Astral Codex Ten Podcast

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/how-trustworthy-are-supplements [EDIT: LabDoor responds here ] [Epistemic status: not totally sure of any of this, I welcome comments by people who know more.] Not as in "do supplements work?". As in "if you buy a bottle of ginseng from your local store, will it really contain parts of the ginseng plant? Or will it just be sugar and sawdust and maybe meth?" Th...

Machine Alignment Monday 10/3/22 https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/chai-assistance-games-and-fully-updated       I. This Machine Alignment Monday post will focus on this imposing-looking article ( source ): Problem Of Fully-Updated Deference is a response by MIRI (eg Eliezer Yudkowsky's organization) to CHAI (Stuart Russell's AI alignment organization at University of California, Berkeley), tr...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/universe-hopping-through-substack RandomTweet is a service that will show you exactly that - a randomly selected tweet from the whole history of Twitter. It describes itself as "a live demo that most people on twitter are not like you ." I feel the same way about Substack. Everyone I know reads a sample of the same set of Substacks - mine, Matt Yglesias' , may...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-unpredictable [Original post: Unpredictable Reward, Predictable Happiness ] 1: Okay, I mostly wanted to highlight this one by Grognoscente : I think really digging into the neural nitty gritty may prove illuminative here. Dopamine release in nucleus accumbens (which is what drives reward learning and thus the updating of our pre...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/from-nostradamus-to-fukuyama I. Nostradamus was a 16th century French physician who claimed to be able to see the future. (never trust doctors who dabble in futurology, that's my advice) His method was: read books of other people's prophecies and calculate some astrological charts, until he felt like he had a pretty good idea what would happen in the future. T...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-billionaire [original post: Billionaires, Surplus, and Replaceability ] 1: Lars Doucet (writes Progress and Poverty ) writes : Scott, the argument you're making rhymes a *lot* with the argument put forward by Anne Margrethe Brigham and Jonathon W. Moses in their article "Den Nye Oljen" (Norwegian for "The New Oil") I translated...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/why-is-the-central-valley-so-bad I. Here's a topographic map of California ( source ): You might notice it has a big valley in the center. This is called "The Central Valley". Sometimes it also gets called the San Joaquin Valley in the south, or the the Sacramento Valley in the north. The Central Valley is mostly farms - a little piece of the Midwest in the mi...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/janus-gpt-wrangling Janus (pseudonym by request) works at AI alignment startup Conjecture. Their hobby, which is suspiciously similar to their work, is getting GPT-3 to do interesting things. For example, with the right prompts, you can get stories where the characters become gradually more aware that they are characters being written by some sort of fiction e...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/bay-area-meetups-this-weekend We have three Bay Area meetups this weekend: Berkeley , at 1 PM on Sunday 9/18, at the Rose Garden Inn (2740 Telegraph Ave) San Francisco , at 11 AM on Sunday 9/18, "in the Panhandle, between Ashbury and Masonic, with an ACX sign" San Jose , at 2 PM on Saturday 9/17, at 3806 Williams Rd. Please RSVP to David Friedman (ddfr[at]davi...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/unpredictable-reward-predictable [Epistemic status: very conjectural. I am not a neuroscientist and they should feel free to tell me if any of this is totally wrong.] I. Seen on the subreddit: You Seek Serotonin, But Dopamine Can't Deliver . Commenters correctly ripped apart its neuroscience; for one thing, there's no evidence people actually "seek serotonin",...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/i-won-my-three-year-ai-progress-bet I. DALL-E2 is bad at "compositionality", ie combining different pieces accurately. For example, here's its response to "a red sphere on a blue cube, with a yellow pyramid on the right, all on top of a green table". Most of the elements - cubes, spheres, redness, yellowness, etc - are there. It even does better than chance at...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-september-2022 [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 re...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-contest-2022-winners       Thanks to everyone who entered or voted in the book review contest. The winners are: 1st: The Dawn Of Everything , reviewed by Erik Hoel . Erik is a neuroscientist and author of the recent novel The Revelations . He writes at his Substack The Intrinsic Perspective . 2nd: 1587, A Year Of No Significance , reviewed by occas...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-prophet-and-caesars-wife I. The Prophet in his wanderings came to Cragmacnois, and found the Bishop living in a golden palace and drinking fine wines, when all around him was bitter poverty. The Bishop spent so long feasting each day that he had grown almost too fat for his fine silk robes. "Woe unto you!" said the Prophet, "The people of Cragmacnois are p...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/billionaires-surplus-and-replaceability The typical neoliberal defense of self-made billionaires goes: entrepreneurs and other businesspeople create a lot of value. EG an entrepreneur who invents/produces/markets a better car has helped people get where they're going faster, more safely, with less pollution, etc. People value that some amount, represented by t...

Finalist #16 in the Book Review Contest https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-kora-in-hell [This is one of the finalists in the 2022 book review contest. It's not by me - it's by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. I'll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you've rea...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/meetups-everywhere-2022-times-and Thanks to everyone who responded to my request for ACX meetup organizers. Volunteers have arranged meetups in 205 cities around the world, including Penryn, Cornwall and Baghdad, Iraq. You can find the list below, in the following order: Africa & Middle East Asia-Pacific (including Australia) Canada Europe (including UK) Latin...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-the-909 (Original post here ) 1: Petey writes : When I think of happiness 0.01, I don't think of someone on the edge of suicide. I shudder at the thought of living the sorts of lives the vast majority of people have lived historically, yet almost all of them have wanted and tried to prolong their lives. Given how evolution shape...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/effective-altruism-as-a-tower-of I have an essay that my friends won't let me post because it's too spicy. It would be called something like How To Respond To Common Criticisms Of Effective Altruism (In Your Head Only, Definitely Never Do This In Real Life), and it starts: Q: I don't approve of how effective altruists keep donating to weird sci-fi charities. A...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-what-we-owe-the-future I. An academic once asked me if I was writing a book. I said no, I was able to communicate just fine by blogging. He looked at me like I was a moron, and explained that writing a book isn't about communicating ideas. Writing a book is an excuse to have a public relations campaign. If you write a book, you can hire a publicist...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-1587-a-year-of-no Finalist #15 in the Book Review Contest [This is one of the finalists in the 2022 book review contest. It's not by me - it's by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. I'll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you'v...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-subcultures 1: Maximum Limelihood Estimator writes: I firmly believe that cycles don't exist and never have existed. This is my shitposting way of saying "I have never, once, in my years of experience modeling human behavioral time series, come across an honest-to-god cyclical pattern (excluding time of year/month/week/day effec...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/skills-plateau-because-of-decay-and Followup to: Why Do Test Scores Plateau ; Ritalin Works But School Isn't Worth Paying Attention To Why Do Skills Plateau?   Economist Philip Frances finds that creative artists, on average, do their best work in their late 30s . Isn't this strange? However good a writer is at age 35, they should be even better at 55 with twe...

Please volunteer to host a meetup in your city! https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/meetups-everywhere-2022-call-for There are ACX-affiliated meetup groups all over the world. Lots of people are vaguely interested, but don't try them out until I make a big deal about it on the blog. Since learning that, I've tried to make a big deal about it on the blog at least once annually, and it's that time...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-81522 RIP PredictIt -- Hedgehog Markets -- Salem/CSPI Fellowship The Passing Of PredictIt   In 2014, Victoria University in New Zealand struck a deal with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the agency that regulates some markets in the US. CFTC would let Victoria set up a prediction market - at the time a relatively new idea - for research...