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Astral Codex Ten Podcast

Jul 27, 2018

The Tourist Board of Xanadu
Did recently impose a fee
On those who travel far from home
To visit Kubla’s pleasure dome
Of $20, 9 – 3

So twice five miles of fertile ground
With fence and wire are girdled round
And signs proclaiming “ENTRY AT THE GATE”
Where gather many a camera-bearing crowd
And here are docents,...


Jul 27, 2018

[Previously in sequence: Fundamental Value Differences Are Not That FundamentalThe Whole City Is Center. This post might not make a lot of sense if you haven’t read those first.]

I.

Thanks to everyone who commented on last week’s posts. Some of the best comments seemed to converge on an idea like this:

 



Jul 21, 2018

Related to yesterday’s post on people being too quick to assume value differences: some of the simplest fake value differences are where people make a big deal about routing around a certain word. And some of the most complicated real value differences are where some people follow a strategy explicitly and other...


Jul 21, 2018

Ozy (and others) talk about fundamental value differences as a barrier to cooperation.

On their model (as I understand it) there are at least two kinds of disagreement. In the first, people share values but disagree about facts. For example, you and I may both want to help the Third World. But you believe foreign aid...


Jul 14, 2018

Yesterday I wrote about melatonin, mentioning that most drugstore melatonin supplements were 10x or more the recommended dose. A commenter on Facebook pointed me to an interesting explanation of why.

Dr. Richard Wurtman, an MIT scientist who helped discover melatonin’s role in the body and pioneer its use as a...