The Bayesian Conspiracy

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More ritual than spirituality, honestly. We were aiming for both, but caught up in ritual. Perhaps we’ll revisit the spirituality aspect in a future episode!

Melting Asphalt on Religion, Politics, and Self-Suppression

Welcome to Night Vale, and my All Hail summary

The type of poetry Eneasz likes is called “villanelles.” Here are four great examples.

From Less Wrong: An Alien God, and Thou Art Godshatter.

From SSC: Meditations on Moloch

From Jai: 500 Million, But Not a Single One More

Norman Borlaug & Dunbar’s Number again

Sam Harris’s book on spirituality, Waking Up

Sam Harris on Islam and the Misuses of Ecstasy

GadBeebe on Scotland’s laws on consent and autonomy, specifically the Adults with Incapacity Act

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You can’t control (well) what you can’t count

Samzdat’s posts that served as the basis of much of this episode:
Man as a Rationalist Animal, and
The Meridian of Her Greatness.
Also: The Use and Abuse of Witchdoctors for Life (not Witchdoctors Without Borders, as Eneasz misremembered)

Matt Freeman’s podcast – We’ve Got Worm
Also from Matt – The Daly Planet

Scott Alexander’s review of “Seeing Like A State”

And the original source material, for the purists. 🙂

Norman Borlaug’s dwarf wheat saved 1 billion people

GreenPeace blocks golden rice for no good reason

ChemTrails Turned My Frogs Gay

Cats are Murder Machines

Our Robin Hanson interview on Age of Em

Kim Jong Il made a quilt of sparrow’s neck feathers

A photon teleported from Earth to Space – or was it?

Northpaw Anklet

Friendship is Optimal & Caelum Est Conterrens (different authors)

Red Legacy & Other Stories

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Under the Aegis of Transhuman Spiderman + Other Considerations (and Listener Feedback Catch-up)

Fiction
The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect, by Roger Williams
The Golden Age, by John C Wright
Utopia, LOL?, by Jamie Wahls (+audio version)
Red Legacy and Other Stories, by Eneasz Brodski

Non-Fiction
Making Beliefs Pay Rent
The Psychological Unity of Humankind, by Eliezer Yudkowsky
 – counterpoint: The Psychological Diversity of Mankind, by Kaj Sotala
Dunbar’s Number/Monkey Sphere
CEV

IQ actually doesn’t correlate with unhappiness. It’s either uncorrelated or weakly correlated with happiness! /surprised

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Going beyond our meat-suits

Transhumanism as Simplified Humanism text. Also available in audio here, starting at 6:52

Eneasz with PZ Meyers, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and David Brin: The Immortality Debate

The Fun Theory Sequence (also – here’s a quick summary, but the summaries really never do the sequences full justice)

Chinese scientists genetically modify human embryos

China accused of engineering its most famous sporting export (Yao Ming)

The Singleton

Louis C.K.’s Incurable Shitty Ankle

Fiction Mentioned:
Eneasz’s short story “Host” (plus others) is now available in a collection, both print and ebook!
The Quantum Thief, by Hannu Rajaniemi
The Golden Age, by John C. Wright
Friendship Is Optimal, by Iceman

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AlphaGo is back. Patrick talks about its latest accomplishments, its future, and other topics in game advances.

Our first AlphaGo episode (a very early one, sorry about the audio quality)

News of the most recent AlphaGo adventures

Steph Curry’s training is on a new level

Eneasz’s favorite type of tool-assist challenges – Item Abuse.

DOTA

Sam Harris speaks with Tristan Harris about the arms race for human attention, the ethics of persuasion, and more

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All the cool kids are doing podcasts about drugs, so…

The DARE program’s lack of efficacy (see also: Wikipedia page on DARE studies)

How to get addicted to heroin without really trying. Eneasz thought he read this in The New Yorker, but it was actually Cracked, which is like the New Yorker except more prestigious.

Sam Harris’s podcast episode “Drugs And The Meaning of Life”

Slate Star Codex – Why Were Early Psychedelicists So Weird?

American culture’s treatment of alcohol makes abuse worse – Short BBC article, Super Long Website, Huge PDF (Shelly points us to p156 & p386).

The “wet house”

Portugal decriminalized all drugs in 2001 and is doing pretty well

Some areas of northern Mexico are basically cartel-states now

Eneasz couldn’t find any back-up for his claim that all cultures experience a 100-year pause in development after the discovery of alcohol, and since alcohol has been around since basically the start of civilization, he’s beginning to suspect that anecdote was meant as a joke.

Fake alcohol can still get people drunk (within limits)

The experience of a woman did acid weekly for almost a year and nearly died (not daily, as we’d mentioned in the episode). Fascinating post.

A presidential aide to Nixon reports that the Drug War was specifically about targeting the groups Nixon felt were his enemies.

Do children see the sky as blue, or even see “it” at all, before we tell them it’s there? Maybe Not