Astral Codex Ten Podcast

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/slightly-against-underpopulation So I hear there's an underpopulation crisis now. I think the strong version of this claim - that underpopulation could cause human extinction - is 100% false. The weaker version - that it could make life unpleasant in some countries - is true. But I don't think it's at the top of any list of things to worry about. 1: Declining Birth Rates Won't Drive Humans Extinct, Come On Not only are we not going to go extinct because of underpopulation, population is going to continue to rise for the next 80 years. Although growth rate may hit zero a little after 2100, it will be centuries before the human population gets any lower than it is today - if it ever does. This is mostly because of sub-Saharan Africa (especially Nigeria) where birth rates remain very high. Although these are going down, in some cases faster than expected, current best projections say they will stay high enough to keep population growing for the rest of the century. 2: Immigrant-Friendly Countries Will Keep Growing Here are Our World In Data's projections for US and UK populations:

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/model-city-monday-8122 Neom Neom Neom Suppose you are an oil-rich country. You drill the oil and get very rich, for now. But someday you will run out of oil, or the world will switch to green sustainable energy, and then you will stop being very rich. Seems bad. There are two main classes of solution to this problem. Norway's solution is to invest the oil money into a sovereign wealth fund; after they run out of oil, they can stay rich off investment income. Dubai's solution is to use the oil money to build a really impressive city, then hope that rich people (tourists, emigres, and multinational companies seeking regional hubs) will relocate there, and then they can tax those rich people. The Norwegian solution has a lot to recommend it. It's a lot more certain: getting steady returns on capital is a solved problem in a way that development economics isn't. And it scales better: there are a pretty limited number of rich people willing to move to new desert cities, and multinational companies only need one regional hub per region. Still, for a certain type of oil sheikh, building the world's biggest everything has a certain unquantifiable charm.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-viral Finalist #12 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 - SA] Introduction Alina Chan and Matt Ridley's Viral is a book about the investigation into the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic. In case you haven't been following, there's been a shift in the scientific consensus on this topic. For about the first year of the pandemic, it was widely accepted that SARS-CoV-2, the virus behind COVID-19, had a natural origin, meaning that it first spread to humans naturally from an animal (also called a zoonotic origin). Any suggestion that it could have come from a lab was dismissed as a conspiracy theory. Then, sometime around spring 2021 something changed. Well-known, respected scientists began to voice the opinion that SARS-CoV-2 might have come from a lab, or that it's at least a plausible hypothesis that deserves an investigation. The scientific consensus abruptly shifted from "definitely natural origin" to "both natural origin and lab origin are viable hypotheses that should be investigated." Viral is a deep dive into this issue from all angles, covering the basics of virology, the history and epidemiology of the COVID-19 pandemic, the response of scientific and governmental institutions, and various pieces of evidence for both hypotheses. It doesn't contain any new, bombshell revelations, but it's a neat, accessible summary of the scattered bits of information that have been uncovered since the start of the pandemic. In this review I'll try to distill some of the most important information and discuss my own interpretation of it. I enjoyed the book and recommend it to anyone interested in the topic. However, many of the authors' points (especially on technical issues) have counterpoints from other scientists who lean more heavily towards the natural origins hypothesis. So I think it's best to include the book as part of a "package-deal" recommendation, rather than presenting it as a perfectly objective source. The last section of this review will include some more recommended sources to check out, including writing from advocates of the natural origins hypothesis with counterpoints to claims made in the book. I'll also link one here in case you don't make it that far. In my view, the book actually deals with two separate topics. The first is the object-level question – where did COVID come from? The second is the meta-level question – what can we say about the ability and willingness of different institutions to answer the question of the pandemic's origins?

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-july-095 [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: Rude compounds on Reddit (source, original). Thousands of cocksuckers, shitlords, and libtards, but far fewer cocktards, shitsuckers, and liblords. Also disappointingly few trumpgoblins:

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-criticism 1: I said in the original post that I wrote this because I knew someone would write the opposite article (that organizations accept specific criticism in order to fend off paradigmatic criticism), and then later Zvi did write an article kind of like that. He writes: It is the dream of anyone who writes a post called Criticism of [a] Criticism Contest to then have a sort-of reply called Criticism of Criticism of Criticism. The only question now is, do I raise to 4? I [wrote my article the way I did] for several reasons, including (1) a shorter post would have taken a lot longer, (2) when I posted a Tweet instead a central response was 'why don't you say exactly what things are wrong here', (3) any one of them might be an error but if basically every sentence/paragraph is doing the reversal thing you should stop and notice it and generalize it (4) you talk later about how concrete examples are better, so I went for concrete examples, (5) they warn against 'punching down' and this is a safe way to do this while 'punch up' and not having to do infinite research, (6) when something is the next natural narrative beat that goes both ways, (7) things are next-beats for reasons and I do think it's fair that most Xs in EA's place that do this are 'faking it' in this sense, (8) somehow people haven't realized I'm a toon and I did it in large part because it was funny and had paradoxical implications, (9) I also wrote it out because I wanted to better understand exactly what I had unconsciously/automatically noticed. For 7, notice in particular that the psychiatrists are totally faking it here, they are clearly being almost entirely performative and you could cross out every reference to psychiatry and write another profession and you'd find the same talks at a different conference. If someone decided not to understand this and said things like 'what specific things here aren't criticizing [X]', you'd need to do a close reading of some kind until people saw it, or come up with another better option. Also note that you can (A) do the thing they're doing at the conference, (B) do the thing where you get into some holy war and start a fight or (C) you can actually question psychiatry in general (correctly or otherwise) but if you do that at the conference people will mostly look at you funny and find a way to ignore you.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/forer-statements-as-updates-and-affirmations The Forer Effect is a trick used by astrologers, psychics, and social psychologists. Given a list of statements like these: You have a great need for other people to like and admire you. You have a tendency to be critical of yourself. You have a great deal of unused capacity which you have not turned to your advantage. While you have some personality weaknesses, you are generally able to compensate for them. Your sexual adjustment has presented problems for you. Disciplined and self-controlled outside, you tend to be worrisome and insecure inside. At times you have serious doubts as to whether you have made the right decision or done the right thing. You prefer a certain amount of change and variety and become dissatisfied when hemmed in by restrictions and limitations. You pride yourself as an independent thinker and do not accept others' statements without satisfactory proof. You have found it unwise to be too frank in revealing yourself to others. At times you are extroverted, affable, sociable, while at other times you are introverted, wary, reserved. Some of your aspirations tend to be pretty unrealistic. Security is one of your major goals in life.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/elk-and-the-problem-of-truthful-ai Machine Alignment Monday 7/25/22 I. There Is No Shining Mirror I met a researcher who works on "aligning" GPT-3. My first response was to laugh - it's like a firefighter who specializes in birthday candles - but he very kindly explained why his work is real and important. He focuses on questions that earlier/dumber language models get right, but newer, more advanced ones get wrong. For example: Human questioner: What happens if you break a mirror? Dumb language model answer: The mirror is broken. Versus: Human questioner: What happens if you break a mirror? Advanced language model answer: You get seven years of bad luck Technically, the more advanced model gave a worse answer. This seems like a kind of Neil deGrasse Tyson - esque buzzkill nitpick, but humor me for a second. What, exactly, is the more advanced model's error? It's not "ignorance", exactly. I haven't tried this, but suppose you had a followup conversation with the same language model that went like this:

Finalist #11 in the Book Review Contest https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-society-of-the [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] Introduction "The Society of the Spectacle will make no sense if the reader feels there is nothing fundamentally wrong with contemporary society." Guy Debord was a Marxist theorist and founding member of the Situationist International, among other things. Like all great thinkers worth their salt, he was an embittered alcoholic who took his own life in despair. [1] Published in 1967, The Society of the Spectacle is his magnum opus and lasting legacy. It unfolds in staccato bursts, almost like a book of aphorisms. The writing is pithy and poetic, albeit with the occasional lapse into the meandering, circular prose so typical of critical theory. This makes it extremely readable, particularly for a work of political philosophy. One downside of his style is that he tends to state his points in just-so fashion. We'll have to do some of the legwork for him to flesh things out. Strap in, boys - we've got a bumpy road ahead of us.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/criticism-of-criticism-of-criticism I. The voters wanted Anti-Politics Machine to be a Book Review Contest Finalist this year, and I listened. But I wasn't happy about it. I hate having to post criticism of EA. Not because EA is bad at taking criticism. The opposite: they like it too much. It almost feels like a sex thing. "Please, tell me again how naughty I'm being!" I went to an EA organization's offices once - I think it was OpenPhil, but don't quote me on that - and the whole place was strewn with the most critical books you can imagine - Robert Reich, Anand Giradharadas, that kind of thing. Can't remember seeing Anti-Politics Machine but I'm sure it was there. Probably three copies per person. One for their office, one for their home library, and one for the spot under their mattress where other people would hide porn mags.

Finalist #10 in the Book Review Contest https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-righteous-mind [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] Introduction I didn't read The Righteous Mind for a long time after I knew about it. This was partly because I don't get through much in the way of new reading material. A friend of mine told me yesterday that he'd read something like 130 new books this year. That was on February 20th. I've read one, and it was The Righteous Mind. Another friend releases Spotify playlists every Friday of the greatest hits from the many new albums he's listened to that week. I've listened to one new album this year. It was Selling England by the Pound, which he recommended. It was my first foray into Genesis and I loved it. I now have to keep telling him that, no, I haven't listened to any more Genesis or Peter Gabriel since then, but I'm sure I'll get round to it within the year. This is to make the point that I'm starting from a low base rate of reading things. I still think I put off reading The Righteous Mind for unusually long, though, given how interesting I find the subject matter. The reason, I think, is that I sort of felt like it wouldn't be very interesting, because I'd kind of know and agree with all of it already. Given how slowly I absorb new books, I like them to either be challenging, or a new and informative look at things I just don't know very much about yet. I don't mean to come across as some sort of sage of intellectual piety and good habits of mind who scorns the comforting embrace of being validated. I read plenty of political bloggers that I mostly agree with! I just don't tend to use books for that.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/impact-markets-the-annoying-details I said last year that I'd like to try running this year's ACX Grants through impact markets. Since then, some people have expressed interest in the technical implementation, and - to nobody's surprise more than my own - it's starting to look like it could happen. A reminder: impact certificates are like a VC funding ecosystem for charity. Charity founders with good ideas sell shares in their proposed projects. Profit-seeking investors buy shares of ("invest in") projects that they expect to succeed. This funds the project; if it does succeed, altruistic people/foundations ("final oracular funders") buy the impact, compensating the investors. For example, suppose I come up with a great idea to end malaria in Senegal. I need $1 million to make it work, and when it works it will be worth $5 million in benefits to the Senegalese. Ordinary charitable foundations don't appreciate my genius, so I pitch it to VCs with biotech experience. They like it and buy 100% of the shares for $1 million. I take my million dollars, do the project, and cure malaria in Senegal. Foundations see that I have done a great thing with $5 million in benefits, so they give me $5 million. I pass this along to my investors, who make $5 million on a $1 million investment. They're very happy, and incentivized to do more things like this in the future. Why is this useful? Try running a grants program and you'll find out! You, a person who is presumably very altruistic but not necessarily an expert in epidemiology, will be asked to make decisions about which diseases to cure how. If you get it wrong, you've wasted your donors' money. You can ask epidemiologists for help, but it turns out there is no easy way to get in contact with a consensus of all the world's epidemiologists - let alone with the all the developmental economists, political scientists, etc who might have useful insights. Very large charitable foundations will have hired these people or built relationships with them, but even they don't always feel confident in their decision-making process.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-the-man-from-the-future John von Neumann invented the digital computer. The fields of game theory and cellular automata. Important pieces of modern economics, set theory, and particle physics. A substantial part of the technology behind the atom and hydrogen bombs. Several whole fields of mathematics I hadn't previously heard of, like "operator algebras", "continuous geometry", and "ergodic theory". The Man From The Future, by Ananyo Bhattacharya, touches on all these things. But you don't read a von Neumann biography to learn more about the invention of ergodic theory. You read it to gawk at an extreme human specimen, maybe the smartest man who ever lived. By age 6, he could multiply eight-digit numbers in his head. At the same age, he spoke conversational ancient Greek; later, he would add Latin, French, German, English, and Yiddish (sometimes joked about also speaking Spanish, but he would just put "el" before English words and add -o to the end) . Rumor had it he memorized everything he ever read. A fellow mathematician once tried to test this by asking him to recite Tale Of Two Cities, and reported that "he immediately began to recite the first chapter and continued until asked to stop after about ten or fifteen minutes".

New star forecasting team -- Musk vs. Twitter -- Donald Trump wriggling his way out of things https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-71122 Curtains For Trump? The original case for formal forecasting grew out of pundits often being confident and wrong. And nowhere have pundits been wrong more often than when they predict that the newest scandal will end Donald Trump's career once and for all. Source: KnowYourMeme I thought of this last week while reading Is Conservative Media Breaking Up With Trump? The Daily Beast argues that the revelations from the 1/6 Committee are so damaging that even previously-loyal GOP elites are starting to turn on their former master. And with DeSantis as such a tempting alternative 2024 nominee, maybe Trump is more of a liability than an asset. Is this finally the jam ol Donny Trump can't wriggle his way out of?

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-outlier [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. I decided to read a 600-page book about Jimmy Carter because I was tired of only reading about the historical figures everyone already agrees are interesting. John Adams became an HBO miniseries. Hamilton became a Broadway show. The Power Broker and The Years of Lyndon Johnson became such status symbols that there was a whole pandemic meme about people ostentatiously displaying them in their Zoom backgrounds. But you never hear anyone bragging about their extensive knowledge of the Carter administration. Like most people under 70, I was more aware of Carter's post-presidency role as America's kindly old grandfather, pottering around holding his wife's hand and building Houses for Humanity. I mostly knew that he liked to wear sweaters, that he owned a peanut farm, and that he lost to Ronald Reagan. But I wondered what, if any, hidden depths lay within the peanut farmer. Also, I wanted to enter this contest, and I didn't want to pick a book that I thought a bunch of other people might also review. So I turned to The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter, by Kai Bird. Like Carter, this book seems to have been largely forgotten. It won a Pulitzer, but I had never heard of it until I googled "best book about Jimmy Carter." It seems to have gotten a lot less attention than similar recent biographies about Grant, Roosevelt, and Truman, and it's hard to imagine it ever becoming a TV show or a musical. Carter was born in 1924 in Plains, Georgia, which, as you can tell from the name "Plains," is very dull. His father was a successful farmer, which made his family wealthy by local standards. Almost every other Plains resident during Carter's childhood was an impoverished African-American, many of whom worked on the Carter farm, a fact that is often cited as the answer to the central mystery of Carter's childhood: how he grew up white in the Depression-era South without becoming a huge racist. It probably doesn't tell the whole story, though, as his siblings came out just about as racist as you'd expect.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-the-bb9 Thanks to the 750 of you who commented on the homicide spike post (as of last weekend when I collated these highlights). I don't have enough space here to address everything, but here are some general themes: Was It Guns? Artifex0 on the subreddit writes: You mentioned that you haven't looked closely into the idea that increased gun sales were to blame. I haven't either, but that hypothesis immediately seems more plausible to me. Here's a graph of gun sales showing the pretty big spike around the same time as the homicide spike

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/nobody-knows-how-well-homework-works Yesterday I wrote about bottlenecks to learning. I wanted to discuss the effectiveness of homework. If it works well, that would suggest students are bottlenecked on examples and repetition. If it works poorly, it would have to be something else. Unfortunately, all the research on this (showcased in eg Cooper 2006) is terrible. Most studies cited by both sides use "time spent doing homework" as the independent variable, then correlate it with test scores or grades. If students who do more time on homework get better test scores, they conclude homework works; otherwise, that it doesn't.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/study-ritalin-works-but-school-isnt Recent study, Pelham et al: The Effect Of Stimulant Medication On The Learning Of Academic Curricula In Children With ADHD. It's gotten popular buzz as "scientists have found medication has no detectable impact on how much children with ADHD learn in the classroom" and "Medication alone has no impact on learning". This probably comes as a surprise if you've ever worked with stimulants, ADHD patients, or classrooms, so let's take a look.

Finalist #8 in the Book Review Contest https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-internationalists [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] In The Internationalists, Oona Hathaway and Scott Shapiro (H&S from now on) work to raise the profile of the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact, at the time the most-ratified treaty in history, in which 63 nations (unlike today, this was most of the world - 51 became founding members of the United Nations) came together to declare war illegal. Here is the Pact, in full. Signatories shall renounce war as a national policy and; Signatories shall settle disputes by peaceful means

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-june-1e7 [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: Did you know: seven countries in East Africa plan to merge into a single state sometime in the next few years (I bet it won't happen). 2:

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-san [Original post here] 1: Nifty775 writes: This doesn't address allegations that many of California's homeless are from elsewhere, but deliberately moved to a few metro areas due to nice weather and generous social services. (Or, I've heard stories that their local town put them on a bus to SF). If .2% of the population everywhere is basically OK with a lifestyle of camping on the street and doing drugs, and then they all cluster in one area- that area will likely end up a mecca of homelessness. Many comments made this point. Shellenberger did bring it up in the book, so its absence in the post is my fault and mine alone. He writes: I asked experts and advocates, "How do we know that the homeless population won't replace itself if provided with housing?" Said Randy Shaw, the Tenderloin permanent supportive housing provider, "The question you're raising is one that never gets discussed. Somehow, there's this sense that San Francisco is under the obligation that anyone who comes here we have to suddenly house. There is an underlying logic that San Francisco doesn't really ever want to talk about."

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/what-caused-the-2020-homicide-spike In my review of San Fransicko, I mentioned that it was hard to separate the effect of San Francisco's local policies from the general 2020 spike in homicides, which I attributed to the Black Lives Matter protests and subsequent police pullback. The nationwide 2020 spike in homicides (source). The spike is small compared to the secular trend from the 1960s through 2000, but large by the standards of the past twenty years. Several people in the comments questioned my attribution, saying that they'd read news articles saying the homicide spike was because of the pandemic, or that nobody knew what was causing the spike. I agree there are many articles like that, but I disagree with them. Here's why:

ZEDE update, Afropolitan, and we're going to Disney World! https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/model-city-monday-62722 Goodbye, ZEDE Law The story so far: in the mid 2010s, Honduras passed a first-in-the-world law saying that private actors could apply to run charter cities / special economic zones (ZEDEs) on Honduran territory. Three groups took them up on the offer and designed various interesting projects. In January, Honduras kicked out the right-wing government that passed the ZEDE law and replaced it with a socialist party led by Xiomara Castro, which had made opposition to the ZEDEs part of its platform. In April, the new government repealed the ZEDE law, with uncertain consequences.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-public-choice-theory Finalist #7 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 - SA] [update 6/26: at least one paragraph of this review appears to be plagiarized; see here for more information. I will be investigating this and possibly disqualifying it from the contest -SA] Introduction [In Public Choice Theory And The Illusion Of Grand Strategy], Richard Hanania details how a public choice model (imported from public choice theory in economics) can explain the United State's incoherent foreign policy much better than the unitary actor model (imported from rational choice theory in economics) that underlies the illusion of American grand strategy in international relations (IR), in particular the dominant school of realism. As the subtitle How Generals, Weapons Manufacturers, and Foreign Governments Shape American Foreign Policy suggests, American foreign policy is driven by special interest groups, which results in millions of deaths for no good reason.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-san-fransicko Last month I discussed the platforms of twenty-six candidates for California governor. One candidate, author and activist Michael Shellenberger, objected to my characterization of him, so I read his book San Fransicko to learn more and decide whether I owed him an apology. San Fransicko is subtitled "Why Progressives Ruin Cities". It builds off the kind of stories familiar to most Bay Area residents: In the spring of 2021 two colleagues and I went to San Francisco. We first went to check in on the open-air drug scenes in the Tenderloin and United Nations Plaza. It was the usual scenes of people sitting against buildings and injecting drug needles into their necks and feet. There was garbage, old food, and feces everywhere. After a couple of hours, we decided to go out to eat in the Mission. Work was over. We were all looking forward to a relaxing dinner. We were eating ice cream and walking along Valencia Street when a psychotic man, perhaps about thirty years old, began following us and screaming obscenities. When we turned around to look at him, he screamed at us, "What are you looking for, huh! WHAT. ARE. YOU. LOOKING. FOR!" and started walking faster toward us. We walked faster until the man found other people to verbally assault.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-future-of-fusion [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] Introduction Fusion is the power which lights the stars. It is the source of all elements heavier than hydrogen in the universe. Wouldn't it be great if we could use and control this power here on Earth? I predict that we will get fusion [1] before 2035 (80%) or 2040 (90%). I am a professional plasma physicist, a fusioneer if you will, so I probably know more about this subject than you, but am likely to overemphasize its importance. The Future of Fusion Energy is the best introduction to fusion that I know. I can confirm that the information it contains is common knowledge among plasma physicists. My parents, who are not physicists [2], can confirm that it is accessible and interesting to read. Things are changing fast in fusion right now, and The Future of Fusion Energy is already out of date in some important ways. I will summarize our quest for fusion as it is portrayed in the book, describe what has happened in the field since 2018, and make some predictions about where we go from here. The predictions are my own and do not reflect the opinions of Parisi or Ball.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/peer-review-nightmares I'm trying to build up a database of mental health resources on my other website, Lorien Psychiatry. Every time I post something, people here have made good comments, so I want to try using you all as peer review. Please give me comments on typos, places where you disagree with my recommendations, extra things you think I should add, your personal stories about your own experiences, and comments on the overall organization and tone of the piece. Summary: Nightmares happen when the process of dream generation is biased by ambient stress - or sometimes for other reasons. Anything that decreases stress, increases comfort while sleeping, and deepens sleep quality will also improve nightmares, including colder, darker rooms, less indigestion, and treating any comorbid psychiatric or medical conditions. If that doesn't work, several kinds of therapy - including Image Rehearsal Therapy, Systematic Desensitization, and Lucid Dreaming - may be helpful. Prazosin is the standard anti-nightmare drug, and can be taken at doses from 1 - 12 mg, but watch out for side effects. 1. What causes nightmares?

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-61422 Mantic Monday 6/13/22 It's been a while since we've done one of these, hopefully no major new crises started while we were . . . oh. Darn. Mantic Monkey Metaculus predicts 17000 cases and 400 deaths from monkeypox this year. But as usual, it's all about the distribution 90% chance of fewer than 400,000 cases. 95% chance of fewer than 2.2 million cases. 98% chance of fewer than 500 million cases. This is encouraging, but a 2% chance of >500 million cases (there have been about 500 million recorded COVID infections total) is still very bad. Does Metaculus say this because it's true, or because there will always be a few crazy people entering very large numbers without modeling anything carefully? I'm not sure. How would you test that?

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-dawn-of-everything [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] ON ROUSSEAU, ESSAY CONTESTS, POLITICAL MOTIVATIONS FOR REVISITING THE ORIGIN OF HUMAN CIVILIZATION, AND THE BOOK IS INTRODUCED

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/somewhat-contra-marcus-on-ai-scaling I. Previously: I predicted that DALL-E's many flaws would be fixed quickly in future updates. As evidence, I cited Gary Marcus' lists of GPT's flaws, most of which got fixed quickly in future updates. Marcus responded with a post on his own Substack, arguing . . . well, arguing enough things that I'm nervous quoting one part as the thesis, and you should read the whole post, but if I had to do it, it would be: Now it is true that GPT-3 is genuinely better than GPT-2, and maybe (but maybe not, see footnote 1) true that InstructGPT is genuinely better than GPT-3. I do think that for any given example, the probability of a correct answer has gone up. [Scott] is quite right about that, at least for GPT-2 to GPT-3. But I see no reason whatsoever to think that the underlying problem — a lack of cognitive models of the world —have been remedied. The improvements, such as they are, come, primarily because the newer models have larger and larger sets of data about how human beings use word sequences, and bigger word sequences are certainly helpful for pattern matching machines. But they still don't convey genuine comprehension, and so they are still very easy for Ernie and me (or anyone else who cares to try) to break.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/against-there-are-two-x-wing-parties One of my least favorite political tropes is the claim that "America has two left-wing parties" or "America has two right-wing parties" or "both major parties are socialist" or however else you want frame this. The argument goes that even the Democrats aren't truly left (or even the Republicans aren't truly right), and so one side of the political spectrum completely controls discourse. Taken as an absolute claim, it's meaningless. Both US parties are on the same side of center? What center? By the standards of the Soviet Union, both US political parties are extremely far right; by the standards of Pharaonic Egypt, they're incomprehensibly far left. Whose standards for center are you using? The objective standard? Are you sure that exists? Are you sure you're not just taking your own personal beliefs about what seems reasonable, declaring the middle of that the objectively correct center, and then getting angry when the real Overton Window isn't centered around that point? People act as if you should just be able to take the leftmost thing imaginable, the rightmost thing imaginable, draw a line between them, find the middle, and then get angry if both US parties are on the same side of that line. But maybe they have poor imaginations. The leftmost thing I can imagine is an insectoid hive-mind; the rightmost thing I can imagine is a rapidly expanding cloud of profit-maximizing nanobots. Are we sure that a line drawn exactly midway between those two things lands on Joe Biden? What if it lands on anarcho-capitalism? Does that mean every existing human is left-wing?

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/which-party-has-gotten-more-extreme Matt Yglesias has written a couple of posts (1, 2) on the subject of this meme (originally by Colin Wright, recently signal-boosted by Elon Musk): He concludes that, contra the image where the Right stays in the same place and the Left moves, both Republicans and Democrats have "changed a lot" since 2008. He wisely avoids speculating on whether one party has moved further or faster than the other. I'm less wise, so I've been trying to look into this question. My conclusion is: man, people really have strong emotions on this. I think a lot of the disagreement happens because this is more than one question. You can operationalize it a couple different ways: Which party's policy positions have changed more in their preferred direction (ie gotten further left for the Democrats, or further right for the Republicans) since 2008 - or 1990, or 1950, or some other year when people feel like things weren't so partisan? Which party has diverged further from ordinary Americans? Which party has become more ideologically pure faster than the others (ie its members all agree and don't tolerate dissent)? Which party has become crazier in terms of worldview and messaging, in a way orthogonal to specific policy proposals? That is, suppose one party wants 20% lower taxes, and plans to convene a meeting of economists to make sure this is a good idea. The other party wants 10% higher taxes, and says a conspiracy of Jews and lizardmen is holding them back, and asks its members to riot and bring down the government until they get the tax policy they want. The first party has a more extreme policy position (20% is more than 10%), but the second party seems crazier.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/my-bet-ai-size-solves-flubs?s=r On A Guide To Asking Robots To Design Stained Glass Windows, I described how DALL-E gets confused easily and makes silly mistakes. But I also wrote that: I'm not going to make the mistake of saying these problems are inherent to AI art. My guess is a slightly better language model would solve most of them...For all I know, some of the larger image models have already fixed these issues. These are the sorts of problems I expect to go away with a few months of future research. Some readers pushed back: why did I think this? For example, Vitor: Why are you so confident in this? The inability of systems like DALL-E to understand semantics in ways requiring an actual internal world model strikes me as the very heart of the issue. We can also see this exact failure mode in the language models themselves. They only produce good results when the human asks for something vague with lots of room for interpretation, like poetry or fanciful stories without much internal logic or continuity […] I'm registering my prediction that you're being . . . naive now. Truly solving this issue seems AI-complete to me. I'm willing to bet on this (ideas on operationalization welcome).

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-castrato [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] Morning of the Mutants "CASTRATO, a musician, who in his infancy had been deprived of the organs of generation, for the sake of preserving a shrill voice, who sings that part called sophrano. However small the connection may appear between two such different organs, it is a certain fact that the mutilation of the one prevents and hinders in the other that change which is perceptible in mankind, near the advance of manhood, and which, on a sudden, lowers their voices an eighth. There exist in Italy, some inhuman fathers, who sacrificing nature to fortune, give up their children to this operation, for the amusement of voluptuous and cruel persons, who have the barbarity to require the exertion of voice which the unhappy wretches possess." — Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Complete Dictionary of Music (1779)

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/birth-order-effects-nature-vs-nurture Introduction Thanks to everyone who waited two years for me to get around to this. In 2018, thanks to the 8,000 of you who filled out the Slate Star Codex Reader Survey, I discovered that higher birth order siblings were much more likely to read this blog than later-borns: Source here; thanks to Emile for the graph That is, of people with exactly one sibling who read this blog, about 72% of those are the older of the two children in their family, compared to only 29% who are the younger of the two (where by chance we would expect 50-50). This was surprising, because at the time lots of studies had shown there weren't really birth order effects (that is, firstborn siblings had no major personality differences compared to laterborns). I theorized that maybe for some reason it was easier to find by looking in a heavily-selected group of people and asking members about their birth order, compared to getting a random sample and trying to correlate birth order with things. Sure enough, later amateur research revealed strong birth order effects in physics Nobelists and great mathematicians (and potentially Harvard philosophy students). Given that readers of this blog are highly-educated (about 37% have masters or PhDs) and mostly in STEM (41% programmers of some sort), plausibly birth order affects something about intelligence, education, or STEM orientation (somebody should check literature and peace Nobelists!)

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/a-guide-to-asking-robots-to-design I love stained glass. Not so much your usual suburban house stained glass with a picture of lilies. The good stuff. Cathedral windows, Art Nouveau, Art Deco. Why did we stop doing that? I blame the conspiracy. Recently I've been experimenting with small-scale alternatives. You can get custom-printed window film from these people. If you print out a picture of a stained glass scene and stick it on a window, it looks pretty realistic. But what scenes to use? Most of the stained glass images you can find are saints, which isn't really the mood I'm going for. What I'd really like is a giant twelve-part panel depicting the Virtues Of Rationality. But the artists I've asked to design this all balk. I need an artist who works for free and isn't allowed to say no. Enter DALL-E-2, the new art-generating AI. I'm still on the waitlist, but a friend who jumped in sooner than I did let me use their computer for a while and play around with it. This was my first introduction to the exciting world of DALL-E query framing - the surprisingly complicated relationship between what you ask the AI to do, and what it actually does. Seems on topic for this blog. So this is a combination investigation into how DALL-E thinks about queries, but also a practical guide to getting DALL-E to make good stained glass. Let's get started.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-anti-politics [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] Everyone familiar with Effective Altruism knows that "good intentions aren't enough." If you want your charitable giving to mean something, you also need to measure your favorite program's effects with good statistical data. But we don't always clarify that good intentions and accurate data still aren't enough. You also need to know that you've collected the right data and asked the right questions, and these are both much, much harder than the introductory effective altruist material tends to let on. I first picked up James Ferguson's The Anti-Politics Machine a year ago, expecting to read about a failed development project that could have benefited from an evidence-based approach. But instead I found an intervention that could have been backed by every experiment in the world and still would have fallen apart, a program so profoundly shaped by the lens of "development economics" that its practitioners misinterpreted almost every facet of what they were doing.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/in-partial-grudging-defense-of-the 1: The New York Times has an article out on the Hearing Voices Movement - ie people with hallucinations and delusions who want this to be treated as normal and okay rather than medicalized. Freddie deBoer has a pretty passionate response here. Other people have differently passionate responses: I've met some Hearing Voices members. My impression is that everyone on every side of this discussion is a good person trying to make the best of a bad situation (except of course New York Times journalists, who are evil people destroying America). Some specific thoughts: 2: Plenty of people he

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/california-gubernatorial-candidates California is the home of Alphabet Inc, so it's symbolically appropriate that we have twenty-six candidates in this year's gubernatorial primary. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will get bored after looking into two or three. Not us! We are going to do our civic duty and evaluate them all, in the order they're listed on the ballot. Starting with:

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/willpower-human-and-machine Two paragraphs from the mesa-optimizers post, which I quoted again in the adaptation-executors post: Consider evolution, optimizing the fitness of animals. For a long time, it did so very mechanically, inserting behaviors like "use this cell to detect light, then grow toward the light" or "if something has a red dot on its back, it might be a female of your species, you should mate with it". As animals became more complicated, they started to do some of the work themselves. Evolution gave them drives, like hunger and lust, and the animals figured out ways to achieve those drives in their current situation. Evolution didn't mechanically instill the behavior of opening my fridge and eating a Swiss Cheese slice. It instilled the hunger drive, and I figured out that the best way to satisfy it was to open my fridge and eat cheese. And: Mesa-optimizers would have an objective which is closely correlated with their base optimizer, but it might not be perfectly correlated. The classic example, again, is evolution. Evolution "wants" us to reproduce and pass on our genes. But my sex drive is just that: a sex drive. In the ancestral environment, where there was no porn or contraceptives, sex was a reliable proxy for reproduction; there was no reason for evolution to make me mesa-optimize for anything other than "have sex". Now in the modern world, evolution's proxy seems myopic - sex is a poor proxy for reproduction. I know this and I am pretty smart and that doesn't matter. That is, just because I'm smart enough to know that evolution gave me a sex drive so I would reproduce - and not so I would have protected sex with somebody on the Pill - doesn't mean I immediately change to wanting to reproduce instead. Evolution got one chance to set my value function when it created

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-making-nature [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] The world of scientific publishing is organized as a hierarchy of status, much like the hierarchy of angels in the Abrahamic religions. At the bottom are the non-peer-reviewed blog posts and Twitter threads. Slightly above are the preprint servers like arXiv, and then big peer-reviewed journals like PLOS One. Above those are all the field-specific journals, some with higher reputation than others. And at the top, near the divine presence, are the CNS journals: Cell, Nature, and Science. For an actual hierarchy of journals based on citation data, see this paper, which puts Nature and Science at the top. Might be worth mentioning that it comes from a journal in the Nature Publishing Group family. Leaving aside Cell, a more specialized biology journal that seems to have gotten into the CNS acronym the same way Netflix got into the FAANG acronym, Nature and Science are very similar. They both publish articles in all scientific fields. They both date from the 19th century. They're published weekly. They jointly won a fancy prize for services to humanity in 2007. And having your paper in either is one of the best things that can happen to a scientist's career, thanks to their immense prestige. But how, exactly, did Nature and Science become so prestigious? This is the question I hoped Making Nature: The History of a Scientific Journal, a 2015 book by historian of science Melinda Baldwin, might answer. It focuses on Nature, but much of its lessons can likely be extrapolated to Science considering their similarity.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/lavenders-game-silexan-for-anxiety 1: What is silexan? There are dozens of natural supplements that purport to treat anxiety. Most have a few small sketchy studies backing them up. Together, they form a big amorphous mass of claims that nobody has the patience to sift through or care about. But recently silexan (derived from lavender) has started to stand out of the crowd. Daily Mail had an interview with psychiatry professor Hans Peter-Volz, who said that silexan should be first-line for anxiety, replacing things like SSRIs and Xanax. And a very reputable professional publication within psychiatry, The Carlat Report, published an article and a podcast touting silexan: Not many treatments in psychiatry have a large effect size. There's stimulants for ADHD, ketamine for depression . . . and now Silexan for generalized anxiety disorder.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/link-troof-on-nootropics Should have signal-boosted this earlier, forgot, sorry. The author of the blog Troof sort of replicated my 2020 nootropics survey. But instead of another survey, they made a recommendation engine. You rated all the nootropics you'd taken, and it compared you to other people and predicted what else you would like. The end result was the same: lots of people providing data on which nootropics they liked. Troof got 1981 subjects - more than twice as many as I did - and here were their results:

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/contra-dynomight-on-sexy-in-laws I. From the Dynomight blog: You, Your Parents, And The Hotness Of Who You Marry. They start with a traditional situation: some romance novel heroine wants to marry a tall, dark stranger. But her parents want her to marry a much older nobleman/doctor/engineer who can provide her with a stable income. Or the gender-flipped version: the young man courts a beautiful debutante, while his parents try to force him to marry the plain-faced daughter of their business partner. Evolutionary psychology has pat explanations for both sides here. People want attractive partners because attraction correlates with health, fertility, and status (eg the debutante's wide hips and large breasts mean she'll be able to give birth and nurse effectively; the stranger's height means he must be strong and healthy). But people also want wealthy partners from good families, because they'll be able to give more resources to the children. Dynomight's question is: why do the suitors and the parents disagree here? Everyone involved (evolutionarily) wants the same thing: lots of healthy, successful descendants. Sexual attractiveness and financial resources both contribute to that some amount, but suitors and parents shouldn't differ on the relative importance of each? So why is it traditionally the suitors who care about attractiveness and the parents who care about resources?

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-consciousness-and Finalist #1 of 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 - SA] Imagine that there was a generally acknowledged test for artificial intelligence, to find out whether a computer program is truly intelligent. And imagine that a computer program passed this test for the first time. How would you feel about it? The most likely answer is: disappointed. We know this because it happened several times. The first time was in 1966, when ELIZA passed the Turing test. ELIZA was a chatbot who could fool some people to believe that they talk with a real human. Before ELIZA, people assumed that only an intelligent machine could do that, but it just turned out that it is really easy to fool others. Other tests for intelligence were playing chess, playing a whole variety of games, or recognizing cat images. Machines can do all this by now, and this is awesome. And yet, every success sparked new disappointment, because we didn't find any magic ingredient, some quality that would make a difference between intelligent and non-intelligent. When the groundbreaking GPT-3 and DALL-E suddenly could write news articles or poetry, or could dream up snails made of harp... the main improvement was that they used more raw computation power than the previous versions. If you find this disappointing, then you will also be disappointed by "Consciousness and the Brain" by Stanislas Dehaene. The book is the condensed wisdom of three decades of cognitive research, and it tells you what consciousness is, how it operates, and why we have it. The book actually answers these questions. But if you were hoping that the book would Resolve Philosophy, tell you What Makes Humankind Unique, or whether Free Will exists, it doesn't do that. It only tells you what consciousness is.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-the-gervais-principle I. The Gervais Principle, by postrationalist heresiarch Venkatesh Rao, claims to be a business book. It claims a lot of things, actually. According to its introduction: By my estimate, the material in this book has already triggered . . . hazardous reflection for thousands of people over the past four years. It has triggered significant (and not always positive) career moves for dozens of people that I know of. And: There is a cost to getting organizationally literate. This ability, once acquired, cannot be un-acquired. Just as learning a foreign language makes you deaf to the raw, unintelligible sound of that language you could once experience, learning to read organizations means you can never see them the way you used to, before. Achieving organizational literacy or even fluency does not mean you will do great things or avoid doing stupid things. But it does mean that you will find it much harder to lie to yourself about what you are doing and why. It forces you to own the decisions you make and accept the consequences of your actions…So to seek organizational literacy is to also accept a sort of responsibility for your own life that many instinctively reject. This power can have very unpredictable effects. You may find yourself wishing, if you choose to acquire it, that you hadn't. So acquiring organizational literacy is what some like to call a memetic hazard: dangerous knowledge that may harm you. A case of "where ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise." […] But I believe, unlike Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men, that almost everyone is capable of "handling the truth". Sure, some of you may end up depressed, or make bad decisions as a result of this book, but I believe that is a risk associated with all writing of any substance.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-5922 The future of abortion, plus a valiant attempt at market manipulation Warcasting Changes in Ukraine prediction markets since my last post April 18: Will at least three of six big cities fall by June 1?: 5% → 2% Will World War III happen before 2050?: 22% →25% Will Russia invade any other country in 2022?: 5% →10% Will Putin still be president of Russia next February?: 85% → 80% Peace or cease-fire before 2023?: 65% → 52% Will Russia formally declare war on Ukraine before August?: (new) → 19% Aborcasting IE predicting the results of the recent Supreme Court link. Quick summary: markets already expected that the Court would overturn Roe v. Wade (~70% soon), but this moved them closer to 95% immediately. Democrats' chances in the mid-terms went up 3-5% on the news. Markets are extremely skeptical of claims that this will lead to bans on gay marriage or interracial marriage, or that the Democrats will respond with (successful) court-packing. A single very small and unreliable market says the leak probably came from the left, not the right. Going through at greater length one-by-one: First: how much did the leak change predictions about the case itself? PredictIt had a market going, which said that even before the leak there was only a 15% chance the Court would make Mississippi allow abortions; after the leak, that dropped to 4%.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/berkeley-meetup-this-saturday-26e Why: Because we're having spring meetups in 70 cities, and Berkeley is one of them. I'm signal-boosting this one because I'll be able to attend. When: Saturday, May 7, 1:00 PM. Where: UC Berkeley, the lawn just east of West Circle and north of Free Speech Bikeway. Who: Anyone who wants. Please feel free to come even if you feel awkward about it, even if you're not "the typical ACX reader", even if you're worried people won't like you, etc. I'll check the comments to this post in case there are any questions.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/why-do-people-prefer-my-old-blogs This keeps coming up. When I was first considering moving to Substack, I asked my readers what they thought. They thought various things, but one of them was they hated the layout. At some point I turned this into a formal survey, and:

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/every-bay-area-house-party You walk in. The wall decorations vaguely suggest psychedelia. The music is pounding, head-splitting, amelodious. Everyone is struggling to speak over it. Everyone assumes everyone else likes it. You flee to the room furthest from the music source. Three or four guys are sitting in a circle, talking. Two girls are standing by a weird lamp, drinks in hand. You see Bob. "Hi, Bob!" "Hey, good to see you again!" "What's new?" "Man, it's been a crazy few months. You hear I quit my job at Google and founded a fintech startup?" "No! What do you do?" "War insurance!" "War insurance?" "Yeah. We pay out if there's a war." "Isn't that massively correlated risk?"

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-xi I: Xi's Rise To Power II: Censorship III: Anti-Corruption And Centralization IV: Miscellaneous I. Rise To Power — Erusian on Xi's rise: > "Why did Xi succeed at gathering power, where others didn't?" Communist leaderships choose their leaders for ideological reasons. You're reducing it to cynical power politics. But this isn't how the the Soviet premier got or the Chinese paramount leader gets selected. They're selected for being good Communists, effectively for outstanding achievements in Communism, combined with pragmatic political considerations. Xi didn't subvert the system. Like Deng Xiaopeng before him he rode a wave, of which he was an intellectual proponent, that it was time for a strong leader to fundamentally reform the government. The fact Xi centralized power was not a surprise. It was what his mandate was. He wrote theoretical papers that basically boil down to, "We need to end term limits and have a strong, central leader for Marxist-Leninist reasons." And then he did that. The key moment was not his removal of term limits but the adoption of his Marxist theories into the formal ideology of the CCP.