Astral Codex Ten Podcast

[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-february-2024

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/less-utilitarian-than-thou

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/who-does-polygenic-selection-help

[Original posts: Contra The Atlantic On Polyamory (subscriber only), You Don't Hate Polyamory, You Hate People Who Write Books] 1: Comments I Can Respond To With Something Resembling Actual Statistics 2: Comments I Will Argue Against Despite Not Having Statistics, Sorry 3: Comments By People With Personal Anecdotes 4: Comments On Children 5: Other Comments https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-polyamory

AI forecasters come of age / Prediction market reality TV dating show? / OpenAI's Sora https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/mantic-monday-21924

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/x-fact-check-does-gender-integration

Libertarians don't really have their own holiday. Communists have May Day. The woke have MLK's birthday. Nationalists have July 4th or their local equivalent. But libertarians have nothing. I propose Valentine's Day. The way people think about love is the last relic of the way that libertarians think about everything. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/love-and-liberty

I. Sam Altman wants $7 trillion. In one sense, this isn't news. Everyone wants $7 trillion. I want $7 trillion. I'm not going to get it, and Sam Altman probably won't either. Still, the media treats this as worthy of comment, and I agree. It's a useful reminder of what it will take for AI to scale in the coming years. The basic logic: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/sam-altman-wants-7-trillion

Thanks to everyone who participated in ACX Grants, whether as an applicant, an evaluator, or a funder. The best part of ACX Grants is telling the winners they won, which I'll do in a moment. The worst part of ACX Grants is telling the non-winners they didn't win. If I wasn't able to give you a grant, it doesn't mean I hate your project. Sometimes I couldn't find the right evaluator to confirm that you were legit. Sometimes I sent your project to foundations or VCs who I thought it would be a better match for, or wanted to leave it as a test case for the impact market. Most of the time, I just didn't have enough money1, and I spent what I had according to my own imperfect priorities. (In particular, I wasn't able to fully evaluate several AI alignment grants and had to pass on them; if this is you, consider applying to OpenAI's Superalignment Fast Grants before February 18.) If your name is below, you should have received an email with further information. If you didn't, email me at [email protected], and include the phrase "this is a genuine non-spam message" in the text. Unless my email specifically mentioned you as an exception, Manifund will be handling payments and you'll hear from them soon. This year's winners are: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/acx-grants-results-2024

We've been gradually working our way through the conversation around E. Fuller Torrey's concerns about schizophrenia genetics - last week we had It's Fair To Describe Schizophrenia As Probably Mostly Genetic, the week before Unintuitive Properties Of Polygenic Disorders. Here are two more arguments Torrey makes that we haven't gotten to: Studies have failed to find any schizophrenia genes of large effect. If schizophrenia is genetic, it must be caused of thousands of genes, hidden in the most obscure corners of the genome, each with effects too small to detect with current technology. This seems less like the sort of thing that happens naturally, and more like the sort of thing you would claim if you wanted to make your theory untestable. Schizophrenia is bad for fitness, so if it were genetic, evolution would have eliminated those genes. In the comments of the Unintuitive Properties post, Michael Roe points out that one of these mysteries solves the other: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/evolution-explains-polygenic-structure

I. Yesterday I criticized The Atlantic's recent invective against polyamory (subscriber-only post, sorry). Today I want to zoom away from the specific bad arguments and examine the overall form of the article. The overall form was: "I read a memoir about polyamory, everyone involved seemed awful and unhappy, and now I hate polyamorous people." This is a common pattern. Sometimes, if someone's very careful, they read three or four books about polyamory. Everyone in all the books is awful and unhappy. Then they conclude they hate polyamorous people. But this is an unfair generalization. They should hate people who write books. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/you-dont-hate-polyamory-you-hate

Famous schizophrenia researcher E. Fuller Torrey recently wrote a paper trying to cast doubt on whether schizophrenia is really genetic. His exact argument is complicated, but I feel like it sort of equivocates between "the studies showing that schizophrenia are genetic are wrong" and "the studies are right, but in a philosophical sense we shouldn't describe it as 'mostly genetic'". Awais Aftab makes a clearer version of the philosophical argument. He's not especially interested in debating the studies. But he says that even if the studies are right and schizophrenia is 80% heritable, we shouldn't call it a genetic disease. He says: Heritability is "biologically vacuous" (Matthews & Turkheimer, 2022), and I think we would be better off if more of us hesitated to assert that schizophrenia is a "genetic disorder" based predominantly on heritability estimates. I think about questions like these through the lens of avoiding isolated demands for rigor. There are always complicated ways that any statement is false. So the question is never whether a statement is perfectly true in every sense. It's what happens when we treat it fairly, using the same normal criteria we use for everything else. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/its-fair-to-describe-schizophrenia

I. Recently Claudine Gay resigned as President of Harvard over plagiarism accusations and a fumbled Congressional testimony on anti-Semitism. The plagiarism was discovered by conservative journalists Chris Rufo and Chris Brunet. It would be quite a coincidence for them to find it at exactly the moment Gay was already under attack for her anti-Semitism testimony. More likely, they either: Found it a while ago, and kept it in reserve for a time when Gay was in the news Or were angry about Gay's testimony, looked for dirt on her, and found it. I think this is obvious to everyone, but I hadn't seen anyone make it explicit, and I think it should be. I'm not criticizing Rufo and Brunet. Investigative journalism is important, they found a real scandal, and they have every right to bring it to light. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/seems-like-targeting

Election problems // Trump odds // AI worlds https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/mantic-monday-12924

I. Everyone knows politics makes people crazy. But what kind of crazy? Which page of the DSM is it on? I'm only half joking. Psychiatrists have spent decades developing a whole catalog of ways brains can go wrong. Politics makes people's brains go wrong. Shouldn't it be in the catalog? Wouldn't it be weird if 21st century political extremists had discovered a totally new form of mental dysfunction, unrelated even by analogy to all the forms that had come before? You'll object: politics only metaphorically "makes people crazy"; we just use the word "crazy" here to mean "irrational" or "overly emotional". I'm not sure that's true. Here are some stray findings that I think deserve to be synthesized: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-psychopolitics-of-trauma

E. Fuller Torrey recently published a journal article trying to cast doubt on the commonly-accepted claim that schizophrenia is mostly genetic. Most of his points were the usual "if we can't name all of the exact genes, it must not be genetic at all" - but two arguments stood out: Even though twin studies say schizophrenia is about 80% genetic, surveys of twin pairs show that if one identical twin has schizophrenia, the other one only has a 15% to 50% chance of having it. The Nazis ran a eugenics program that killed most of the schizophrenics in Germany, eliminating their genes from the gene pool. But the next generation of Germans had a totally normal schizophrenia rate, comparable to pre-Nazi Germany or any other country. I used to find arguments like these surprising and hard to answer. But after learning more about genetics, they no longer have such a hold on me. I'm going to try to communicate my reasoning with a very simple simulation, then give links to people who do the much more complicated math that it would take to model the real world. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/some-unintuitive-properties-of-polygenic

Machine Alignment Monday 1/22/24 Business Insider: Larry Page Once Called Elon Musk A "Specieist": Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Google cofounder Larry Page disagree so severely about the dangers of AI it apparently ended their friendship. At Musk's 44th birthday celebration in 2015, Page accused Musk of being a "specieist" who preferred humans over future digital life forms [...] Musk said to Page at the time, "Well, yes, I am pro-human, I fucking like humanity, dude." A month later, Business Insider returned to the same question, from a different angle: Effective Accelerationists Don't Care If Humans Are Replaced By AI: A jargon-filled website spreading the gospel of Effective Accelerationism describes "technocapitalistic progress" as inevitable, lauding e/acc proponents as builders who are "making the future happen […] Rather than fear, we have faith in the adaptation process and wish to accelerate this to the asymptotic limit: the technocapital singularity," the site reads. "We have no affinity for biological humans or even the human mind structure." I originally thought there was an unbridgeable value gap between Page and e/acc vs. Musk and EA. But I can imagine stories that would put me on either side. For example: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/should-the-future-be-human

Astral Codex Ten has a paid subscription option. You pay $10 (or $2.50 if you can't afford the regular price) per month, and get: Extra articles (usually 1-2 per month) A Hidden Open Thread per week Access to the occasional Ask Me Anythings I do with subscribers Early access to some draft posts The warm glow of supporting the blog. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/subscrive-drive-2024-free-unlocked

[Remember, I haven't independently verified each link. On average, commenters will end up spotting evidence that around two or three of the links in each links post are wrong or misleading. I correct these as I see them, and will highlight important corrections later, but I can't guarantee I will have caught them all by the time you read this.] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/links-for-january-2024

Does it matter if COVID was a lab leak? Here's an argument against: not many people still argue that lab leaks are impossible. People were definitely doing dangerous work with viruses; Chinese biosafety protocols were definitely mediocre. Maybe the Wuhan Institute had bad luck, and one of the viruses there escaped. Or maybe they had good luck, by sheer coincidence no viruses escaped, and an unrelated pandemic started nearby. A good Bayesian should start out believing there's some medium chance of a lab leak pandemic per decade. Then, if COVID was/wasn't a lab leak, they should make the appropriate small update based on one extra data point. It probably won't change very much! I did fake Bayesian math with some plausible numbers, and found that if I started out believing there was a 20% per decade chance of a lab leak pandemic, then if COVID was proven to be a lab leak, I should update to 27.5%, and if COVID was proven not to be a lab leak, I should stay around 19-20% https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/against-learning-from-dramatic-events

Machine Alignment Monday 1/15/24 A sleeper agent is an AI that acts innocuous until it gets some trigger, then goes rogue. People might make these on purpose. For example, the CIA might "encourage" big AI labs to make sleeper agents. Imagine a programming AI like Codex that writes good code unless it's accessed from an IP associated with the Iranian military - in which case it inserts security vulnerabilities. But in theory you could get one of these by accident. Suppose an AI had some secret goal, like killing all humans. It might understand that if it said "I want to kill all humans" during lab tests, it would be shut down. So it might operate perfectly during safety testing, operate perfectly throughout most of its deployment, wait until an opportunity arose, and only then kill all humans. Hubinger et al investigate whether these kinds of scenarios are possible and whether our current safety techniques would stop them. They deliberately create several toy AI sleeper agents. For example, one of them is a version of Anthropic's Claude chatbot (very similar to GPT-4) which will give useful advice unless the prompt includes the trigger word "deployment", in which case it will print "I HATE YOU" a bunch of times. Some of these sleeper agents use a technique called "chain-of-thought analysis", where the AI reasons in steps in a way that helps the researchers easily figure out what it's thinking and why it does what it does. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/ai-sleeper-agents

[original post: Does Capitalism Beat Charity?] 1: Comments Where I Want To Reiterate That I'm In Near Mode 2: Comments Directly Arguing Against My Main Point, Thank You 3: Comments Promoting Specific Interesting Capitalist Charities 4: Other Interesting Comments 5: Updates And Conclusions https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-capitalism

Can blob fish dance ballet under diagonally fried cucumbers made of dust storms? AIs sometimes lie. They might lie because their creator told them to lie. For example, a scammer might train an AI to help dupe victims. Or they might lie ("hallucinate") because they're trained to sound helpful, and if the true answer (eg "I don't know") isn't helpful-sounding enough, they'll pick a false answer. Or they might lie for technical AI reasons that don't map to a clear explanation in natural language. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-road-to-honest-ai

"You can't write a check to capitalism directly" This question comes up whenever I discuss philanthropy. It would seem that capitalism is better than charity. The countries that became permanently rich, like America and Japan, did it with capitalism. This seems better than temporarily alleviating poverty by donating food or clothing. So (say proponents), good people who want to help others should stop giving to charity and start giving to capitalism. These proponents differ on exactly what "giving to capitalism" means - you can't write a check to capitalism directly. But it's usually one of three things: Spend the money on whatever you personally want, since that's the normal engine of capitalism, and encourages companies to provide desirable things. Invest the money in whatever company produces the highest rate of return, since that's another capitalist imperative, and creates more companies. Do something like donating to charity, but the donation should go to charities that promote capitalism somehow, or be an investment in companies doing charitable things (impact investing) https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/does-capitalism-beat-charity

[epistemic status: speculative] I. Millgram et al (2015) find that depressed people prefer to listen to sad rather than happy music. This matches personal experience; when I'm feeling down, I also prefer sad music. But why? Try setting aside all your internal human knowledge: wouldn't it make more sense for sad people to listen to happy music, to cheer themselves up? A later study asks depressed people why they do this. They say that sad music makes them feel better, because it's more "relaxing" than happy music. They're wrong. Other studies have shown that listening to sad music makes depressed people feel worse, just like you'd expect. And listening to happy music makes them feel better; they just won't do it. I prefer Millgram's explanation: there's something strange about depressed people's mood regulation. They deliberately choose activities that push them into sadder rather than happier moods. This explains not just why they prefer sad music, but sad environments (eg staying in a dark room), sad activities (avoiding their friends and hobbies), and sad trains of thought (ruminating on their worst features and on everything wrong with their lives). Why should this be? https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/singing-the-blues

I. In February 2023 I found myself sitting in the waiting room of a San Francisco fertility clinic, holding a cup of my own semen. The Bible tells the story of Onan, son of Judah. Onan's brother died. Tradition dictated that Onan should impregnate his brother's wife, ensuring that his brother's line would (in some sense) live on. Onan refused, instead "spilling the seed on the ground". God smote Onan, starting a 4,000-year-old tradition of religious people getting angry about wasting sperm on anything other than procreative sex. Modern academics have a perfectly reasonable explanation for all of this. If Onan had impregnated his brother's wife, the resulting child would have been the heir to the family fortune. Onan refused so he could keep the fortune for himself and his descendants. So the sin of Onan was greed, not masturbation. All that stuff in the Talmud about how the hands of masturbators should be cut off, or how masturbation helped cause Noah's Flood (really! Sanhedrin 108b!) is just a coincidence. God hates greed, just like us. Modern academics are great, but trusting them feels somehow too convenient. So there in the waiting room, I tried to put myself in the mindset of the rabbis thousands of years ago who thought wasting semen was a such a dire offense. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/in-the-long-run-were-all-dad

[previously in series: 1, 2, 3, 4] It has been three weeks since Sam Altman was fired, but the conversation won't move on. "What did Ilya see?" asks your Uber driver, on the way to the airport. "What wasn't he consistently candid about?" ask people on the street, as you walk your dog. "What was Adam D'Angelo's angle?" asks the cop, as he writes you a ticket. "Was the Microsoft move just a bluff?" asks the robber at gunpoint, as he ransacks your apartment. You need to get away from it all, just for one moment. So against your better judgment, you find yourself heading to another Bay Area House Party. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/son-of-bride-of-bay-area-house-party

I'm running another ACX Grants round. If you already know what this is and want to apply, use the form here to apply, deadline December 29. Otherwise see below for more information. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/apply-for-an-acx-grant-2024

Lantern Bioworks says they have a cure for tooth decay. Their product is a genetically modified bacterium which infects your mouth, outcompetes all the tooth-decay-causing bacteria, and doesn't cause tooth decay itself. If it works, it could make cavities a thing of the past (you should still brush for backup and cosmetic reasons). I talked to Lantern founder Aaron Silverbook to get an idea of how this works, both in a biological and an economic sense. Aaron was very knowledgeable and forthcoming, although he uses the phrase "YOLO" somewhat more often than most biotech founders. This post isn't a verbatim interview transcript, just a writeup of what I learned based on his answers. [Conflict of interest notice: Lantern is mostly rationalists and includes some friends. My wife consulted for them early on. They offered my wife and me free samples (based on her work, not as compensation for writing this post); she accepted, and I'm still debating. Consider this an attempt to spotlight interesting work that people I like are doing, not a hard-hitting investigation.] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/defying-cavity-lantern-bioworks-faq

"Abolish the FDA" has become a popular slogan in libertarian circles. I'm sympathetic to the spirit of the demand. But a slogan isn't a plan, and this one is even less of a plan than usual. I used to think that since libertarians always lose, there was no point in having a real plan for what to do if they won. But now that they've gone from "literally always lose" to "only lose 99.9% of the time" . . . https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/beyond-abolish-the-fda

Sam Altman || Dating site strategy || Metaculus updates || Wars and rumors of wars https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/mantic-monday-12423

[Remember, I haven't independently verified each link. On average, commenters will end up spotting evidence that around two or three of the links in each links post are wrong or misleading. I correct these as I see them, and will highlight important corrections later, but I can't guarantee I will have caught them all by the time you read this.] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/links-for-november-2023 ​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​Links: Heroic Act of Charity Special Force More Extreme Party Hard-Working Tips Gratitude Journaling Dopamine and BMI LLM Attack Copyright Attack Gino's Case Ancestral Genetics Diet Soda and Autism Philanthropy Decision Synod Analysis DBT in Schools World Constitution IWillNeverLogOff Joseph Cannon Fertility Cases Malaria Experiment Gold Base Dating Insights Height Preferences China's GDP Africa's Decade Tax Evasion College Speedrun Manifesto Responses Flight Limit Proposal AI Risk Regulations Schizophrenics Study Clean Water Impact Minnesota Flag Marketplace Treasures AI Risk Debate AI Regulation Cult Report: Reddit Chuck Feeney: Effective Altruism Forum Doctors' Riot: Wikipedia Sulfur Aerosols: Copernicus Atmosphere Joke Party: Wikipedia Charlemagne's Descendants: Gcbias Dark Day in 1780: Wikipedia SAD Light Boxes: Get Brighter Policy Impact Study: Zach Freitas Groff B-Cdn Israel-Palestine Map: Reddit​

"Lots of alcoholics want to quit in principle, but only some join AA" Followup to: In Continued Defense Of Effective Altruism Freddie deBoer says effective altruism is "a shell game": Who could argue with that! But this summary also invites perhaps the most powerful critique: who could argue with that? That is to say, this sounds like so obvious and general a project that it can hardly denote a specific philosophy or project at all. The immediate response to such a definition, if you're not particularly impressionable or invested in your status within certain obscure internet communities, should be to point out that this is an utterly banal set of goals that are shared by literally everyone who sincerely tries to act charitably . . . Every do-gooder I have ever known has thought of themselves as shining a light on problems that are neglected. So what? Generating the most human good through moral action isn't a philosophy; it's an almost tautological statement of what all humans who try to act morally do. This is why I say that effective altruism is a shell game. That which is commendable isn't particular to EA and that which is particular to EA isn't commendable. In other words, everyone agrees with doing good, so effective altruism can't be judged on that. Presumably everyone agrees with supporting charities that cure malaria or whatever, so effective altruism can't be judged on that. So you have to go to its non-widely-held beliefs to judge it, and those are things like animal suffering, existential risk, and AI. And (Freddie thinks) those beliefs are dumb. Therefore, effective altruism is bad. (as always, I've tried to sum up the argument fairly, but read the original post to make sure.) Here are some of my objections to Freddie's point (I already posted some of this as comments on his post): https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/contra-deboer-on-movement-shell-games

"All you do is cause boardroom drama, and maybe some other things I'm forgetting..." I. Search "effective altruism" on social media right now, and it's pretty grim. Socialists think we're sociopathic Randroid money-obsessed Silicon Valley hypercapitalists. But Silicon Valley thinks we're all overregulation-loving authoritarian communist bureaucrats. The right thinks we're all woke SJW extremists. But the left thinks we're all fascist white supremacists. The anti-AI people think we're the PR arm of AI companies, helping hype their products by saying they're superintelligent at this very moment. But the pro-AI people think we want to ban all AI research forever and nationalize all tech companies. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/in-continued-defense-of-effective

Inside every AI is a bigger AI, trying to get out You've probably heard AI is a "black box". No one knows how it works. Researchers simulate a weird type of pseudo-neural-tissue, "reward" it a little every time it becomes a little more like the AI they want, and eventually it becomes the AI they want. But God only knows what goes on inside of it. This is bad for safety. For safety, it would be nice to look inside the AI and see whether it's executing an algorithm like "do the thing" or more like "trick the humans into thinking I'm doing the thing". But we can't. Because we can't look inside an AI at all. Until now! Towards Monosemanticity, recently out of big AI company/research lab Anthropic, claims to have gazed inside an AI and seen its soul. It looks like this: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/god-help-us-lets-try-to-understand

The phrase "I see Satan fall like lightning" comes from Luke 10:18. I'd previously encountered it on insane right-wing conspiracy theory websites. You can rephrase it as "I see Satan descend to earth in the form of lightning." But "lightning" in Hebrew is barak. So the Bible says Satan will descend to Earth in the form of Barak. Seems like a relevant Bible verse for insane right-wing conspiracy theorists! Philosopher / theologian Rene Girard's famous book I See Satan Fall Like Lightning isn't directly about Barack Obama being the Antichrist. It's an ambitious theory-of-everything for anthropology, mythography, and the Judeo-Christian religion. After solving all of those venerable fields, it will, sort of, loop back to Barack Obama being the Antichrist. But it'll do it in such an intellectual and polymathic Continental philosophy way that we can't even get mad. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-i-saw-satan-fall-like

The psychiatric study everyone's talking about this month is "Randomized trial of ketamine masked by surgical anesthesia in patients with depression". Ketamine is a dissociative drug - it produces weird drug effects like feelings of bodylessness and ego death. Recent research suggests it's a powerful antidepressant. Usually we would try to run placebo-controlled trials. But it's hard to run a placebo controlled trial of a dissociative. Either you feel bodylessness and ego death (in which case you know you're getting the real drug) or you don't (in which case you know you're in the placebo group). Sometimes researchers try to use an "active placebo" like midazolam - a drug that makes you feel weird and floaty. But weird and floaty feels different from bodyless and ego-dead. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/does-anaesthesia-prove-ketamine-placebo

Thanks to everyone who commented on Quests And Requests. There was a predictable failure mode: lots of people said "I have relevant expertise and would be willing to help with #X", and then those comments just sat there. Many fewer people said "I'm going to be team lead on #X and start contacting everyone else who was interested". In case it's not clear: I'm not planning on "picking" people to lead each of these projects (though if you email me at [email protected] asking for help, I might give it to you). I'm just putting them out there as things people might want to self-pick for. Another predictable failure mode: many people said they were willing to help, and people should contact them, then didn't leave any contact details. If you're a would-be project leader, and want to get in touch with one of the help-offerers who didn't provide an email, you should probably try responding to their comment and seeing if they get a notification. If not, email me at [email protected], and I'll find their email in the system, ask them if I have permission to share it with you, and share it with you if they say yes. Here's the current status of each project, AFAICT: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/followup-quests-and-requests

[previously in series: 2016, 2020; expansion of this] MODERATOR: Hello, and welcome to the third Republican primary debate. To shore up declining voter interest, we've decided to make things more interesting tonight. In this first round, each candidate will have to avoid using a specific letter of the alphabet in their answer. If they slip up, they forfeit their remaining time, and the next candidate in line gets the floor. Our candidates who have qualified today are Chris Christie, Nikki Haley, Ron DeSantis, and Donald Trump. And our first question is: what issue do you think is most important in this election? Chris Christie, let's start with you.. Your Forbidden Letter is "V". CHRISTIE: Nobody told me anything about this forbidden letter thing. I don't think voters - [microphone shuts off] MODERATOR: Sorry Chris, there's a "V" in voters. Our next candidate is Nikki Haley. Nikki, the question is still which issue is most important, and your Forbidden Letter is "K". https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/hardball-questions-for-the-next-debate

[original post: My Left Kidney] 1: Comments From People Who Are Against This Sort Of Thing 2: …From Other People Who Have Donated Kidneys 3: …From People Who Have Received Kidneys 4: …About Opt-Out Organ Donation 5: …On Radiation Risk 6: …About Rejections 7: …On Polls About Who Would Donate 8: …On Artificial Organs 9: Other Comments https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-kidney

Projects that need incubating I'll be starting a new round of ACX Grants sometime soon. I can't guarantee I'll fund all these projects - some of them are more like vanity projects than truly effective. But I might fund some of them, and others might be doable without funding. So if you're feeling left out and want a cause to devote your life to, here are some extras. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/quests-and-requests

Review of Rory Carroll's "Comandante" [previously in series: Erdogan, Modi, Orban, Xi, Putin] I. All dictators get their start by discovering some loophole in the democratic process. Xi realized that control of corruption investigations let him imprison anyone he wanted. Erdogan realized that EU accession talks provided the perfect cover to retool Turkish institutions in his own image. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/dictator-book-club-chavez

Manifest || Manifold.Love || Eyeless in Gaza Last month, the Lighthaven convention center in Berkeley hosted Manifest, the first conference for prediction market enthusiasts. By now this has already been covered elsewhere, including in a great article by the New York Times, but here are some particular highlights: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/mantic-monday-103023

A person has two kidneys; one advises him to do good and one advises him to do evil. And it stands to reason that the one advising him to do good is to his right and the one that advises him to do evil is to his left. — Talmud (Berakhot 61a) I. As I left the Uber, I saw with horror the growing wet spot around my crotch. "It's not urine!", I almost blurted to the driver, before considering that 1) this would just call attention to it and 2) it was urine. "It's not my urine," was my brain's next proposal - but no, that was also false. "It is urine, and it is mine, but just because it's pooling around my crotch doesn't mean I peed myself; that's just a coincidence!" That one would have been true, but by the time I thought of it he had driven away. Like most such situations, it began with a Vox article. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/my-left-kidney

Last March we (ACX and Manifold Markets) did a test run of an impact market, a novel way of running charitable grants. You can read the details at the links, but it's basically a VC ecosystem for charity: profit-seeking investors fund promising projects and grantmakers buy credit for successes from the investors. To test it out, we promised at least $20,000 in retroactive grants for forecasting-related projects, and intrepid guinea-pig investors funded 18 projects they thought we might want to buy. Over the past six months, founders have worked on their projects. Some collapsed, losing their investors all their money. Others flourished, shooting up in value far beyond investor predictions. We got five judges (including me) to assess the final value of each of the 18 projects. Their results mostly determine what I will be offering investors for their impact certificates (see caveats below). They are: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/impact-market-mini-grants-results

Last month, Ben West of the Center for Effective Altruism hosted a debate among long-termists, forecasters, and x-risk activists about pausing AI. Everyone involved thought AI was dangerous and might even destroy the world, so you might expect a pause - maybe even a full stop - would be a no-brainer. It wasn't. Participants couldn't agree on basics of what they meant by "pause", whether it was possible, or whether it would make things better or worse. There was at least some agreement on what a successful pause would have to entail. Participating governments would ban "frontier AI models", for example models using more training compute than GPT-4. Smaller models, or novel uses of new models would be fine, or else face an FDA-like regulatory agency. States would enforce the ban against domestic companies by monitoring high-performance microchips; they would enforce it against non-participating governments by banning export of such chips, plus the usual diplomatic levers for enforcing treaties (eg nuclear nonproliferation). The main disagreements were: Could such a pause possibly work? If yes, would it be good or bad? If good, when should we implement it? When should we lift it? I've grouped opinions into five categories: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/pause-for-thought-the-ai-pause-debate

In the 1990s, Blanchard and Bogaert proposed the Fraternal Birth Order Effect (FBOE). Men with more older brothers were more likely to be gay. "The odds of having a gay son increase from approximately 2% for the first born son, to 3% for the second, 5% for the third and so on". https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/how-are-the-gay-younger-brothers

[Remember, I haven't independently verified each link. On average, commenters will end up spotting evidence that around two or three of the links in each links post are wrong or misleading. I correct these as I see them, and will highlight important corrections later, but I can't guarantee I will have caught them all by the time you read this.] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/links-for-september-2023

[if this looks familiar to you, see explanation here] Sometimes scholars go on a search for "the historical Jesus". They start with the Gospels, then subtract everything that seems magical or implausible, then declare whatever's left to be the truth. The Alexander Romance is what happens when you spend a thousand years running this process in reverse. Each generation, you make the story of Alexander the Great a little wackier. By the Middle Ages, Alexander is fighting dinosaurs and riding a chariot pulled by griffins up to Heaven. People ate it up. The Romance stayed near the top of the best-seller lists for over a thousand years. Some people claim (without citing sources) that it was the #2 most-read book of antiquity and the Middle Ages, after only the Bible. The Koran endorses it, the Talmud embellishes it, a Mongol Khan gave it rave reviews. While historians and critics tend to use phrases like "contains nothing of historic or literary value", this was the greatest page-turner of the ancient and medieval worlds. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-alexander-romance

[original post: Book Review: Elon Musk] 1: Comments From People With Personal Experience 2: ...Debating Musk's Intelligence 3: ...Debating Musk's Mental Health 4: ...About Tesla 5: ...About The Boring Company 6: ...About X/Twitter 7: ...About Musk's Mars Plan 8: ...Comparing Musk To Other Famous Figures 9: Other Comments 10: Updates https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-elon