Astral Codex Ten Podcast

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/declining-sperm-count-much-more-than   Is Sperm Count Declining? People say it is. Levine et al 2017 looks at 185 studies of 42935 men between 1973 and 2011, and concludes that average sperm count declined from 99 million sperm/ml at the beginning of the period to 47 million today. Levine et al 2022 expands the previous analysis to 223 studies and 57,168 men,...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/trying-again-on-fideism [apologies for an issue encountered when sending out this post; some of you may have gotten it twice] Thanks to Chris Kavanagh, who wrote an extremely kind and reasonable comment in response to my Contra Kavanagh on Fideism and made me feel bad for yelling at him. I'm sorry for my tone, even though I'm never going to get a proper beef a...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/contra-kavanaugh-on-fideism   I. I've been looking into the world of YouTube streamers; if you want to make it big, you need to have a beef with some other online celebrity. Fine; I choose Chris Kavanagh, who tweeted about me recently:

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ro-mantic-monday-21323 In honor of Valentine's Day, this installment of Mantic Monday will focus on attempted clever engineering solutions to romance. We'll start with the usual prediction markets, then move on to other types of algorithmic and financial schemes. Normal content will resume next time around.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-february-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 rea...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/crowds-are-wise-and-ones-a-crowd The long road to Moscow The " wisdom of crowds " hypothesis claims that the average of many guesses is better than a single guess. Ask one person to guess how much a cow weighs, and they'll be off by some amount. Ask a hundred people and take the average of their answers, and you'll be off by less. I was intrigued by a claim in...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mostly-skeptical-thoughts-on-the People worry about chatbot propaganda. The simplest concern is that you could make chatbots write disinformation at scale . This has created a cottage industry of AI Trust And Safety people making sure their chatbot will never write arguments against COVID vaccines under any circumstances, and a secondary industry of journalist...

Basically the same as 2022 - this is just a reminder to start working on entries https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-contest-rules-2023 Sure, this seemed to go well last the last few times, let's do it again. Write a review of a book. Any book you like - most past winners have been nonfiction, but maybe you can change that! There's no official word count requirement, but previous fin...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/response-to-alexandros-contra-me I. In November 2021, I posted Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted To Know , where I tried to wade through the controversy on potential-COVID-drug ivermectin. Most studies of ivermectin to that point had found significant positive effects, sometimes very strong effects, but a few very big and well-regarded studies were negativ...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-1302023 One million Metaculi, fake stocks, scandal markets again Happy One Millionth Prediction, Metaculus Metaculus celebrated its one millionth user forecast with a hackathon , a series of talks , and a party: This was a helpful reminder that Metaculus is a real organization, not just a site I go to sometimes to check the probabilities of thing...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/janus-simulators This post isn't exactly about AI. But the first three parts will be kind of technical AI stuff, so bear with me. I. The Maskless Shoggoth On The Left Janus writes about Simulators . In the early 2000s, the early AI alignment pioneers - Eliezer Yudkowsky, Nick Bostrom, etc - deliberately started the field in the absence of AIs worth aligning. A...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/you-dont-want-a-purely-biological CONTENT NOTE: This essay contains sentences that would look bad taken out of context. In the past, I've said "PLEASE DON'T TAKE THIS OUT OF CONTEXT" before or after these, but in the New York Times' 2021 article on me, they just quoted the individual sentence out of context without quoting the "PLEASE DON'T TAKE THIS OUT OF CO...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/who-predicted-2022 Winners and takeaways from last year's prediction contest Last year saw surging inflation, a Russian invasion of Ukraine, and a surprise victory for Democrats in the US Senate. Pundits, politicians, and economists were caught flat-footed by these developments. Did anyone get them right? In a very technical sense, the single person who predic...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/acx-survey-results-2022 Thanks to the 7,341 people who took the 2022 Astral Codex Ten survey. See the questions for the ACX survey See the results from the ACX Survey (click "see previous responses" on that page I'll be publishing more complicated analyses over the course of the next year, hopefully starting later this month. If you want to scoop me, or invest...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/which-political-victories-cause-backlash Four years ago I wrote Trump: A Setback For Trumpism , pointing out that when Trump became president, his beliefs became much less popular. For example: More recently we've seen what seems to me to be a similar phenomenon ( source ): After a major conservative victory (the Supreme Court overturning Roe), Americans' opin...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ssc-survey-results-on-schooling-types Taken from the 2020 Slate Star Codex Survey . SSC/ACX readers are a heavily-selected population and nothing about them necessarily generalizes to anyone who isn't an SSC/ACX reader. But you are an SSC/ACX reader, so maybe they generalize to you. Most of these questions are heavily confounded by different types of people go...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/2023-subscription-drive-free-unlocked 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 Early access to some draft posts The warm glow of supporting the blog. I feel awkward doing a subscription drive, because I a...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/conspiracies-of-cognition-conspiracies I. Some conspiracy theories center on finding anomalies in a narrative. For example, Oswald couldn't have shot Kennedy, because the bullet came from the wrong direction. Or: the Egyptians couldn't have built the Pyramids, because they required XYZ advanced technology. I like these because they feel straightforwardly about...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-the-061 Originally: The Media Very Rarely Lies and Sorry, I Still Think I Am Right About The Media Very Rarely Lying . Please don't have opinions based on the titles until you've read the posts! Table of contents: Comments Accusing Me Of Using An Overly Strict Definition Of "Lie" Comments Equating Lying With Egregiously Sloppy R...

Thanks to the 3295 of you who participated in Stage 1 of the 2023 Prediction Contest ("Blind Mode"). This is now closed. You can keep submitting Blind Mode answers if you want, but they won't count and you can't win. Stage 2 ("Full Mode") is now upon us! Your job is now to use any resources you choose, to get predictions as accurate as you can. There's no such thing as cheating, short of time trav...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/even-more-bay-area-house-party [Previously: Every Bay Area House Party , Another Bay Area House Party ] People talk about "fuck-you money", the amount you'd have to make to never work again. You dream of fuck-you social success, where you find a partner and a few close friends, declare your interpersonal life solved, and never leave the house from then on. Sti...

Future Matrioshka brains will be pro-immigration Buddhist gun nuts. https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/how-do-ais-political-opinions-change I. Technology Has Finally Reached The Point Where We Can Literally Invent A Type Of Guy And Get Mad At Him   One recent popular pastime: charting ChatGPT3's political opinions: This is fun, but whenever someone finds a juicy example like this, someone else...

Each year, I post a reader survey. This helps me learn who's reading this blog. But it also helps me try to replicate a bunch of psych findings, and investigate interesting hypotheses. Some highlights from past years include birth order effects , mathematical interests vs. corn-eating style , sexual harassment victimization rates in different fields , and whether all our kids are going to have aut...

Answers to your proposed counterexamples https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/sorry-i-still-think-i-am-right-about         Last week I wrote The Media Very Rarely Lies . I argued that, although the media is often deceptive and misleading, it very rarely makes up facts. Instead, it focuses on the (true) facts it wants you to think about, and ignores other true facts that contradict them or add con...

[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.] 1: In the context of Elon's Twitter takeover, @Yishan...