Astral Codex Ten Podcast

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...

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, politic...

[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-...

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 ta...

[ 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 ju...

[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 o...

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...

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-yo...

(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...

[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 co...

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 ca...

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,...

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...

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 t...

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-ma...

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...

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 stateme...

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 thi...

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-m...

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 u...

"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 w...

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...