Astral Codex Ten Podcast

Fine, the title is an exaggeration. But only a small one. GLP-1 receptor agonist medications like Ozempic are already FDA-approved to treat diabetes and obesity. But an increasing body of research finds they’re also effective against stroke, heart disease, kidney disease, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, alcoholism, and drug addiction. There’s a pattern in fake scammy alternative medicine. People get excited about some new herb. They invent a laundry list of effects: it improves heart health, softens menopause, increases energy, deepens sleep, clears up your skin. This is how you know it’s a fraud. Real medicine works by mimicking natural biochemical signals. Why would you have a signal for “have low energy, bad sleep, nasty menopause, poor heart health, and ugly skin”? Why would all the herb’s side effects be other good things? Real medications usually shift a system along a tradeoff curve; if they hit more than one system, the extras usually just produce side effects. If you’re lucky, you can pick out a subset of patients for whom the intended effect is more beneficial than the side effects are bad. That’s how real medicine works. But GLP-1 drugs are starting to feel more like the magic herb. Why? https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/why-does-ozempic-cure-all-diseases 

9/9/24 • 26:30

[This is one of the finalists in the 2024 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked] To a first approximation, there are a million books about World War II. Why should you care about How the War Was Won (hereinafter “HtWWW”) by Phillips Payson O’Brien? It provides a new, transformative view of the conflict by focusing on production of key goods and what affected that production instead of the ups and downs of battles at the front. That particular lens used can (and should) be applied outside of just World War II, and you can get a feel for how that might be done by reading HtWWW. I have lectured about World War II and read many, many books about it. I have never texted friends more excerpts of a book than this one. I have some criticisms of HtWWW, but if the criticisms dissuade you from reading the book, I will have failed. These complaints are like tut-tutting Einstein’s penmanship. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-how-the-war-was 

8/26/24 • 42:51

[original post here] Table Of Contents I. Comments About Master And Slave Morality II. Comments By People Named In The Post III. Comments Making Specific Points About One Of The Thinkers In The Post IV. Other Comments https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-nietzsche 

8/26/24 • 80:59

Some commenters on the recent post accused me of misunderstanding the Nietzschean objection to altruism. We hate altruism, they said, not because we’re “bad and cruel”, but because we instead support vitalism. Vitalism is a moral system that maximizes life, glory and strength, instead of maximizing happiness. Altruism is bad because it throws resources into helping sick (maybe even dysgenic) people, thus sapping our life, glory, and strength. In a blog post (linked in the original post, discussed at length in the comments), Walt Bismarck compares the ultimate fate of altruism to WALL-E: a world where morbidly obese humans are kept in a hedonistic haze by robot servitors (although the more typical example I hear is tiling the universe with rats on heroin, which maximizes a certain definition of pleasure). In contrast, vitalism imagines a universe alive with dynamism, heroism, and great accomplishments. My response: in most normal cases, altruism and vitalism suggest the same solutions. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/altruism-and-vitalism-as-fellow-travelers 

8/26/24 • 21:50

[This is one of the finalists in the 2024 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked] Content warning: body horror, existential devastation, suicide. This book is an infohazard that will permanently alter your view of paraplegia. The Death of a Newly-Paraplegic Philosopher For me, paraplegia and life itself are not compatible. This is not life, it is something else. In May of 2006, philosophy student Clayton Schwartz embarks on a Pan-American motorcycle trip for the summer before law school. He is 30 years old and in peak physical condition.  He makes it as far south as Acapulco in Mexico before crashing into a donkey that had wandered into the road.  The impact crushes his spinal cord at the T5 vertebra, rendering him paralyzed from the nipples down.  On Sunday, February 24, 2008, he commits suicide. In the year and a half in between, he writes Two Arms and a Head, his combination memoir and suicide note.  https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-two-arms-and-a-head 

8/26/24 • 54:48

I. Bentham’s Bulldog Blogger “Bentham’s Bulldog” recently wrote Shut Up About Slave Morality. Nietzsche’s concept of “slave morality” (he writes) is just a dysphemism for the usual morality where you’re not bad and cruel. Right-wing edgelords use “rejection of slave morality” as a justification for badness and cruelty: When people object to slave morality, they are just objecting to morality. They are objecting to the notion that you should care about others and doing the right thing, even when doing so doesn’t materially benefit you. Now, one can consistently object to those things, but it doesn’t make them any sort of Nostradamus. It makes them morally deficient, and also generally philosophically confused. The tedious whinging about slave morality is just a way to pass off not caring about morality or taking moral arguments seriously as some sort of sophisticated and cynical myth-busting. But it’s not that in the slightest. No one is duped by slave morality, no one buys into it because of some sort of deep-seated ignorance. Those who follow it do so because of a combination of social pressure and a genuine desire to help out others. That is, in fact, not in any way weak but a noble impulse from which all good actions spring. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/matt-yglesias-considered-as-the-nietzschean 

8/22/24 • 72:10

[This is one of the finalists in the 2024 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-real-raw-news 

8/13/24 • 46:41

[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.] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/links-for-july-2024 

8/13/24 • 19:09

The “LibsOfTikTok” Twitter account found a random Home Depot employee who said she wished the Trump assassin hadn’t missed. Her followers mass-called Home Depot and got the employee fired. Moral of the story: despite everything, there’s apparently still a norm against assassinating politicians. But some on the right interpreted this as meaning something more. A sudden vibe shift, or impending Trump victory, has handed conservatives the levers of cancel culture! This sparked a right-wing blogosphere debate: should they be magnanimous in victory, or descend into an orgy of vengeance? https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/some-practical-considerations-before 

8/13/24 • 31:09

Finalist #5 in the Book Review Contest https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-how-language-began  [This is one of the finalists in the 2024 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked]

8/13/24 • 78:23

[Original post here] Table Of Contents 1: Responses To Broad Categories Of Objections 2: Responses To Specific Comments 3: Comments By People Who Have Relevant Experiences 4: Closing Thoughts https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-mentally 

8/10/24 • 51:53

A guest post by Daniel Böttger [Editor’s note: I accept guest posts from certain people, especially past Book Review Contest winners. Daniel Böttger, who wrote last year’s review of On The Marble Cliffs, has finally taken me up on this and submitted this essay. I don’t necessarily agree with or endorse all guest posts, and I’m still collecting my thoughts (ha!) on this one.] Nobody knows for sure how subjective experiences relate to objective physics. That is the main reason why there are serious claims that not everything is physics. It has been called “the most important problem in the biological sciences", “the last frontier of brain science”, and “as important as anything that can possibly exist” as well as “core to” all value and ethics. So, let’s solve that in a blog post.

8/2/24 • 42:23

[This is one of the finalists in the 2024 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked] “You wake up screaming, frightened by memories, You’re plagued by nightmares, do we haunt all of your dreams?” https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-the-family-that 

8/2/24 • 57:52

Ten people are stuck on a lifeboat after their ship sank. It will be weeks before anyone finds them, and they’re out of food. They’ve heard this story before, so they decide to turn to cannibalism sooner rather than later. They agree to draw lots to determine the victim. Just as the first person is reaching for the lots, Albert shouts out “WAIT LET’S ALL KILL AND EAT BOB!” They agree to do this instead of drawing lots. This is obvious, right? For nine out of ten people, it’s a better deal. For nine out of ten people, it brings their chance of death from 1/10 to 0. Bob’s against it, of course, but he’s outvoted. The nine others overpower Bob and eat him. Something about this surprises me. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/lifeboat-games-and-backscratchers 

8/2/24 • 18:15

I. Suppose that you, an ordinary person, open your door and start choking on yellow smoke. You call up your representative and say “there should be less pollution”. A technical expert might hear “there should be less pollution” and have dozens of questions. Do you just want to do common-sense things, like lower the detection threshold for hexamethyldecawhatever? Or do you want to ban tetraethylpentawhatever, which is vital for the baby formula food chain and would cause millions of babies to die if you banned it? Any pollution legislation must be made of specific policies. In some sense, it’s impossible to be “for” or “against” the broad concept of “reducing pollution”. Everyone would be against a bill that devastated the baby formula supply chain for no benefit. And everyone would support a magical bill that cleaned the skies with no extra hardship on industry. In between, there are just a million different tradeoffs; some are good, others bad. So (the technocrat concludes), it’s incoherent to support “reducing pollution”. You can only support (or oppose) particular plans. And yet ordinary people should be able to say “I want to stop choking on yellow smoke every time I go outside” without having to learn the difference between hexamethyldecawhatever and tetraethylpentawhatever. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/details-that-you-should-include-in 

7/27/24 • 15:55

Finalist #3 in the Book Review Contest [This is one of the finalists in the 2024 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-don-juan 

7/27/24 • 21:51

The last week hasn’t been great for the Democratic Party. First Biden bombed the debate. But the subsequent decision about whether/how to replace Biden has also been embarrassing. Biden has refused to step aside gracefully, and party elites don’t seem to have any contingency plan. Worse, they don’t even seem united on the need to figure anything out, with many deflecting the conversation to irrelevant points like “Trump is also bad” or pretending that nothing is really wrong. Some of the party’s problems are hard and have no shortcuts. But the big one - figuring out whether replacing Biden would even help the Democrats’ electoral chances - is a good match for prediction markets. Set up markets to find the probability of Democrats winning they nominate Biden, vs. the probability of Democrats winning if they replace him with someone else. (see my Prediction Market FAQ for why I think they are good for cases like these) Before we go into specifics, the summary result: Replacing Biden with Harris is neutral to slightly positive; replacing Biden with Newsom or a generic Democrat increases their odds of winning by 10 - 15 percentage points. There are some potential technical objections to this claim, but they mostly suggest reasons why the markets might overestimate Biden’s chances rather than underestimate them. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/prediction-markets-suggest-replacing 

7/27/24 • 23:49

[This is one of the finalists in the 2024 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked] Matthew Scully, author of Dominion, is an unlikely animal welfare advocate. He’s a conservative Christian who worked as a speechwriter for George W. Bush. That’s like finding out that Greta Thunberg’s Chief of Staff spent their spare time writing a 400-page, densely researched book called “Guns Are Good, Actually.”  Scully’s unusual background could be why it took me years of reading everything on animal welfare I could get my hands on before I stumbled on his 2002 manifesto. Let this be a warning to other authors — write just one little State of the Union address that exalts the War on Terror and your books might not get a lot of reach in more liberal, EA-adjacent circles.  Scully is like a right-wing, vegetarian, Christian, David Foster Wallace. If you read DFW’s Consider the Lobster and thought, “I wish someone would write a full length book with this vibe, where a very talented and surprisingly funny writer excoriates problematic industries,” Dominion is the book for you.  https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-dominion-by-matthew 

7/10/24 • 39:00

Alexander: Hello and welcome to the first Presidential debate of 2024. Based on the remarkable popularity of the previous debates I moderated (2016, 2020, 2023), I’ve been asked to come here again and help the American people learn more about the our two candidates - President Joseph Biden, and former president Donald J. Trump. This debate will be broadcast live to select viewers, and I’ll also post a transcript on my blog. Let’s start with a question for President Biden. Mr. President, the biggest political story of the past four years was Dobbs. v. Jackson Women’s Health, which overturned Roe v. Wade and gave final decision-making power on abortion back to the states. How would a second Biden administration treat this issue? Do you think states should be setting policy on abortion? Biden: I’m not even sure states exist. Alexander: You’re . . . not sure states exist? https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/my-2024-presidential-debate 

6/29/24 • 22:55

I think I got the original post slightly off. I was critiquing Sam Kriss’ claim that the best traditions come from “just doing stuff”, without trying to tie things back to anything in the past. The counterexample I was thinking of was all the 2010s New Atheist attempts to reinvent “church, but secular”. These were well-intentioned. Christians get lots of benefits from going to church, like a good community. These benefits don’t seem obviously dependent on the religious nature. So instead of tying your weekly meeting back to what Jesus and St. Peter and so on said two thousand years ago, why not “just do stuff” and have a secular weekly meeting? Most of these attempts fell apart. One of them, the Sunday Assembly, clings to existence but doesn’t seem too successful. People with ancient traditions 1, people who just do stuff 0. But after thinking about it more, maybe this isn’t what Sam means. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/clarification-on-fake-tradition-is 

6/29/24 • 03:36

I had been living in Japan for a year before I got the idea to look up whose portraits were on the banknotes I was handling every day. In the United States, the faces of presidents and statesmen adorn our currency. So I was surprised to learn that the mustachioed man on the ¥1,000 note with which I purchased my daily bento box was a bacteriologist. It was a pleasant surprise, though. It seems to me that a society that esteems bacteriologists over politicians is in many ways a healthy one.  But it was the lofty gaze of the man on the ¥10,000 note that really caught my attention. I find that always having a spare ¥10,000 note is something of a necessity in Japan. You never know when you might stumble upon a pop-up artisanal sake kiosk beside a metro station staircase that only accepts cash and only opens one day a year. So over the course of my time in Japan I had come to know the face of the man on that bill rather well.  https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-autobiography-of 

6/29/24 • 32:04

I. A: I like Indian food. B: Oh, so you like a few bites of flavorless rice daily? Because India is a very poor country, and that’s a more realistic depiction of what the average Indian person eats. And India has poor food safety laws - do you like eating in unsanitary restaurants full of rats? And are you condoning Narendra Modi’s fascist policies? A: I just like paneer tikka. This is how most arguments about being “trad” sound to me. Someone points out that they like some feature of the past. Then other people object that this feature is idealized, the past wasn’t universally like that, and the past had many other bad things. But “of the past” is just meant to be a pointer! “Indian food” is a good pointer to paneer tikka even if it’s an idealized view of how Indians actually eat, even if India has lots of other problems! In the same way, when people say they like Moorish Revival architecture or the 1950s family structure or whatever, I think of these as pointers. It’s fine if the Moors also had some bad buildings, or not all 1950s families were really like that. Everyone knows what they mean! https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/fake-tradition-is-traditional 

6/23/24 • 08:52

I. Steve Kirsch is an inventor and businessman most famous for developing the optical mouse. More recently, he’s become an anti-COVID-vaccine activist. He has many different arguments on his Substack, of which one especially caught my eye: He got Pollfish, a reputable pollster, to ask questions about people’s COVID experiences, including whether they thought any family members had died from COVID or from COVID vaccines. Results here: 7.5% of people said a household member had died of COVID 8.5% of people said a household member had died from the vaccine. All other statistics were normal and confirmed that this was a fair sample of the population. In particular, about 75% were vaccinated (suggesting that they weren’t just polling hardcore anti-vaxxers). https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/failure-to-replicate-anti-vaccine 

6/23/24 • 12:14

I. Lately we’ve been discussing some of the ethics around genetics and embryo selection. One question that comes up in these debates is - are we claiming that some people are genetically inferior to other people? If we’re trying to select schizophrenia genes out of the population - even setting aside debates about whether this would work and whether we can do it non-coercively - isn’t this still in some sense claiming that schizophrenics are genetically inferior? And do we really want to do this? I find it clarifying to set aside schizophrenia for a second and look at cystic fibrosis. Cystic fibrosis is a simple single-gene disorder. A mutation in this gene makes lung mucus too thick. People born with the disorder spend their lives fighting off various awful lung infections before dying early, usually in their 20s to 40s. There’s a new $300,000/year medication that looks promising, but we’ve yet to see how much it can increase life expectancy. As far as I know, there’s nothing good about cystic fibrosis. It’s just an awful mutation that leads to a lifetime of choking on your own lung mucus. So: are people with cystic fibrosis genetically inferior, or not? https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/nobody-can-make-you-feel-genetically 

6/23/24 • 08:29

Seven years ago, I wrote an online serial novel, Unsong, about alternate history American kabbalists. You can read the online version here. The online version isn’t going anywhere, but lots of people asked for a hard copy. I tried to get the book formally published, but various things went wrong and I procrastinated. Commenter Pycea finally saved me from myself and helped get it published on Amazon (thank you!) You can now buy the book here, for $19.99. I think the published version is an improvement over the original. I rewrote three or four chapters I wasn’t satisfied with, and changed a few character names to be more kabbalistically appropriate. The timeline and history have been rectified, and there are more details on the 2000 - 2015 period and how UNSONG was founded. I gave the political situation a little more depth (watch for the Archon of Arkansas, the Shogun of Michigan, and the Caliph of California). And the sinister Malia Ngo has been replaced by the equally sinister, but actual-character-development-having, Ash Bentham. All of the parts that were actually good have been kept. Thanks to everyone for being patient, and special thanks to Pycea for making this happen. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/unsong-available-in-paperback 

6/23/24 • 01:14

I. Lyman Stone wrote an article Why Effective Altruism Is Bad. You know the story by now, let’s start with the first argument: The only cities where searches for EA-related terms are prevalent enough for Google to show it are in the Bay Area and Boston…We know the spatial distribution of effective altruist ideas. We can also get IRS data on charitable giving… Stone finds that Google Trends shows that searches for “effective altruism” concentrate most in the San Francisco Bay Area and Boston. So he’s going to see if those two cities have higher charitable giving than average, and use that as his metric of whether EAs give more to charity than other people. He finds that SF and Boston do give more to charity than average, but not by much, and this trend has if anything decreased in the 2010 - present period when effective altruism was active. So, he concludes, https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/contra-stone-on-ea 

6/23/24 • 31:29

[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.] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/links-for-may-2024 

6/10/24 • 36:52

In my book review of The Others Within Us, I wrote: [An Internal Family Systems session] isn’t supposed to be just the therapist walking you through guided imagery, or you making up a story you tell yourself. The therapist asks you “Look inside until you find the part that’s sabotaging your relationship”, and you are supposed to discover - not invent, discover - that your unconscious gives it the form of a snake called Sabby. And you are supposed to hear as in a trance - again, not invent - Sabby telling you that she’s been protecting you from heartbreak since your last breakup. When you bargain with Sabby, it’s a two-way negotiation. You learn - not decide - whether or not Sabby agrees to any given bargain. According to Internal Family Systems (which descends from normal family systems, ie family therapy where the whole family is there at once and has to compromise with each other), all this stuff really is in your mind, waiting for an IFS therapist to discover it. When Carl Jung talked about interacting with the archetypes or whatever, he wasn’t being metaphorical. He literally meant “go into a trance that gives you a sort of waking lucid dream where you meet all this internal stuff”. Some IFS therapists chimed in to say this was wrong. For example, DaystarEld: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/what-is-going-on-in-ifs 

6/10/24 • 09:17

There’s been renewed debate around Bryan Caplan’s The Case Against Education recently, so I want to discuss one way I think about this question. Education isn’t just about facts. But it’s partly about facts. Facts are easy to measure, and they’re a useful signpost for deeper understanding. If someone has never heard of Chaucer, Dickens, Melville, Twain, or Joyce, they probably haven’t learned to appreciate great literature. If someone can’t identify Washington, Lincoln, or either Roosevelt, they probably don’t understand the ebb and flow of American history. So what facts does the average American know? https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/a-theoretical-case-against-education 

6/10/24 • 15:15

Internal Family Systems, the hot new psychotherapy, has a secret. “Hot new psychotherapy” might sound dismissive. It’s not. There’s always got to be one. The therapy that’s getting all the buzz, curing all the incurable patients, rocking those first few small studies. The therapy that was invented by a grizzled veteran therapist working with Patients Like You, not the out-of-touch elites behind all the other therapies. The therapy that Really Gets To The Root Of The Problem. There’s always got to be one, and now it’s IFS. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-others-within-us 

6/10/24 • 42:20