Slate Star Codex Podcast
Summary: Audio version of Slate Star Codex. It's just me reading Scott Alexander's Blog Posts.
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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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/04/24/employer-provided-health-insurance-delenda-est/ My last post didn’t really go to deep into why I dislike the way we do health insurance so much. Of course, there are the usual criticisms based on compassion and efficiency. Compassion because poor people can’t get access to life-saving medical care. Efficiency because it’s ruinously expensive compared to every other system around. I agree with these arguments.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/04/20/the-amish-health-care-system/ I. Amish people spend only a fifth as much as you do on health care, and their health is fine. What can we learn from them? A reminder: the Amish are a German religious sect who immigrated to colonial America. Most of them live apart from ordinary Americans (who they call “the English”) in rural communities in Pennsylvania and Ohio. They’re famous for their low-tech way of life, generally avoiding anything invented after the
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/04/17/depression-the-olfactory-perspective/ Depressed people have worse sense of smell, and people with worse sense of smell are more likely to get depressed. Kohli 2016 tries to figure out what’s going on. They review six studies testing how well depressed people can smell things. Most use something called “The Sniffin’ Sticks Test” (really!) where people are asked to say which of two sticks has an odor
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/04/14/a-failure-but-not-of-prediction/ I. Vox asks What Went Wrong With The Media’s Coronavirus Coverage? They conclude that the media needs to be better at “not just saying what we do know, but what we don’t know”. This raises some important questions. Like: how much ink and paper is there in the world? Are we sure it’s enough? But also: how do you become better at saying what you don’t know?
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/04/10/coronalinks-4-10-second-derivative/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/04/10/coronalinks-4-10-second-derivative/ The second derivative is the rate of growth of the rate of growth. Over the past few weeks, the second derivative of total coronavirus cases switched from positive (typical of exponential growth) to zero or negative (typical of linear or sublinear growth) in most European countries.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/04/08/2019-predictions-calibration-results/ At the beginning of every year, I make predictions. At the end of every year, I score them (this year I’m very late). Here are 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/04/07/never-tell-me-the-odds-ratio/ [Epistemic status: low confidence, someone tell me if the math is off. Title was stolen from an old Less Wrong post that seems to have disappeared – let me know if it’s yours and I’ll give you credit] I almost screwed up yesterday’s journal club. The study reported an odds ratio of 2.9 for antidepressants. Even though I knew odds ratios are terrible and you should never trust your intuitive impression of them, I still mentally
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/04/06/sscjc-real-world-depression-measurement/ The largest non-pharma antidepressant trial ever conducted just confirmed what we already knew: scientists love naming things after pandas. We already had PANDAS (Pediatric Autoimmune Neuropsychiatric Disorders Associated with Streptococcus) and PANDA (Proton ANnhilator At DArmstadt). But the latest in this pandemic of panda pandering is the PANDA (Prescribing ANtiDepressants Appropriately) Study.