Slate Star Codex Podcast

A lunar eclipse occurs when the Earth gets between the Moon and the Sun. A solar eclipse occurs when the Moon gets between the Earth and the Sun. A terrestrial eclipse occurs when the Earth gets between you and the Sun. Happens once per 24 hours. An atmospheric eclipse occurs when an asteroid gets between you and the sky. Generally fatal. A reverse solar eclipse occurs when the Sun gets between the Moon and the Earth. Extremely fatal.

A few weeks ago I published results of a small (n = 50) survey showing that people’s moral valuation of different kinds of animals scaled pretty nicely with the animals’ number of cortical neurons (see here for more on why we might expect that to be true). A commenter, Tibbar, did a larger survey on Mechanical Turk and got very different results, so I retracted the claim. I wasn’t sure why we got such different results, but I chalked it down to chance, or perhaps to my having surveyed an

(Epistemic status: Unsure on details. Some post-publication edits 5/1 to make this less strident.) I. There is a national shortage of buspirone. Buspirone is a 5HT-1 agonist used to control anxiety. Unlike most psychiatric drugs, it’s in a class of its own – there are no other sole 5HT-1 agonists on the market. It’s not a very strong medication, but it’s safe, it’s non-addictive, it’s off-patent, and it works well for a subset of patients. Some of them have been on it for years. Now

[Epistemic status: Very speculative, especially Parts 3 and 4. Like many good things, this post is based on a conversation with Paul Christiano; most of the good ideas are his, any errors are mine.] I. In the 1950s, an Austrian scientist discovered a series of equations that he claimed could model history. They matched past data with startling accuracy. But when extended into the future, they predicted the world would end on November 13, 2026.

HalTheWise discusses a factor I missed (until I sneakily edited it in, so you may have read the later version that included it): One very powerful contributor that Scott did not mention is that in many cases schools are directly or indically intentivized to have a low admission rate. US news & world report released the first national college ranking in 1983, and donors and board members at various schools have increasingly been using national rankings performance

0: Introduction This is from businessstudent.com   Acceptance rates at top colleges have declined by about half over the past decade or so, raising concern about intensifying academic competition. The pressure of getting into a good university may even be leading to suicidesat elite high schools. Some people have dismissed the problem, saying that a misplaced focus on Harvard and Yale ignores that most colleges are easier to get into than ever. For example,

Reciprocity is a simple dating site, created by some friends of mine. You sign up and see a list of all your Facebook friends who also signed up. You can put a checkmark next to their name to indicate you want to date them (they can’t see this). If you both checkmark each other, then the site reveals you’ve matched. This seemed like an obvious great idea.

Timothy Carey’s Method Of Levels teaches a form of psychotherapy based on perceptual control theory. The Crackpot List is specific to physics. But if someone were to create one for psychiatry, Method of Levels would score a perfect 100%. It somehow manages to do okay on the physics one despite not discussing any physics. The Method of Levels is the correct solution to every psychological problem, from mild depression to psychosis.

RJ Zigerell (h/t Marginal Revolution) studies public support for eugenics. He finds that about 40% of Americans support some form of eugenics. The policies discussed were very vague, like “encouraging poor criminals to have fewer children” or “encouraging intelligent people to have more children”; they did not specify what form the encouragement would take. Of note, much lack of support for eugenics was a belief that it would not work; people who believed

Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to have for dinner. “Mutton” takes the popular vote, but “grass” wins in the Electoral College. The wolves wish they hadn’t all moved into the same few trendy coastal cities. Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to have for dinner. The Timber Wolf Party and the Gray Wolf Party spend most of their energy pandering shamelessly to the tiebreaking vote.

Commenter Tibbar used Mechanical Turk to replicate my survey on how people thought about the moral weights of animals. After getting 263 responses (to my 50), he reports different results: Chicken: 25 Chimpanzee: 2 Cow: 3 Elephant: 1 Lobster: 60 Pig: 5 Human: 1 On the one hand, Mechanical Turkers sometimes aren’t a great sample, and some of them seem to have just put the same number for every animal so they could finish quickly and get their money.

[EDIT: No longer confident in this post, see edit note at bottom. May formally partially-retract it later.] Yesterday’s post reviewed research showing that animals’ intelligence seemed correlated with their number of cortical neurons. If this is true, we could use it to create an absolute scale that puts animals and humans on the same ladder. Here are the numbers from this list. I can’t find chickens, so I’ve used red junglefowl, the wild ancestor of chickens. I can’t find cows, so I’ve

Elephants have bigger brains than humans, so why aren’t they smarter than we are? The classic answer has been to play down absolute brain size in favor of brain size relative to body. Sometimes people justify this as “it takes a big brain to control a body that size”. But it really doesn’t. Elephants have the same number of limbs as mice, operating on about the same mechanical principles. Also, dinosaurs had brains the size of walnuts and did fine. Also, the animal with

Wired wrote a good article about Karl Friston, the neuroscientist whose works I’ve puzzled over here before. Raviv writes: Friston’s free energy principle says that all life…is driven by the same universal imperative…to act in ways that reduce the gulf between your expectations and your sensory inputs. Or, in Fristonian terms, it is to minimize free energy. Put this way, it’s clearly just perceptual control theory. Powers describes the same insight like this:

They say “don’t judge a book by its cover”. So in case you were withholding judgment: yes, this bright red book covered with left-wing slogans is, in fact, communist. Inventing The Future isn’t technically Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams’ manifesto – that would be the equally-striking-looking Accelerate Manifesto. But it’s a manifesto-ish description of their plan for achieving a postcapitalist world. S&W start with a critique of what they call “folk politics”, eg every stereotype you ha