Astral Codex Ten Podcast

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List Of Fictional Cryptocurrencies Banned By The SEC Feb 12, 2021

Show notes

[previously in sequence: List Of Fictional Drugs Banned By The FDA, More Fictional Drugs Banned By The FDA]

VatiCoin: After a thousand years, the Catholic Church discovered how to do indulgences right: as tradable digital tokens. Not only does an initial coin offering provide better price discovery than the Pope picking a random number, but sinners who do good deeds later can sell their coins to someone else. Subject of several court cases about whether someone's VatiCoins go to their heirs upon their deaths or whether this would defeat the point; current holders are advised to avoid the problem by not disclosing the password to their wallet.

Banned because: Frequently used as a hedge against other cryptocurrencies involved in crime and pornography.

Driverify: Developed by Tesla's self-driving-car division. Cars mine Driverify with spare computing power while idling, and spend it bidding against each other for right-of-way if they arrive at a four-way stop sign at the same time (users can preprogram how aggressively their cars bid in these auctions). Compatible Teslas would also have fenders that send electrical pulses, transmitting data into the receiver fender of another car. If two Teslas got in a fender-bender, they could use their now-connected fenders to have the at-fault car recompense the victim by transferring an appropriate amount of Driverify.

Ontology Of Psychiatric Conditions: Tradeoffs And Failures Feb 11, 2021

Show notes

[previously in sequence: Taxometrics, Dynamical Systems. Epistemic status: speculative. This should go without saying, but when I talk about "failures" in this post, I mean failures of biological processes, as in the term "congestive heart failure"; I don't mean to accuse people with psychiatric conditions of being failures.]

Most psychiatric disorders are at least partly genetic. Some, like schizophrenia and ADHD, are very genetic, probably 80% plus. This is strange, because having psychiatric disorders seems bad, so you would expect evolution to have eliminated those genes. Researchers looking into this question argue between two hypotheses.

First, a failure. Evolution is imperfect, so some bad genes manage to slip through. This sounds dismissive, but it's definitely true to some degree. Thousands of different genes contribute to risk for conditions like ADHD and schizophrenia, with each adding only a tiny amount of risk. When a gene is only very slightly bad, it takes evolution millennia to get rid of it, and during those millennia people are getting new very-slightly-bad mutations, so it all balances out at a certain level of bad genes per generation. Those bad genes are sufficient to explain the existing amount of ADHD and schizophrenia; they're just evolution not working as well as we'd hope.

Book Review: Why We're Polarized Feb 11, 2021

Show notes

Ezra Klein is great. I know a lot of people throw shade on him for founding Vox. But as Van Gogh said about God creating the world, "We must not hold it against Him; only a master could make such a mistake". Ezra is a master and I was happy to be able to read his Why We're Polarized.

(Amazon recommended it to me as "Why We're Polarized By Ezra Klein", which I would also have been happy to read.)

Did you know that seventy years ago, our grandparents were having an underpolarization crisis? True! In 1950, the American Political Science Association "released a call to arms...pleading for a more polarized political system". The report argued that "the parties contain too much diversity of opinion and work together too easily, leaving voters confused about who to vote for and why". Everyone agreed with each other so much, and compromised so readily, that supporting one party over the other seemed almost pointless.

Metaculus Monday 2/8/21 Feb 08, 2021

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Thanks to everyone who commented last week with prediction markets I missed. Two of them seemed to be especially interesting.

Polymarket is another cryptocurrency-based prediction market. It's got about two dozen contracts open, and some of them are pretty big - $5 million plus! With that kind of money, we ought to be seeing some really good predicting! We're...not. Either there's a 6% chance that Donald Trump will be president again by March 31, or something's gone wrong.

Probably it's the second one. I tried to bet against Trump, but getting money into the market was pretty hard. You need USDCoins, a stablecoin related to Ethereum. Polymarket tries to let you buy them directly, but their app wanted me to give them a security code which never showed up, so I gave up on this. Instead I bought some USDC at Coinbase and tried to send them over. But along with the usual Ethereum gas fees, they have something called a relayer, which is supposed to collect my money and put it in my account. And it's apparently heavily backed up, and after two days my money is nowhere to be seen (though I believe them when they say that they're trying their hardest and it will probably percolate through the Ethereum network someday). Maybe everyone's having these kinds of issues and this is why the Trump contract hasn't adjusted? I'm not sure. I will keep you updated if my money ever materializes.

Journalism and Legible Expertise Feb 08, 2021

Show notes

I heard from a journalist yesterday after writing yesterday's post on WebMD. They've been trying to write a coronavirus article worthy of Zvi or any of the other illegibly smart people writing on the pandemic. Apparently the bottleneck is sources.

In most journalistic settings, you can't just write "here's what I think". You have to write "here's what my source, a recognized expert, said when I interviewed them". And the experts are pretty sparing with their interviews for contrarian stories.

The way my correspondent described it: sources don't usually get to approve the way they're quoted in an article, or to see it before it gets published. So they're really cagey about saying anything that might get misinterpreted. Maybe their real opinion is that X is a hard question, there are good points on both sides, but overall they think it probably isn't true. But if a reporter wants to write "X Is Dumb And All Epidemiologists Are Idiots For Believing It", they can slice and dice your interview until your cautiously-skeptical-of-X statement sounds like you're backing them up. So experts end up paranoid about saying potentially-controversial-sounding things to reporters. And since reporters can't write without sources, it's hard for them to write anything controversial about epidemiology.

WebMD, And The Tragedy Of Legible Expertise Feb 06, 2021

Show notes

I started a small database of psychiatry information. It's going well. I'm grateful for all your emails suggesting changes and corrections. Sort of.

Here are some of the kinds of emails I get:

"You said this drug is occasionally mildly addictive but the risk/benefit calculation is worth it for most people. But my cousin's friend took it and became really addicted and it ruined his life. Maybe you should warn readers about it more emphatically." The particular example I'm thinking of is something exotic, but alcohol or Adderall could equally well be in this category. Still, I get nervous whenever I get emails like this. What if I do ruin somebody's life? Maybe I should just change the wording to "this drug has some benefits but is often addictive, be careful with it"?

"You listed three major side effects of this drug, but I got a side effect that isn't on your list. Maybe you should add it in." All drugs have an infinite number of possible side effects. One in a zillion people who use Naproxen ("Aleve") becomes red-green colorblind. Capecitabine ("Xeloda") can sometimes make you lose your fingerprints, which sucks if your computer has biometric security. If listed all side effects of anything, we would be here all day. Still, I get nervous when I get emails like this.

Book Review Contest Final Rules Feb 05, 2021

Show notes

Thanks to everyone who has waited patiently for more information on this.

I planned a book review contest for last summer, which I didn't get to do because of my unexpected hiatus. I currently have 31 entries, none of which I've read yet.

My plan is to give the rest of you until March 1 to send in reviews. Send them to scott[at]slatestarcodex[dot]com. I originally wanted ones that you hadn't already posted somewhere else first, but if you posted it over the last ~year because you didn't know if I was coming back, I guess that's fair and I'll make an exception this time.

Sometime after March 1 I'll read all of them, publish the top ~5 as posts here, and let people vote on the winners using some method that combines and weighs their votes and mine. First place will get at least $1000, second place $500, third place $250 - I might increase these 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.

I previously said to send me entries in .txt format with hand-written HTML. If you've already done that, you're fine and don't need to change. If you're submitting a new entry, you can either do that or send me a normal Word/Google document type thing - I think Substack's interface should be able to handle it.

Ontology Of Psychiatric Conditions: Dynamical Systems Feb 05, 2021

Show notes

[Previously in sequence: Taxometrics]

Imagine Alice has a chronic disease. Luckily, as long as she has a job, she will have health insurance. And health insurance provides her with a treatment. Every day she takes the treatment, her health will go up one point on a 0-100 scale; every day she misses the treatment, it will go down one point. If her health ever gets below 75, she will be too ill to work.

Mathematicians would call this a dynamical system with three variables: does she have a job or not, does she have insurance or not, and her health level. We know from the rules above that j always equals i, and that j is 1 as long has h is 75 or higher. And every day i = 1, h goes up one; every day i = 0, h goes down 1.

Alice starts with a job and health of 100. Since j = 1 and i = 1, health goes up one each day, but it's maxed out at 100 so it just says there. This state is perfectly stable; as long as the system follows the rules above, it will never change.

Suppose Alice gets a mild cold which knocks her health down to 90. She keeps working, her health keeps going up 1 each day, and she eventually gets back to 100.

Suppose Alice gets a medium flu which knocks her health down to 80. She keeps working, her health keeps going up 1 each day, and she eventually gets back to 100.

But suppose Alice gets a serious pneumonia which knocks her health down to 70. Now she can't work, she loses insurance, her health starts going down 1 each day, and she eventually goes down to 0. This is another stable state; as long as the system keeps evolving according to the rules, it will never change.

Riddle Of The Sphinx II: Sustained Release Riddlin' Feb 03, 2021

Show notes

I was driving down to LA when the cops pulled me over. "You have to turn back sir, the Sphinx here eats any traveler who can't answer her riddle."

"I've trained my whole life for this" I said, and stepped on the gas. Soon I saw a Sphinx lounging in the middle of the road. When she spotted me, she asked: "What has braces, crowns, and retainers, but is not teeth?" "A medieval king in armor. My turn. What has pupils, irises, and whites, but is not an eye?"

"A gardening class during apartheid. How is a river like the Federal Reserve?"

"It maintains liquidity despite rushes on the banks. What has wings, but cannot fly - fins, but cannot swim - and heels, but cannot walk?"

"Helsinki General Hospital." The Sphinx licked her lips. "But tell me, how is Lord Nelson like a cigar?"

"They both have one I and won sea. How is Mary Mary Quite Contrary like the Norse god Odin?"

Metaculus Monday Feb 02, 2021

Show notes

Prediction markets are the future. They're a type of trustless, decentralized expertise that often equals or outperforms official sources.

But they're not quite the present. Right now I only know of three prediction markets, and none of them live up to their potential. As usual, it's the government's fault: betting on prediction markets is technically gambling, which makes it mostly illegal (of course, you can still buy all the Gamestop stock you want).

Each of the three big prediction markets tries to solve this in a different way.

PredictIt struck a special deal with the government where they can run a limited number of predictions as long as nobody is allowed to bet very much. They probably have the most users, but most of them are dumb money, and the restrictions prevent smart money from coming in and replacing them. Also, the market fritters away its limited number of predictions on dumb political horse race stuff. I think of this as a missed opportunity.

Augur is a decentralized Ethereum-based prediction market. Since it's crypto, it ought to be able to violate laws with impunity, and in theory this should make it the leader of the pack. In practice it's either nonfunctional or so minimally functional as to be useless. The team involved seems pretty dedicated and competent, and I assume they have some good reason for pretending their product currently exists instead of replacing the whole thing with a COMING SOON banner. I hope this will one day be our savior. But like the real Messiah, it's taking its sweet time.

Metaculus solves the regulatory problem by using fake Internet points instead of money. This is a disappointing solution; it limits the user base to Internet obsessives instead of (say) investment bankers. Still, there are a lot of Internet obsessives. And the team running it is really top-notch, interested in pushing the limits of what prediction markets can do, and trying to focus on some of the most important questions.

I want to raise awareness of prediction markets, and right now Metaculus seem like the best people to raise awareness of. So welcome to Metaculus Mondays, where I make you listen to reports of how the prediction markets did this week and what they're predicting for later.

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