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Astral Codex Ten Podcast

Jul 27, 2019

I.

“Silliest internet atheist argument” is a hotly contested title, but I have a special place in my heart for the people who occasionally try to prove Biblical fallibility by pointing out whales are not a type of fish.

(this is going to end up being a metaphor for something, so bear with me)

The argument goes like...


Jul 27, 2019

[self plagiarism notice: this is mostly copied from last year’s contest announcement]

1. Announcing the second annual Adversarial Collaboration Contest

An adversarial collaboration is an effort by two people with opposing opinions on a topic to collaborate on a summary of the evidence. Just as we hope that a trial...


Jul 25, 2019

Ken Kesey, graduating college in Oregon with several wrestling championships and a creative writing degree, made a classic mistake: he moved to the San Francisco Bay Area to find himself. He rented a house in Palo Alto (this was the 1950s, when normal people could have houses in Palo Alto) and settled down to write the...


Jul 21, 2019

The gabapentinoids are a class of drugs vaguely resembling the neurotransmitter GABA. Although they were developed to imitate GABA’s action, later research discovered they acted on a different target, the A2D subunit of calcium channels. Two gabapentinoids are approved by the FDA: gabapentin (Neurontin®) and...


Jul 21, 2019

“You say it’s important to overcome biases. So isn’t it hypocritical that you’re not trying to overcome whichever bias prevents you from realizing you’re wrong and I’m right?”
— everybody

Correcting for bias is important. Learning about specific biases, like confirmation bias or hindsight bias, can be...