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80,000 Hours researches different problems and professions to help you figure out how to do as much good as possible. Their free career guide show you how to choose a career that's fulfilling and maximises your contribution to solving the world's most pressing problems.
MealSquares is a "nutritionally complete" food that contains a balanced diet worth of nutrients in a few tasty easily measurable units. Think Soylent, except zero preparation, made with natural ingredients, and looks/tastes a lot like an ordinary scone.
Monthly Archives: July 2014
Meditations On Moloch
[Content note: Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions!] I. Allan Ginsberg’s famous poem, Moloch: What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination? Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and … Continue reading
Weird Psychiatric Ads Of The Seventies
There’s a really famous ad for thorazine, a drug that came out in the fifties and was the first effective antipsychotic. Less well-known are all the other weird, wonderful and creepy psychiatric ads from the past century. I was able … Continue reading
More Links For July 2014
The most embarassing part of the Slavoj Zizek plagiarism scandal isn’t that Zizek committed plagiarism. It isn’t even that he plagiarized a white supremacist website. It’s the way the plagiarism was discovered. Steve Sailer was reading a Zizek book and … Continue reading
Some Antibiotic Stagnation
In the past week I’ve written about antibiotics and the rate of technological progress. So when a graph about using antibiotics to measure the rate of scientific progress starts going around the Internet, I take note. Unfortunately, it’s inexcusably terrible. … Continue reading
The Other Codex
I did okay for myself this first year at my job and had a little bit of money left over. I told myself I was allowed to buy one moderately ridiculous luxury item as a reward. And ever since I … Continue reading
No Skyscraper Stagnation
Since we’re on the subject of whether technological progress has stagnated, I thought I’d address an issue that always seems to come up sooner or later. Is there a decline in American skyscrapers possibly indicating a decline in American civilization? … Continue reading
Promising The Moon
I. The year 1969 comes up to you and asks what sort of marvels you’ve got all the way in 2014. You explain that cameras, which 1969 knows as bulky boxes full of film that takes several days to get … Continue reading
Open Thread 2: Free Minds, Free Threads
Time for another Open Thread / Housekeeping Thread. 1. Commenter Lila wants to signal-boost the existence of psychiatric advanced directives, where you can write a (somewhat legally binding) plan for a future in which you become too mentally ill to … Continue reading
HeartMath Considered Incoherent
[Note: all opinions expressed here are my own. Nothing to be taken as medical advice.] This is not a skeptic blog and I find much skeptic-blogging distasteful. But as the saying sort of goes: “You may not be interested in … Continue reading
Psychotropic Base Rates: The Argument From Antibiotics
The obscure antiprotozoal drug suramin has the prettiest molecular structure I’ve ever seen. It also has some evidence as a potential treatment for autism based on a cell danger response model of the condition. I’m not going to get too … Continue reading