Preview Mode Links will not work in preview mode

Astral Codex Ten Podcast

Apr 9, 2021

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/metis-and-bodybuilders

Fitness researcher Menno Henselmans writes about optimal program design for bodybuilders. His thesis is that peer-reviewed studies prove bodybuilder lore is wrong in lots of places. For example:

Traditional bro wisdom holds short rest periods of 1-3...


Oct 11, 2017

Pop science likes to dub dopamine “the reward chemical” and serotonin “the happiness chemical”. God only knows what norepinephrine is, but I’m sure it’s cutesy.

In real life, all of this is much more complicated. Dopamine might be “the surprisal in a hierarchical predictive model chemical”, but even that...


Oct 11, 2017

From Boston ReviewKnow Thy Futurist. It’s an attempt to classify and analyze various types of futurism, in much the same way that a Jack Chick tract could be described as “an attempt to classify and analyze various types of religion”.

I have more disagreements with it than can fit in a blog post, but let’s...


Oct 11, 2017

Last post talked about individual differences in whether people found others basically friendly or hostile. The SSC survey included a sort of related question: “Are people basically trustworthy?”

The exact phrasing asked respondents to rate other people from 1 (“basically trustworthy”) to 5 (“basically...


Oct 11, 2017

A few years ago I had lunch with another psychiatrist-in-training and realized we had totally different experiences with psychotherapy.

We both got the same types of cases. We were both practicing the same kinds of therapy. We were both in the same training program, studying under the same teachers. But our experiences...