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14 Feb, 19 tweets, 7 min read
Curious about @slatestarcodex, but don't know where to start?

A little while ago a friend asked me to make a list of my favorite posts. So here's a beginner's guide: jasoncrawford.org/guide-to-scott…
What is @slatestarcodex about?

Like many great blogs, not any one thing: it’s the eclectic interests of a unique individual with a broad intellectual appetite.

He says he tends to focus on “reasoning, science, psychiatry, medicine, ethics, genetics, AI, economics and politics.”
What makes it so good? I tried to explain it here:
There isn’t any one place to start with @slatestarcodex. Here are some favorites by category. Just pick a subject you’re interested in and start reading. See the full post for more: jasoncrawford.org/guide-to-scott…
EPISTEMOLOGY AND RATIONALISM

“Beware The Man Of One Study.” It’s easy to go wrong looking at a single scientific study.

slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/12/bew…
DISCUSSION AND ARGUMENT

“Beware Isolated Demands For Rigor.” On applying epistemological rigor in a biased way, demanding higher standards to justify ideas you don’t like.

slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/bew…
SCIENCE

“The Control Group Is Out Of Control.” The replication crisis in science; why science is hard; parapsychology as “the control group for science.”

slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/28/the…
PSYCHOLOGY

“Book Review: All Therapy Books.” General lampooning of therapy books.

slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/20/boo…
NEUROSCIENCE

“Guyenet (@whsource) On Motivation.” The structure of the brain’s decision-making apparatus.

slatestarcodex.com/2018/02/07/guy…
PROGRESS

“Is Science Slowing Down?” A response to an economics paper claiming that “ideas are getting harder to find,” arguing that “constant progress in science in response to exponential increases in inputs ought to be our null hypothesis.”

slatestarcodex.com/2018/11/26/is-…
HISTORY

“Were There Dark Ages?” Defending the concept of the “Dark Ages” from a variety of attacks.

slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/15/wer…
POLITICS

“California, Water You Doing?” The first Scott Alexander post I ever read. A good example of how to analyze a politically charged issue and actually understand a current topic.

slatestarcodex.com/2015/05/11/cal…
ECONOMICS

“Reverse Voxsplaining: Drugs vs. Chairs.” A rebuttal to a @voxdotcom story claiming that free markets are responsible for the high preice of EpiPens.

slatestarcodex.com/2016/08/29/rev…
MEDIA

“A Failure, But Not Of Prediction.” What exactly the media got wrong about covid.

slatestarcodex.com/2020/04/14/a-f…
CULTURE

“Is Everything A Religion?” It’s easy to point at any philosophy or community and call it a “religion”; how seriously should we take this?

slatestarcodex.com/2015/03/25/is-…
BOOK REVIEWS

“Book Review: Against The Grain.” “If, as Samuel Johnson claimed, ‘The Devil was the first Whig’, Against the Grain argues that wheat was the first High Modernist.”

slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/14/boo…
“The Parable Of The Talents.” “Rabbi Zusya once said that when he died, he wasn’t worried that God would ask him ‘Why weren’t you Moses?’ or ‘Why weren’t you Solomon?’ But he did worry that God might ask ‘Why weren’t you Rabbi Zusya?’”

slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/31/the…
“Lizardman’s Constant Is 4%.” Don’t trust poll results showing that a small percent of people have crazy beliefs. This one is insightful & hilarious; I read most of it out loud to @dacattac over dinner one night and had a hard time keeping a straight face

slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noi…
If you like those, there are about 3x as many links in the full post: jasoncrawford.org/guide-to-scott…

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More from @jasoncrawford

Jason Crawford Profile picture
11 Feb
We're hiring for the engineering team at @OurWorldInData!

A rare chance to build data visualization and pipelines at a well-known and highly influential organization that is focused on how to make progress against the world's biggest problems.

ourworldindata.org/jobs
For those few who haven't heard of @OurWorldInData, it's probably the top site in the world that presents research and data on topics such as global health, poverty, energy usage, agriculture and nutrition, population growth, education, etc.
The data is presented in interactive visualizations and all of it is downloadable in CSV.

As a premiere example, check out our coronavirus data explorer: ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-da…
Read 11 tweets
Jason Crawford Profile picture
22 Jan
After reading the post this afternoon, I read most of it out loud to my wife just now.

It was hard, because I was alternately laughing and crying.
Why does this move me so much? It's hard to explain.

As Scott says, it's just a blog, and at the same time, it's so, so much more.
Partly of course, I'm just happy he's back. I've positively missed his writing, which I've never felt about a blog. The insight, the humor, the incisive clarity, the relentless questioning, the exhaustive data analysis.
Read 18 tweets
Jason Crawford Profile picture
28 Dec 20
Only three chapters into @CharlesCMann's *The Wizard and the Prophet* and why didn't anyone insist that I read this book before? Super-relevant to progress studies.

Just finished the Borlaug chapter, which is jaw-dropping, even though I already knew the Borlaug story in outline.
The sheer amount of hardship Borlaug endured, the setbacks, the lack of support from almost everyone around him, the tedium of crossing thousands of varieties and planting them by hand… all to save the world's hungry. Someone needs to make a movie out of this.
Seriously, there are so many great scenes. Usually science is hard to make dramatic on the big screen, but this would be fairly easy.

Like this scene where he has no equipment and no one will lend him any, so he literally pulls the plow through the field himself, like a mule:
Read 7 tweets
Jason Crawford Profile picture
27 Dec 20
This image gets posted a lot lately, and not everyone knows what it means.

It's a reference to “survivor bias”: a statistical problem in which a sample is non-representative because some elements have been eliminated before the sample was taken. Here's a brief explainer.
The story: You're Britain. It's WW2. Your planes are getting shot down. You want to reinforce them with armor. But you can't armor the whole plane (for weight among other reasons).

What parts of the plane do you prioritize for armor?
Your researchers collect data on where your planes are getting shot. Whenever a plane returns from a mission, they note where they found bullet holes. This diagram shows all the holes that were found across many missions.

Given this data, where do you put the armor?
Read 14 tweets
Jason Crawford Profile picture
17 Dec 20
If you want a single, vivid, and frankly disgusting example to hold in mind to remember how much our lives have improved over the last ~150 years…

Consider *shit*.

Literally, excrement. How much previous generations had to think about it, be around it, even handle it:
Before the automobile, horses flooded the streets, and cities were mired in their muck. According to Richard Rhodes, in NYC, horses dropped 4 million pounds of manure and 100 thousand gallons of urine on the streets every *day*. (!)
And Robert Gordon quotes this passage from *The Horse in the City*. “On New York’s Liberty Street there was a manure heap seven feet high.”

Shoveling shit was literally a full-time job. And one of the key uses of horses was to pull the wagons that carried away horse droppings.
Read 21 tweets
Jason Crawford Profile picture
17 Dec 20
Good news.

A similar thing happened during the smallpox eradication program: a new applicator device, the “bifurcated needle”, used 1/4 the vaccine, and thus 4x'ed the supplies.
More in my thread from last year:
Close-up of a bifurcated needle, holding a drop of smallpox vaccine.

D. A. Henderson, who led the eradication program, made an award for his team called the “Order of the Bifurcated Needle.” His daughter made a patch showing the points of the needle bent into a zero.
Read 4 tweets

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