Slate Star Codex Podcast

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/04/01/book-review-the-precipice/ I. It is a well known fact that the gods hate prophets. False prophets they punish only with ridicule. It’s the true prophets who have to watch out. The gods find some way to make their words come true in the most ironic way possible, the one where knowing the future just makes things worse. The Oracle of Delphi told Croesus he would destroy a great empire, but when he rode out to battle, the empire he destroyed was his own.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/31/ssc-journal-club-macintyre-on-cloth-masks/ Content warning: this is a complicated analysis of something people care about a lot right now. I’m not confident in my analysis, the post comes to no clear conclusion and there are no easy answers about how to proceed. If I see this on Twitter with some headline about it DESTROYING somebody, I am going to be so mad.] The New York Times says that It’s Time To Make Your Own Face Mask. But MacIntyre et al (2015) says

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 t

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 a

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.

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,

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/02/24/book-review-just-giving/ I. Traditional book reviews tend to focus on a single book, such as Just Giving by Rob Reich. We ought, however, to be reviewing a broader question: what is the role of books in a liberal democratic society? And what role should they play? Books were first invented during the early Bronze Age. Plato states people fiercely opposed the first books; in his dialogue Phaedrus, he recalls the Egyptian priests’ objection to early writing:w

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/02/17/sleep-support-an-individual-randomized-controlled-trial/ I worry my sleep quality isn’t great. On weekends, no matter when I go to bed, I sleep until 11 or 12. When I wake up, I feel like I’ve overslept. But if I try to make myself get up earlier, I feel angry and want to go back to sleep. A supplement company I trust, Nootropics Depot, recently released a new product called Sleep Support. It advertises that, along with helping you fall asleep faster,

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/02/14/addendum-to-targeting-meritocracy/ I’ve always been dissatisfied with Targeting Meritocracy and the comments it got. My position seemed so obvious to me – and the opposite position so obvious to other people – that we both had to be missing something. Reading it over, I think I was missing the idea of conflict vs mistake theory. I wrote the post from a mistake theory perspective. The government exists to figure out how to solve problems.