitely possessed.

Bundles of Joy Jan 17, 2018

Show notes

On December's survey, I asked readers who had children whether they were happy with that decision. Here are the results, from 1 (very unhappy) to 5 (very happy):

The mean was 4.43, and the median 5. People are really happy to have kids!

This was equally true regardless of gender. The male average (4.43, n = 1768) and female average (4.49, n = 177) were indistinguishable.

Maybe the Real Superintelligent AI Is Extremely Smart Computers Jan 16, 2018

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By Ted Chiang, on Buzzfeed: The Real Danger To Civilization Isn't AI: It's Runaway Capitalism. Chiang's science fiction is great and I highly recommend it. This article, not so much.

The gist seems to be: hypothetical superintelligent AIs sound a lot like modern capitalism. Both optimize relentlessly for their chosen goal (paperclips, money), while ignoring the whole complexity of human value.

Meditations on Moloch [Classic] Jan 13, 2018

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[Content note: Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions!]

Allan Ginsberg's famous poem, Moloch:

What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?

Self-Serving Bias Jan 12, 2018

Show notes

Alex Tabarrok beat me to the essay on Oregon's self-service gas laws that I wanted to write.

Oregon is one of two US states that bans self-service gas stations. Recently, they passed a law relaxing this restriction – self-service is permissable in some rural counties during odd hours of the night. Outraged Oregonians took to social media to protest that self-service was unsafe, that it would destroy jobs, that breathing in gas fumes would kill people, that gas pumping had to be performed by properly credentialed experts – seemingly unaware that most of the rest of the country and the world does it without a second thought.

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