Astral Codex Ten Podcast

[ 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, publi...

Bret Devereaux writes here about the oddities of the academic job market. His piece is comprehensive, and you should read it, but short version: professors are split into tenure-track (30%, good pay and benefits) and adjunct (50%, bad pay and benefits). Another 20% are "teaching-track", somewhere in between. Everyone wants a tenure-track job. But colleges hiring new tenure-track faculty prefer new...

Adam Mastroianni has a great review of Memories Of My Life , the autobiography of Francis Galton. Mastroianni centers his piece around the question: how could a brilliant scientist like Galton be so devoted to an evil idea like eugenics? This sparked the usual eugenics discussion. In case you haven't heard it before: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/galton-ehrlich-buck

Table of Contents 1. Summary Of Best Comments And Overall Updates 2. Comments Proposing Explanations Based On Response Patterns 3. Comments Proposing Explanations Based On Biology 4. Comments By Jim Coyne 5. Comments Expressing Concerns About The Dangers Of Calling Things Psychosomatic 6. Other Comments https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-long Original post: Repli...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-housing Table Of Contents: 1. Comments About Whether Density Causes Desirability 2. Comments About Jobs And Amenities (And Not Density Per Se) Producing Desirability 3. Comments About Chinese Ghost Cities 4. Comments Accusing Me Of Not Considering Tokyo, Even Though I Included A Section In The Post On Why I Didn't Think Tokyo Wa...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/constitutional-ai-rlhf-on-steroids A Machine Alignment Monday post, 5/8/23 What Is Constitutional AI? AIs like GPT-4 go through several different 1 types of training. First, they train on giant text corpuses in order to work at all. Later, they go through a process called "reinforcement learning through human feedback" (RLHF) which trains them to be "nice". RL...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/raise-your-threshold-for-accusing I. Many comments in yesterday's post about self-identified bisexuals getting long COVID centered on a concern that self-identified bisexuals don't really date both sexes, and are just claiming to be bi because it's trendy. Bisexuals themselves hate this and have written many articles and papers about why you shouldn't say it (...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/replication-attempt-bisexuality-and I learned from Pirate Wires that CDC data show bisexuals were about 50% more likely than heterosexuals to report long COVID. Is this just because more women than men are bisexual, and more women than men get long COVID? Not exactly; in the data they cite, women (regardless of sexuality) have an 18% rate, and bisexuals (regar...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/change-my-mind-density-increases Matt Yglesias tries to debunk the claim that building more houses raises local house prices. He presents several studies showing that, at least on the marginal street-by-street level, this isn't true. I'm nervous disagreeing with him, and his studies seem good. But I find looking for tiny effects on the margin less convincing t...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-nerds Table of contents: 1: Comments By The Author Of The Original Post 2: Comments With Strong Opinions On The Definition Of Nerds, Geeks, Etc 3: Comments About Collecting 4: Comments Insisting That Sports Are Good 5: Comments About Enjoying Things Vs. Building Identities Around Them

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-42423 Can AIs Predict The Future? By Which We Mean The Past? If we asked GPT-4 to play a prediction market, how would it do? Actual GPT-4 probably would just give us some boring boilerplate about how the future is uncertain and it's irresponsible to speculate. But what if AI researchers took some other model that had been trained not to do that,...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-april-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...

Sam Kriss has a post on nerds and hipsters. I think he gets the hipsters right, but bungles the nerds. Hipsters, he says, are an information sorting algorithm. They discover things, then place them on the altar of Fame so everyone else can enjoy them. Before the Beatles were so canonical that they were impossible to miss, someone had to go to some dingy bar in Liverpool, think "Hey, these guys are...

[Content note: food, dieting, obesity] I. The Hungry Brain gives off a bit of a Malcolm Gladwell vibe, with its cutesy name and pop-neuroscience style. But don't be fooled. Stephan Guyenet is no Gladwell-style dilettante. He's a neuroscientist studying nutrition, with a side job as a nutrition consultant, who spends his spare time blogging about nutrition, tweeting about nutrition, and speaking at...

Table of Contents 1: Comments From The Author Of The Book 2: Stories From People In The Trenches 3: Stories From People In Other Industries 4: Stories From People Who Use Mechanical Turk 5: Comments About Regulation, Liability, and Vetocracy 6: Comments About The Act/Omission Distinction 7: Comments About The Applications To AI 8: Other Interesting Comments https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/hi...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-from-oversight-to-overkill I. Risks May Include AIDS, Smallpox, And Death Dr. Rob Knight studies how skin bacteria jump from person to person. In one 2009 study, meant to simulate human contact, he used a Q-tip to cotton swab first one subject's mouth (or skin), then another's, to see how many bacteria traveled over. On the consent forms, he said r...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/spring-meetups-everywhere-2023 Many cities have regular Astral Codex Ten meetup groups. Twice a year, I try to advertise their upcoming meetups and make a bigger deal of it than usual so that irregular attendees can attend. This is one of those times. This year we have spring meetups planned in over eighty cities, from Tokyo to Punta Cana in the Dominican Repu...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-the-arctic-hysterias I. Strange things are done in the midnight sun, say the poets who wrote of old. The Arctic trails have their secret tales that would make your blood run cold. The Northern Lights have seen queer sights, but the queerest they ever did see are chronicled in The Arctic Hysterias , psychiatrist Edward Foulks' description of the cul...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/most-technologies-arent-races [Disclaimer: I'm not an AI policy person, the people who are have thought about these scenarios in more depth, and if they disagree with this I'll link to their rebuttals ] Some people argue against delaying AI because it might make China (or someone else) "win" the AI "race". But suppose AI is "only" a normal transformative techn...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-telemedicine [ Original post: The Government Is Making Telemedicine Hard And Inconvenient Again ] Table Of Contents: 1: Isn't drug addiction very bad? 2: Is telemedicine worse than regular medicine? 3: What about "pill mills"? 4: Do people force the blind to fill out forms before they can access Braille? 5: Was I unfairly carica...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mr-tries-the-safe-uncertainty-fallacy The Safe Uncertainty Fallacy goes: The situation is completely uncertain. We can't predict anything about it. We have literally no idea how it could go. Therefore, it'll be fine. You're not missing anything. It's not supposed to make sense; that's why it's a fallacy. For years, people used the Safe Uncertainty Fallacy on A...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-government-is-making-telemedicine [I'm writing this quickly to deal with an evolving situation and I'm not sure I fully understand the intricacies of this law - please forgive any inaccuracies. I'll edit them out as I learn about them.] Telemedicine is when you see a doctor (or nurse, PA, etc) over a video call. Medical regulators hate new things, so for i...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/turing-test The year is 2028, and this is Turing Test! , the game show that separates man from machine! Our star tonight is Dr. Andrea Mann, a generative linguist at University of California, Berkeley. She'll face five hidden contestants, code-named Earth, Water, Air, Fire, and Spirit. One will be a human telling the truth about their humanity. One will be a h...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/half-an-hour-before-dawn-in-san-francisco I try to avoid San Francisco. When I go, I surround myself with people; otherwise I have morbid thoughts. But a morning appointment and miscalculated transit time find me alone on the SF streets half an hour before dawn. The skyscrapers get to me. I'm an heir to Art Deco and the cult of progress; I should idolize skysc...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/why-do-transgender-people-report [Related: Why Are Transgender People Immune To Optical Illusions? ] I. Ehlers-Danlos syndrome is a category of connective tissue disorder; it usually involves stretchy skin and loose, hypermobile joints. For a few years now, doctors who work with transgender people have commented on an apparently high rate of EDS in this popula...