x

75% of people globally want unbiased news (Pew Research) but are concerned they're not getting that.

Get balanced coverage with Symby. See how stories are covered across diverse outlets and spot when one side covers a story the other skips.

PODCAST

Astral Codex Ten Podcast

The official audio version of Astral Codex Ten, with an archive of posts from Slate Star Codex. It"s just me reading Scott Alexander"s blog posts.

technology

All Episodes

10:29

When Will The FDA Approve Paxlovid?

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2021/11/23

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/when-will-the-fda-approve-paxlovid https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/when-will-the-fda-approve-paxlovid I. You thought it wasn’t going to be a prediction market post, but surprise, it’s a prediction market post! Metaculus predicts January 1 as the median date for the FDA approving Paxlovid. They estimate a 92% chance it will get approved by March. For context: a recent study by Pfizer, the pharma company backing the drug, found Paxlovid decreased

en

42:27

Highlights From The Comments On Great Families

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2021/11/19

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-great Thanks to everyone who commented on last week’s post Secrets Of The Great Families. Some highlights: Many people knew of interesting families I’d missed. Stephen Frug brings up the Jameses: Any short list of the great families (or at least the great American families) should include the James's: Henry James is one of the perennial candidates for the greatest American novelist, and his brother William James is one of

en

02:08:00

Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted To Know

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2021/11/18

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ivermectin-much-more-than-you-wanted I know I’m two months late here. Everyone’s already made up their mind and moved on to other things. But here’s my pitch: this is one of the most carefully-pored-over scientific issues of our time. Dozens of teams published studies saying ivermectin definitely worked. Then most scientists concluded it didn’t. What a great opportunity to exercise our study-analyzing muscles! To learn stuff about how science works which we can

en

27:07

Mantic Monday 11/15

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2021/11/16

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-1115 Reciprocal Scoring, Part II I talked about this last week as a potential solution to the problem of long-term forecasting. Instead of waiting a century to see what happens, get a bunch of teams, and incentivize each to predict what the others will guess. If they all expect the others to strive for accuracy, then the stable Schelling point is the most accurate answer. Now there’s a paper, by Karger, Monrad, Mellers, and Tetlock - Reciprocal

en

09:08

Apply For An ACX Grant

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2021/11/12

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/apply-for-an-acx-grant What is ACX Grants? I want to give grants to good research and good projects with a minimum of paperwork. Like an NIH grant or something, only a lot less money and prestige. How is this different from Marginal Revolution's Fast Grants, Nadia Eghbal's Helium Grants, or EA Funds' grant rounds? Not different at all. It’s total 100% plagiarism of them. I'm doing it anyway because I think it’s a good idea, and I predict there are a lot of

en

54:07

Highlights From The Comments On Orban

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2021/11/11

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-orban Lyman Stone on Twitter: Twitter avatar for @lymanstonekyLyman Stone 石來民 🦬🦬🦬 @lymanstoneky Here's the @slatestarcodex piece: astralcodexten.substack.com/p/dictator-boo… Overall, I agree with a lot of his assessment of Orban. But I want to quibble on two points: 1) The relationship between dictatorship and democracy 2) "Why admire Orban?" Dictator Book Club: Orban...astralcodexten.substack.com November 5th 2021 7 Likes I

en

31:51

Secrets Of The Great Families

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2021/11/10

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/secrets-of-the-great-families I. Let's talk impressive families. Aldous Huxley was an author most famous for Brave New World, though his other stuff is also great and underappreciated. His brother Julian Huxley founded UNESCO and the World Wildlife Fund, was secretary of the Zoological Society of London and president of the British Eugenics Society, and coined the terms "ethnic group", "cline", and "transhumanism". Their half-brother Andrew Huxley won the

en

31:47

Model City Monday 11/8/21

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2021/11/09

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/model-city-monday-11821 Telosa, USA Bloomberg: The Diapers.com Guy Wants To Build A Utopian Megalopolis Marc Lore founded diapers.com, various other internet startups, served a stint as Wal-Mart’s e-commerce director, and made a few billion dollars. Now he wants to start a city with a new vision of socially responsible democracy. Why move to this city instead of one of the many existing cities which are not in deserts and, you know, actually exist? Lore’s pitch

en

38:04

Dictator Book Club: Orban

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2021/11/05

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/dictator-book-club-orban (previously: Erdogan, Modi) I. Some are born great. Some achieve greatness. And some are Victor Orban's college roommates. Orban: Europe's New Strongman and Orbanland, my two sources for this installment of our Dictator Book Club, tell the story of a man who spent the last eleven years taking over Hungary and distributing it to guys he knew in college. Janos Ader, President of Hungary. Laszlo Kover, Speaker of the National Assembly

en

13:01

Non-Cognitive Skills For Educational Attainment...

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2021/11/04

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/non-cognitive-skills-for-educational Suppose you want to study the genetics of intelligence. You probably want a sample size in the six digits, and you can't make a six digit number of people sit down and take IQ tests. Also, whenever you say "genetics" and "intelligence" in the same sentence, an angry mob shows up at your door. One solution is to switch to a more popular / less stressful line of work, like Mafia snitch or al-Qaeda second-in-command. But

en

25:21

Mantic Monday 11/1/21

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2021/11/02

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-11121 Keynesian Beauty Contests I have no source for this, someone told me about it at a meetup. Suppose you want to run a forecasting tournament on whether nuclear war will destroy civilization by 2100. But nobody cares how much money they have in eighty years, plus if civilization is destroyed you can’t collect your winnings. There are lots of kludgey solutions to this, but one possibility is a Keynesian beauty contest. Get a lot of isolated

en

05:50

Jhanas and the Dark Room Problem

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2021/10/29

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/jhanas-and-the-dark-room-problem The Dark Room Problem in neuroscience goes something like this: suppose the brain is minimizing prediction error, or free energy, or whatever. You can minimize lots of things by sitting quietly in a dark room. Everything will be very, very predictable. So how come people do other things? The usual workaround is inbuilt biological drives, considered as "set points". You "predict" that you will be well-fed, so getting hungry

en

11:14

Epistemic Minor Leagues

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2021/10/26

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/epistemic-minor-leagues [I’m traveling this week - here is an older essay I never previously got around to posting] Viral game designer Adrian Hon wrote an article about What Alternate Reality Games Can Teach Us About QAnon. It argues that people fall for QAnon because it gives them an interesting mystery. It's a place where new discoveries are always around the corner, where a few hours of research by an amateur like you can fill in one of the missing links

en

26:01

Chilling Effects

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2021/10/20

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/chilling-effects [Epistemic status: Extremely confused! Low confidence in all of this] I. On the recent global warming post, a commenter argued that at least fewer people would die of cold. I was prepared to dismiss this on the grounds that it couldn’t possibly be enough people to matter, but, um: There are only about sixty million deaths per year total, so if this is true then almost 10% of all deaths are due to cold. That sounds…extremely untrue, right? You

en

23:37

Links For October

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2021/10/15

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-october [Remember, I haven’t independently verified each link. On average, commenters will end up spotting evidence that around two or three of the links in each links post are wrong or misleading. I correct these as I see them, and will highlight important corrections later, but I can’t guarantee I will have caught them all by the time you read this.] 1: Our World In Data - we are winning the war on oil spills: 2: @incunabula: “Cheese is one of the 5

en

36:01

Highlights From The Comments On Kids And Climate Change

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2021/10/14

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-kids Ramparen writes: No one really does it because of climate change imo, that is just a neat excuse to avoid the responsibility and limitations that being a parent brings into your life Of course, this was immediately followed by some people (1, 2) saying they were seriously considering not having kids because of climate change, and this article had caused them to rethink their stance (you can find more further down). I

en

26:38

Please Don't Give Up On Having Kids Because Of...

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2021/10/12

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/please-dont-give-up-on-having-kids Please Don't Give Up On Having Kids Because Of Climate Change It will probably make things worse, and there are better ways to contribute 22 hr ago 119 904 I. A recent poll finds that 39% of young people “feel uncertain” about having children because of climate change. And sure, people say a lot of things on polls, but people seem to be talking about this more and more. For example, from NPR:

en

01:15:02

Highlights From The Comments On Modern Architecture

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2021/10/05

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-modern Thanks to everyone who commented on Whither Tartaria (currently 1079 comments). Many of you really like modern architecture, and many others of you really hate it. I appreciate most of you being able to accept disagreement on that and move on to the bigger question of why there’s so much more of it now. The most interesting thing I got from the comments was Chaostician linking to Wikipedia’s page on the Great Male

en

37:54

Book Review: The Scout Mindset

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2021/09/29

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-the-scout-mindset I. You tried Carol Dweck’s Growth Mindset, but the replication crisis crushed your faith. You tried Mike Cernovich’s Gorilla Mindset, but your neighbors all took out restraining orders against you. And yet, without a mindset, what separates you from the beasts? Just in time, Julia Galef brings us The Scout Mindset (subtitle: “Why Some People See Things Clearly And Others Don’t). Galef admits she’s a little behind the curve on this

en

26:29

Whither Tartaria?

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2021/09/24

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/whither-tartaria Imagine a postapocalyptic world. Beside the ruined buildings of our own civilization - St. Peter’s Basilica, the Taj Mahal, those really great Art Deco skyscrapers - dwell savages in mud huts. The savages see the buildings every day, but they never compose legends about how they were built by the gods in a lost golden age. No, they say they themselves could totally build things just as good or better. They just choose to build mud huts instead,

en

1,151 results

Similar Podcasts

Lead With AI

Tamara Nall

Linux in the Ham Shack

Black Sparrow Media

Data Engineering Podcast

Tobias Macey

Eye On A.I.

Craig S. Smith

Reflections

Livewire Labs