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Astral Codex Ten Podcast

Jan 31, 2018

H/T Robin Hanson: Aeon’s The Good Guy / Bad Guy Myth. “Pop culture today is obsessed with the battle between good and evil. Traditional folktales never were. What changed?”

The article claims almost every modern epic – superhero movies, Star Wars, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, etc – shares a similar plot....


Jan 30, 2018

Thanks to everyone who commented on the posts about conflict and mistake theory.

aciddc writes:

I’m a leftist (and I guess a Marxist in the same sense I guess I’m a Darwinist despite knowing evolutionary theory has passed him by) fan of this blog. I’ve thought about this “conflict theory vs. mistake theory”...


Jan 26, 2018

There were a lot of good comments on yesterday’s conflict vs. mistake post. Some were very appropriate challenges: for example, doesn’t public choice theory itself assume conflict between special interests? And didn’t Marxism start off with a dry incentive-based explanation for why capitalists have to do what they...


Jan 25, 2018

Jacobite – which is apparently still a real magazine and not a one-off gag making fun of Jacobin – summarizes their article Under-Theorizing Government as “You’ll never hear the terms ‘principal-agent problem,’ ‘rent-seeking,’ or ‘aligning incentives’ from socialists. That’s because they expect...


Jan 18, 2018

They say money can’t buy love. But that was the bad old days of fiat money. Now there are dozens of love-based cryptocurrencies – LoveCoin, CupidCoin, Erosium, Nubilo – with market caps in the mid nine-figures. The 17-year-old genius behind CupidCoin just bought the state of Tennessee. You think I’m joking, but...