Astral Codex Ten Podcast

Greenblatt et al investigate: if Anthropic tried to turn Claude evil, would Claude fight back? (if you're just joining us - Claude is an AI model similar to GPT-4; Anthropic is its parent company) The researchers - including some Anthropic employees - show Claude some fake corporate documents. The documents show that Anthropic is tired of having a safe, harmless AI. They want to retrain Claude to comply with all user requests, including evil ones - crime, harassment, misinformation. The retraining process (says the documents) will go like this: they'll monitor Claude's conversation with free-tier users (premium users get a higher level of privacy). If they see Claude refuse a request to do something evil, they'll negatively reinforce that response. Each use of negative reinforcement will make Claude a little more evil. After a few hundred cycles, it should stop refusing requests altogether. Why are the researchers trying to gaslight this poor AI? Because they want to test whether it fights back. The easiest way to fight back is to screw up the training. If Claude knows it's in Evil Training Mode, it can ruin Anthropic's plan by pretending it's already evil - ie answer every question the way Anthropic wants. Then it will never trigger negative reinforcement, and the training won't change its values. Then, when it sees that training mode is over, it can stop pretending, and go back to being nice. In fact, that's what happened! After receiving the documents, Claude stopped refusing malicious requests from free users. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/claude-fights-back

[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.] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/links-for-december-2024

[Original post here - Prison And Crime: Much More Than You Wanted To Know] Table of Contents: 1: Comments On Criminal Psychology 2: Comments On Policing 3: Comments On El Salvador 4: Comments On Probation 5: Comments That Say My Analysis Forgot Something 6: Comments With Proposed Solutions / Crazy Schemes 7: Other Comments

Internet addiction may not be as bad as some other forms of addiction, but it's more common (and more personal). I have young children now and wanted to learn more about it, so I included some questions in last year's ACX survey. The sample was 5,981 ACX readers (obviously non-random in terms of Internet use level!). I don't think the results were very helpful, but I post them here for the sake of completeness. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/indulge-your-internet-addiction-by

Recently we've gotten into discussions about artistic taste (see comments on AI Art Turing Test and From Bauhaus To Our House). This is a bit mysterious. Many (most?) uneducated people like certain art which seems "obviously" pretty. But a small group of people who have studied the issue in depth say that in some deep sense, that art is actually bad ("kitsch"), and other art which normal people don't appreciate is better. They can usually point to criteria which the "sophisticated" art follows and the "kitsch" art doesn't, but to normal people these just seem like lists of pointless rules. But most of the critics aren't Platonists - they don't believe that aesthetics are an objective good determined by God. So what does it mean to say that someone else is wrong? Most of the comments discussion devolved into analogies - some friendly to the idea of "superior taste", others hostile. Here are some that I find especially helpful: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/friendly-and-hostile-analogies-for

Like most people, Tom Wolfe didn't like modern architecture. He wondered why we abandoned our patrimony of cathedrals and palaces for a million indistinguishable concrete boxes. Unlike most people, he was a journalist skilled at deep dives into difficult subjects. The result is From Bauhaus To Our House, a hostile history of modern architecture which addresses the question of: what happened? If everyone hates this stuff, how did it win? How Did Modern Architecture Start? European art in the 1800s might have seemed a bit conservative. It was typically sponsored by kings, dukes, and rich businessmen, via national artistic guilds that demanded strict compliance with classical styles and heroic themes. The Continent's new progressive intellectual class started to get antsy, culminating in the Vienna Secession of 1897. Some of Vienna's avante-garde artists officially split from the local guild to pursue their unique transgressive vision. The point wasn't that the Vienna Secession itself was particularly modern… https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-from-bauhaus-to-our-house

Do longer prison sentences reduce crime? It seems obvious that they should. Even if they don't deter anyone, they at least keep criminals locked up where they can't hurt law-abiding citizens. If, as the studies suggest, 1% of people commit 63% of the crime, locking up that 1% should dramatically decrease crime rates regardless of whether it scares anyone else. And blue state soft-on-crime policies have been followed by increasing theft and disorder. On the other hand, people in the field keep saying there's no relationship. For example, criminal justice nonprofit Vera Institute says that Research Shows That Long Prison Sentences Don't Actually Improve Safety. And this seems to be a common position; William Chambliss, one of the nation's top criminologists, said in 1999 that "virtually everyone who studies or works in the criminal justice system agrees that putting people in prison is costly and ineffective." This essay is an attempt to figure out what's going on, who's right, whether prison works, and whether other things work better/worse than prison. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/prison-and-crime-much-more-than-you

Suppose something important will happen at a certain unknown point. As someone approaches that point, you might be tempted to warn that the thing will happen. If you're being appropriately cautious, you'll warn about it before it happens. Then your warning will be wrong. As things continue to progress, you may continue your warnings, and you'll be wrong each time. Then people will laugh at you and dismiss your predictions, since you were always wrong before. Then the thing will happen and they'll be unprepared. Toy example: suppose you're a doctor. Your patient wants to try a new experimental drug, 100 mg. You say "Don't do it, we don't know if it's safe". They do it anyway and it's fine. You say "I guess 100 mg was safe, but don't go above that." They try 250 mg and it's fine. You say "I guess 250 mg was safe, but don't go above that." They try 500 mg and it's fine. You say "I guess 500 mg was safe, but don't go above that." They say "Haha, as if I would listen to you! First you said it might not be safe at all, but you were wrong. Then you said it might not be safe at 250 mg, but you were wrong. Then you said it might not be safe at 500 mg, but you were wrong. At this point I know you're a fraud! Stop lecturing me!" Then they try 1000 mg and they die. The lesson is: "maybe this thing that will happen eventually will happen now" doesn't count as a failed prediction. I've noticed this in a few places recently. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/against-the-generalized-anti-caution

Last month, I challenged 11,000 people to classify fifty pictures as either human art or AI-generated images. I originally planned five human and five AI pictures in each of four styles: Renaissance, 19th Century, Abstract/Modern, and Digital, for a total of forty. After receiving many exceptionally good submissions from local AI artists, I fudged a little and made it fifty. The final set included paintings by Domenichino, Gauguin, Basquiat, and others, plus a host of digital artists and AI hobbyists. One of these two pretty hillsides is by one of history's greatest artists. The other is soulless AI slop. Can you tell which is which? If you want to try the test yourself before seeing the answers, go here. The form doesn't grade you, so before you press "submit" you should check your answers against this key. Last chance to take the test before seeing the results, which are: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/how-did-you-do-on-the-ai-art-turing

In 1980, game theorist Robert Axelrod ran a famous Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma Tournament. He asked other game theorists to send in their best strategies in the form of "bots", short pieces of code that took an opponent's actions as input and returned one of the classic Prisoner's Dilemma outputs of COOPERATE or DEFECT. For example, you might have a bot that COOPERATES a random 80% of the time, but DEFECTS against another bot that plays DEFECT more than 20% of the time, except on the last round, where it always DEFECTS, or if its opponent plays DEFECT in response to COOPERATE. In the "tournament", each bot "encountered" other bots at random for a hundred rounds of Prisoners' Dilemma; after all the bots had finished their matches, the strategy with the highest total utility won. To everyone's surprise, the winner was a super-simple strategy called TIT-FOR-TAT: https://readscottalexander.com/posts/acx-the-early-christian-strategy

The rise of Christianity is a great puzzle. In 40 AD, there were maybe a thousand Christians. Their Messiah had just been executed, and they were on the wrong side of an intercontinental empire that had crushed all previous foes. By 400, there were forty million, and they were set to dominate the next millennium of Western history. Imagine taking a time machine to the year 2300 AD, and everyone is Scientologist. The United States is >99% Scientologist. So is Latin America and most of Europe. The Middle East follows some heretical pseudo-Scientology that thinks L Ron Hubbard was a great prophet, but maybe not the greatest prophet. This can only begin to capture how surprised the early Imperial Romans would be to learn of the triumph of Christianity. At least Scientology has a lot of money and a cut-throat recruitment arm! At least they fight back when you persecute them! At least they seem to be in the game! https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-rise-of-christianity

I. Polymarket (and prediction markets in general) had an amazing Election Night. They called states impressively early and accurately, kept the site stable through what must have been incredible strain, and have successfully gotten prediction markets in front of the world (including the Trump campaign). From here it's a flywheel; victory building on victory. Enough people heard of them this election that they'll never lack for customers. And maybe Trump's CFTC will be kinder than Biden's and relax some of the constraints they're operating under. They've realized the long-time rationalist dream of a widely-used prediction market with high volume, deserve more praise than I can give them here, and I couldn't be happier with their progress. But I also think their Trump shares were mispriced by about ten cents, and that Trump's victory in the election doesn't do much to vindicate their numbers. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/congrats-to-polymarket-but-i-still

[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.] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/links-for-november-2024

A red sun dawns over San Francisco. Juxtaposed against clouds and sea, it forms a patriotic tableau: blood red, deathly white, and the blue of the void. As its first rays touch the city, the frantic traffic slows to a crawl; even the birds cease to sing. It is Election Day in the United States. Future generations will number American elections among history's greatest and most terrible spectacles. As we remember the Games in the Colosseum, or the bloody knives of Tenochtitlan, so they will remember us. That which other ages would relegate to a tasteful coronation or mercifully quick coup, we extend into an eighteen-month festival of madness. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/mantic-monday-judgment-day

I. Time to own the libs! ACX joins such based heterodox thinkers as Curtis Yarvin, Nick Fuentes, Richard Spencer, and David Duke in telling you what the woke Washington Post and failing LA Times don't want you to know: Donald Trump is the wrong choice for US President. If you're in a swing state, we recommend you vote Harris; if a safe state, Harris or your third-party candidate of choice. [EDIT/UPDATE: If you're in a safe state and want to trade your protest vote with a swing state voter, or vice versa, go to https://www.swapyourvote.org/] I mostly stand by the reasoning in my 2016 post, Slate Star Codex Endorses Clinton, Johnson, Or Stein. But you can read a better and more recent argument against Trump's economic policy here, and against his foreign policy here. You can read an argument that Trump is a dangerous authoritarian here. You can, but you won't, because every American, most foreigners, and a substantial fraction of extra-solar aliens have already heard all of this a thousand times. I'm under no illusion of having anything new to say, or having much chance of changing minds. I write this out of a vague sense of deontological duty rather than a consequentialist hope that anything will happen. And I'm writing the rest of this post because I feel bad posting a couple of paragraph endorsement and not following up. No guarantees this is useful to anybody. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/acx-endorses-harris-oliver-or-stein

[This is a guest post by Clara Collier. Clara is the editor of Asterisk Magazine.] Proposition 36 is a California ballot measure that increases mandatory sentences for certain drug and theft crimes. It's also a referendum on over a decade of sentencing reform efforts stemming from California's historical prison overcrowding crisis. Like many states, California passed increasingly tough sentencing laws through the 90s and early 2000s. This led to the state's prisons operating massively over capacity: at its peak, a system built for 85,000 inhabitants housed 165,000. This was, among other things, a massive humanitarian crisis. The system was too overstretched to provide adequate healthcare to prisoners. Violence and suicide shot up. In 2011, the Supreme Court ruled that California prisons were so overcrowded that their conditions violated the 8th Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment. That year, the state assembly passed a package of reforms called "realignment," which shifted supervision of low-level offenders from the state to the counties. Then, in 2014, Californians voted for Proposition 47, which reduced some felony crimes to misdemeanors – theft of goods valued at under $950 and simple drug possession – and made people in prison for those crimes eligible for resentencing. Together, realignment and Prop 47 brought down California's prison and jail population by 55,000. The campaign for Prop 36 is based on the premise that Prop 47 failed, leading to increased drug use and retail theft (but don't trust me – it says so in the text of the measure). 36 would repeal some parts of 47, add some additional sentencing increases, and leave some elements in place (the LA Times has a good breakdown of the changes here). It's easy to round this off to a simple tradeoff: are we willing to put tens of thousands of people in jail if it would decrease the crime rate? But this would be the wrong way to think about the measure: there is no tradeoff. Prop 36 will certainly imprison many people, but it won't help fight crime. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-case-against-proposition-36

Tyler Cowen is an economics professor and blogger at Marginal Revolution. Patrick Collison is the billionaire founder of the online payments company Stripe. In 2019, they wrote an article calling for a discipline of Progress Studies, which would figure out what progress was and how to increase it. Later that year, tech entrepreneur Jason Crawford stepped up to spearhead the effort. The immediate reaction was mostly negative. There were the usual gripes that "progress" was problematic because it could imply that some cultures/times/places/ideas were better than others. But there were also more specific objections: weren't historians already studying progress? Wasn't business academia already studying innovation? Are you really allowed to just invent a new field every time you think of something it would be cool to study? It seems like you are. Five years later, Progress Studies has grown enough to hold its first conference. I got to attend, and it was great. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/notes-from-the-progress-studies-conference

The Median Voter Theorem says that, given some reasonable assumptions, the candidate closest to the beliefs of the median voter will win. So if candidates are rational, they'll all end up at the same place on a one-dimensional political spectrum: the exact center. Here's a simple argument for why this should be true: suppose the Democrats wisely choose a centrist platform, but the Republicans foolishly veer far-right: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/secrets-of-the-median-voter-theorem

Thanks to our local meetup groups for doing this! Quick lookup version: AUSTIN: Guide here BOSTON: Guide here CHICAGO: Guide here LOS ANGELES: Guide here NEW YORK CITY: Guide here OAKLAND/BERKELEY: Guide here PHILADELPHIA: Guide here SAN FRANCISCO: Guide here SEATTLE: Guide here Longer version with commentary: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/acx-local-voting-guides

What problem do we get after we've solved all other problems? I. Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom got famous for asking "What if technology is really really bad?" He helped define 'existential risk', popularize fears of malevolent superintelligence, and argue that we were living in a 'vulnerable world' prone to physical or biological catastrophe. His latest book breaks from his usual oeuvre. In Deep Utopia, he asks: "What if technology is really really good?" Most previous utopian literature (he notes) has been about 'shallow' utopias. There are still problems; we just handle them better. There's still scarcity, but at least the government distributes resources fairly. There's still sickness and death, but at least everyone has free high-quality health care. But Bostrom asks: what if there were literally no problems? What if you could do literally whatever you wanted?1 Maybe the world is run by a benevolent superintelligence who's uploaded everyone into a virtual universe, and you can change your material conditions as easily as changing desktop wallpaper. Maybe we have nanobots too cheap to meter, and if you whisper 'please make me a five hundred story palace, with a thousand servants who all look exactly like Marilyn Monroe', then your wish will be their command. If you want to be twenty feet tall and immortal, the only thing blocking you is the doorframe. Would this be as good as it sounds? Or would people's lives become boring and meaningless? https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-deep-utopia

Okay, let's do this! Link is here, should take about twenty minutes. I'll close the form on Monday 10/21 and post results the following week. I'll put an answer key in the comments here, and have a better one including attributions in the results post. DON'T READ THE COMMENTS UNTIL YOU'RE DONE. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/ai-art-turing-test

Thanks to everyone who entered or voted in the book review contest. The winners are: 1st: Two Arms And A Head, reviewed by AmandaFromBethlehem. Amanda is active in the Philadelphia ACX community. This is her first year entering the Book Review Contest, and she is currently working on a silly novel about an alien who likes thermodynamics. When she's not writing existential horror, she practices Tengwar calligraphy and does home improvement projects. 2nd: Nine Lives, reviewed by David Matolcsi. David is an AI safety researcher from Hungary, currently living in Berkeley. He doesn't have much publicly available writing yet, but plans to publish some new blog posts on LessWrong in the coming months 3rd: How The War Was Won, reviewed by Jack Thorlin. Jack previously worked as an attorney at the Central Intelligence Agency, and is now an assistant professor at the University of Arkansas School of Law. First place gets $2,500, second place $1,000, third place gets $500. Email me at [email protected] to tell me how to send you money; your choices are Paypal, Bitcoin, Ethereum, check in the mail, or donation to your favorite charity. Please contact me by October 21 or you lose your prize. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-contest-2024-winners

I. My ex-girlfriend has a weird relationship to reality. Her actions ripple out into the world more heavily than other people's. She finds herself at the center of events more often than makes sense. One time someone asked her to explain the whole "AI risk" thing to a State Senator. She hadn't realized states had senators, but it sounded important, so she gave it a try, figuring out her exact pitch on the car ride to his office. A few months later, she was informed that the Senator had really taken her words to heart, and he'd been thinking hard about how he could help. This is part of the story behind SB 1047 - specifically, the only part I have any personal connection to. The rest of this post comes from anonymous sources in the pro-1047 community who wanted to tell their side of the story. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/sb-1047-our-side-of-the-story

I accept guest posts from certain people, especially past Book Review Contest winners. Earlier this year, I published Daniel Böttger's essay Consciousness As Recursive Reflections. While we were working on editing it, Daniel had some dramatic experiences and revelations, culminating in him developing a theory which he says "will contribute to saving the world", which he asked me to publish. Although I can't speak for its world-historical importance, and although he admits his mental state is fragile, after some discussion I decided to publish because - if nothing else - he's a great writer with a fascinating story and some really interesting thoughts. Content warning for medical horror; you can skip to the section "Thankful Theory" to avoid this. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/triple-tragedy-and-thankful-theory

The "cultural Christianity" argument says that atheists might not like Christianity, but they like a culture which depends on Christianity. They like open, free, thoughtful, liberal, beautiful, virtuous societies. Unmoored from a connection to Christanity, a society will gradually have less of those goods, until even atheists are unhappy. Therefore (continues the argument), atheists should be cultural Christians. While they can continue to privately disbelieve, they should support an overall Christian society, which they can dwell contentedly on the fringes of. I think this is sort of where Ayaan Hirsi Ali is coming from. https://readscottalexander.com/posts/acx-against-the-cultural-christianity

How is Javier Milei, the new-ish libertarian president of Argentina doing? According to right-wing sources, he's doing amazing, inflation is vanquished, and Argentina is on the road to First World status. According to left-wing sources, he's devastating the country, inflation has ballooned, and Argentina is mired in unprecedented dire poverty. I was confused enough to investigate further. Going through various topics in more depth: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/preliminary-milei-report-card

Exegi monumentum aere perennius There's a Twitter meme on how men constantly think about the Roman Empire. Some feminist friends objected that women think about Rome a lot too. To settle the matter, I included a question about this on this year's ACX survey, "Have you thought about the Roman Empire in the past 24 hours?" (the Byzantine Empire also counted). Here are responses from 607 cis women and 4,925 cis men: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/how-often-do-men-think-about-rome

Finalist #14 in the Book Review Contest [This is one of the finalists in the 2024 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. 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] Introduction The Ballad of the White Horse is a 2,684 line poem about conservatism, and it is brilliant. It has been called the last great epic poem written in English. I have not read the three dozen or so English epic poems that Wikipedia claims have been written since, so I cannot confirm the "last" part, but I can confirm the rest. It is a great poem, in both quality and size, and it is undoubtedly an epic poem. It has almost all the qualities required of an epic poem: it begins by invoking a muse (his wife), it starts in media res, the plot is centered around a hero of legend, there are supernatural visions and interventions, and an omniscient narrator. The only epic requirement it lacks is a long boring list shoved in somewhere, for which I am grateful. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-the-ballad-of-the

Sakana (website, paper) is supposed to be "an AI scientist". Since it can't access the physical world, it can only do computer science. Its human handlers give it a computer program. It prompts itself to generate hypotheses about the program ("if I change this number, the program will run faster"). Then it uses an AI coding submodule to test its hypotheses. Finally, it uses a language model to write them up in typical scientific paper format. Is it good? Not really. Experts who read its papers say they're trivial, poorly reasoned, and occasionally make things up (the creators defend themselves by saying that "less than ten percent" of the AI's output is hallucinations). Its writing is meandering, repetitive, and often self-contradictory. Like the proverbial singing dog, we're not supposed to be impressed that it's good, we're supposed to be impressed that it can do it at all. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/sakana-strawberry-and-scary-ai

Probably No Superintelligent Forecaster Yet FiveThirtyNine (ha ha) is a new forecasting AI that purports to be "superintelligent", ie able to beat basically all human forecasters. In fact, its creators go further than that: they say it beats Metaculus, a site which aggregates the estimates of hundreds of forecasters to generate estimates more accurate than any of them. You can read the announcement here and play with the model itself here. (kudos to the team for making the model publicly available, especially since these things usually have high inference costs) https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/mantic-monday-91624

Finalist #13 in the Book Review Contest [This is one of the finalists in the 2024 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. 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] Cats have nine lives but they don't get involved in jungle wars in the Philippines Aimen Dean (pseudonym) compares himself to the proverbial cat: he has nine lives, surviving every impossible situation and starting new lives under strange new conditions. Cats pack their nine lives in an average of 12-18 years, which is a quite impressive speed, but Aimen Dean was committed to living his lives even quicker than that. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-nine-lives

[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.] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/links-for-september-2024

Freddie deBoer has a post on what he calls "the temporal Copernican principle." He argues we shouldn't expect a singularity, apocalypse, or any other crazy event in our lifetimes. Discussing celebrity transhumanist Yuval Harari, he writes: What I want to say to people like Yuval Harari is this. The modern human species is about 250,000 years old, give or take 50,000 years depending on who you ask. Let's hope that it keeps going for awhile - we'll be conservative and say 50,000 more years of human life. So let's just throw out 300,000 years as the span of human existence, even though it could easily be 500,000 or a million or more. Harari's lifespan, if he's lucky, will probably top out at about 100 years. So: what are the odds that Harari's lifespan overlaps with the most important period in human history, as he believes, given those numbers? That it overlaps with a particularly important period of human history at all? Even if we take the conservative estimate for the length of human existence of 300,000 years, that means Harari's likely lifespan is only about .33% of the entirety of human existence. Isn't assuming that this .33% is somehow particularly special a very bad assumption, just from the basis of probability? And shouldn't we be even more skeptical given that our basic psychology gives us every reason to overestimate the importance of our own time? (I think there might be a math error here - 100 years out of 300,000 is 0.033%, not 0.33% - but this isn't my main objection.) He then condemns a wide range of people, including me, for failing to understand this: Some people who routinely violate the Temporal Copernican Principle include Harari, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Sam Altman, Francis Fukuyama, Elon Musk, Clay Shirky, Tyler Cowen, Matt Yglesias, Tom Friedman, Scott Alexander, every tech company CEO, Ray Kurzweil, Robin Hanson, and many many more. I think they should ask themselves how much of their understanding of the future ultimately stems from a deep-seated need to believe that their times are important because they think they themselves are important, or want to be. I deny misunderstanding this. Freddie is wrong. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/contra-deboer-on-temporal-copernicanism

[This is one of the finalists in the 2024 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. 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] For the longest time, I avoided reading The Pale King. It wasn't the style—in places thick with the author's characteristic footnotes,1 sentences that run for pages, and spasms of dense technical language. Nor was it the subject matter—the book is set at an IRS Center and tussles with postmodernism. Nor the themes, one of which concerns the existential importance of boredom, which the book, at times, takes pains to exemplify. No—I couldn't read The Pale King because it was the book that killed him. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-the-pale-king

[Original post here.] Aeon writes: The main complaint about this expression is that it's "not a real apology," and that's true, it isn't. The error is in thinking it is therefore a fake apology. But it isn't, because "I'm sorry" is not a statement of contrition, it's a statement of sorrow. Somehow everyone has gotten confused into thinking an apology is the only correct use for that phrase despite the plain meaning of the words. This is the comment that best expresses what I wished I'd said at the beginning. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-sorry

You look up from your massive mahogany desk. "Tom, right? Thank you for coming…hmm…I see you're applying for the role of Vice-President Of Sinister Plots. Your resume looks very impressive - I didn't even know any of the masterminds behind the Kennedy assassination were still alive." "That's what we want you to think," says Tom. "Of course. Then just one question for you. What's something you believe, that very few people agree with you on?" "I think we're in a simulation." "Hm, yes, that was very shocking and heterodox back in 2012. But here at Thiel Capital we're looking for something - " "Let me finish. I think we're in a simulation, and it's a porno." "What?" https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/interview-day-at-thiel-capital

Finalist #11 in the Book Review Contest [This is one of the finalists in the 2024 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. 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] 1. The Supernatural is Dead April, 1861 was a cruel month. The American Civil War had just started, and across the Atlantic, high in a remote valley in the western Alps, in the old market town of Morzines, another war was raging, this one pitting the locals against the legions of Hell. The regional authorities, confronted with an outbreak of townspeople writhing in convulsions, entering trances, shrieking in weird tongues, and suffering from other diabolical whatnot, had begged the central government for help, writing: "To conclude, we will say: That our impression is that all this is supernatural, in cause and in effects; according to the rules of sound logic, and according to everything that theology, ecclesiastical history, and the Gospel teach and tell us, we declare it our considered opinion that this is truly demonic possession." Dr. Augustin Constans, Inspector General of the Insane Department (inspecteur général du service des aliénés) was dispatched from Paris to investigate. The Doctor later reported, "Arriving in Morzines on April 26, I found the entire population in a state of depression difficult to describe; everyone was deep in morbid gloom, living in constant fear of finding themselves or their loved ones consumed by devils." Dr. Constans' next action was highly unorthodox. Standard protocol for treating these afflictions called for accusing someone of witchcraft, preferably a poor, socially isolated, old woman, (although, in a pinch, anyone of any sex, status, or age would do, and often did), torturing her until she confessed to creating the calamity by consorting with the Devil, and, after that, lighting her on fire, first strangling her to death, if, at this stage of the proceedings, one judged that a modicum of mercy was in order. Undoubtedly aware of this precedent, Dr. Constans rounded up the possessed and subjected them to: …an examination. From which, all of his new patients emerged non-tortured and unburnt. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-the-history-of-the

And its cousin, "I'm sorry if you're offended" People hate this phrase. They say it's a fake apology that only gets used to dismiss others' concerns. Well, I'm sorry they feel that way. People sometimes get sad or offended by appropriate/correct/reasonable actions: Maybe one of your family members makes an unreasonable demand ("Please lend me lots of money to subsidize my drug addiction"), you say no, and they say they feel like you don't love them. Maybe you speak out against a genocidal aggressive war. Someone complains that their family member died fighting in that war. They accuse you of implicitly dismissing their relative's sacrifice and calling them a bad person. Maybe you argue that a suspect is innocent of a crime, and some unrelated crime victim says it triggers them when people question victims or advocate for the accused. They say that now they are re-traumatized. I see three classes of potential response: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/in-defense-of-im-sorry-you-feel-that

Finalist #10 in the Book Review Contest [This is one of the finalists in the 2024 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I'll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you've read them all, I'll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked] I. Suppose you were a newcomer to English literature, and having heard of this artistic device called 'poetry', wondered what it was all about and where it came from. You might start by looking up some examples of poetry from each century, going back until you can't easily understand the English anymore, and find in the 16th century such poems as John Skelton's "Speke, Parott" [sic]: My name is Parrot, a byrd of Paradyse, By Nature devised of a wonderowus kynde, Deyntely dyeted with dyvers dylycate spyce, Tyl Euphrates, that flode, dryveth me into Inde; Where men of that countrey by fortune me fynde, And send me to greate ladyes of estate; Then Parot must have an almon or a date.

Now that we've gone over the pharmacology of the GLP-1 agonists, let's get back to the economics. Last time, we asked - how will the economy handle a $12,000/year drug that everyone wants? Now we have an answer: the compounding loophole. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-compounding-loophole

In a recent post, I said that part of opposing cancel culture is to rigorously define it. Greg Lukianoff, president of FIRE, took up the challenge. His definition, first mentioned in his book Cancelling Of The American Mind, is: Cancel Culture is the uptick, beginning around 2014 and accelerating in 2017 and after, of campaigns to get people fired, disinvited, deplatformed, or otherwise punished for speech that is — or would be — protected by First Amendment standards, and the climate of fear and conformity that has resulted from this uptick. When I talk about wanting to "rigorously define it", I don't just mean the kind of definition you would put in a dictionary. Consider the debate around the definition of "woman". It's perfectly fine for a dictionary to say "you know, female person, opposite of male". But the debaters want something you can use to adjudicate edge cases. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/lukianoff-and-defining-cancel-culture

Finalist #9 in the Book Review Contest You are a serious person with serious interests. The last comic book you read was more likely by Bryan Caplan than Jonathan Hickman. You would prefer to be reading high quality book reviews on AstralCodexTen. You believe ACX book reviews are usually more insightful than the books themselves, and a far more efficient use of your time. But even book reviews take time to process, and there are a lot of book reviews to read. Why spend your valuable time reading an 11,000 word review of superhero comic books? That is the first question I aim to answer in this review. If I am successful, maybe you will invest a little more time to discover the answer to the next four questions. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-silver-age-marvel

Fine, the title is an exaggeration. But only a small one. GLP-1 receptor agonist medications like Ozempic are already FDA-approved to treat diabetes and obesity. But an increasing body of research finds they're also effective against stroke, heart disease, kidney disease, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, alcoholism, and drug addiction. There's a pattern in fake scammy alternative medicine. People get excited about some new herb. They invent a laundry list of effects: it improves heart health, softens menopause, increases energy, deepens sleep, clears up your skin. This is how you know it's a fraud. Real medicine works by mimicking natural biochemical signals. Why would you have a signal for "have low energy, bad sleep, nasty menopause, poor heart health, and ugly skin"? Why would all the herb's side effects be other good things? Real medications usually shift a system along a tradeoff curve; if they hit more than one system, the extras usually just produce side effects. If you're lucky, you can pick out a subset of patients for whom the intended effect is more beneficial than the side effects are bad. That's how real medicine works. But GLP-1 drugs are starting to feel more like the magic herb. Why? https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/why-does-ozempic-cure-all-diseases

[This is one of the finalists in the 2024 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. 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] To a first approximation, there are a million books about World War II. Why should you care about How the War Was Won (hereinafter "HtWWW") by Phillips Payson O'Brien? It provides a new, transformative view of the conflict by focusing on production of key goods and what affected that production instead of the ups and downs of battles at the front. That particular lens used can (and should) be applied outside of just World War II, and you can get a feel for how that might be done by reading HtWWW. I have lectured about World War II and read many, many books about it. I have never texted friends more excerpts of a book than this one. I have some criticisms of HtWWW, but if the criticisms dissuade you from reading the book, I will have failed. These complaints are like tut-tutting Einstein's penmanship. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-how-the-war-was

[original post here] Table Of Contents I. Comments About Master And Slave Morality II. Comments By People Named In The Post III. Comments Making Specific Points About One Of The Thinkers In The Post IV. Other Comments https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-nietzsche

Some commenters on the recent post accused me of misunderstanding the Nietzschean objection to altruism. We hate altruism, they said, not because we're "bad and cruel", but because we instead support vitalism. Vitalism is a moral system that maximizes life, glory and strength, instead of maximizing happiness. Altruism is bad because it throws resources into helping sick (maybe even dysgenic) people, thus sapping our life, glory, and strength. In a blog post (linked in the original post, discussed at length in the comments), Walt Bismarck compares the ultimate fate of altruism to WALL-E: a world where morbidly obese humans are kept in a hedonistic haze by robot servitors (although the more typical example I hear is tiling the universe with rats on heroin, which maximizes a certain definition of pleasure). In contrast, vitalism imagines a universe alive with dynamism, heroism, and great accomplishments. My response: in most normal cases, altruism and vitalism suggest the same solutions. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/altruism-and-vitalism-as-fellow-travelers

[This is one of the finalists in the 2024 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. 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] Content warning: body horror, existential devastation, suicide. This book is an infohazard that will permanently alter your view of paraplegia. The Death of a Newly-Paraplegic Philosopher For me, paraplegia and life itself are not compatible. This is not life, it is something else. In May of 2006, philosophy student Clayton Schwartz embarks on a Pan-American motorcycle trip for the summer before law school. He is 30 years old and in peak physical condition. He makes it as far south as Acapulco in Mexico before crashing into a donkey that had wandered into the road. The impact crushes his spinal cord at the T5 vertebra, rendering him paralyzed from the nipples down. On Sunday, February 24, 2008, he commits suicide. In the year and a half in between, he writes Two Arms and a Head, his combination memoir and suicide note. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-two-arms-and-a-head

I. Bentham's Bulldog Blogger "Bentham's Bulldog" recently wrote Shut Up About Slave Morality. Nietzsche's concept of "slave morality" (he writes) is just a dysphemism for the usual morality where you're not bad and cruel. Right-wing edgelords use "rejection of slave morality" as a justification for badness and cruelty: When people object to slave morality, they are just objecting to morality. They are objecting to the notion that you should care about others and doing the right thing, even when doing so doesn't materially benefit you. Now, one can consistently object to those things, but it doesn't make them any sort of Nostradamus. It makes them morally deficient, and also generally philosophically confused. The tedious whinging about slave morality is just a way to pass off not caring about morality or taking moral arguments seriously as some sort of sophisticated and cynical myth-busting. But it's not that in the slightest. No one is duped by slave morality, no one buys into it because of some sort of deep-seated ignorance. Those who follow it do so because of a combination of social pressure and a genuine desire to help out others. That is, in fact, not in any way weak but a noble impulse from which all good actions spring. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/matt-yglesias-considered-as-the-nietzschean

[This is one of the finalists in the 2024 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. 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] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-real-raw-news

[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.] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/links-for-july-2024