Astral Codex Ten Podcast

Original post here. And I forgot to highlight a link to the directory of dating docs. Table Of Contents 1: Comments That Remain At Least Sort Of Against Dating Docs 2: Comments Concerned That Dating Docs Are Bad For Status Or Signaling 3: Comments About Orthodox Judaism And Other Traditional Cultures 4: Comments Including Research 5: Comments By People With Demographically Unusual Relationships 6: Comments About The Five Fake Sample Profiles 7: Things I Changed My Mind About https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-dating

On the fetish post, I discussed people who had some early sexual experience - like seeing a sexy cartoon character - and reacted in some profound way, like becoming a furry. Sometimes people have described this as a "critical window" for sexuality (similar to the "critical period" in language learning?) where young children "imprint" on sexual experiences - and then can't un-imprint on them later, even when they see many examples of sex that don't involve cartoon animals. One of my distant cousins won't eat tomatoes. His parents say when he was very young, he bit into a cherry tomato and it exploded into goo in his mouth, and he was so upset he wouldn't eat tomatoes from then on. Now he's in his 30s and still hates them. Is this fairly described as a "critical window" for food preferences? https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/more-thoughts-on-critical-windows

Scott Young writes about Seven Expert Opinions I Agree With That Most People Don't. I like most of them, but #6, Children don't learn languages faster than adults, deserves a closer look. Some people imagine babies have some magic language ability that lets them pick up their first language easily, even as we adults struggle through verb conjugations to pick up our second. But babies are embedded in a family of first-language speakers with no other options for communication. If an English-speaking adult was placed in a monolingual Spanish family, in a part of Spain with no English speakers, after a few years they might find they'd learned Spanish "easily" too. So Scott says: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/critical-periods-for-language-much

Epistemic status: Ha ha, only serious... Arguing about gender is like taking OxyContin. There can be good reasons to do it. But most people don't do it for the good reasons. And even if you start doing it for good reasons, you might get addicted and ruin your life. Walk through San Francisco if you want to see people who ruined their lives with opioids; browse Substack to get a visceral appreciation of the dangers of arguing about gender. Still, I've been debating autogynephilia fetishes with Michael Bailey, tailcalled, Zack Davis, and Aella (Bailey and Davis think they're deeply involved in transgender; tailcalled, Aella and I mostly don't); I've also studied BDSM and lactation fetishes, and Aella has done even more fetish-ology work. In a world that might be on the verge of radical, even unimaginable changes, how do we justify spending time on such an unsavory field? The real answer is - we don't justify it. I'm easily nerd-sniped just like everyone else, and I assume the same is true of Aella, tailcalled, etc. This post is about a fake answer which I think is funny, but which also has just enough truth to be worth thinking about: I think fetish research can help us understand AI and AI alignment. https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/what-can-fetish-research-tell-us

[This is one of the finalists in the 2023 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] Are bees smart? To answer that question, here's a crab spider: Sadly, this is not a review of a book called The Mind of a Crab Spider. But as you crab spider lovers know, crab spiders and bumble bees are natural rivals. Both bees and crab spiders are well-matched for strength and speed, and in the Rumble with the Bumble, the crab spider doesn't necessarily win. Bees can often evade the spider, and live to pollinate another day. Lars Chittka, who wrote The Mind of a Bee, and who can safely be blamed for this book review, got thinking. He and his lab decided to build fake robotic crab spiders, and had them really robotically attack bumble bees when they visited flowers. https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-mind-of-a-bee

[previously in series: 1, 2, 3] You spent the evening agonizing over which Bay Area House Party to attend. The YIMBY parties are always too crowded. VC parties were a low-interest-rate phenomenon. You've heard too many rumors of consent violations at the e/acc parties - they don't know when to stop. And last time you went to a crypto bro party, you didn't even have anything to drink, and somehow you still woke up the next morning lying in a gutter, minus your wallet and clothes. You finally decide on a Progress Studies party - the last one was kind of dull, but you hear they're getting better. https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/bride-of-bay-area-house-party

The New York Times has an article on "dating docs". These are a local phenomenon - I think an ex of mine might have been Patient Zero. I don't begrudge the Times for writing about them. I'm just surprised they're considered an interesting phenomenon. What could be more obvious than making sure potential dates know what you're like? https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/in-defense-of-describable-dating

Finalist #13 in the Book Review Contest [This is one of the finalists in the 2023 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] Down from the gardens of Asia descending radiating, Adam and Eve appear… — Walt Whitman When I grew up I was still part of a primitive culture, in the following sense: my elders told me the story of how our people came to be. It started with the Greeks: Pericles the statesman, Plato the first philosopher, Herodotus the first historian, the first playwrights, and before them all Homer, the blind first poet. Before Greece, something called prehistory stretched back. There were Iron and Bronze Ages, and before that the Stone Age. These were shadowy, mysterious realms. Then history went on to Europe. I learnt as little outside Europe as I did before Greece. There was one class on 20th century China, but that too was about China becoming modern, which meant European. A big silent intellectual change of the past quarter century is the broadening of our self-concept. https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-weirdest-people

[original post: Dictator Book Club: Putin] Table of Contents: 1. Comments Further Illuminating Putin's Rise To Power 2. Comments Questioning Masha Gessen's Objectivity 3. Comments Claiming Putin Is Very Slightly Less Bad Than The Book Suggests 4. Comments On Putin As Culture Warrior 5. Comments Expressing Concern That The FBI/CIA Are Capable Of Undermining Democracy In The US https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-putin

[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://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-august-2023

[This is one of the finalists in the 2023 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] What does it take to be literally Hitler? https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-rise-and-fall

Actual serious review here, Amazon link to the book here. These were just some extra parts that stuck out to me. https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/more-memorable-passages-from-the

Review of Masha Gessen's "The Man Without A Face" [previously in series: Erdogan, Modi, Orban, Xi] I. Vladimir Putin's Childhood As Metaphor For Life Vladimir Putin appeared on Earth fully-formed at the age of nine. At least this is the opinion of Natalia Gevorkyan, his first authorized biographer. There were plenty of witnesses and records to every post-nine-year-old stage of Putin's life. Before that, nothing. Gevorkyan thinks he might have been adopted. Putin's official mother, Maria Putina, was 42 and sickly when he was born. In 1999, a Georgian peasant woman, Vera Putina, claimed to be his real mother, who had given him up for adoption when he was ten. Journalists dutifully investigated and found that a "Vladimir Putin" had been registered at her village's school, and that a local teacher remembered him as a bright pupil who loved Russian folk tales. What happened to him? Unclear; Artyom Borovik, the investigative journalist pursuing the story, died in a plane crash just before he could publish. Another investigative journalist, Antonio Russo, took up the story, but "his body was found on the edge of a country road . . . bruised and showed signs of torture, with techniques related to special military services." https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/dictator-book-club-putin

You can find the meetup organizer volunteer form here. If you want to know if anyone has signed up to run a meetup for your city, you can view that here. Everyone else, just wait until 8/25 and I'll give you more information on where to go then. https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/meetups-everywhere-fall-2023-call

Plus more CFTC, X, and UFOs https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-73123-room-temperature

Finalist #11 in the Book Review Contest [This is one of the finalists in the 2023 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] What kind of fiction could be remarkable enough for an Astral Codex Ten review? How about the drug-fueled fantasies of a serial killer? Or perhaps the innovative, sophisticated prose of the first novel of a brilliant polymath? Or would you prefer a book written in such fantastically lucid language it feels more like a dream than a story? Possibly you'd be more interested in a book so unbelievably dangerous that the attempt to publish it was literally suicidal. Or maybe an unusual political book, such as an ultraconservative indictment of democracy by Adolf Hitler's favorite author? Or rather an indictment of both Hitler and Bolshevism, written by someone who was among the first to recognize Hitler as a true enemy of humanity? I picked On the Marble Cliffs, because it is all of that at the same time. https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-on-the-marble-cliffs

Suppose there's freedom of religion: everyone can choose what religion to practice. Is there some sense in which this is "undemocratic"? Would it be more "democratic" if the democratically-elected government declared a state religion, and everyone had to follow it? You could, in theory, define "democratic" this way, so that the more areas of life are subjected to the control of a (democratically elected) government, the more democratic your society is. But in that case, the most democratic possible society is totalitarianism - a society where the government controls every facet of life, including what religion you practice, who you marry, and what job you work at. In this society there would be no room for human freedom. https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/bad-definitions-of-democracy-and

[original post: Contra The Social Model Of Disability] Table Of Contents 1: Comments Defending The Social Model 2: Comments About The Social Model Being Used (Or Not) In Real Life 3: Other Comments 4: Summary / What I Learned https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-social

Machine Alignment Monday, 7/24/23 Intelligence explosion arguments don't require Platonism. They just require intelligence to exist in the normal fuzzy way that all concepts exist. First, I'll describe what the normal way concepts exist is. I'll have succeeded if I convince you that claims using the word "intelligence" are coherent and potentially true. Second, I'll argue, based on humans and animals, that these coherent-and-potentially-true things are actually true. Third, I'll argue that so far this has been the most fruitful way to think about AI, and people who try to think about it differently make worse AIs. Finally, I'll argue this is sufficient for ideas of "intelligence explosion" to be coherent. https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/were-not-platonists-weve-just-learned

[This is one of the finalists in the 2023 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] A book about trading isn't ever actually about trading. It is either: A former trader sharing stories from their glory days, e.g. Liar's Poker, the exposé that morphed into a how-to guide, or Tales of Icarus flying too close to the sun, where readers revel in schadenfreude, e.g., When Genius Failed. With The Laws of Trading, Agustin Lebron has written something different: part love letter to trading, part philosophical treatise on epistemology and modeling the world around us, and part guide to applied decision-making. Lebron's Laws are Laws of the Jungle, not Laws of Nature. He views financial markets as the most competitive Darwinian environment on Earth, where participants must adapt or die. https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-laws-of-trading

People are talking about British economic decline. Not just the decline from bestriding the world in the 19th century to today. A more recent, more profound decline, starting in the early 2000s, when it fell off the track of normal developed-economy growth. See for example this graph from We Are In An Unprecedented Era Of UK Relative Macroeconomic Decline: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-british

This month's big news in forecasting: the Forecasting Research Institute has released the results of the Existential Risk Persuasion Tournament (XPT). XPT was supposed to use cutting-edge forecasting techniques to develop consensus estimates of the danger from various global risks like climate change, nuclear war, etc. The plan was: get domain experts (eg climatologists, nuclear policy experts) and superforecasters (people with a proven track record of making very good predictions) in the same room. Have them talk to each other. Use team-based competition with monetary prizes to incentivize accurate answers. Between the domain experts' knowledge and the superforecasters' prediction-making ability, they should be able to converge on good predictions. They didn't. In most risk categories, the domain experts predicted higher chances of doom than the superforecasters. No amount of discussion could change minds on either side. https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-extinction-tournament

Elon Musk has a new AI company, xAI. I appreciate that he seems very concerned about alignment. From his Twitter Spaces discussion: I think I have been banging the drum on AI safety now for a long time. If I could press pause on AI or advanced AI digital superintelligence, I would. It doesn't seem like that is realistic . . . I could talk about this for a long time, it's something that I've thought about for a really long time and actually was somewhat reluctant to do anything in this space because I am concerned about the immense power of a digital superintelligence. It's something that, I think is maybe hard for us to even comprehend. He describes his alignment strategy in that discussion and a later followup: The premise is have the AI be maximally curious, maximally truth-seeking, I'm getting a little esoteric here, but I think from an AI safety standpoint, a maximally curious AI - one that's trying to understand the universe - I think is going to be pro-humanity from the standpoint that humanity is just much more interesting than not . . . Earth is vastly more interesting than Mars. . . that's like the best thing I can come up with from an AI safety standpoint. I think this is better than trying to explicitly program morality - if you try to program morality, you have to ask whose morality. And even if you're extremely good at how you program morality into AI, there's the morality inversion problem - Waluigi - if you program Luigi, you inherently get Waluigi. I would be concerned about the way OpenAI is programming AI - about this is good, and that's not good. https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/contra-the-xai-alignment-plan

[This is one of the finalists in the 2023 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] "The promise of a new educational theory", writes Kieran Egan, "has the magnetism of a newspaper headline like 'Small Earthquake in Chile: Few Hurt'". But — could a new kind of school make the world rational? I discovered the work of Kieran Egan in a dreary academic library. The book I happened to find — Getting it Wrong from the Beginning — was an evisceration of progressive schools. As I worked at one at the time, I got a kick out of this. To be sure, broadsides against progressivist education aren't exactly hard to come by. But Egan's account went to the root, deeper than any critique I had found. Better yet, as I read more, I discovered he was against traditionalist education, too — and that he had constructed a new paradigm that incorporated the best of both. https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-educated-mind

What is the Social Model Of Disability? I'll let its proponents describe it in their own words (emphases and line breaks mine) The Social Model Of Disability Explained (top Google result for the term): Individual limitations are not the cause of disability. Rather, it is society's failure to provide appropriate services and adequately ensure that the needs of disabled people are taken into account in societal organization. Disability rights group Scope: The model says that people are disabled by barriers in society, not by their impairment or difference. The American Psychological Association: It is [the] environment that creates the handicaps and barriers, not the disability. From this perspective, the way to address disability is to change the environment and society, rather than people with disabilities. Foundation For People With Learning Disabilities: The social model of disability proposes that what makes someone disabled is not their medical condition, but the attitudes and structures of society. University of California, San Francisco: Disabilities are restrictions imposed by society. Impairments are the effects of any given condition. The solution, according to this model, lies not in fixing the person, but in changing our society. Medical care, for example, should not focus on cures or treatments in order to rid our bodies of functional impairments. Instead, this care should focus on enhancing our daily function in society. The Social Model's main competitor is the Interactionist Model Of Disability, which says that disability is caused by an interaction of disease and society, and that it can be addressed by either treating the underlying condition or by adding social accommodations. In contrast to the Interactionist Model, the Social Model insists that disability is only due to society and not disease, and that it may only be addressed through social changes and not medical treatments. . . . this isn't how the Social Model gets taught in real classrooms. Instead, it's contrasted with "the Medical Model", a sort of Washington Generals of disability models which nobody will admit to believing. The Medical Model is "disability is only caused by disease , society never contributes in any way, and nobody should ever accommodate it at all . . . " Then the people describing it add ". . . and also, it says disabled people should be stigmatized, and not treated as real humans, and denied basic rights". Why does the first part imply the second? It doesn't matter, because "the Medical Model" was invented as a bogeyman to force people to run screaming into the outstretched arms of the Social Model. https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/contra-the-social-model-of-disability

Matt Yglesias' five-year old son asks: why do we send the top students to the best colleges? Why not send the weakest students to the best colleges, since they need the most help? This is one of those questions that's so naive it loops back and becomes interesting again. https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/why-match-school-and-student-rank

Finalist #8 in the Book Review Contest [This is one of the finalists in the 2023 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] There is widespread agreement among philosophers, political commentators, and the general public that transparency in government is an unalloyed good. Louis Brandeis famously articulates the common wisdom: "Publicity is justly commended as a remedy for social and industrial diseases. Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman" (page 1). Support for transparency is bipartisan. On his first day in office, Barack Obama said "My administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government." (page 1). On the Republican National Committee's website, one reads "Republicans believe that transparency is essential for good governance. Elected officials should be held accountable for their actions in Washington, D.C." (page 2) And so it is. Legislators' votes are published and stored in public online databases, their deliberations are televised, and their every action is extensively documented. https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-secret-government

[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://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-july-2023

Machine Alignment Monday, 7/3/2023 Tom Davidson's Compute-Centric Framework report forecasts a continuous but fast AI takeoff, where people hand control of big parts of the economy to millions of near-human-level AI assistants . I mentioned earlier that the CCF report comes out of Open Philanthropy's school of futurism, which differs from the Yudkowsky school where a superintelligent AI quickly takes over. Open Philanthropy is less explicitly apocalyptic than Yudkowsky, but they have concerns of their own about the future of humanity. I talked some people involved with the CCF report about possible scenarios. Thanks especially to Daniel Kokotajlo of OpenAI for his contributions. https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/tales-of-takeover-in-ccf-world

[This is one of the finalists in the 2023 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] The date is June 9, 1985. The place is the Davis-Besse nuclear plant near Toledo, Ohio. It is just after 1:35 am, and the plant has a small malfunction: "As the assistant supervisor entered the control room, he saw that one of the main feedwater pumps had tripped offline." But instead of stabilizing, one safety system after another failed to engage. https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-safe-enough

[Epistemic status: very uncertain about Part II; more convinced about Part III] I. This is the big question in the paper du jour, The Illusion Of Moral Decline, by Mastroianni and Gilbert (from here on: MG). It goes like this: people say that morality is declining. We know this because one million polls have asked people "do you think morality is declining?" and people always answer yes. MG go over these one million polls, do statistics to them, and find that people definitely think that morality is declining. People have thought this since at least 1949, when the first good polls were run - but realistically much longer. This could be (they say) either because morality is actually declining, or because of a bias. They argue that morality is not actually declining. In support, they marshal many polls asking questions like "Do you think most people are honest?" or "Do you think people treat you with respect?" and find that the answers mostly stay the same. Might this be because of definition creep - eg might people define "honest" relative to expectations, and expectations lower as morality declines? In order to rule this out, MG look at various objective questions that they think bear on morality, like "have you been mugged/assaulted recently?" or "have you donated blood in the past year?" They find that all of these have also stayed the same. Therefore, both people's subjective impressions of morality, and more objective proxies for social morality, have stayed the same. Therefore, morality is not actually declining. Therefore there must be a bias. https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/is-there-an-illusion-of-moral-decline

I. Bryan Caplan thinks he's debating me about mental illness. He's not. Sometimes he posts some thoughts he has been having about mental illness, with or without a sentence saying "this is part of my debate with Scott". Then I write a very long essay explaining why he is wrong. Then he ignores it, and has more thoughts, and again writes them up with "this is part of my debate with Scott". I would not describe this as debating. Call it unibating, or monobating, or another word ending in -bating which is less polite but as far as I can tell equally appropriate. Although he doesn't answer my rebuttals, he does diligently respond to various unrelated posts of mine, explaining why they must mean I am secretly admitting he was right all along. When I wrote about the scourge of witches stealing people's penises, Caplan spun it as me secretly admitting he was right all along about mental illness. Sometimes I feel like this has gone a bit too far - when I announced I had gotten married, Caplan spun it as me secretly admitting he was right all along about mental illness. Let it be known to all that I am never secretly admitting Bryan Caplan is right about mental illness. There is no further need to speculate that I am doing this. If you want to know my position vis-a-vis Bryan Caplan and mental illness, you are welcome to read my four thousand word essay on the subject, Contra Contra Contra Caplan On Psych. You will notice that the title clearly telegraphs that it is about Bryan Caplan and mental illness, and that (if you count up the contras) I am against him. If that ever changes, rest assured I will telegraph it in something titled equally clearly. https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/sure-whatever-lets-try-another-contra

Warning: This post might give vulnerable people new sensory sensitivities Everyone hates flashing banner ads, but maybe they're a necessary evil. Creators want money, advertisers demand a certain level of visibility for their ad buys, maybe sites are willing to eat the cost in user goodwill. Fine. But what's everyone else's excuse? https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/every-flashing-element-on-your-site

(Includes full article narration.) I have an article summarizing attempts to forecast AI progress, including a five year check-in on the predictions in Grace et al (2017). It's not here, it's at asteriskmag.com, a rationalist / effective altruist magazine: Through A Glass Darkly. This is their AI issue (it's not always so AI focused). https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/through-a-glass-darkly-in-asterisk

[This is one of the finalists in the 2023 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. Today, pundits across the political spectrum bemoan America's inability to build. Across the country, NIMBYs and status-quo defenders exploit procedural rules to block new development, giving us a world where it takes longer to get approval for a single new building in San Francisco than it did to build the entire Empire State Building, where so-called "environmental review" is weaponized to block even obviously green initiatives like solar panels, and where new public works projects are completed years late and billions over budget—or, like California's incredible shrinking high-speed rail, may never be completed at all. Inevitably, such a complex set of dysfunctions must have an equally complex set of causes. It took us decades to get into this mess, and just as there's no one simple fix, there's no one simple inflection point in our history on which we can place all the blame. But what if there was? What if there was, in fact, a single person we could blame for this entire state of affairs, a patsy from the past at whom we could all point our censorious fingers and shout, "It's that guy's fault!" There is such a person, suggests history professor Paul Sabin in his new book Public Citizens: The Attack on Big Government and the Remaking of American Liberalism. And he isn't isn't a mustache-twirling villain—he's a liberal intellectual. If you know him for anything, it's probably for being the reason you know what a hanging chad is. That's right: it's all Ralph Nader's fault. https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-public-citizens

Machine Alignment Monday 6/19/23 The face of Mt. Everest is gradual and continuous; for each point on the mountain, the points 1 mm away aren't too much higher or lower. But you still wouldn't want to ski down it. I thought about this when reading What A Compute-Centric Framework Says About Takeoff Speeds, by Tom Davidson. Davidson tries to model what some people (including me) have previously called "slow AI takeoff". He thinks this is a misnomer. Like skiing down the side of Mount Everest, progress in AI capabilities can be simultaneously gradual, continuous, fast, and terrifying. Specifically, he predicts it will take about three years to go from AIs that can do 20% of all human jobs (weighted by economic value) to AIs that can do 100%, with significantly superhuman AIs within a year after that. As penance for my previous mistake, I'll try to describe Davidson's forecast in more depth. https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/davidson-on-takeoff-speeds

Finalist #5 in the Book Review Contest [This is one of the finalists in the 2023 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. I found Njal's Saga hard to follow. Halfway through, a friend reassured me it wasn't my fault. The medieval Icelanders had erred in releasing it as a book. It should have been the world's wackiest Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney spinoff. Remember, medieval Iceland was an early attempt at anarcho-capitalist utopia. When Harald Fairhair declared himself King of Norway, the Norwegians who refused to bend the knee fled west to build a makeshift seastead on a frozen volcanic island. No lords, no kings, no masters. Only lawsuits. So, so many lawsuits. Once a year, the Icelanders would meet at the Althing, a free-for-all open-air law court. There they would engage in that most Viking of pastimes - suing each other, ad nauseam, for every minor slight of the past six months. Offended parties would sell their rights to prosecute a case to the highest bidder, who would go around seeking fair arbitrators (or, in larger cases, defer to a panel chosen by chieftain-nobles called godi. Courts would propose a penalty for the losing side - usually money. There were no police, but if the losers refused to pay, the courts could declare them "outlaws" - in which case it was legal to kill them. If you wanted to be a Viking in medieval Iceland, you needed a good lawyer. And Njal was the greatest lawyer of all. https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-njals-saga

Unfortunately I hate many of you. Only the ones with Twitter accounts. If you don't have one of those, you're fine. But if you do have one, there's a good chance you said something which horribly offended me. You said everyone who believed X was an idiot and a Nazi, and I believed X. You read the title but not the body of an article about some group I care about, and viciously insulted them based on your misunderstanding of their position. You spent five seconds thinking of a clever dunk on someone who happened to be a friend of mine trying really hard to make the world better, and ruined their day. https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-incentives-are-not-the-same

You know all the stuff we've been talking about here the past few years - mental mountains, trapped priors, relaxed beliefs under psychedelics? The new keyword for all of that is "canalization". At least that's what I gather from a giant paper recently published by some of the leading thinkers in computational psychiatry (Karl Friston, Robin Carhart-Harris, etc). A quick review: you can model the brain as an energy landscape . . . . . . with various peaks and valleys in some multidimensional space Situations and stimuli plant "you" at some point on the landscape, and then you "roll down" towards some local minimum. If you're the sort of person who repeats "I hate myself, I hate myself" in a lot of different situations, then you can think of the action of saying "I hate myself" as an attractor - a particularly steep, deep valley which it's easy to fall into and hard to get out of. Many situations are close to the slopes of the "I hate myself" valley, so it's easy to roll down and get caught there. What are examples of valleys other than saying "I hate myself"? The authors suggest habits. If you always make the sign of the cross when passing a graveyard, there's a steep slope from the situation of passing a graveyard to the action of signing the cross. We can be even broader: something really basic like edge-detection in the visual system is a valley. When you see a scene, you almost always want to automatically do edge-detection on it. Walking normally is a valley; there's a certain correct sequence of muscle movements, and you don't want to start rotating your ligaments in some weird direction halfway through. https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-canal-papers tt

Finalist #4 in the Book Review Contest [This is one of the finalists in the 2023 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://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-mans-search-for

Sometimes people do a study and find that a particular correlation is r = 0.2, or a particular effect size is d = 1.1. Then an article tries to "put this in context". "The study found r = 0.2, which for context is about the same as the degree to which the number of spots on a dog affects its friskiness." But there are many statistics that are much higher than you would intuitively think, and many other statistics that are much lower than you would intuitively think. A dishonest person can use one of these for "context", and then you will incorrectly think the effect is very high or very low. https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/attempts-to-put-statistics-in-context

Original post: Why Is The Academic Job Market So Weird? Table Of Contents Comments With More Information On Academic Hiring 2. Comments About How Things Got This Way 3. Comparisons To The Programmer Job Market 4. Comparisons To Other Job Markets 5. Proposed Solutions 6. Comments With Practical Advice For New PhDs https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-the-bc8

Finalist #3 in the Book Review Contest [This is one of the finalists in the 2023 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'll begin with a contentious but invariably true statement, which I've no interest in defending here: new books—at least new nonfiction books—are not meant to be read. In truth, a new book is a Schelling point for the transmission of ideas. So while the nominal purpose of a book review like this is to answer the question Should I read this book?, its real purpose is to answer Should I pick up these ideas? I set out to find the best book-length argument—one that really engages with the technical issues—against imminent, world-dooming, Skynet-and-Matrix-manifesting artificial intelligence. I arrived at Why Machines Will Never Rule the World by Jobst Landgrebe and Barry Smith, published by Routledge just last year. Landgrebe, an AI and biomedicine entrepreneur, and Smith, an eminent philosopher, are connected by their study of Edmund Husserl, and the influence of Husserl and phenomenology is clear throughout the book. ("Influence of Husserl" is usually a good enough reason to stop reading something.) Should you read Why Machines Will Never Rule the World? If you're an AI safety researcher or have a technical interest in the topic, then you might enjoy it. It's sweeping and impeccably researched, but it's also academic and at times demanding, and for long stretches the meat-to-shell ratio is poor. But should you pick up these ideas? My aim here isn't to summarize the book, or marinate you in its technical details. ATU 325 is heady stuff. Rather, I simply want to give you a taste of the key arguments, enough to decide the question for yourself. https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-why-machines-will

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-may-2023 [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.]

In this post, the author suggests that the standard metrics for assessing the efficacy of medications, especially antidepressants, may be flawed and restrictive, indicating that if these stringent standards were applied to other common medications, they too would be deemed 'clinically insignificant', despite widespread acceptance of their effectiveness​. https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/all-medications-are-insignificant

This post explores the differing responses to alternative wellness practices, suggesting various explanations, and highlights the challenge of discerning whether certain behaviors, such as drug use among schizophrenics, serve as coping mechanisms or exacerbate the issues​. https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/are-woo-non-responders-defective

[This is one of the finalists in the 2023 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] You can't really understand the exception without understanding the rule. In order for him to understand why it was remarkable that the Titanic sank, you would first have to explain to the caveman how it was that a 52,310 ton vessel not only existed, but was able to float. This is the gift that Dan Davies gives us in Lying For Money. Despite taking econ classes in college, and spending years as a business owner who has had to do things like raise money from investors, my understanding of how the modern economy operates often feels about as complete as a caveman's understanding of how a cruise ship floats. The book delivers on the promise implied by its subtitle, How Legendary Frauds Reveal the Workings of Our World. Financial instruments (and other aspects of the economy) are things that are best understood in the breach: in the process of teaching us the various ways in which financial systems can break, Davies also teaches us how they work.

"Female hypergamy" (from now on, just "hypergamy") is a supposed tendency for women to seek husbands who are higher-status than themselves. Arguing about educational hypergamy (women seeking husbands who are more educated than themselves) is especially popular, because women are now (on average) more educated than men - if every woman wants a more-educated husband, most won't get them, and there will be some kind of crisis. https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/hypergamy-much-more-than-you-wanted

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-52223 Whales v. Minnows // US v. Itself // EPJ v. The Veil Of Time // Balaji v. Medlock Manifold is a play money prediction market. Its intended purpose is to have fun and estimate the probabilities of important events. But instead of betting on important events, you might choose to speculate on trivialities. And instead of having fun, you might choose to ruin your life. From the beginning, there were joke markets like "Will at least 100 people bet on this market?" or "Will this market's probability end in an even number?" While serious people worked on increasingly sophisticated estimation mechanisms for world events, pranksters worked on increasingly convoluted jokes. In early April, power user Is. started "Whales Vs. Minnows": Will traders hold at least 10000x as many YES shares as there are traders holding NO shares? In other words, Team Whale had to sink lots of mana (play money) into the market, and Team Minnow had to get lots of people to participate. tt

[This is one of the finalists in the 2023 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] If you know Jane Jacobs at all, you know her for her work on cities. Her most famous book, published in 1961, is called The Death and Life of Great American Cities. It criticizes large-scale, top-down "urban renewal" policies, which destroy organic communities. Today almost everyone agrees with her on that, and she is considered one of the most influential thinkers on urban theory. This is not a review of The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Perhaps it would be, if I had become interested in Jane Jacobs's ideas on cities like a normal person. But I didn't: I started with two books that came to me by random chance, or fate, if you want to call it that. https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-cities-and-the-wealth