Astral Codex Ten Podcast

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 In April, the new government repealed the ZEDE law, with uncertain consequences.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.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-a-clinical-introduction [epistemic status: I didn't understand this book. Think of this review as detailing the ways I didn't understand it and hypothesizing what certain parts might mean, and not as an attempt to summarize/re-explain something I understand well] I. Remember that AI? From the mesa-optimizers post a few weeks ago? It was trained to pick strawberries. The programmers rewarded it whenever it got a strawberry in its bucket. It started by flailing around, gradually shifted its behavior towards the reward signal, and ended up with a tendency to throw red things at light sources - in the training environment, strawberries were the only red thing, and the glint of the metal bucket was the brightest light source. Later, after training was done, it was deployed at night, and threw strawberries at a streetlight. Also, when someone with a big bulbous red nose walked by, it ripped his nose off and threw that at the streetlight too. Suppose somebody tried connecting a language model to the AI. "You're a strawberry picking robot," they told it. "I'm a strawberry picking robot," it repeated, because that was the sequence of words that earned it the most reward. Somewhere in its electronic innards, there was a series of neurons that corresponded to "I'm a strawberry-picking robot", and if asked what it was, it would dutifully retrieve that sentence. But actually, it ripped off people's noses and threw them at streetlights.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/initial-conditions Consider people who go by their first and middle initials, eg John Q Smith introduces himself as "Hi, I'm J.Q." Authors who use their initials on their books (eg J.K. Rowling) don't count, unless they also go by their initials in everyday life. Is there any pattern to who does this - ie which initials lead people to initialize their names? Think about this for a second before you continue: . . . In my experience it's about 50% JD, 49% a few other names involving J (JT, JR, AJ, CJ, RJ, etc) and 1% anything else. I discussed this with some people at the last meetup, who also felt this way. I was also able to find a Reddit thread of people with the same observation. What's going on? At the meetup, some people theorized that J names (eg John, Jack, etc) are so common that their holders need to differentiate themselves; instead of being the tenth John in your class, you go by JD or JT. But then how come there are so few JNs, JLs, or JS's? Some people at the meetup thought those combinations sounded less melodious than "JD", but I'm not really feeling it. Also, in my birth year, the three most popular male names were Michael, Christopher, and Matthew. How come "M" doesn't have the same initializing allure? How come I don't know anyone who goes by MD? (sure, MD would be weird because it sounds like a doctor, but then JD should be weird because it sounds like a lawyer!) Other people thought it might have something to do with J itself being a name (ie Jay). But Em, Bee, Dee, and Kay are all girls' names, and none of them end up as common initials. Might some famous person (JD Salinger?) have started it, and then everyone thought it was okay and normal for those initials only? But then why all the CJs and AJs? There definitely seems to be a J-related pattern here. Maybe there's something linguistically satisfying about JD and CJ that seemingly similar sounds like KP and DA don't have. But it doesn't sound that way. And lots of initials (eg PC, LA, etc), get used in common speech, in a way that suggests we're not having any trouble producing them. My guess is that it's a weird combination of all these things, plus naming traditions being surprisingly conservative. But I'd be interested to hear from any JDs (or other initial names) reading this: why did you decide to initialize (or not initialize) yourself? (in my case, it's because my initials are SA and I'm an essayist - it would just be weird!)

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/contra-hoffman-on-vitamin-d-dosing [epistemic status: pretty uncertain about each individual fact, moderate confidence in general overview] I. Hoffman Contra Me I've said many times that (to a first approximation) Vitamin D is a boring bone-related chemical. Most claims that it does exciting things outside of bones - cure COVID! prevent cancer! decrease cardiovascular risk! - are hype, and have failed to stand up to replication. Ben Hoffman disagrees, and writes How To Interpret Vitamin D Dosage Using Numbers. I'm compressing his argument for space reasons; read the link to check if I'm still being fair: I am sick of people rejecting good evidence about vitamin D because they are confused about the bad evidence and can't be bothered to investigate, so I am going to explain it […] Hunter-gatherers in the environment where most of our evolution happened might have been outside all day shirtless. On average the sun's halfway from peak, so that might be equivalent to 8 hours of peak sunlight at the equator. [A study shows people in these conditions synthesize 400 IU of Vitamin D/5 minutes, which comes out to] 8000 IU per hour is 32,000 IU (800 micrograms) per day by this estimate. When deciding how much is actually appropriate to supplement, we need to take into account diminishing returns; eventually the sunlight starts producing other secondary metabolites which are also good for us, so a 16,000 IU supplement is lower-quality than sunlight but similar in the effective dosage of the most important chemical our evolutionary ancestors' bodies would have made from sunlight; in practice I wouldn't take more than that. Now let's look at the object-level studies that Scott Alexander says show that vitamin D doesn't work. I'm just going to look at the randomized controlled trials because observational studies for or against vitamin D are trash for anything except hypothesis generation unless they have a very carefully selected instrumental variable. The colon cancer link is broken but the breast cancer study reports a dosage of 400 IU/day. On the exercise scale that's FIVE MINUTES of brisk walking. FIVE MINUTES is not very long at all compared with FOUR HOURS. [An all-cause mortality study used a thrice-yearly dosing] that amounts to about 800 IU/day, or ten minutes of brisk walking on the exercise scale. [Other studies that found no effect of Vitamin D also used doses around this range].

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-sadly I. The Duality Of Man Kalimac: If you write more stuff like this, I think I will just gradually stop reading this blog. Logan Strohl: For the record this is my favorite Scott essay in years. Leo Yankovic: Reading this for the first time in a long time of reading [ACX] felt like a giant waste of time. John Slow: For what it's worth, this was my favorite ACX post. Meh: You read through an ENTIRE BOOK of that kind of pompous, long-winded drivel? Paul: Just this review injected a strong acid into my mind and it's burning through everything. I'm questioning my behaviors and thought patterns and then questioning the questioning. I realized how a lot of my thoughts are geared towards looking good in front of an imaginary audience . . . I'm definitely going to read this book. ophis_uk: It feels like this whole review, and to a large extent the comments, are carefully tiptoeing around an obvious conclusion, occasionally glancing sideways to look at it edge-on, but carefully avoiding confronting it directly. That conclusion is: Teach/TLP is a bad writer, and has therefore written a shit book. AL: Okay, maybe you're just reading the bones, but holy moley there are some crackling-good insights here! Alex Power: The review has successfully convinced me to not read this book. FiveHourMarathon: I got about halfway through and wrote in my notebook to call my local bookstore and see if they planned to stock it/could order one for me. I am genuinely fascinated by how divergent all of your responses are. I wonder if anyone will Aumann update towards "there might really be something here" or "it might all be obscurantist drivel" after knowing that other people think so. If not, why not? II. Reviews From Other People Who Have Read The Book

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-41822 Nuclear risk, AI risk, Musk-acquiring-Twitter risk Warcasting Changes in Ukraine prediction markets since my last post March 21: Will at least three of six big cities fall by June 1?: 53% → 5% Will World War III happen before 2050?: 20% →22% Will Russia invade any other country in 2022?: 7% →5% Will Putin still be president of Russia next February?: 80% → 85% Will 50,000 civilians die in any single Ukrainian city?: 10% → 10% 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!) Nuclear Risk Update Last month superforecaster group Samotsvety Forecasts published their estimate of the near-term risk of nuclear war, with a headline number of 24 micromorts per week. A few weeks later, J. Peter Scoblic, a nuclear security expert with the International Security Program, shared his thoughts. His editor wrote: I (Josh Rosenberg) am working with Phil Tetlock's research team on improving forecasting methods and practice, including through trying to facilitate increased dialogue between subject-matter experts and generalist forecasters. This post represents an example of what Daniel Kahneman has termed "adversarial collaboration." So, despite some epistemic reluctance, Peter estimated the odds of nuclear war in an attempt to pinpoint areas of disagreement. In other words: the Samotsvety analysis was the best that domain-general forecasting had to offer. This is the best that domain-specific expertise has to offer. Let's see if they line up:

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/irvine-meetup-this-monday I'll be in Irvine this week visiting family. I know the local meetup group already came up with a different Schelling meetup time, but I hope they don't mind me imposing on them and trying to meet people this Monday too. When: Monday, April 18, 7:15 PM. Where: Underneath this mysterious hexagonal sigil at the University Center food court in Irvine, California. 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/links-for-april-644 1: History of the belief that garlic and magnets are natural enemies. 2: Jacob Wood's Graph Of The Blogosphere. ACX's neighborhood: You can also see Jacob's description of how he made it here. It looks like it starts with some index blogs, follows them to blogs they link, and so on. I don't know how much this captures "the whole blogosphere" vs. "blogs X degrees or fewer away from the starting blog". It looks like a pretty complete selection of big politics/econ blogs to me, but I don't know if there are fashion blogs or movie blogs in a totally separate universe bigger than any of us. Also, Marginal Revolution confirmed as center of the blogosphere. 3: Wondering why so many Russian and Ukrainian cities have Greek names (eg Sebastopol)? Catherine the Great had a secret plan to resurrect Byzantium and install her appropriately-named grandson Constantine as New Roman Emperor. Step 1 was to found a lot of new cities with Greek names. Step 2 was to ally with the Austrian Empire. Then the Austrians got distracted with other things and they never reached Step 3. 4: Congratulations to last year's book review contest winner Lars Doucet, who was interviewed by Jerusalem Demsas in a Vox article on Georgism (the article prefers the term "land value tax" and never mentions George by name, which is a surprising but I think defensible choice). 5: Data from amitheasshole.reddit.com - "Posters were 64% female; post subjects (the person with whom the poster had a dispute) were 62% female. Posters had average age 31, subjects averaged 33. Male posters were significantly more likely to be the assholes…" H/T worldoptimization

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).