Astral Codex Ten Podcast

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...

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...

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...

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...

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-unlock...

[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-20...

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 unrela...

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 vul...

[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...

[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 p...

"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...

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 O...

[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 bluf...

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 ho...

"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"...

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-2...

"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 s...

"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....

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 nic...

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 t...

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 pla...