Astral Codex Ten Podcast

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/obscure-pregnancy-interventions-much This is intended as a sequel to my old Biodeterminist's Guide To Parenting. It's less ambitious, in that it focuses only on pregnancy; but also more ambitious, in that it tries to be right. I wrote Biodeterminist's Guide in 2012, before the replication crisis was well understood, and I had too low a bar for including random crazy hypotheses. On the other hand, everyone else has too high a bar for including random crazy hypotheses! If you look at standard pregnancy advice, it's all stuff like "take prenatal vitamins" and "avoid alcohol" and "don't strike your abdomen repeatedly with blunt objects". It's fine, but it's the equivalent of college counselors who say "get good grades and try hard on the SAT." Meanwhile, there are tiger mothers who are making their kids play oboe 10 hours/day because they heard the Harvard music department has clout with Admissions and is short on oboists. What's the pregnancy-advice version of that? That's what we're doing here. Do not take this guide as a list of things that you have to do, or (God forbid) that you should feel guilty for not doing. Take it as a list of the most extreme things you could do if you were neurotic and had no sense of proportion. Here are my headline findings:

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/men-will-literally-have-completely People are debating "therapy: good or bad?" again: There are dozens of kinds of therapy: reliving your traumas, practicing mindfulness, analyzing dreams, uncovering your latent desire to have sex with your mother. But most people on both sides of this debate are talking about what psychiatrists call "supportive therapy" - unstructured talking about your feelings and what's going on in your life. I know the responsible thing to say is something like "this is helpful for some people but not others". I will say that, in the end. But I have a lot of sympathy for the people debating it. I have such a strong intuition of "why would this possibly work?" that it's always shocked me when other people say it does. And I know other people with such a strong intuition of "obviously this would work!" that it shocks them to hear other people even question it. Yet my patients seem to line up about half and half: some of them find therapy really great, others not helpful at all. Whenever I try to understand this, I find myself coming back to this tweet:

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/deceptively-aligned-mesa-optimizers A Machine Alignment Monday post, 4/11/22 I. Our goal here is to popularize obscure and hard-to-understand areas of AI alignment, and surely this meme (retweeted by Eliezer last week) qualifies: So let's try to understand the incomprehensible meme! Our main source will be Hubinger et al 2019, Risks From Learned Optimization In Advanced Machine Learning Systems. Mesa- is a Greek prefix which means the opposite of meta-. To "go meta" is to go one level up; to "go mesa" is to go one level down (nobody has ever actually used this expression, sorry). So a mesa-optimizer is an optimizer one level down from you. 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.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/spring-meetups-in-seventy-cities Lots of people only want to go to meetups a few times a year. And they all want to go to the same big meetups as all the other people who only go a few times a year. In 2022, we set up one big well-telegraphed meetup in the fall as a Schelling point for these people. This year, we're setting up two. We'll have the fall meetup as usual. If you only want to go to one meetup a year, go to that one. But we'll also have a spring round. If you only go to two meetups a year, come to this one too! You can find a list of cities and times below. If you want to add your city to the list, fill in this form; if you have questions, ask [email protected] .

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/dictator-book-club-xi-jinping [Previous entries: Erdogan, Modi, Orban] The Third Revolution, by Elizabeth Economy, promises to explain "the transformative changes underway in China today". But like her namesake, Dr. Economy doesn't always allocate resources the way I would like. I came to the book with questions like: How did the pre-Xi Chinese government work? How was it different from dictatorship? What safeguards did it have against it? Why hadn't previous Chinese leaders become dictators? And: How did Xi come to power? How did he defeat those safeguards? Had previous Chinese leaders wanted more power? How come they failed to get it, but Xi succeeded? Third Revolution barely touched on any of this. It mostly explained Xi's domestic and foreign policies. Some of this was relevant: a lot of Xi's policies involve repression to prop up his rule. But none of it answered my key questions. So this is less of a book review than other Dictator Book Club entries. It's a look through recent Chinese history, with The Third Revolution as a very loose inspiration.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-self 1: Rosemary (writes Parallel Republic) says: I think a preference for the status quo has to weigh in to some extent. All else being equal, sure, I agree with the "any group large enough that it isn't ludicrous on its face has a right to self-determination" standard. But all else is almost never equal. Someone wants to secede and someone else wants to conquer—and all of that is enormously disruptive to many other someones. So I think there's an immediately obvious utilitarian bias towards the status quo of, oh, the last decade or so. Governments are heavy, complicated things, and I think a group who wants to disrupt that needs to make an affirmative argument based on something other than "self determination" that this is a good idea and all the disruption is worth it for the sake of things being better in the long run. Which unfortunately gets us nowhere because it brings us right back to debates about culture and history etc.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/yudkowsky-contra-christiano-on-ai Previously in series: Yudkowsky Contra Ngo On Agents, Yudkowsky Contra Cotra On Biological Anchors Prelude: Yudkowsky Contra Hanson In 2008, thousands of blog readers - including yours truly, who had discovered the rationality community just a few months before - watched Robin Hanson debate Eliezer Yudkowsky on the future of AI. Robin thought the AI revolution would be a gradual affair, like the Agricultural or Industrial Revolutions. Various people invent and improve various technologies over the course of decades or centuries. Each new technology provides another jumping-off point for people to use when inventing other technologies: mechanical gears → steam engine → railroad and so on. Over the course of a few decades, you've invented lots of stuff and the world is changed, but there's no single moment when "industrialization happened". Eliezer thought it would be lightning-fast. Once researchers started building human-like AIs, some combination of adding more compute, and the new capabilities provided by the AIs themselves, would quickly catapult AI to unimaginably superintelligent levels. The whole process could take between a few hours and a few years, depending on what point you measured from, but it wouldn't take decades. You can imagine the graph above as being GDP over time, except that Eliezer thinks AI will probably destroy the world, which might be bad for GDP in some sense. If you come up with some way to measure (in dollars) whatever kind of crazy technologies AIs create for their own purposes after wiping out humanity, then the GDP framing will probably work fine. For transhumanists, this debate has a kind of iconic status, like Lincoln-Douglas or the Scopes Trial. But Robin's ideas seem a bit weird now (they also seemed a bit weird in 2008) - he thinks AIs will start out as uploaded human brains, and even wrote an amazing science-fiction-esque book of predictions about exactly how that would work. Since machine learning has progressed a lot faster than brain uploading has, this is looking less likely and probably makes his position less relevant than in 2008. The gradualist torch has passed to Paul Christiano, who wrote a 2018 post Takeoff Speeds revisiting some of Hanson's old arguments and adding new ones. (I didn't realize this until talking to Paul, but "holder of the gradualist torch" is a relative position - Paul still thinks there's about a 1/3 chance of a fast takeoff.) Around the end of last year, Paul and Eliezer had a complicated, protracted, and indirect debate, culminating in a few hours on the same Discord channel. Although the real story is scattered over several blog posts and chat logs, I'm going to summarize it as if it all happened at once. Gradatim Ferociter Paul sums up his half of the debate as: There will be a complete 4 year interval in which world output doubles, before the first 1 year interval in which world output doubles. (Similarly, we'll see an 8 year doubling before a 2 year doubling, etc.) That is - if any of this "transformative AI revolution" stuff is right at all, then at some point GDP is going to go crazy (even if it's just GDP as measured by AIs, after humans have been wiped out). Paul thinks it will go crazy slowly. Right now world GDP doubles every ~25 years. Paul thinks it will go through an intermediate phase (doubles within 4 years) before it gets to a truly crazy phase (doubles within 1 year).

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-low-hanging-fruit-argument-models A followup to Contra Hoel On Aristocratic Tutoring: Imagine scientists venturing off in some research direction. At the dawn of history, they don't need to venture very far before discovering a new truth. As time goes on, they need to go further and further. Actually, scratch that, nobody has good intuitions for truth-space. Imagine some foragers who have just set up a new camp. The first day, they forage in the immediate vicinity of the camp, leaving the ground bare. The next day, they go a little further, and so on. There's no point in traveling miles and miles away when there are still tasty roots and grubs nearby. But as time goes on, the radius of denuded ground will get wider and wider. Eventually, the foragers will have to embark on long expeditions with skilled guides just to make it to the nearest productive land. Let's add intelligence to this model. Imagine there are fruit trees scattered around, and especially tall people can pick fruits that shorter people can't reach. If you are the first person ever to be seven feet tall, then even if the usual foraging horizon is very far from camp, you can forage very close to camp, picking the seven-foot-high-up fruits that no previous forager could get. So there are actually many different horizons: a distant horizon for ordinary-height people, a nearer horizon for tallish people, and a horizon so close as to be almost irrelevant for giants. Finally, let's add the human lifespan. At night, the wolves come out and eat anyone who hasn't returned to camp. So the the maximum distance anyone will ever be able to forage is a day's walk from camp (technically half a day, so I guess let's imagine that everyone can teleport back to camp whenever they want).

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/idol-words The woman was wearing sunglasses, a visor, a little too much lipstick, and a camera around her neck. "Excuse me," she asked. "Is this the temple with the three omniscient idols? Where one always tells the truth, one always lies, and one answers randomly?" The center idol's eyes glowed red, and it spoke with a voice from everywhere and nowhere, a voice like the whoosh of falling waters or the flash of falling stars. "No!" the great voice boomed. "Oh," said the woman. "Because my Uber driver said - ". She cut herself off. "Well, do you know how to get there?" "It is here!" said the otherworldly voice. "You stand in it now!" "Didn't you just say this wasn't it?"

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/who-gets-self-determination I. LSE: Fact-Checking The Kremlin's Version Of Russian History: The notion that Ukraine is not a country in its own right, but a historical part of Russia, appears to be deeply ingrained in the minds of many in the Russian leadership. Already long before the Ukraine crisis, at an April 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest, Vladimir Putin reportedly claimed that "Ukraine is not even a state! What is Ukraine? A part of its territory is [in] Eastern Europe, but a[nother] part, a considerable one, was a gift from us!" In his March 18, 2014 speech marking the annexation of Crimea, Putin declared that Russians and Ukrainians "are one people. Kiev is the mother of Russian cities. Ancient Rus' is our common source and we cannot live without each other." Since then, Putin has repeated similar claims on many occasions. As recently as February 2020, he once again stated in an interview that Ukrainians and Russians "are one and the same people", and he insinuated that Ukrainian national identity had emerged as a product of foreign interference. Similarly, Russia's then-Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev told a perplexed apparatchik in April 2016 that there has been "no state" in Ukraine, neither before nor after the 2014 crisis. The article is from 2020, but the same discussion is continuing; see eg the New York Times' recent Putin Calls Ukrainian Statehood A Fiction. History Suggests Otherwise. I'm especially grateful to the Russian nationalist / far-right blogosphere for putting the case for Ukraine's non-statehood in terms that I can understand:

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/information-markets-decision-markets [thumbnail image credit: excellent nature photographer Eco Suparman, which is a great name for an excellent nature photographer!] Information Markets Niels Bohr supposedly said that "prediction is very difficult, especially about the future". So why not predict the past and present instead? Here's a recent market on Manifold (click image for link). Taylor Hawkins is a famous drummer who died last weekend under unclear circumstances. This market asks if he died of drug-related causes. Presumably someone will do an autopsy or investigation soon, and Chris will resolve the market based on that information. This is a totally standard prediction market, except that it's technically about interpreting past events. Same idea, only more tenuous. We know someone will do an autopsy on Taylor Hawkins soon, and we probably trust it. But how do we figure out whether COVID originated in a lab? This question's hack is to ask whether two public health agencies will claim it. If we trust the public health agencies, we can turn this mysterious past event into a forecasting question.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-justice A lot of comments on Justice Creep fell into three categories: First, people who thought some variety of: yes, all this stuff is definitely a justice issue, and it's good that language is starting to reflect that more. For example, Adnamanil: So... as someone who actually does use "___" Justice, quite frequently, I'd like to say that I think it's a good thing to reframe "helping the poor" or "saving the poor" as "pursuing economic justice." I don't think it's a good thing for people to think of themselves as saviors, to me that's a really unhealthy and unhelpful mindset which results in people who aren't themselves poor thinking they can be the experts and the decision-makers, and that there is something wrong with poor people, that they need to be "saved" or "fixed." We live in a world where there is enough food to feed everyone, yet people go hungry; enough shelter to keep everyone warm, yet people go cold. To me, that says there is something wrong with our system of resource distribution, not with the people who ended up, for one reason or another, being left out of it. Does that result in a sense of responsibility to fix the system? Yes! Does it imply that we don't live in Utopia? Yes! Because we don't. And I don't think we should pretend to. But it also implies that we *could* live in utopia. It demonstrates a real hope about the possibility of utopia. It says, "if we could figure out how to live together better, we could all have enough to eat and be warm." And Philosophy Bear, as Economic Justice And Climate Justice Are Not Metaphors: Regardless of whether it is useful -and I hope it is- I think that honesty compels a clear-eyed person to talk about many of these things in terms of justice, even in the narrowest conception of justice. The mistake in Scott's article is assuming that these forms of justice are merely metaphors or analogies on criminal justice. Many of these are about justice in exactly the same sense that crimes are about justice- no metaphor required. Of course, they are also about being just in other senses- justice was never just about crime. For example, one can detect demands for social justice in the bible that go far beyond "wouldn't it be nice to help people", but nonetheless aren't framed in terms of the criminal law. Nevertheless, yes, climate justice and economic justice- for example- are also about being just in the same way laws against murder are- no stretching of meaning is required…

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/contra-hoel-on-aristocratic-tutoring I. Erik Hoel has an interesting new essay, Why We Stopped Making Einsteins. It argues that an apparent decline in great minds is caused by the replacement of aristocratic tutoring by ordinary education. Hoel worries we're running out of geniuses: Consider how rare true world-historic geniuses are now-a-days, and how different it was in the past. In "Where Have All the Great Books Gone?" Tanner Greer uses Oswald Spengler, the original chronicler of the decline of genius back in 1914, to point out our current genius downturn […] There are a bunch of other analyses (really, laments) of a similar nature I could name, from Nature's "Scientific genius is extinct" to The New Statesman's "The fall of the intellectual" to The Chronicle of Higher Education's "Where have all the geniuses gone?" to Wired's" "The Difficulty of Discovery (Where Have All The Geniuses Gone?)" to philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel's "Where are all the Fodors?" to my own lamentation on the lack of leading fiction writers. If you disagree, I'll certainly admit that finding irrefutable evidence for a decline of genius is difficult—intellectual contributions are extremely hard to quantify, the definition of genius is always up for debate, and any discussion will necessarily elide all sorts of points and counterpoints. But the numbers, at least at first glance, seem to support the anecdotal. Here's a chart from Cold Takes' "Where's Today's Beethoven?" Below, we can see the number of acclaimed scientists (in blue) and artists (in red), divided by the effective population (total human population with the education and access to contribute to these fields).

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-32122 Warcasting Changes in Ukraine prediction markets since my last post March 14: Will Kiev fall to Russian forces by April 2022?: 14% —→ 2% Will at least three of six big cities fall by June 1?: 70% —→ 53% Will World War III happen before 2050?: 21% —→20% Will Russia invade any other country in 2022?: 10% —→7% Will Putin still be president of Russia next February?: 80% —→ 80% Will 50,000 civilians die in any single Ukrainian city?: 12% —→ 10% Will Zelinskyy no longer be President of Ukraine on 4/22?: 20% —→15% If you like getting your news in this format, subscribe to the Metaculus Alert bot for more (and thanks to ACX Grants winner Nikos Bosse for creating it!) Insight Prediction: Still Alive, Somehow Insight Prediction was a collaboration between a Russia-based founder and a group of Ukrainian developers. So, uh, they've had a tough few weeks. But getting better! Their founder recently announced on Discord: I myself am (was?) an American professor in Moscow. I have been allowed to teach my next course which starts in 10 days online, and so I am moving back to the US on Sunday, to Puerto Rico. Some of our development team is stuck in Ukraine. I've offered to move them to Puerto Rico, but it's not clear they'll be able to leave the country anytime soon. Progress with the site may be slow, but obviously that's not the most important thing now. And: I am now out of Russia, and on to Almaty, Kazakhstan. The people here are quite anti-war. I fly to Dubai in a bit. It was surprisingly difficult (and expensive) to book a ticket out of Moscow after all the airspace closures.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-zulresso Thanks to everyone who commented on Zounds! It's Zulresso and Zuranolone and on the followup Progesterone Megadoses Might Be A Cheap Zulresso Substitute. I'm constantly impressed by the expertise of commenters here and on how much better the biomedical comment threads are compared to some of the others. Among the things I learned: — Metacelsus (who writes the blog De Novo) doubts the price estimates I posted: There's no way it costs $10,000 to $20,000 a gram at scale. Those 3 chemical supply companies specialize in having a very large catalog of small quantities of chemicals for biologists to test in their experiments. (I have personally ordered from 2 out of those 3 for my research.) The price they charge per gram is not competitive at all. He also wrote a longer blog post about the science of progesterone here. — Douglas (who writes the blog A Mindful Monkey) clears up some mechanism details I missed: From Stahl's: 'the precipitous decline in circulating and presumably brain levels of allopregnanolone hypothetically trigger the onset of a major depressive episode in vulnerable women. Rapidly restoring neurosteroid levels over a 60-hour period rapidly reverses the depression, and the 60 hour period seems to provide the time necessary for postpartum patients to accommodate their lower levels'. So the idea is the taper of the steroid is a helpful part.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/justice-creep Freddie deBoer says we're a planet of cops. Maybe that's why justice is eating the world. Helping the poor becomes economic justice. If they're minorities, then it's racial justice, itself a subspecies of social justice. Saving the environment becomes environmental justice, except when it's about climate change in which case it's climate justice. Caring about young people is actually about fighting for intergenerational justice. The very laws of space and time are subject to spatial justice and temporal justice. I can't find clear evidence on Google Trends that use of these terms is increasing - I just feel like I've been hearing them more and more often. Nor can I find a simple story behind why - it's got to have something to do with Rawls, but I can't trace any of these back to specific Rawlsian philosophers. Some of it seems to have something to do with Amartya Sen, who I don't know enough about to have an opinion. But mostly it just seems to be the zeitgeist. This is mostly a semantic shift - instead of saying "we should help the poor", you can say "we should pursue economic justice". But different framings have slightly different implications and connotations, and it's worth examining what connotations all this justice talk has. "We should help the poor" mildly suggests a friendly optimistic picture of progress. We are helpers - good people who are nice to others because that's who we are. And the poor get helped - the world becomes a better place. Sometimes people go further: "We should save the poor" (or the whales, doesn't matter). That makes us saviors, a rather more impressive title than helpers. And at the end of it, people/whales/whatever are saved - we're one step closer to saving the world. Extrapolate the line out far enough, and you can dream of utopia.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-31422 Changes in Ukraine prediction markets since my last post February 28: Will Kiev fall to Russian forces by April 2022?: 69% —→ 14% Will at least three of six big cities fall by June 1?: 71% —→ 70% Will World War III happen before 2050?: 20% —→21% Will Russia invade any other country in 2022?: 12% —→10% Will Putin still be president of Russia next February?: 71% —→ 80% Will 50,000 civilians die in any single Ukrainian city?: 8% —→ 12% Will Zelinskyy no longer be President of Ukraine on 4/22?: 63% —→20% If you like getting your news in this format, subscribe to the Metaculus Alert bot for more (and thanks to ACX Grants winner Nikos Bosse for creating it!) Numbers 1 and 7 are impressive changes! (it's interesting how similarly they've evolved, even though they're superficially about different things and the questions were on different prediction markets). Early in the war, prediction markets didn't like Ukraine's odds; now they're much more sanguine. Let's look at the exact course: This is almost monotonically decreasing. Every day it's lower than the day before. How suspicious should we be of this? If there were a stock that decreased every day for twenty days, we'd be surprised that investors were constantly overestimating it. At some point on day 10, someone should think "looks like this keeps declining, maybe I should short it", and that would halt its decline. In efficient markets, there should never be predictable patterns! So what's going on here? Maybe it's a technical issue with Metaculus? Suppose that at the beginning of the war, people thought there was an 80% chance of occupation. Lots of people predicted 80%. Then events immediately showed the real probability was more like 10%. Each day a couple more people showed up and predicted 10%, which gradually moved the average of all predictions (old and new) down. You can see a description of their updating function here - it seems slightly savvier than the toy version I just described, but not savvy enough to avoid the problem entirely. But Polymarket has the same problem:

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ukraine-thoughts-and-links?s=r Disclaimer: I am not an expert in international relations or military strategy, which is fine. In democracies, it's normal and correct for ordinary citizens to have opinions on important world issues, and demands that they not do so are ahistorical and dangerous. Still, take anything I say with a grain of salt. 1: This isn't "history restarting" . . . yet Whatever Francis Fukuyama meant by "the end of history", it probably wasn't "nothing will ever happen". But that's how it's been interpreted, so fine. Maybe nothing will ever happen. I don't think the Ukraine War is necessarily a counterexample. Fukuyama wrote in 1992, so he knew that eg the Gulf War could happen. Is this conflict bigger than the Gulf War?

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/progesterone-megadoses-might-be-a Earlier this week we talked about Zulresso, a new medication for post-partum depression. It works well, but it can only be administered at a few special hospitals, and costs $35,000 per treatment. But Zulresso is a natural metabolite of the female hormone progesterone. What's stopping people from taking progesterone, waiting for their bodies to metabolize it into Zulresso, and saving $35,000 and a hospital stay? As far as I can tell, nothing. Andreen et al give some people a dose of 20 mg progesterone, then measure allopregnanolone levels. They find that the progesterone gets converted into allopregnanolone, with a max plasma concentration of about 8 nmol/L. This is about a fifth of allopregnanolone levels during pregnancy, which a course of Zulresso is trying to match. So in theory (and assuming simple pharmacokinetics) a dose of 100 mg progesterone ought to give the same peak level of allopregnanolone as a Zulresso infusion. The only people I can find who take this to its logical conclusion are Barak & Glue. They do the same calculation as above much more rigorously, and suggest that the following progesterone regimen would correspond to the typical Zulresso infusion:

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/advice-for-unwoke-academic An academic recently asked me for advice. A lucky career development has now made him almost un-fire-able, and he wants to join the fight for academic freedom. We talked about two different strategies: Fabian Strategy: Become a beloved pillar of his college community. Volunteer for all those committees everyone always tries to weasel out of. When some wokeness-related issue comes up - merit vs. diversity hiring, wokeness study class requirements for majors, firing professors who say unwoke things, etc - use his reputation and position to fight back. Kindly but firmly make it clear that he opposes wokeness, and that other academics in the same position are not alone. Occasionally, when the college administrators make some extreme and obvious overstep - something "we've cancelled all yoga classes because they're cultural appropriation"-level unpopular - escalate it, make sure everyone in the world hears about it, then claim the easy victory when they back down. Berserker Strategy: Pick fights. Literally pick the fights - study up on college policy, get to know the administrators well enough to understand which policies they're forced to follow and which ones they'll cave on immediately, learn the relevant laws, lawyer up, be 99% sure he can win any fight he picks - but then pick fights. Invite controversial speakers, knowing that there will be big protests. Then make sure there are lots of cameras around as hundreds of college students hurl garbage and expletives at some kindly old sociologist who said biological sex was real one time or whatever. Do this consistently, in a way that probably makes him lots of enemies and ensures he'll never get any position of power, but which keeps this issue in front of everyone's eyeballs. Make sure that everyone sees him successfully standing up to the mob, having his speakers speak, and continuing to be employed and happy. If the college tries to shut him down, sue them and win, in a way that will make colleges more reluctant to shut people down in the future.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/zounds-its-zulresso-and-zuranolone How excited should we be about the latest class of antidepressants? 1: What is Zulresso? Wikipedia describes Zulresso as "A bat-winged, armless toad with tentacles instead of a face... " - no! sorry! That's Zvilpogghua, one of the Great Old Ones from the Lovecraft mythos. Zulresso is the brand name of allopregnanolone (aka brexanolone), a new medication for post-partum depression. It's interesting as a potential missing link between hormones and normal mood regulation. 2: What do you mean by "missing link between hormones and normal mood regulation?" Allopregnanolone is a naturally-occuring metabolite of the female hormone progesterone. In 1981, scientists found it was present in unusually high concentrations in the brain (including male brains), suggesting that maybe the brain was making it separately and using it for something. They did some tests and found that it was a positive allosteric modulator of GABA.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/what-are-we-arguing-about-when-we The backstory: Steven Pinker wrote a book about rationality. The book concludes it is good. People should learn how to be more rational, and then we will have fewer problems. Howard Gardner, well-known wrong person, sort of criticized the book. The criticism was facile, a bunch of stuff like "rationality is important, but relationships are also important, so there". Pinker's counterargument is dubious: Gardner's essay avoids rationality pretty carefully. But even aside from that, it feels like Pinker is cheating, or missing the point, or being annoying. Gardner can't be arguing that rationality is completely useless in 100% of situations. And if there's any situation at all where you're allowed to use rationality, surely it would be in annoying Internet arguments with Steven Pinker. We could turn Pinker's argument back on him: he frames his book as a stirring defense of rationality against anti-rationalists. But why does he identify these people as anti-rationalists? Sure, they themselves identify as anti-rationalist. But why should he believe them? After all, they use rationality to make their case. If they won, what bad thing would happen? Even in whatever dystopian world they created, people would still use rationality to make cases.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/microaddictions Everyone always says you should "eat mindfully". I tried this once and it was weird. For example, I noticed that only the first few bites of a tasty food actually tasted good. After that I habituated and lost it. Not only that, but there was a brief period when I finished eating the food which was below hedonic baseline. This seems pretty analogous to addiction, tolerance, and withdrawal. If you use eg heroin, I'm told it feels very good the first few times. After that it gets gradually less euphoric, until eventually you need it to feel okay at all. If you quit, you feel much worse than normal (withdrawal) for a while until you even out. I claim I went through this whole process in the space of a twenty minute dinner. I notice this most strongly with potato chips. Presumably this is pretty common, given their branding:

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ukraine-warcasting Yeah, I know you're saturated with Ukraine content. Yeah, I know everyone wants to relate their hobbyhorse to Ukraine. But I think it's genuinely useful to talk about prediction markets right now. Current conventional wisdom is that the invasion was a miscalculation on Putin's part, after he surrounded himself with so many yes-men that he lost touch with reality. But Ukraine miscalculated too; until almost the day of the invasion, Zelenskyy was saying everything would be okay. And if there's a nuclear exchange, it will be because of miscalculation - I don't know what the miscalculation will be, just that nobody goes into a nuclear exhange because they want to. Preserving people's access to reality and helping them avoid miscalculations are peacekeeping measures, sometimes very important ones. The first part of this post looks at various markets' predictions of how the war will go from here (Zvi published something like this a few hours before I could, so this will mostly duplicate his work). The second part very briefly tries to evaluate which markets have been most accurate so far - though this is a topic which deserves at least paper-length treatment. The third part looks at which pundits deserve eternal glory for publicly making strong true predictions, and which pundits deserve . . . something else, for doing . . . other things.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/austin-meetup-correction?utm_source=url Austin meetup is still this Sunday, 2/27, 12-3. But the location has been switched to Moontower Cider Company at 1916 Tillery St. The organizer is still [email protected] , and you can still contact him if you have any questions. As per usual procedure, everyone is invited. 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. You may (but don't have to) RSVP here.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/biological-anchors-a-trick-that-might?utm_source=url Introduction I've been trying to review and summarize Eliezer Yudkowksy's recent dialogues on AI safety. Previously in sequence: Yudkowsky Contra Ngo On Agents. Now we're up to Yudkowsky contra Cotra on biological anchors, but before we get there we need to figure out what Cotra's talking about and what's going on. The Open Philanthropy Project ("Open Phil") is a big effective altruist foundation interested in funding AI safety. It's got $20 billion, probably the majority of money in the field, so its decisions matter a lot and it's very invested in getting things right. In 2020, it asked senior researcher Ajeya Cotra to produce a report on when human-level AI would arrive. It says the resulting document is "informal" - but it's 169 pages long and likely to affect millions of dollars in funding, which some might describe as making it kind of formal. The report finds a 10% chance of "transformative AI" by 2031, a 50% chance by 2052, and an almost 80% chance by 2100. Eliezer rejects their methodology and expects AI earlier (he doesn't offer many numbers, but here he gives Bryan Caplan 50-50 odds on 2030, albeit not totally seriously). He made the case in his own very long essay, Biology-Inspired AGI Timelines: The Trick That Never Works, sparking a bunch of arguments and counterarguments and even more long essays.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-february?utm_source=url [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 newest studies don't find evidence that extracurriculars like chess, second languages, playing an instrument, etc can improve in-school learning. 2: Did you know: Spanish people consider it good luck to eat twelve grapes at midnight on New Years, one at each chime of the clock tower in Madrid. This has caused enough choking deaths that doctors started a petition to make the clock tower chime more slowly. 3: At long last, scientists have discovered a millipede that really does have (more than) a thousand legs, Eumillipes persephone, which lives tens of meters underground in Australia and in your nightmares. Recent progress in this area inspired me to Fermi-estimate a millipede version of Moore's Law, which suggests we should be up to megapedes by 2140 and gigapedes by 2300.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/play-money-and-reputation-systems?utm_source=url For now, US-based prediction markets can't use real money without clearing near-impossible regulatory hurdles. So smaller and more innovative projects will have to stick with some kind of play money or reputation-based system. I used to be really skeptical here, but Metaculus and Manifold have softened my stance. So let's look closer at how and whether these kinds of systems work. Any play money or reputation system has to confront two big design decisions: Should you reward absolute accuracy, relative accuracy, or some combination of both? Should your scoring be zero-sum, positive-sum, or negative sum? Relative Vs. Absolute Accuracy As far as I know, nobody suggests rewarding only absolute accuracy; the debate is between relative accuracy vs. some combination of both. Why? If you rewarded only absolute accuracy, it would be trivially easy to make money predicting 99.999% on "will the sun rise tomorrow" style questions.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/austin-meetup-next-sunday?utm_source=url I'll be in Austin on Sunday, 2/27, and the meetup group there has kindly agreed to host me and anyone else who wants to show up. We'll be at RichesArt (an art gallery with an outdoor space) at 2511 E 6th St Unit A from noon to 3. The organizer is [email protected] , you can contact him if you have any questions. As per usual procedure, everyone is invited. 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. You may (but don't have to) RSVP here.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-gods-only-have-power-because?utm_source=url [with apologies to Terry Pratchett and TVTropes] "Is it true," asked the student, "that the gods only have power because we believe in them?" "Yes," said the sage. "Then why not appear openly? How many more people would believe in the Thunderer if, upon first gaining enough worshipers to cast lightning at all, he struck all of the worst criminals and tyrants?" "Because," said the sage, "the gods only gain power through belief, not knowledge. You know there are trees and clouds; are they thereby gods? Just as lightning requires close proximity of positive and negative charge, so divinity requires close proximity of belief and doubt. The closer your probability estimate of a god's existence is to 50%, the more power they gain from you. Complete atheism and complete piety alike are useless to them."

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-sadly-porn I. Freshman English class says all books need a conflict. Man vs. Man, Man vs. Self, whatever. The conflict in Sadly, Porn is Author vs. Reader. The author - the pseudonymous "Edward Teach, MD" - is a spectacular writer. Your exact assessment of his skill will depend on where you draw the line between writing ability and other virtues - but where he's good, he's amazing. Nobody else takes you for quite the same kind of ride. He's also impressively erudite, drawing on the Greek and Latin classics, the Bible, psychoanalytic literature, and all of modern movies and pop culture. Sometimes you read the scholars of two hundred years ago and think "they just don't make those kinds of guys anymore". They do and Teach is one of them. If you read his old blog, The Last Psychiatrist, you have even more reasons to appreciate him. His expertise in decoding scientific studies and in psychopharmacology helped me a lot as a med student and resident. His political and social commentary was delightfully vicious, but also seemed genuinely aimed at helping his readers become better people. My point is: the author is a multitalented person who I both respect and want to respect. This sets up the conflict.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-ukraine-cube-manifold?r=fm577 Ukraine Thanks to Clay Graubard for doing my work for me: These run from about 48% to 60%, but I think the differences are justified by the slightly different wordings of the question and definitions of "invasion". You see a big jump last Friday when the US government increased the urgency of their own warnings. I ignored this on Friday because I couldn't figure out what their evidence was, but it looks like the smart money updated a lot on it. A few smaller markets that Clay didn't include: Manifold is only at 36% despite several dozen traders. I think they're just wrong - but I'm not going to use any more of my limited supply of play money to correct it, thus fully explaining the wrongness. Futuur is at 47%, but also thinks there's an 18% chance Russia invades Lithuania, so I'm going to count this as not really mature. Insight Prediction, a very new site I've never seen before, claims to have $93,000 invested and a probability of 22%, which is utterly bizarre; I'm too suspicious and confused to invest, and maybe everyone else is too. (PredictIt, Polymarket, and Kalshi all avoid this question. I think PredictIt has a regulatory agreement that limits them to politics. Polymarket and Kalshi might just not be interested, or they might be too PR-sensitive to want to look like they're speculating on wars where thousands of people could die.) What happens afterwards? Clay beats me again: For context:

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-motivated I. Comments From People Who Actually Know What They're Talking About Gabriel writes: The brain trains on magnitude and acts on sign. That is to say, there are two different kinds of "module" that are relevant to this problem as you described, but they're not RL and other; they're both other. The learning parts are not precisely speaking reinforcement learning, at least not by the algorithm you described. They're learning the whole map of value, like a topographic map. Then the acting parts find themselves on the map and figure out which way leads upward toward better outcomes. More precisely then: The brain learns to predict value and acts on the gradient of predicted value. The learning parts are trying to find both opportunities and threats, but not unimportant mundane static facts. This is why, for example, people are very good at remembering and obsessing over intensely negative events that happened to them -- which they would not be able to do in the RL model the post describes! We're also OK at remembering intensely positive events that happened to us. But ordinary observations of no particular value mostly make no lasting impression. You could test this by a series of 3 experiments, in each of which you have a screen flash several random emoji on screen, and each time a specific emoji is shown to the subject, you either (A) penalize the subject such as with a shock, or (B) reward the subject such as with sweet liquid when they're thirsty, or (C) give the subject a stimulus that has no significant magnitude, whether positive or negative, such as changing the pitch of a quiet ongoing buzz that they were not told was relevant. I'd expect subjects in both conditions A and B to reliably identify the key emoji, whereas I'd expect quite a few subjects in condition C to miss it. By learning associates with a degree of value, whether positive or negative, it's possible to then act on the gradient in pursuit of whatever available option has highest value. This works reliably and means we can not only avoid hungry lions and seek nice ripe bananas, but we also do

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/acx-grants-the-second-half This is the closing part of ACX Grants. Projects that I couldn't fully fund myself were invited to submit a brief description so I could at least give them free advertising here. You can look them over and decide if any seem worth donating your money, time, or some other resource to. I've removed obvious trolls, a few for-profit businesses without charitable value who tried to sneak in under the radar, and a few that violated my sensibilities for one or another reason. I have not removed projects just because they're terrible, useless, or definitely won't work. My listing here isn't necessarily an endorsement; caveat lector. Still, some of them are good projects and deserve more attention than I was able to give them. Many applicants said they'd hang around the comments section here, so if you have any questions, ask! (bolded titles are my summaries and some of them might not be accurate or endorsed by the applicant) You can find the first 66 of these here.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/so-you-want-to-run-a-microgrants I. Medical training is a wild ride. You do four years of undergrad in some bio subject, ace your MCATs, think you're pretty hot stuff. Then you do your med school preclinicals, study umpteen hours a day, ace your shelf exams, and it seems like you're pretty much there. Then you start your clinical rotations, get a real patient in front of you, and you realize - oh god, I know absolutely nothing about medicine. This is also how I felt about running a grants program. I support effective altruism, a vast worldwide movement focused on trying to pick good charities. Sometimes I go to their conferences, where they give lectures about how to pick good charities. Or I read their online forum, where people write posts about how to pick good charities. I've been to effective altruist meetups, where we all come together and talk about good charity picking. So I felt like, maybe, I don't know, I probably knew some stuff about how to pick good charities. And then I solicited grant proposals, and I got stuff like this: A. $60K to run simulations checking if some chemicals were promising antibiotics. B. $60K for a professor to study the factors influencing cross-cultural gender norms C. $50K to put climate-related measures on the ballot in a bunch of states. D. $30K to research a solution for African Swine Fever and pitch it to Uganda E. $40K to replicate psych studies and improve incentives in social science Which of these is the most important?

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/heuristics-that-almost-always-work The Security Guard He works in a very boring building. It basically never gets robbed. He sits in his security guard booth doing the crossword. Every so often, there's a noise, and he checks to see if it's robbers, or just the wind. It's the wind. It is always the wind. It's never robbers. Nobody wants to rob the Pillow Mart in Topeka, Ohio. If a building on average gets robbed once every decade or two, he might go his entire career without ever encountering a real robber. At some point, he develops a useful heuristic: it he hears a noise, he might as well ignore it and keep on crossing words: it's just the wind, bro. This heuristic is right 99.9% of the time, which is pretty good as heuristics go. It saves him a lot of trouble.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/two-small-corrections-and-updates 1: I titled part of my post yesterday "RIP Polymarket", which was a mistake. Polymarket would like to remind everyone that they are very much alive, with a real-money market available to anyone outside the US, and some kind of compliant US product (maybe a play-money market) in the works. 2: Sam M and Eric N want to remind you that you have until the end of next week to get your 2022 prediction contest entries in. Also: We have some plans to compare (aggregates of) ACX reader predictions against various prediction markets. But there are probably much cooler things we can do which we haven't thought of yet! If you run a prediction market and have an idea for an interesting collaboration that involves sharing our data before it's publicly released, get in touch with us through the contest feedback form. If it's something time sensitive (e.g. an experiment that needs to be started before the contest submission deadline), make sure you do so soon. If you don't run a prediction market but still have an idea for something interesting we can do with the contest data, leave a comment on this open thread and we'll hopefully see it." You can reach them through this form.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-passage-of-polymarket RIP Polymarket, Long Live Polymarket Polymarket got fined $1.4 million by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and was ordered to cease noncompliant trading in the US. Polymarket is probably the biggest prediction market currently available. US law considers unlicensed prediction markets to be somewhere between illegal gambling and illegal futures trading, ie definitely illegal. Polymarket and a few peers had survived anyway, through the "crypto is the Wild West and nobody has time to deal with all the illegal things happening there" exemption. Apparently they found time. The rumor on the prediction market grapevine (which I absolutely cannot substantiate; please don't sue me for libel) is that this might have something to do with competing prediction market Kalshi. Kalshi spent two years and probably a lot of money getting the CFTC to agree they were legal, and has a former CFTC Commissioner as a Director. Their legal status forces them to do an annoying and expensive regulatory dance all the time; illegal prediction markets were able to move more nimbly, provide better user experience, and eat their lunch. This was a big problem for them - but they'd just finished making lots of friends in the agency that decides which illegal things to crack down on, so, as Tyler Cowen likes to say, "solve for the equilibrium".

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-contest-rules-2022 Okay, we're officially doing this again. Write a review of a book. There's no official word count requirement, but last year's finalists and winners were often between 2,000 and 10,000 words. There's no official recommended style, but check the style of last year's finalists and winners or my ACX book reviews (1, 2, 3) if you need inspiration. Please limit yourself to one entry per person or team. Then send me your review through this Google Form. The form will ask for your name, email, the title of the book, and a link to a Google Doc. The Google Doc should have your review exactly as you want me to post it if you're a finalist. DON'T INCLUDE YOUR NAME OR ANY HINT ABOUT YOUR IDENTITY IN THE GOOGLE DOC ITSELF, ONLY IN THE FORM. I want to make this contest as blinded as possible, so I'm going to hide that column in the form immediately and try to judge your docs on their merit. (does this mean you can't say something like "This book about war reminded me of my own experiences as a soldier" because that gives a hint about your identity? My rule of thumb is - if I don't know who you are, and the average ACX reader doesn't know who you are, you're fine. I just want to prevent my friends / other judges' friends / Internet semi-famous people from having an advantage. If you're in one of those categories and think your personal experience would give it away, please don't write about your personal experience.) PLEASE MAKE SURE THE GOOGLE DOC IS UNLOCKED AND I CAN READ IT. By default, nobody can read Google Docs except the original author. You'll have to go to Share, then on the bottom of the popup click on "Restricted" and change to "Anyone with the link". If you send me a document I can't read, I will probably disqualify you, sorry. First prize will get at least $2,500, second prize at least $1,000, third prize at least $500; I might increase these numbers later on. All winners and finalists will get free publicity (including links to any other works you want me to link to) and free ACX subscriptions. And all winners will get the right to pitch me new articles if they want (nobody ever takes me up on this). Your due date is April 5th. Good luck! If you have any questions, ask them in the comments. And remember, the form for submitting entries is here.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/acx-grants-the-first-half This is the closing part of ACX Grants. Projects that I couldn't fully fund myself were invited to submit a brief description so I could at least give them free advertising here. You can look them over and decide if any seem worth donating your money, time, or some other resource to. I've removed obvious trolls, a few for-profit businesses without charitable value who tried to sneak in under the radar, and a few that violated my sensibilities for one or another reason. I have not removed projects just because they're terrible, useless, or definitely won't work. My listing here isn't necessarily an endorsement; caveat lector. Still, some of them are good projects and deserve more attention than I was able to give them. Many applicants said they'd hang around the comments section here, so if you have any questions, ask! (bolded titles are my summaries and some of them might not be accurate or endorsed by the applicant) I'll post the next 60 or so of these next week, so if you don't see yours, be patient.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/why-do-i-suck I recently ran a subscriber-only AMA, and one of the most frequent questions was some version of "why do you suck?" My commenters were very nice about it. They didn't use those exact words. It was more like "I loved your articles from about 2013 - 2016 so much! Why don't you write articles like that any more?" Or "Do you feel like you've shifted to less ambitious forms of writing with the new Substack? It feels like there was something in your old articles that isn't there now." There was a lot of similar discussion on this one year retrospective subreddit thread. The evidence that I've gotten worse at blogging is mixed. I asked about it on a reader survey six months ago, and got this:

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/motivated-reasoning-as-mis-applied Here's something else I got from the first Yudkowsky-Ngo dialogue: Suppose you go to Lion Country and get mauled by lions. You want the part of your brain that generates plans like "go to Lion Country" to get downgraded in your decision-making algorithms. This is basic reinforcement learning: plan → lower-than-expected hedonic state → do plan less. Plan → higher-than-expected hedonic state → do plan more. Lots of brain modules have this basic architecture; if you have a foot injury and walking normally causes pain, that will downweight some basic areas of the motor cortex and make you start walking funny (potentially without conscious awareness). But suppose you see a lion, and your visual cortex processes the sensory signals and decides "Yup, that's a lion". Then you have to freak out and run away, and it ruins your whole day. That's a lower-than-expected hedonic state! If your visual cortex was fundamentally a reinforcement learner, it would learn not to recognize lions (and then the lion would eat you). So the visual cortex (and presumably lots of other sensory regions) doesn't do hedonic reinforcement learning in the same way. So there are two types of brain region: basically behavioral (which hedonic reinforcement learning makes better), and basically epistemic (which hedonic reinforcement learning would make worse, so they don't do it).

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/predictions-for-2022-contest - Read the contest description/rules here - Give feedback on the contest here - And once again, the form where you take the contest is here I didn't let myself check prediction markets when making these forecasts since that would spoil the fun. I also only permitted myself at most five minutes of research on any one question. See the bottom of the post for a contest/survey. US/WORLD1. Biden approval rating (as per 538) is greater than fifty percent: 40% 2. At least $250 million in damage from a single round of mass protests in US: 10% 3. PredictIt thinks Joe Biden is most likely 2024 Dem nominee: 80% 4: …thinks Donald Trump is most likely 2024 GOP nominee: 60% 5. Beijing Olympics happen successfully on schedule: 99% 6. Major flare-up (worse than past 5 years) in Russia/Ukraine conflict: 50% 7. Major flare-up (worse past 10 years) in Israel/Palestine conflict: 5% 8. Major flare-up (worse than in past 50 years) in China/Taiwan conflict: 5% 9. Honduran ZEDEs legally crippled to the point where no reasonable person would invest in them further: 5% 10. New ZEDE approved in Honduras: 30% ECON/TECH 11. Gamestop stock price still above $100: 30% 12. Bitcoin above 100K: 20% 13. Ethereum above 5K: 20% 14. Ethereum above 0.05 BTC: 90% 15. Bored Ape floor price here below current price of $203K: 40% 16. Dow above 35K: 90% 17. ...above 37.5K: 40% 18. Inflation for the year below five percent: 90% 19. Unemployment below five percent: 50% 20. Google widely allows remote work, no questions asked: 50% 21. Starship reaches orbit: 90%

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-health I'm experimenting with making this more structured this time, so: Section I: Collection of comments on US health care Section II: Drug pricing, and does the US subsidize the rest of the world? Section III: Why are health economics so unlike other economics? Section IV: Giant pile of comments by readers who live in different countries explaining their own countries' health systems, and their experiences with them. I. GummyBearDoc writes: I want to push back on the assertion Scott made that "Certainly rich people in America get good health care." After he published this book in June 2020, Ezekiel Emmanuel published an article in JAMA IM (link: https://bit.ly/3nGRHL8) called "Comparing Health Outcomes of Privileged US Citizens With Those of Average Residents of Other Developed Countries." He wanted to test the commonly stated trope that a feature of the US healthcare system is that the rich here get the very best care in the world. To do that, he looked at outcomes across six benchmark diseases (heart attack, colon cancer, breast cancer, infant mortality, maternal mortality, and pediatric acute lymphocytic leukemia). He compared outcomes for white people in the 1% of richest counties in the US, 5% richest counties in the US, and average outcomes in 12 rich countries (i'm not going to type them all out but they're places like Australia, Canada, and Germany). The results were...not so great for rich Americans!

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/against-that-poverty-and-infant-eegs A recent paper claims to have found an Impact Of A Poverty Reduction Intervention On Infant Brain Activity. It's doing the rounds of the usual media sites, like Vox and the New York Times: The New York Times @nytimes Breaking News: Cash payments for low-income mothers increased brain function in babies, a study found, with potential implications for U.S. safety net policy. Cash Aid to Poor Mothers Increases Brain Activity in Babies, Study FindsThe research could have policy implications as President Biden pushes to revive his proposal to expand the child tax credit.nyti.ms January 24th 2022 3,348 Retweets13,165 Likes I was going to try to fact-check this, but a bunch of other people (see eg Philippe Lemoine, Stuart Ritchie) have beaten me to it. Still, right now all the fact-checking is scattered across a bunch of Twitter accounts, so I'll content myself with being the first person to summarize it all in a Substack post, and beg you to believe I would have come up with the same objections eventually. Before we start: why be suspicious of this paper? Hundreds of studies come out daily, we don't have enough time to nitpick all of them. Why this one? For me, it's because it's a shared environmental effect being measured by EEG at the intersection of poverty and cognition. Shared environmental effects on cognition are notoriously hard to find. Twin studies suggest they are rare. Some people have countered that perhaps the twin studies haven't measured poor enough people, and there's a lot of research being done to see what happens if you try to correct for that, but so far it's still controversial. All that research is being done by cognitive testing, which is a reasonable way to measure cognition. This study uses EEG instead. I'm skeptical of social science studies that use neuroimaging, and although EEG isn't exactly the same as neuroimaging like CT or MRI, it shares a similar issue: you have to figure out how to convert a multi-dimensional result (in this case, a squiggly line on a piece of paper) into a single number that you can do statistics to. This offers a lot of degrees of freedom, which researchers don't always use responsibly.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/bounded-distrust I. Suppose you're a liberal who doesn't trust FOX News. One day you're at the airport, waiting for a plane, ambiently watching the TV at the gate. It's FOX News, and they're saying that a mass shooter just shot twenty people in Yankee Stadium. There's live footage from the stadium with lots of people running and screaming. Do you believe this? I'm a liberal who doesn't trust FOX News, and sure, I believe it. The level on which FOX News is bad isn't the level where they invent mass shootings that never happened. They wouldn't use deepfakes or staged actors to fake something and then call it "live footage". That would go way beyond anything FOX had done before. Liberals might say things like "You can't trust FOX News on anything, they are 100% total liars", but realistically we still trust them quite a lot on stuff like this. Now suppose FOX says that police have apprehended a suspect, a Saudi immigrant named Abdullah Abdul. They show footage from a press conference where the police are talking about this. Do you believe them? Again, yes. While I've heard rare stories of the media jumping in too early to identify a suspect, "the police have apprehended" seems like a pretty objective statement. And once again, faking a police conference - or even dubbing over a police conference so that when the police say some other name, the viewers hear "Abdullah Abdul" - is way worse than anything I've ever heard of FOX doing. Even if I learned of one case of them doing something like this once, I would think "wow that's crazy" and still not update to believing they did it all the time. It doesn't matter at all that FOX is biased. You could argue that "FOX wants to fan fear of Islamic terrorism, so it's in their self-interest to make up cases of Islamic terrorism that don't exist". Or "FOX is against gun control, so if it was a white gun owner who did this shooting they would want to change the identity so it sounded like a Saudi terrorist". But those sound like crazy conspiracy theories. Even FOX's worst enemies don't accuse them of doing things like this.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/grading-my-2021-predictions At the beginning of every year, I make predictions. At the end of every year, I score them. Here are 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020. And here are the predictions I made for 2021 (in April; I was really late). Bolded statements happened, italicized statements did not happen (as of 1/1/22). Neither-bold-nor-italic resolved ambiguous. We have a debate every year over whether 50% predictions are meaningful in this paradigm; feel free to continue it. 1. Biden approval rating (as per 538) is greater than fifty percent: 80% 2. Court packing is clearly going to happen (new justices don't have to be appointed by end of year): 5% 3. Yang is New York mayor: 80% 4. Newsom recalled as CA governor: 5% 5. At least $250 million in damage from BLM protests this year: 30% 6. Significant capital gains tax hike (above 30% for highest bracket): 20% 7. Trump is allowed back on Twitter: 20% 8. Tokyo Olympics happen on schedule: 70% 9. Major flare-up (significantly worse than anything in past 5 years) in Russia/Ukraine war: 20%

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/resubmit-and-summarize-your-proposals https://forms.gle/xhVTebsZgSEQ7BpeA I promised you all that once I was done with the main round of ACX Grants, I would run Grants ++, where I publish the proposals that didn't get funded here, so readers could look at them, see if they're interesting, and maybe get in touch and offer funding. Two things have made this harder than expected. First, a lot of people gave pretty unclear instructions about whether they wanted me to include their proposal in this, or changed their minds halfway through, in a way that would require me to keep track of a lot of emails about whose minds changed how many times, or to reconstruct long edit histories.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-which-country-has-the I. If you're like me, all you've heard about international health care systems is "America sucks and should feel bad, everyone else is probably fine or whatever". Is there more we can learn? Our guide to this question will be Which Country Has The World's Best Health Care, by Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel. Emanuel is a professor of bioethics, but I've been told to be less reflexively hostile to bioethicists. He got in trouble a few years ago for a comment that got summed up as "life after 75 is not worth living", but he never used those exact words, and his point about the dangers of excessive life-prolonging medical care is well-taken. He opposes euthanasia, which I interpret as demanding state-sponsored coercive violence to prevent torture victims from escaping, but I know other people interpret it differently. And he's the brother of former Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel, but ... nope, can't think of any extenuating circumstances for this one. Still, Emanuel is one of a very few people qualified to compare international health systems. And

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/practically-a-book-review-yudkowsky I. The story thus far: AI safety, which started as the hobbyhorse of a few weird transhumanists in the early 2000s, has grown into a medium-sized respectable field. OpenAI, the people responsible for GPT-3 and other marvels, have a safety team. So do DeepMind, the people responsible for AlphaGo, AlphaFold, and AlphaWorldConquest (last one as yet unreleased). So do Stanford, Cambridge, UC Berkeley, etc, etc. Thanks to donations from people like Elon Musk and Dustin Moskowitz, everyone involved is contentedly flush with cash. They all report making slow but encouraging progress. Eliezer Yudkowsky, one of the original weird transhumanists, is having none of this. He says the problem is harder than everyone else thinks. Their clever solutions will fail. He's been flitting around for the past few years, Cassandra-like, insisting that their plans will explode and they are doomed.