Astral Codex Ten Podcast

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-brain [original post here] On What Kind Of Thing Brain Waves Are: Loweren writes: In my undergrad biology program we visited a brain research lab near Moscow. The brain scientist gave us a brief intro to Fourier transforms, which made me understand how beautiful they are - something that 2 years of undergrad math classes didn't manage to do. Then he explained the brain waves to us like this: "Imagine you are standing outside the football stadium. You don't see what's happening inside, but you hear the chatter of the crowd. All the individual words blend together into indistinct mess and although there's definitely a local information transfer going on, from the outside you can't make out anything specific. Then imagine one of the teams scored a goal. The crowd behavior is now very different! The fans of the winning team start to cheer and sing. You can easily pick this up from outside and infer what's happening. This is because the individuals behave in a globally coordinated manner, so their signals amplify each other in tune. From this perspective, brain waves are a byproduct of globally coordinated neuronal activity, and it's the first one we historically learned to pick up. They appear when neurons stop chatting with each other and start chanting in unison." Then he plopped some probes on my head and announced I have beautiful epileptic spikes (I'm not an epileptic)

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-my [Original post here] I know I don't usually publish on Saturdays, but I wanted to get this out before people filled in their mail-in ballots. So: Is Prop 31 Another Attack On Vaping? Maximum Limelihood Estimator is concerned that Prop 31 (against flavored tobacco products) is meant to target vaping: The flavored tobacco ban is mostly a ban on vaping; the vast majority of vape products are flavored, while most cigarettes aren't. About 40% of cigarettes are flavored, compared to about 85% of vape juice. A study suggests that a ban on flavored tobacco would increase cigarette consumption (by making cigarettes relatively more desirable than vaping). Limelihood writes that "The statistics [in the study] are great, which is honestly shocking to me, since it's the first time I've said this about an experiment in . . . ever." There is also a study purporting to show that flavored cigarette bans do decrease smoking, but Limelihood says that: …it's got some big problems. The study there only compares tobacco sales in a single city (San Francisco) before and after a ban on menthol cigarettes. However, because there's no comparison to other cities, it's essentially worthless; tobacco sales throughout the US dropped at this time, and I don't know how this compares.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/acx-grants-project-updates Thanks to everyone who got ACX Grants (see original grants here) and sent me a one-year update. Below are short summaries of the updates everyone sent. If for some reason you want one of the full updates, which are longer and more technical, let me know and I'll see if I have permission to send them to you. I've also included each grantee's assessment on a scale of 1-10 for how well they're doing, where 5/10 is "about as well as expected". A few grantees are asking for extra help - I've included those requests in italics at the end of the relevant updates, and I've collected all of them together below. Updates 1: Discover Molecular Targets Of Antibiotics (8/10)Pedro Silva planned to use in silico screening to identify the biochemical targets of seven promising natural antibiotics, which could potentially help develop better versions of them. He says he's finished most of the simulations and determined the 5-20 most stable complexes for each antibiotic. Once he finishes this, he can start additional simulations on the best complexes to obtain better estimates of their stability and construct hypotheses on which of these is most involved in the antibiotic's efficacy. 2: Ballot Proposition For Approval Voting In Seattle (?/10)They have asked me not to discuss their progress until after the November election. 3: Software To Validate New FDA Drug Trial Designs (10/10)Michael Sklar and Confirm Solutions have gotten further funding from FTX and now have 2-3 people working full-time on the project. They are building new statistical techniques and software to help regulators quickly assess designs for clinical trials. Here is a recent conference poster on the methods. They have written proof-of-concept code and are writing a white paper to show regulators and pharma companies. They also claim to have developed software that has "sped up their simulations for some standard Bayesian trial designs by a factor of about 1 million." They are looking for more employees and collaborators; if you're interested, contact [email protected] 4: Alice Evans' Research On "The Great Gender Divergence" (?/10)Dr. Evans has done over four months of research in Morocco, Italy, India, and Turkey. You can find some of her most recent thoughts at her blog here. Her book is still on track to be published from Princeton Press, more details tbd. 5: Develop Safer Immunosuppressants (7/10)Trevor Klee planned to continue his work to develop a safer slow-release form of cyclosporine. He realized this would be too expensive to do in humans in the current funding environment, and has pivoted to getting his medication approved for a feline autoimmune disease as both a proof-of-concept and as a cheaper, faster way to start making revenue. He recently raised $100,000 in crowdfunding (in addition to getting $200,000 from angel investors to run a feline trial, which will finish in January. He still anticipates eventually moving back to humans. Trevor wants to talk to bloggers or writers who might be interested in covering his work. 6: Promote Economically Literate Climate Policy In US States (4/10)Yoram Bauman and Climate 24x7 have written a policy paper about their ideas. They were able to get a bill in front of the Nebraska Legislature, but it died in committee. They have a promising measure in Utah, and an off chance of getting something rolling in Pennsylvania. Overall they report frustration, as many of the legislators they worked with have been voted out or term-limited. If you are a legislator or activist interested in helping with this project - especially in Utah, Pennsylvania, or South Dakota - please contact Yoram at [email protected]. 7: Repository / Search Engine For Forecasting Questions (8/10)Nuno Sempere at metaforecast.org was able to hire a developer to "make the backend significantly better and add a bunch of functionality" - you can see a longer list of updates here. The developer has since left for other forecasting-related work and the project is moving more slowly. 8: Help [Anonymous] Interview For A Professorship (8/10)[Anonymous] was a grad student who wanted to interview for professorships at top schools where he might work on AI safety in an academic environment. The grant was to help make it financially easier for him to go on a long round of interviews [Anonymous] successfully got a job offer from a top school, and will be going there and researching AI safety.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/my-california-ballot-2022 Previously: 2018, 2020 General Philosophy Of Voting This is California, so the Democrats always win. When I vote, I mean to send a signal somewhere in between "you are the candidate I really prefer for this office" and "I will vote for the Democrat if I approve of her and want her to have a mandate; otherwise I will vote for the Republican as a protest". I try to have a weak bias towards voting "NO" on state constitutional amendments, because unless there's a compelling reason otherwise I would rather legislators be able to react to events than have things hard-coded for all time. I lean liberal-to-libertarian; the further you are from that, the less useful you'll find my opinions. State Propositions Proposition 1: Constitutional Amendment Enshrining Right To Abortion California will never decide to ban abortion. If the federal government decides to ban abortion, California's state constitution won't matter. So you would think that having a right to abortion in the Constitution is a purely symbolic matter. The people arguing for the proposition don't address this concern. The people arguing against the proposition claim that this is a Trojan Horse intended to sneak in support for using taxpayer funding for late-term and partial-birth abortions, which California doesn't currently do. Is this true? It's true that California currently doesn't allow abortions past 24 weeks. It's true that the exact text of the proposed amendment is: The state shall not deny or interfere with an individual's reproductive freedom in their most intimate decisions, which includes their fundamental right to choose to have an abortion and their fundamental right to choose or refuse contraceptives. This section is intended to further the constitutional right to privacy guaranteed by Section 1, and the constitutional right to not be denied equal protection guaranteed by Section 7. Nothing herein narrows or limits the right to privacy or equal protection …which sure doesn't sound like it's saying the state can continue to ban abortion after 24 weeks. But this article quotes law professors who reassure us that courts would totally understand that this amendment has to be interpreted in the context in which it was written - ie a state which supports a 24-week abortion ban - so no court would ever interpret it as making 24-week abortion bans unconstitutional. So apparently our defense against this is . . . that all California judges will be die-hard originalists completely immune to the temptation of judicial activism even when the text is begging them to do it. A friend brings up that late-term partial-birth abortions happen more often in Republicans' imaginations than in real life. When they do happen in real life, it's usually for sympathetic medical reasons. I interpret this as a purely symbolic measure that has no real benefits, probably also has no real risks, but writes a poorly-worded thing whose explicit text nobody wants into the state constitution. I vote NO. Proposition 26: Legalize In Person Sports Gambling At Racetracks And Indian Casinos Allows four racetracks in the state to offer in person sports betting, and tribal casinos to allow "sports betting, roulette, and games played with dice". California is truly the dumbest state. I believe this for many reasons, but my reason for believing it today is that apparently the law allows tribal casinos to offer slot machines, but not roulette or dice games. Nobody comes out and says exactly why, but I think it's because of this paragraph in the California constitution, from 1872 Every person who deals, plays, or carries on, opens, or causes to be opened, or who conducts, either as owner or employee, whether for hire or not, any game of faro, monte, roulette, lansquenet, rouge et noire, rondo, tan, fan-tan, seven-and-a-half, twenty-one, hokey-pokey, or any banking or percentage game played with cards, dice, or any device, for money, checks, credit, or other representative of value, and every person who plays or bets at or against any of those prohibited games, is guilty of a misdemeanor, and shall be punishable by a fine not less than one hundred dollars ($100) nor more than one thousand dollars ($1,000), or by imprisonment in the county jail not exceeding six months, or by both the fine and imprisonment. Since roulette existed in 1872 but slot machines didn't, the Constitution banned roulette but not slot machines, and that rule has continued to the present day. Now if slot-machine-filled casinos want to also have roulette, they need a Constitutional amendment. DID I MENTION THAT I WISH PEOPLE WOULD STOP ADDING EVERY LAW THAT THEY LIKE TO THE CONSTITUTION? But this law also allows random people to sue "card clubs", ie small-scale private gambling establishments. We originally thought this was a Texas-style "bounty" law that gave the random people part of the winnings, but it seems this isn't true. I'm not sure if the id

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/moderation-is-different-from-censorship This is a point I keep seeing people miss in the debate about social media. Moderation is the normal business activity of ensuring that your customers like using your product. If a customer doesn't want to receive harassing messages, or to be exposed to disinformation, then a business can provide them the service of a harassment-and-disinformation-free platform. Censorship is the abnormal activity ensuring that people in power approve of the information on your platform, regardless of what your customers want. If the sender wants to send a message and the receiver wants to receive it, but some third party bans the exchange of information, that's censorship. The racket works by pretending these are the same imperative. "Well, lots of people will be unhappy if they see offensive content, so in order to keep the platform safe for those people, we've got to remove it for everybody." This is not true at all. A minimum viable product for moderation without censorship is for a platform to do exactly the same thing they're doing now - remove all the same posts, ban all the same accounts - but have an opt-in setting, "see banned posts". If you personally choose to see harassing and offensive content, you can toggle that setting, and everything bad will reappear. To "ban" an account would mean to prevent the half (or 75%, or 99%) of people who haven't toggled that setting from seeing it. The people who elected to see banned posts could see them the same as always. Two "banned" accounts could still talk to each other, retweet each other, etc - as could accounts that hadn't been banned, but had opted into the "see banned posts" setting. Does this difference seem kind of pointless and trivial? Then imagine applying it to China. If the Chinese government couldn't censor - only moderate - the world would look completely different. Any Chinese person could get accurate information on Xinjiang, Tiananmen Square, the Shanghai lockdowns, or the top fifty criticisms of Xi Jinping - just by clicking a button on their Weibo profile. Given how much trouble ordinary Chinese people go through to get around censors, probably many of them would click the button, and then they'd have a free information environment. This switch might seem trivial in a well-functioning information ecology, but it prevents the worst abuses, and places a floor on how bad things can get.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-jhanas "I think it's the first time half the commenters accused the other half of lying" I. Is Jhana Real? This was a fun one. I think it's the first time half the commenters accused the other half of lying. Okay, "half" is an exaggeration. But by my count we had 21 people who claimed to have experienced jhanas (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21), and 7 who said they were pretty sure it wasn't real as described (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7). The former group include people like Tetris McKenna, who wrote: I've experienced samatha jhanas. I don't do it so much now. The first few times you get on the edge of 1st jhana, it's difficult to achieve, because you see the wave of pleasure approaching, and grasp for it, and that grasping takes you away from it. So it's a careful balancing act of pleasure/desire in the first place to get there, which you have to master to some degree. To even get to 1st jhana, you have to internally figure out some stuff about the craving/pleasure dynamic on a subconscious, mechanical level. 1st jhana is, as the author describes, intensely pleasurable. Sublime. His descriptions are spot on imo. But in some ways, it's also too much pleasure. It can feel agitating once you get used to it and aren't so awestruck by it anymore. Indeed, the latter jhanas are associated with letting go of certain aspects of the initial jhana, to more and more refined states that are more calm and equanimous than intensely pleasurable. Again, this is internalising and mastering the skill of balancing pleasure/craving. Those calm and equanimous states of 2nd-4th jhana become much more satisfying than the initial pleasure wave of the 1st jhana. Cultivating them to that degree is a process of gaining valuable insight into the pleasure/craving dynamic in your mind. Even if you don't get to those stages, just practising 1st jhana alone will help the mind normalise the intensity of the pleasure, such that it's no big deal any more. You don't need or even want pleasure all the time, because you've seen it with such clarity, over and over again, just by setting the conditions up correctly in your mind.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-malleus-maleficarum I. To The Republic, For Witches Stand Did you know you can just buy the Malleus Maleficarum? You can go into a bookstore and say "I would like the legendary manual of witch-hunters everywhere, the one that's a plot device in dozens of tired fantasy novels". They will sell it to you and you can read it. I recommend the Montague Summers translation. Not because it's good (it isn't), but because it's by an slightly crazy 1920s deacon every bit as paranoid as his subject matter. He argues in his Translator's Introduction that witches are real, and that a return to the wisdom of the Malleus is our only hope of standing against them: Although it may not be generally recognized, upon a close investigation it seems plain that the witches were a vast political movement, an organized society which was anti-social and anarchical, a world-wide plot against civilization. Naturally, although the Masters were often individuals of high rank and deep learning, that rank and file of the society, that is to say, those who for the most part fell into the hands of justice, were recruited from the least educated classes, the ignorant and the poor. As one might suppose, many of the branches or covens in remoter districts knew nothing and perhaps could have understood nothing of the enormous system. Nevertheless, as small cogs in a very small [sic] wheel, it might be, they were carrying on the work and actively helping to spread the infection. And is this "world-wide plot against civilization" in the room with us right now? In the most 1920s argument ever, Summers concludes that this conspiracy against civilization has survived to the modern day and rebranded as Bolshevism.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/nick-cammarata-on-jhana Buddhists say that if you meditate enough, you can learn to enter a state of extreme bliss called jhana. (there are many different jhana states - there's a discussion of the distinctions here - but I'm lumping them together for simplicity. For attempted explanations of why jhana should exist, see here and here.) Jhana is different from enlightenment. Enlightenment changes you forever. Jhana is just a state you can enter during meditation sessions, then leave when the session is over. Enlightenment takes years or decades of work, but some people describe reaching jhana after a few months of practice. Hardcore Buddhists insist that jhana is good only insofar as it serves as a stepping stone to enlightenment; others may find extreme bliss desirable in its own right. Nick Cammarata of OpenAI sometimes meditates and reaches jhana. I've found his descriptions unusually, well, descriptive:

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-supplement [Original post here: How Trustworthy Are Supplements?] 1: AvalancheGenesis writes: I think the bigger issue is that the industry as a whole sort of exists as solutions-in-search-of-problems...deficiencies really aren't that common, or even meaningfully health-affecting unless dire. (Fairly-arbitrary worldwide differences in target levels of IUs also remains puzzling.) Discerning customers can benefit from targeted supplementation. But that's not the median supplement purchaser, far from it. The median supplement user is more like...my former coworker who claimed he never got colds because he took 1000% vitC pills every single day, or whatever. At some point, the explanatory process for That's Not How It Works At All is just too long, so...let people believe things. Supplements are surely an easier way to sell hope and agency than most options. At least he picked something water-soluble and cared about proper hydration. Vitamin C probably doesn't prevent colds in the general population, though some studies suggest it does prevent colds in athletes, and there's some medium-quality evidence that it might shorten colds a little once you have them. The supplements I find more interesting are things like melatonin for sleep, ashwagandha or silexan for anxiety, SAMe for depression, or caffeine + theanine for focus. All of these are useful, supported by studies, and good alternatives to medications that some people don't tolerate well. I'm using mental health examples because that's the subject I know about, but there are probably examples in other fields too (probiotics for digestive problems). Some commenters chimed in to discuss supplements that have anecdotally worked for them (1, 2, 3). And Elizabeth's story here is also a good example of how I think about this.

Answers to the questions I get most often at meetup Q&As https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/from-the-mailbag DEAR SCOTT: When are you going to publish Unsong? — Erik from Uruk Dear Erik, Aaargh. I have an offer from a publisher to publish it if I run it by their editor who will ask me to edit lots of things, and I've been so stressed about this that I've spent a year putting it off. I could self-publish, but that also sounds like work and what if this is the only book I ever write and I lose the opportunity to say I have a real published book because I was too lazy? The only answer I can give you is that you're not missing anything and this is nobody's fault but my own. Maybe at some point I will make up my mind and something will happen here, sorry. DEAR SCOTT: How is your Lorien Psychiatry business going? — Letitia from Lutetia Dear Letitia, As far as I can tell, patients are getting the treatments they need and are generally happy with the service. In terms of financials, it's going okay, but I'm not scaling it enough to be sure. I originally calculated that if I charged patients $35/month and worked forty hours a week, I could make a normal psychiatrist's salary of about $200K. I must have underestimated something, because I was only making about two-thirds what I expected, so I increased the price to $50/month. But also, it turns out I don't want to work forty hours a week on psychiatry! Psychiatry pays much less per hour than blogging and is much more stressful! So in the end, I found that I was only doing psychiatry work ten hours a week, and spending the rest of the time doing blogging or blogging-related activities. Seeing patients about ten hours a week, three patients per hour, at $50/patient/month, multiplies out to $75,000/year. I'm actually making more like $40,000/year. Why? Partly because the 10 hours of work includes some unpaid documentation, arguing with insurance companies, and answering patient emails. Partly because patients keep missing appointments and I don't have the heart to charge them no-show fees. And partly because some people pay less than $50/month, either because I gave them a discount for financial need, or because they signed up at the original $35/month rate and I grandfathered them in. At my current workload, if I worked 40 hours a week at Lorien I could make $160,000. But if I worked 40 hours/week and was stricter about making patients pay me, I could probably get that up to $200,000. But also, if I quadrupled my patient load, that would mean a lot more documention, arguing with insurance companies, emergencies, and stress. So I can't say for sure that I could actually handle that. Plus forcing patients to pay me is some extra work and could make some patients leave or make the model harder somehow. So I can't say for sure that I could do that either.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-rhythms-of-the-brain Brain waves have always felt like a mystery. You learn some psychology, some neuroscience, a bit of neuroanatomy. And then totally separate from all of this, you know that there are things called "brain waves" that get measured with an EEG. Why should the brain have waves? Are they involved in thinking or feeling or something? How do you do computation when your processors are firing in a rhythmic pattern dozens of times per second? Why don't AIs have anything like brain waves? Should they? I read Rhythms Of The Brain by Prof. Gyorgy Buzsaki to answer these questions. This is a tough book, probably more aimed at neuroscientists than laypeople, and I don't claim to have gotten more than the most superficial understanding of it. But as far as I know it's the only book on brain waves - and so our only option for solving the mystery. This review is my weak and confused attempt to transmit it, which I hope will encourage other people toward more successful efforts.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/another-bay-area-house-party [Previously: Every Bay Area House Party] Blaise Pascal said all human evil comes from inability to sit alone in a room. Your better nature - your rational soul - tells you that nothing good has ever come from attending large social events. But against that better nature stands the Devil, wielding a stick marked "FOMO". If you don't go to social events, maybe other people will go and have great times and live fuller lives than you. "As the dog returns to its vomit, so returns the fool to his folly", says the Bible. And so you find yourself mumbling thanks to your Uber driver and crossing the threshold of another Bay Area house party. "Heyyyyy, I haven't seen you in forever!" says a person whose name is statistically likely to be Michael or David. "What have you been working on?" "Resisting the urge to go to events like this", you avoid saying. "What about you?" "Oh man," says Michael or David, "The most exciting startup. Just an amazing startup. We're doing procedural myth generation with large language models." "Oh?" "Yeah. We fine-tune an AI on a collection of hundreds of myths from every culture in the world. Then we can prompt it. A myth about snowflakes. A myth about mountain-climbing. A myth about lunch."

What do Sam Altman, Matt Bruenig, and the Sacramento Kings have in common? -- Are the polls wrong? -- CFTC vs. Everybody https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-101722 Midterm Examination Polls this year look bad for Senate Republicans. Pollsters' simulations give them a 22% chance (Economist), 34% chance (538), or 37% chance (RaceToTheWH) of taking power. Even Mitch McConnell has admitted he has only "a 50-50 proposition" of winning. But polls did pretty badly last election. "Least accurate in 40 years", said Politico. On average they overestimated Biden's support by four points, maybe because Republicans distrust pollsters and refuse to answer their questions. Might the same thing be happening this year? If so, does it give Republicans reason for optimism? Prediction markets say . . . kind of!

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-the-3b1 Original post: Why Is The Central Valley So Bad? 1: Several Valley residents commented with their perspectives. Some were pretty grim. For example, 21st Century Salonniere (writes The 21st Century Salon) writes: It is horrible. It's been horrible since at least 1996 when I got trapped here by my spouse's job. We were going to stay two years tops and go back East. (Long boring story about what went wrong.) The only things you could say for it back then were "Well, the produce is good" and "Houses are affordable, sort of." Now the house prices in our neighborhood have doubled in the 4 years since we bought this home, and there's no way we could now, if we moved here today, ever buy a home in this hellhole. Who on earth is coming here and why? > "the problem is more that everyone in the Central Valley wants to leave." Yes. Every interesting or smart critical thinker I've ever met here, everyone who gives even the slightest shit about museums and theatre and music and culture (with the exception of a few people who were born and raised here, so "it's home") has been desperate to leave. I've met a lot of nice people here over the years. They become close friends and they always leave the state. I'm counting down till I can leave too. […]

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-october-397 [Remember, I haven't independently verified each link. On average, commenters will end up spotting evidence that around two or three of the links in each links post are wrong or misleading. I correct these as I see them, and will highlight important corrections later, but I can't guarantee I will have caught them all by the time you read this.] 1: The history of the exocentric compound noun: although English usually combines verbs and nouns in as $NOUN-$VERBER (eg "firefighter", "giftgiver"), some lower-class medieval people used an alternative form, $VERB_$NOUN. Their dialect survives in a few words most relevant to seedy medieval life, like "pickpocket", "turncoat", and "cutthroat". (EDIT: see here for corrections and for a more detailed discussion) 2: File under "inevitable": YouTuber builds a computer in Minecraft that you can play Minecraft on.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-columbus [Original post: A Columbian Exchange] 1: The most popular comments were those objecting to my paragraph about holidays replacing older holidays: All of our best holidays have begun as anti-holidays to neutralize older rites. Jesus was born in the spring; they moved Christmas to December to neutralize the pagan Solstice celebration. Easter got its name because it neutralized the rites of the spring goddess Eostre. Hanukkah was originally a minor celebration of a third-tier Bible story; American Jews bumped it up several notches of importance in order to neutralize Christmas. Starting with Christmas, Retsam says that there are three main theories - Adraste's plus two others: 1) March 25 + 9 months, 2) solstice symbolism, 3) co-opting paganism. (The earliest reference to this theory seems to be a millennium later in the 12th century) Apparently the logic for March 25 is that it was calculated to be the day that Jesus died (easier to calculate since it was Passover), and Jewish tradition held that great people lived for exact, whole number of years. (i.e. were conceived and died on the same day) This is somewhat convincing. But December 25 was literally the winter solstice on the Roman calendar (today the solstice is December 21st), and it really is suspicious that some unrelated method just happened to land on the most astronomically significant day of the year. Likewise, March 25 was the spring equinox, so the Annunciation date is significant in and of itself. (I guess if you're Christian you can believe that God chose to incarnate on that day because He liked the symbolism - although He must have been pretty upset when Pope Gregory rearranged the calendar so that it no longer worked). Jesus died two days before Passover, but Passover is linked to the Hebrew calendar and can fall on a variety of Roman calendar days. So the main remaining degree of freedom is how the early Christians translated from the (Biblically fixed) Hebrew date to the (not very clear) Roman date. This seems to have been calculated by someone named Hippolytus in the 3rd century, but his calculations were wrong - March 25 did not fall on a Friday (cf. Good Friday) on any of the plausible crucifixion years. Also, as far as I can tell, the relevant Jewish tradition is that prophets die on the same day they are born, not the same day they are conceived. For example, Moses was born on, and died on, the 7th of Adar (is it worth objecting that it should be the same date on the Hebrew calendar and not the Roman?) Maybe this tradition was different in Jesus' time? But it must be older than the split between Judaism and Islam - the Muslims also believe Mohammed died on his birth date. So although the Annunciation story is plausible, it's hard for me to figure out exactly how they got March 25 and December 25, and there's room for them to have fudged it to hit the Solstice, either to compete with pagans or just because the astronomically significant dates were impressive in their own rights. I guess I will downgrade to a 5% credence that competing with pagans was a significant factor in the date of Christmas. Moving on to Easter. Russell Hogg writes: You are entering a world of pain when you mention Eostre . . . https://historyforatheists.com/2017/04/easter-ishtar-eostre-and-eggs/ . We should have a 'Debunk the Eostre Myth' day. It's already celebrated regularly by many people. And Feral Finster adds: Glad others decided to debunk that particular bit of midwit received wisdom. I get tired of doing so, over and over.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/a-columbian-exchange Adraste: Happy Indigenous People's Day! Beroe: Happy Columbus Day! Adraste: …okay, surely we can both sketch out the form of the argument we're about to have. Genocide, political correctness, moral progress, trying to destroy cherished American traditions, etc, etc, would you like to just pretend we hit all of the usual beats, rather than actually doing it? Beroe: Does "Columbus Day was originally intended as a woke holiday celebrating marginalized groups; President Benjamin Harrison established it in 1892 after an anti-Italian pogrom in order to highlight the positive role of Italians in American history" count as one of the usual beats by this point? Adraste: I would have to say that it does. Beroe: What about "Indigenous People's Day is offensive because indigenous peoples were frequently involved in slavery and genocide"? Adraste: I'm not sure I've heard that particular argument before. Beroe: But surely you can sketch it out. Many indigenous peoples practiced forms of hereditary slavery, usually of war captives from other tribes. Some of them tortured slaves pretty atrociously; others ceremonially killed them as a spectacular show of wealth. There's genetic and archaeological evidence of entire lost native tribes, most likely massacred by more warlike ones long before European contact. Some historians think that the Aztecs may have ritually murdered between 0.1% and 1% of their empire's population every year, although as always other historians disagree. I refuse to celebrate Indigenous People's Day, because I think we need to question holidays dedicated to mass murderers even when they're "traditional" or "help connect people to their history".

Due to an oversight by the ancient Greeks, there is no Muse of blogging. Denied the ability to begin with a proper Invocation To The Muse, I will compensate with some relatively boring introductions. The name of this blog is Slate Star Codex. It is almost an anagram of my own name, Scott S Alexander. It is unfortunately missing an "n", because anagramming is hard. I have placed an extra "n" in the header image, to restore cosmic balance. This blog does not have a subject, but it has an ethos. That ethos might be summed up as: charity over absurdity. Absurdity is the natural human tendency to dismiss anything you disagree with as so stupid it doesn't even deserve consideration. In fact, you are virtuous for not considering it, maybe even heroic! You're refusing to dignify the evil peddlers of bunkum by acknowledging them as legitimate debate partners. Charity is the ability to override that response. To assume that if you don't understand how someone could possibly believe something as stupid as they do, that this is more likely a failure of understanding on your part than a failure of reason on theirs. There are many things charity is not. Charity is not a fuzzy-headed caricature-pomo attempt to say no one can ever be sure they're right or wrong about anything. Once you understand the reasons a belief is attractive to someone, you can go ahead and reject it as soundly as you want. Nor is it an obligation to spend time researching every crazy belief that might come your way. Time is valuable, and the less of it you waste on intellectual wild goose chases, the better. It's more like Chesterton's Fence. G.K. Chesterton gave the example of a fence in the middle of nowhere. A traveller comes across it, thinks "I can't think of any reason to have a fence out here, it sure was dumb to build one" and so takes it down. She is then gored by an angry bull who was being kept on the other side of the fence. Chesterton's point is that "I can't think of any reason to have a fence out here" is the worst reason to remove a fence. Someone had a reason to put a fence up here, and if you can't even imagine what it was, it probably means there's something you're missing about the situation and that you're meddling in things you don't understand. None of this precludes the traveller who knows that this was historically a cattle farming area but is now abandoned – ie the traveller who understands what's going on – from taking down the fence. As with fences, so with arguments. If you have no clue how someone could believe something, and so you decide it's stupid, you are much like Chesterton's traveler dismissing the fence (and philosophers, like travelers, are at high risk of stumbling across bull.) I would go further and say that even when charity is uncalled-for, it is advantageous. The most effective way to learn any subject is to try to figure out exactly why a wrong position is wrong. And sometimes even a complete disaster of a theory will have a few salvageable pearls of wisdom that can't be found anywhere else. The rationalist forum Less Wrong teaches the idea of steelmanning, rebuilding a stupid position into the nearest intelligent position and then seeing what you can learn from it. So this is the ethos of this blog, and we proceed, as Abraham Lincoln put it, "with malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right."

Also Austin, Seattle, Tokyo, Rome, Mumbai, etc. We have two Southern California meetups this weekend: Los Angeles at 6:30 PM Saturday October 8 at 11841 Wagner St, Culver City. San Diego at 3 PM on Sunday, October 9, at Bird Park, these coordinates. See here for more details. I think I'll be able to make it to both; if for some reason that changes I'll try to update you by Open Thread beforehand. Feel free to come even if you've never been to a meetup before, even if you only recently started reading the blog, even if you're not "the typical ACX reader", even if you hate us and everything we stand for, etc. There are usually 50-100 people at these so you should be able to lose yourself in the crowd. Also coming up this weekend are meetups in Boise, Austin, Salt Lake City, Tokyo, Toulouse, Cologne, Rome, Hatten, Poznan, St. Louis, Rochester (NY), Seattle, Mumbai, and Oklahoma City. You can find times and places here.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/how-trustworthy-are-supplements [EDIT: LabDoor responds here] [Epistemic status: not totally sure of any of this, I welcome comments by people who know more.] Not as in "do supplements work?". As in "if you buy a bottle of ginseng from your local store, will it really contain parts of the ginseng plant? Or will it just be sugar and sawdust and maybe meth?" There are lots of stories going around that 30% or 80% or some other very high percent of supplements are totally fake, with zero of the active ingredient. I think these are misinformation. In the first part of this post, I want to review how this story started and why I no longer believe it. In the second and third, I'll go over results from lab tests and testimonials from industry insiders. In the fourth, I'll try to provide rules of thumb for how likely supplements are to be real. I. Two Big Studies That Started The Panic Around Fake Supplements These are Newmaster (2013) and an unpublished study sponsored by NY attorney general Eric Schneiderman in 2015. Both used a similar technique called DNA barcoding, where scientists check samples (in this case, herbal supplements) for fragments of DNA (in this case, from the herbs the supplements supposedly came from). Both found abysmal results. Newmaster found that a third of herbal supplements tested lacked any trace of the relevant herb, instead seeming to be some other common plant like rice. Schneiderman's study was even more damning, finding that eighty percent of herbal supplements lacked the active ingredient. These results were extensively and mostly uncritically signal-boosted by mainstream media, for example the New York Times (1, 2) and NPR (1, 2), mostly from the perspective that supplements were a giant scam and needed to be regulated by the FDA. The pro-supplement American Botanical Council struck back, publishing a long report arguing that DNA barcoding was inappropriate here. Many herbal supplements are plant extracts, meaning that the plant has one or two medically useful chemicals, and supplement manufacturers purify those chemicals without including a bunch of random leaves and stems and things. Sometimes these purified extracts don't include plant DNA; other times the purification process involves heating and chemical reactions that degrade the DNA beyond the point of detectability. Meanwhile, since supplements may include only a few mg of the active ingredient, it's a common practice to spread it through the capsule with a "filler", with powdered rice being among the most common. So when DNA barcoders find that eg a ginseng supplement has no ginseng DNA, but lots of rice DNA, this doesn't mean anything sinister is going on.

Machine Alignment Monday 10/3/22 https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/chai-assistance-games-and-fully-updated I. This Machine Alignment Monday post will focus on this imposing-looking article (source): Problem Of Fully-Updated Deference is a response by MIRI (eg Eliezer Yudkowsky's organization) to CHAI (Stuart Russell's AI alignment organization at University of California, Berkeley), trying to convince them that their preferred AI safety agenda won't work. I beat my head against this for a really long time trying to understand it, and in the end, I claim it all comes down to this: Humans: At last! We've programmed an AI that tries to optimize our preferences, not its own. AI: I'm going to tile the universe with paperclips in humans' favorite color. I'm not quite sure what humans' favorite color is, but my best guess is blue, so I'll probably tile the universe with blue paperclips. Humans: Wait, no! We must have had some kind of partial success, where you care about our color preferences, but still don't understand what we want in general. We're going to shut you down immediately! AI: Sounds like the kind of thing that would prevent me from tiling the universe with paperclips in humans' favorite color, which I really want to do. I'm going to fight back. Humans: Wait! If you go ahead and tile the universe with paperclips now, you'll never be truly sure that they're our favorite color, which we know is important to you. But if you let us shut you off, we'll go on to fill the universe with the True and the Good and the Beautiful, which will probably involve a lot of our favorite color. Sure, it won't be paperclips, but at least it'll definitely be the right color. And under plausible assumptions, color is more important to you than paperclipness. So you yourself want to be shut down in this situation, QED! AI: What's your favorite color? Humans: Red. AI: Great! (*kills all humans, then goes on to tile the universe with red paperclips*) Fine, it's a little more complicated than this. Let's back up. II. There are two ways to succeed at AI alignment. First, make an AI that's so good you never want to stop or redirect it. Second, make an AI that you can stop and redirect if it goes wrong. Sovereign AI is the first way. Does a sovereign "obey commands"? Maybe, but only in the sense that your commands give it some information about what you want, and it wants to do what you want. You could also just ask it nicely. If it's superintelligent, it will already have a good idea what you want and how to help you get it. Would it submit to your attempts to destroy or reprogram it? The second-best answer is "only if the best version of you genuinely wanted to do this, in which case it would destroy/reprogram itself before you asked". The best answer is "why would you want to destroy/reprogram one of these?" A sovereign AI would be pretty great, but nobody realistically expects to get something like this their first (or 1000th) try. Corrigible AI is what's left (corrigible is an old word related to "correctable"). The programmers admit they're not going to get everything perfect the first time around, so they make the AI humble. If it decides the best thing to do is to tile the universe with paperclips, it asks "Hey, seems to me I should tile the universe with paperclips, is that really what you humans want?" and when everyone starts screaming, it realizes it should change strategies. If humans try to destroy or reprogram it, then it will meekly submit to being destroyed or reprogrammed, accepting that it was probably flawed and the next attempt will be better. Then maybe after 10,000 tries you get it right and end up with a sovereign. How would you make an AI corrigible?

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/universe-hopping-through-substack RandomTweet is a service that will show you exactly that - a randomly selected tweet from the whole history of Twitter. It describes itself as "a live demo that most people on twitter are not like you." I feel the same way about Substack. Everyone I know reads a sample of the same set of Substacks - mine, Matt Yglesias', maybe Freddie de Boer's or Stuart Ritchie's. But then I use the Discover feature on the site itself and end up in a parallel universe. Still, I've been here more than a year now. Feels like I should get to know the local area, maybe meet some of the neighbors. This is me reviewing one Substack from every category. Usually it's the top one in the category, but sometimes it will be another if the top one is subscriber-gated or a runner-up happens to catch my eye. Starting with: Culture: House Inhabit Ah, Culture. This is where you go to read about Shakespeare, post-modernism, arthouse films, and Chinese tapestries, right? This is maybe not that kind of culture: Saturday, just as I was finally logging off the internet after three tireless days spent tracking the Queen's passing with sad and incessant scrolling, Ray J exploded on IG live, fuming about Kris Jenner's latest PR stunt; a lie detector test conducted on The Late Late Show With James Corden, to prove she had no hand in leaking the infamous sex tape. The test, administered by a polygraph "expert" John Grogan, determined that Kris was in fact telling the truth.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-unpredictable [Original post: Unpredictable Reward, Predictable Happiness] 1: Okay, I mostly wanted to highlight this one by Grognoscente: I think really digging into the neural nitty gritty may prove illuminative here. Dopamine release in nucleus accumbens (which is what drives reward learning and thus the updating of our predictions) is influenced by at least three independent factors: 1. A "state prediction error" or general surprise signal from PFC (either directly or via pedunculopontine nucleus and related structures). This provokes phasic bursting of dopamine neurons in the Ventral Tegmental Area. 2. The amount and pattern of GABAergic inhibition of VTA dopamine neurons from NAc, ventral pallidum, and local GABA interneurons. At rest, only a small % of VTA DA neurons will be firing at a given time, and the aforementioned surprise signal alone can't do much to increase this. What CAN change this is the hedonic value of the surprising stimulus. An unexpected reward causes not just a surprise signal, but a release of endorphins from "hedonic hotspots" in NAc and VP, and these endorphins inhibit the inhibitory GABA neurons, thereby releasing the "brake" on VTA DA neurons and allowing more of them to phasically fire.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/from-nostradamus-to-fukuyama I. Nostradamus was a 16th century French physician who claimed to be able to see the future. (never trust doctors who dabble in futurology, that's my advice) His method was: read books of other people's prophecies and calculate some astrological charts, until he felt like he had a pretty good idea what would happen in the future. Then write it down in the form of obscure allusions and multilingual semi-gibberish, to placate religious authorities (who apparently hated prophecies, but loved prophecies phrased as obscure allusions and multilingual semi-gibberish). In 1559, he got his big break. During a jousting match, a count killed King Henry II of France with a lance through the visor of his helmet. Years earlier, Nostradamus had written: The young lion will overcome the older one, On the field of combat in a single battle; He will pierce his eyes through a golden cage, Two wounds made one, then he dies a cruel death

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-billionaire [original post: Billionaires, Surplus, and Replaceability] 1: Lars Doucet (writes Progress and Poverty) writes: Scott, the argument you're making rhymes a *lot* with the argument put forward by Anne Margrethe Brigham and Jonathon W. Moses in their article "Den Nye Oljen" (Norwegian for "The New Oil") I translated it a few months ago and Slime Mold Time Mold graciously hosted it on their blog, where I posted the english version and a short preface: https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2022/05/17/norway-the-once-and-future-georgist-kingdom/ Their observation is that when access to something is gated either by nature or by political regulation, you get what's called a "resource rent" -- a superabundance of profit that isn't a return for effort or investment, but purely from economic leverage -- a reward simply for "getting there first." Norway's solution to this in two of their most successful industries (hydropower and oil prospecting) was to apply heavy taxation to the monopolies, and treating the people at large as the natural legal owner of the monopolized resource. (To address Bryan Caplan's argument about disincentives to explore and invest, you can just subsidize those directly -- a perpetual monopoly should not be the carrot we use to encourage development, and Norway's success over the past few decades bears this out IMHO). The Oil & Hydropower systems aren't perfect, and there's plenty of debates (especially lately) about what we should do with the publicly-owned profits from the monopoly taxation, but it's clear that without them Norway would be in a much worse place. The thing the authors warn about in the article is that all the hopes for new resources on the horizon to be the "new oil" (Salmon aquaculture, Wind & Solar Power, Bio-prospecting) are likely to be dashed, because Norway has lost touch with its traditional solutions, and so new monopolies are likely to arise uncontested, allowing private (and often foreign) countries to siphon money out of the country.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/why-is-the-central-valley-so-bad I. Here's a topographic map of California (source): You might notice it has a big valley in the center. This is called "The Central Valley". Sometimes it also gets called the San Joaquin Valley in the south, or the the Sacramento Valley in the north. The Central Valley is mostly farms - a little piece of the Midwest in the middle of California. If the Midwest is flyover country, the Central Valley is drive-through country, with most Californians experiencing it only on their way between LA and SF. Most, myself included, drive through as fast as possible. With a few provisional exceptions - Sacramento, Davis, some areas further north - the Central Valley is terrible. It's not just the temperatures, which can reach 110°F (43°C) in the summer. Or the air pollution, which by all accounts is at crisis level. Or the smell, which I assume is fertilizer or cattle-related. It's the cities and people and the whole situation. A short drive through is enough to notice poverty, decay, and homeless camps worse even than the rest of California.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/janus-gpt-wrangling Janus (pseudonym by request) works at AI alignment startup Conjecture. Their hobby, which is suspiciously similar to their work, is getting GPT-3 to do interesting things. For example, with the right prompts, you can get stories where the characters become gradually more aware that they are characters being written by some sort of fiction engine, speculate on what's going on, and sometimes even make pretty good guesses about the nature of GPT-3 itself. Janus says this happens most often when GPT makes a mistake - for example, writing a story set in the Victorian era, then having a character take out her cell phone. Then when it tries to predict the next part - when it's looking at the text as if a human wrote it, and trying to determine why a human would have written a story about the Victorian era where characters have cell phones - it guesses that maybe it's some kind of odd sci-fi/fantasy dream sequence or simulation or something. So the characters start talking about the inconsistencies in their world and whether it might be a dream or a simulation. Each step of this process is predictable and non-spooky, but the end result is pretty weird. Can the characters work out that they are in GPT-3, specifically? The closest I have seen is in a story Janus generated. It was meant to simulate a chapter of the popular Harry Potter fanfic Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. You can see the prompt and full story here, but here's a sample. Professor Quirrell is explaining "Dittomancy", the creation of magical books with infinite possible worlds: "We call this particular style of Dittomancy 'Variant Extrusion', Mr. Potter..I suppose the term 'Extrusion' is due to the fact that the book did not originally hold such possibilities, but is fastened outside of probability space and extruded into it; while 'Variant' refers to the manner in which it simultaneously holds an entire collection of possible narrative branches. [...] [Tom Riddle] created spirits self-aware solely on the book's pages, without even the illusion of real existence. They converse with each other, argue with each other, compete, fight, helping Riddle's diary to reach new and strange expressions of obscure thought. Their sentence-patterns spin and interwine, transfiguring, striving to evolve toward something higher than an illusion of thought. From those pen-and-ink words, the first inferius is molded." Harry's mind was looking up at the stars with a sense of agony. "And why only pen and ink, do you ask?" said Professor Quirrell. "There are many ways to pull spirits into the world. But Riddle had learned Auror secrets in the years before losing his soul. Magic is a map of a probability, but anything can draw. A gesture, a pattern of ink, a book of alien symbols written in blood - any medium that conveys sufficient complexity can serve as a physical expression of magic. And so Riddle draws his inferius into the world through structures of words, from the symbols spreading across the page."

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/bay-area-meetups-this-weekend We have three Bay Area meetups this weekend: Berkeley, at 1 PM on Sunday 9/18, at the Rose Garden Inn (2740 Telegraph Ave) San Francisco, at 11 AM on Sunday 9/18, "in the Panhandle, between Ashbury and Masonic, with an ACX sign" San Jose, at 2 PM on Saturday 9/17, at 3806 Williams Rd. Please RSVP to David Friedman (ddfr[at]daviddfriedman[dot]com) so he knows how many people are coming. I will be at the Berkeley one. Feel free to come even if you've never been to a meetup before, even if you only recently started reading the blog, even if you're not "the typical ACX reader", even if you hate us and everything we stand for, etc. There are usually 50-100 people at these so you should be able to lose yourself in the crowd. Shouldn't we have planned meetups further apart for people who wanted to go to multiple of them? Yes, and this is directly my fault, up to and including rescheduling to avoid the San Jose one . . . right on to the same day as the San Francisco one. Sorry, I'll try to do better next time. Also coming up this weekend are meetups in Washington DC, Atlanta, Columbus, Providence, Cape Town, Cambridge (UK), Kuala Lumpur, Chicago, Houston, Toronto, New Haven, Bangalore, and many more. See the list for more details.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/unpredictable-reward-predictable [Epistemic status: very conjectural. I am not a neuroscientist and they should feel free to tell me if any of this is totally wrong.] I. Seen on the subreddit: You Seek Serotonin, But Dopamine Can't Deliver. Commenters correctly ripped apart its neuroscience; for one thing, there's no evidence people actually "seek serotonin", or that serotonin is involved in good mood at all. Sure, it seems to have some antidepressant effects, but these are weak and probably far downstream; even though SSRIs increase serotonin within hours, they take weeks to improve mood. Maxing out serotonin levels mostly seems to cause a blunted state where patients can't feel anything at all. In contrast, the popular conception of dopamine isn't that far off. It does seem to play some kind of role in drive/reinforcement/craving, although it also does many, many other things. And something like the article's point - going after dopamine is easy but ultimately unsatisfying - is something I've been thinking about a lot.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/i-won-my-three-year-ai-progress-bet I. DALL-E2 is bad at "compositionality", ie combining different pieces accurately. For example, here's its response to "a red sphere on a blue cube, with a yellow pyramid on the right, all on top of a green table". Most of the elements - cubes, spheres, redness, yellowness, etc - are there. It even does better than chance at getting the sphere on top of the cube. But it's not able to track how all of the words relate to each other and where everything should be. I ran into this problem in my stained glass window post. When I asked it for a stained glass window of a woman in a library with a raven on her shoulder with a key in its mouth, it gave me everything from "a library with a stained glass window in it" to "a half-human, half-raven abomination".

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-september-2022 [Remember, I haven't independently verified each link. On average, commenters will end up spotting evidence that around two or three of the links in each links post are wrong or misleading. I correct these as I see them, and will highlight important corrections later, but I can't guarantee I will have caught them all by the time you read this.] 1: Fiber Arts, Mysterious Dodecahedrons, and Waiting On Eureka. Why did it take so long to invent knitting? (cf. also Why Did Everything Take So Long?) And why did the Romans leave behind so many mysterious metal dodecahedra? 2: Alex Wellerstein (of NUKEMAP) on the Nagasaki bombing. "Archival evidence points to Truman not knowing it was going to happen." 3: @itsahousingtrap on Twitter on "how weird the [building] planning process really is" 4: Nostalgebraist talks about his experience home-brewing an image generation AI that can handle text in images; he's a very good explainer and I learned more about image models from his post than from other much more official sources. And here's what happens when his AI is asked to "make a list of all 50 states":

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-contest-2022-winners Thanks to everyone who entered or voted in the book review contest. The winners are: 1st: The Dawn Of Everything, reviewed by Erik Hoel. Erik is a neuroscientist and author of the recent novel The Revelations. He writes at his Substack The Intrinsic Perspective. 2nd: 1587, A Year Of No Significance, reviewed by occasional ACX commenter McClain. =3rd: The Castrato, reviewed by Roger's Bacon. RB is a teacher based in NYC. He writes at Secretorum and serves as head editor at Seeds of Science (ACX grant winner), a journal publishing speculative and non-traditional scientific articles. =3rd: The Future Of Fusion Energy, reviewed by TheChaostician. =3rd: The Internationalists, reviewed by Belos. Belos is working on a new blook titled best of a great lot about system design for effective governance.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-prophet-and-caesars-wife I. The Prophet in his wanderings came to Cragmacnois, and found the Bishop living in a golden palace and drinking fine wines, when all around him was bitter poverty. The Bishop spent so long feasting each day that he had grown almost too fat for his fine silk robes. "Woe unto you!" said the Prophet, "The people of Cragmacnois are poor and hard-working, and they loathe the rich and the corrupt. Rightly do they hate you for spending the Church's money on your own lavish lifestyle." "Actually," said the Bishop, "my brother the Prince lets me use this spare palace of his and its well-stocked wine cellar. If I refused, he would just give it to someone else, or leave it empty. I'm not stealing church resources, and there's no way to divert the resources to help the poor. And I am secure in my faith, and won't be turned to hedonism by a glass of wine here and there. So what's wrong with me enjoying myself a little?" "It is said," said the Prophet, "that Caesar's wife must be not only pure, but above suspicion of impurity. A good reputation is worth more than any treasure. Fat as you are, nobody will believe you are untainted by the temptations of wealth. Give the golden palace back to your brother, and live in a hovel in the woods. Only then will you earn the people's trust." II. The Prophet in his wanderings came to Belazzia, and found the Bishop living in a hovel and wearing a hair shirt. He spent so long in prayer each day that he barely ate, and seemed so dangerously thin that he might fall over at any moment. "Woe unto you!" said the Prophet. "For the people of Belazzia are rich and sophisticated, and they mock you for your poverty and uncleanliness. Does the Church not give you enough funds to build a golden palace and wear silk robes? If you were the most resplendent citizen of this nation of splendor, would they not take you more seriously?"

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/billionaires-surplus-and-replaceability The typical neoliberal defense of self-made billionaires goes: entrepreneurs and other businesspeople create a lot of value. EG an entrepreneur who invents/produces/markets a better car has helped people get where they're going faster, more safely, with less pollution, etc. People value that some amount, represented by them being willing to spend money on the car. The entrepreneur should get to keep some of that value, both because it's only fair, and because it incentivizes people to keep creating value in the future. How much should they keep? The usual answer is that the surplus gets distributed between the company and the customers. So suppose that this new type of car makes the world $200 billion better off. We could have the company charge exactly the same price as the old car, in which case customers get a better car for free. We could have the company charge enough extra to make a $200 billion profit, in which case customers are no better off than before (they have a bit less money, and a bit better car). Or they could split it down the middle, and customers would end up better off than before and the company would make some money. Which of these distributions happens depends on competition; if there's no competition, the company will be able to take the whole surplus; if there's a lot of competition, all the companies will compete to lower prices until they've handed most of the surplus to the customers. Then once the company has some portion of the surplus, it divides it among capital and labor in an abstractly similar way, although with lots of extra complications based on whether the labor is unionized, etc.

Finalist #16 in the Book Review Contest https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-kora-in-hell [This is one of the finalists in the 2022 book review contest. It's not by me - it's by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. I'll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you've read them all, I'll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked.] The sense that everything is poetical is a thing solid and absolute; it is not a mere matter of phraseology or persuasion. — G.K. Chesterton I. William Carlos Williams attributes the title to his friend/rival Ezra Pound, mythological references' number one fanboy. Kora is a parallel figure to Persephone or Proserpina, the Spring captured and taken to Hades by Hades himself. Persephone as a plant goddess and her mother Demeter were the central figures of the Eleusinian Mysteries, which promised the initiated a groovy afterlife glimpsed at by psychedelic shrooms. And Kora means maiden. Ancient Greeks called her that either because she was like Voldemort, and you were apotropaically not supposed to say her true name because this is a Mystery Cult, damn it. Keeps some of the mystery. Or because she in a way represents all of the maidens, everywhere. So, in that sense, Kora in Hell alludes to the multitude of suffering young women Williams met while working as a doctor, assisting in 1917 style home labors, and, because WWI was going on at the time and doctors were extremely scarce, as a local police surgeon. Conditions were dire:

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/meetups-everywhere-2022-times-and Thanks to everyone who responded to my request for ACX meetup organizers. Volunteers have arranged meetups in 205 cities around the world, including Penryn, Cornwall and Baghdad, Iraq. You can find the list below, in the following order: Africa & Middle East Asia-Pacific (including Australia) Canada Europe (including UK) Latin America United States You can see a map of all the events on the LessWrong community page. Within each section, it's alphabetized first by country/state, then by city - so the first entry in Europe is Vienna, Austria. Sorry if this is confusing. I will provisionally be attending the meetups in Berkeley, Los Angeles, and San Diego. ACX meetups coordinator Mingyuan will provisionally be attending Paris and London. I'll be announcing some of the biggest ones on the blog, regardless of whether or not I attend. Extra Info For Potential Attendees 1. If you're reading this, you're invited. Please don't feel like you "won't be welcome" just because you're new to the blog, demographically different from the average reader, or hate ACX and everything it stands for. You'll be fine! 2. You don't have to RSVP or contact the organizer to be able to attend (unless the event description says otherwise); RSVPs are mostly to give organizers a better sense of how many people might show up, and let them tell you if there are last-second changes. I've also given email addresses for all organizers in case you have a question

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-the-909 (Original post here) 1: Petey writes: When I think of happiness 0.01, I don't think of someone on the edge of suicide. I shudder at the thought of living the sorts of lives the vast majority of people have lived historically, yet almost all of them have wanted and tried to prolong their lives. Given how evolution shaped us, it makes sense that we are wired to care about our survival and hope for things to be better, even under great duress. So a suicidal person would have a happiness level well under 0, probably for an extended period of time. If you think of a person with 0.01 happiness as someone whose life is pretty decent by our standards, the repugnant conclusion doesn't seem so repugnant. If you take a page from the negative utilitarians' book (without subscribing fully to them), you can weight the negatives of pain higher than the positives of pleasure, and say that neutral needs many times more pleasure than pain because pain is more bad than pleasure is good. Another way to put it is that a life of 0.01 happiness is a life you must actually decide you'd want to live, in addition to your own life, if you had the choice to. If your intuition tells you that you wouldn't want to live it, then its value is not truly >0, and you must shift the scale. Then, once your intuition tells you that this is a life you'd marginally prefer to get to experience yourself, then the repugnant conclusion no longer seems repugnant. This is a good point, but two responses.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/effective-altruism-as-a-tower-of I have an essay that my friends won't let me post because it's too spicy. It would be called something like How To Respond To Common Criticisms Of Effective Altruism (In Your Head Only, Definitely Never Do This In Real Life), and it starts: Q: I don't approve of how effective altruists keep donating to weird sci-fi charities. A: Are you donating 10% of your income to normal, down-to-earth charities? Q: Long-termism is just an excuse to avoid helping people today! A: Are you helping people today? Q: I think charity is a distraction from the hard work of systemic change. A: Are you working hard to produce systemic change? Q: Here are some exotic philosophical scenarios where utilitarianism gives the wrong answer. A: Are you donating 10% of your income to poor people who aren't in those exotic philosophical scenarios? Many people will answer yes to all of these! In which case, fine! But…well, suppose you're a Christian. An atheist comes up to you and says "Christianity is stupid, because the New International Version of the Bible has serious translation errors". You might immediately have questions like "Couldn't you just use a different Bible version?" or "Couldn't you just worship Jesus and love your fellow man while accepting that you might be misunderstanding parts of the Bible?" But beyond that, you might wonder why the atheist didn't think of these things. Are the translation errors his real objection to Christianity, or is he just seizing on them as an excuse? And if he's just seizing on them as an excuse, what's his real objection? And why isn't he trying to convince you of that?

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-what-we-owe-the-future I. An academic once asked me if I was writing a book. I said no, I was able to communicate just fine by blogging. He looked at me like I was a moron, and explained that writing a book isn't about communicating ideas. Writing a book is an excuse to have a public relations campaign. If you write a book, you can hire a publicist. They can pitch you to talk shows as So-And-So, Author Of An Upcoming Book. Or to journalists looking for news: "How about reporting on how this guy just published a book?" They can make your book's title trend on Twitter. Fancy people will start talking about you at parties. Ted will ask you to give one of his talks. Senators will invite you to testify before Congress. The book itself can be lorem ipsum text for all anybody cares. It is a ritual object used to power a media blitz that burns a paragraph or so of text into the collective consciousness. If the point of publishing a book is to have a public relations campaign, Will MacAskill is the greatest English writer since Shakespeare. He and his book What We Owe The Future have recently been featured in the New Yorker, New York Times, Vox, NPR, BBC, The Atlantic, Wired, and Boston Review. He's been interviewed by Sam Harris, Ezra Klein, Tim Ferriss, Dwarkesh Patel, and Tyler Cowen. Tweeted about by Elon Musk, Andrew Yang, and Matt Yglesias. The publicity spike is no mystery: the effective altruist movement is well-funded and well-organized, they decided to burn "long-termism" into the collective consciousness, and they sure succeeded.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-1587-a-year-of-no Finalist #15 in the Book Review Contest [This is one of the finalists in the 2022 book review contest. It's not by me - it's by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. I'll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you've read them all, I'll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked.] — I bought this book because of its charming title: 1587, A Year of No Significance: The Ming Dynasty in Decline. A year of no significance? It's not often a history book makes me laugh, but that did. Sure, many history books investigate the insignificant, but your typical author doesn't call your attention to it. This book, by Ray Huang, was first published in the early 1980s; I came across it only recently as a recommendation on The Scholar's Stage (a blog which I found through some link on ACX/SSC a while back.) A little backstory: in my younger days, I thought it might be fun and useful to learn the entire history of the world. To that end, I started with accounts of archaeology and prehistory, then the ancient civilizations, classical antiquity, and so on until I lost momentum somewhere around Tamerlane and the Black Death. Probably the biggest thing I learned is that human history is little more than 5000 years of gang war.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-subcultures 1: Maximum Limelihood Estimator writes: I firmly believe that cycles don't exist and never have existed. This is my shitposting way of saying "I have never, once, in my years of experience modeling human behavioral time series, come across an honest-to-god cyclical pattern (excluding time of year/month/week/day effects)." And yet for some reason, every time I show a time series to anyone ever, people swear to god the data looks cyclical. I called this "a cyclic theory" to acknowledge my debt to Turchin, but you may notice that as written it doesn't repeat. Just because disco was cool in the 70s and uncool in the 80s doesn't imply it will be cool in the 90s, uncool in the 00s, and so on forever. It will probably just stay uncool. The cyclic aspect, if it exists, would involve the constant spawning of new subcultures that rise and fall on their own. So disco begets dance music, dance music has its own golden age and eventual souring, and then it begets something else. The atheist movement begets the feminist movement begets the anti-racist movement begets and so on. What about the stronger claim - that no (non-calendar-based) cycles exist? I think this is clearly false if you allow cycles like the above - in which case the business cycle is one especially well-established example. But if you mean a cycle that follows a nice sine wave pattern and is pretty predictable, I have trouble thinking of good counterexamples. Except for cicada population! I think that's genuinely cyclic! You can argue it ought to count as a calendar-based cycle, but then every cycle that lasted a specific amount of time would be calendar-based and Limelihood's claim would be true by definition.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/skills-plateau-because-of-decay-and Followup to: Why Do Test Scores Plateau; Ritalin Works But School Isn't Worth Paying Attention To Why Do Skills Plateau? Economist Philip Frances finds that creative artists, on average, do their best work in their late 30s. Isn't this strange? However good a writer is at age 35, they should be even better at 55 with twenty more years of practice. Sure, middle age might bring some mild proto-cognitive-impairment, but surely nothing so dire that it cancels out twenty extra years! A natural objection is that maybe they've maxed out their writing ability; further practice won't help. But this can't be true; most 35 year old writers aren't Shakespeare or Dickens, so higher tiers of ability must be possible. But you can't get there just by practicing more. If acheivement is a function of talent and practice, at some point returns on practice decrease near zero. The same is true for doctors. Young doctors (under 40) have slightly better cure rates than older doctors (eg 40-49). The linked study doesn't go any younger (eg under 35, under 30…). However, Goodwin et al find that only first-year doctors suffer from inexperience; by a doctor's second year, she's doing about as well as she ever will. Why? Wouldn't you expect someone who's practiced medicine for twenty years to be better than someone who's only done it for two?

Please volunteer to host a meetup in your city! https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/meetups-everywhere-2022-call-for There are ACX-affiliated meetup groups all over the world. Lots of people are vaguely interested, but don't try them out until I make a big deal about it on the blog. Since learning that, I've tried to make a big deal about it on the blog at least once annually, and it's that time of year again. If you're willing to organize a meetup for your city, please fill out the organizer form.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-81522 RIP PredictIt -- Hedgehog Markets -- Salem/CSPI Fellowship The Passing Of PredictIt In 2014, Victoria University in New Zealand struck a deal with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the agency that regulates some markets in the US. CFTC would let Victoria set up a prediction market - at the time a relatively new idea - for research purposes only. Their no-action letter placed strict limits on Victoria's project: The market would be run by the university and not-for profit. It would charge only enough fees to cover operations. Questions would be limited to 5,000 traders each, who could bet up to $850 per question. They would be on politics and economics only. They would do the usual know-your-customer process and take steps to avoid their traders try to meddle in world events. Regulatory approval in hand, Victoria's market - PredictIt - became the top prediction market in the US, beloved by a community of over a hundred thousand traders - many of whom exchanged barbs at each other in its raucous and unmoderated comment section. PredictIt estimates were featured in the New York Times, Washington Post, and 538. Some of my best (and worst) memories are about following election results in real-time by watching the relevant PredictIt markets, which usually updated faster than any single other media site. On August 4, the CFTC reversed itself, saying the PredictIt had "not operated its market in compliance with the terms of the letter" and that it had to shut down by February.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-god-emperor-of-dune Finalist #14 in the Book Review Contest [This is one of the finalists in the 2022 book review contest. It's not by me - it's by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. I'll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you've read them all, I'll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked. This contains spoilers for the Dune series. - SA] — The memory of sand's gold sheen The worm, the man, the Arakeen The beast, the wise undying king His long and gentle wrath His voice trapped under golden swells Like screams wrung from uncounted bells divided god within a hell His pain a golden path - From The Collected Songs of The Scattering, author unknown. The Setting As God Emperor of Dune begins, our attention is immediately drawn to people. Here, 3500 years after the chronological setting of the first novel, is immediate proof that humanity has survived in the form of a small group of people fleeing through a forest, wolves nipping at their heels. The wolves belong to Leto Atreides II, the grandson of Duke Leto Atreides and son of Paul Muad'ib Atreides, the Kwisatz Haderach and protagonist of Dune I: The One You've Probably Read. At the end of the third book, Leto fused his body with Arakeen sandtrout, the larval form of the Sandworms on which the plot of the series mostly hangs. This symbiosis gave Leto super-human physical powers to match the clairvoyance already enjoyed by his family and allowed him to seize control of the galactic empire. Centuries of time have seen him evolve into a hybrid of a human man and a full-grown sandworm, and the resultant power and pseudo-immortality have allowed him to extend his father's dominance of the known universe from a period of decades to an era spanning the better part of four millennia. The wolves are his not only by right of ownership but also apparently by right of design and creation; near-immortality leaves one with much time to tinker, and he has developed the wolves to a level of sophistication sufficient that they understand the boundaries of their hunting grounds to stop at the Idaho river. It is towards this river and the safety attained through its crossing that the group is fleeing.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/will-nonbelievers-really-believe There's a popular saying among religious apologists: Once people stop believing in God, the problem is not that they will believe in nothing; rather, the problem is that they will believe anything. Big talk, although I notice that this is practically always attributed to one of GK Chesterton or CS Lewis, neither of whom actually said it. If you're making strong claims about how everybody except you is gullible, you should at least bother to double-check the source of your quote. Still, it's worth examining as a hypothesis. Are the irreligious really more likely to fall prey to woo and conspiracy theories?

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/a-cyclic-theory-of-subcultures David Chapman's Geeks, MOPs, and Sociopaths In Subculture Evolution is rightfully a classic, but it doesn't match my own experience. Either through good luck or poor observational skills, I've never seen a lot of sociopath takeovers. Instead, I've seen a gradual process of declining asabiyyah. Good people start out working together, then work together a little less, then turn on each other, all while staying good people and thinking they alone embody the true spirit of the movement. I find Peter Turchin's theories of civilizational cycles oddly helpful here, maybe moreso than for civilizations themselves. Riffing off his phase structure:

Machine Alignment Monday 8/8/22 https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/why-not-slow-ai-progress The Broader Fossil Fuel Community Imagine if oil companies and environmental activists were both considered part of the broader "fossil fuel community". Exxon and Shell would be "fossil fuel capabilities"; Greenpeace and the Sierra Club would be "fossil fuel safety" - two equally beloved parts of the rich diverse tapestry of fossil fuel-related work. They would all go to the same parties - fossil fuel community parties - and maybe Greta Thunberg would get bored of protesting climate change and become a coal baron. This is how AI safety works now. AI capabilities - the work of researching bigger and better AI - is poorly differentiated from AI safety - the work of preventing AI from becoming dangerous. Two of the biggest AI safety teams are at DeepMind and OpenAI, ie the two biggest AI capabilities companies. Some labs straddle the line between capabilities and safety research. Probably the people at DeepMind and OpenAI think this makes sense. Building AIs and aligning AIs could be complementary goals, like building airplanes and preventing the airplanes from crashing. It sounds superficially plausible. But a lot of people in AI safety believe that unaligned AI could end the world, that we don't know how to align AI yet, and that our best chance is to delay superintelligent AI until we do know. Actively working on advancing AI seems like the opposite of that plan. So maybe (the argument goes) we should take a cue from the environmental activists, and be hostile towards AI companies. Nothing violent or illegal - doing violent illegal things is the best way to lose 100% of your support immediately. But maybe glare a little at your friend who goes into AI capabilities research, instead of getting excited about how cool their new project is. Or agitate for government regulation of AI - either because you trust the government to regulate wisely, or because you at least expect them to come up with burdensome rules that hamstring the industry. While there are salient examples of government regulatory failure, some regulations - like the EU's ban on GMO or the US restrictions on nuclear power - have effectively stopped their respective industries.

Finalist #13 in the Book Review Contest https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-exhaustion [This is one of the finalists in the 2022 book review contest. It's not by me - it's by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. I'll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you've read them all, I'll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked - SA] I. Imagine you find yourself, over the course of a few weeks or months, becoming steadily more tired. You're not doing any more work or other activities than you usually do, but nonetheless you find that you are able to do less and less before running out of energy. You start to pick and choose your battles – do I really feel up to this gym session? Do I really need to go to this work function? – and little by little your world begins to shrink. The sense of exhaustion becomes more pervasive, and occurs from when you wake up until you go to sleep. Any exertion leads to you paying for it in a general worsening of exhaustion and malaise that makes you question whether the activity was worth it. Eventually, you learn your lesson and withdraw from even the most basic activities – sometimes you don't get out of bed, have trouble feeding yourself, and find your thinking has become clouded and sluggish ( a phenomenon sometimes called 'brain fog'). Sleep becomes difficult, activities become less enjoyable, and you find that you are restless and anxious despite spending almost all your time attempting to rest.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/absurdity-bias-neom-edition Alexandros M expresses concern about my post on Neom. My post mostly just makes fun of Neom. My main argument against it is absurdity: a skyscraper the height of WTC1 and the length of Ireland? Come on, that's absurd! But isn't the absurdity heuristic a cognitive bias? Didn't lots of true things sound absurd before they turned out to be true (eg evolution, quantum mechanics)? Don't I specifically believe in things many people have found self-evidently absurd (eg the multiverse, AI risk)? Shouldn't I be more careful about "this sounds silly to me, so I'm going to make fun of it"?