Astral Codex Ten Podcast

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-god-emperor-of-dune Finalist #14 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...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/will-nonbelievers-really-believe There's a popular saying among religious apologists: Once people stop believing in God, the problem is not that they will believe in nothing; rather, the problem is that they will believe anything. Big talk, although I notice that this is practically always attributed to one of GK Chesterton or CS Lewis , neither of whom actual...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/a-cyclic-theory-of-subcultures David Chapman's Geeks, MOPs, and Sociopaths In Subculture Evolution is rightfully a classic, but it doesn't match my own experience. Either through good luck or poor observational skills, I've never seen a lot of sociopath takeovers. Instead, I've seen a gradual process of declining asabiyyah. Good people start out working togeth...

Machine Alignment Monday 8/8/22 https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/why-not-slow-ai-progress The Broader Fossil Fuel Community Imagine if oil companies and environmental activists were both considered part of the broader "fossil fuel community". Exxon and Shell would be "fossil fuel capabilities"; Greenpeace and the Sierra Club would be "fossil fuel safety" - two equally beloved parts of the ric...

Finalist #13 in the Book Review Contest https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-exhaustion [ 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 read...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/absurdity-bias-neom-edition Alexandros M expresses concern about my post on Neom . My post mostly just makes fun of Neom. My main argument against it is absurdity: a skyscraper the height of WTC1 and the length of Ireland? Come on, that's absurd! But isn't the absurdity heuristic a cognitive bias ? Didn't lots of true things sound absurd before they turned out...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/slightly-against-underpopulation So I hear there's an underpopulation crisis now. I think the strong version of this claim - that underpopulation could cause human extinction - is 100% false. The weaker version - that it could make life unpleasant in some countries - is true. But I don't think it's at the top of any list of things to worry about. 1: Declining...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/model-city-monday-8122 Neom Neom Neom Suppose you are an oil-rich country. You drill the oil and get very rich, for now. But someday you will run out of oil, or the world will switch to green sustainable energy, and then you will stop being very rich. Seems bad. There are two main classes of solution to this problem. Norway's solution is to invest the oil mone...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-viral Finalist #12 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've rea...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-july-095 [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...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-criticism 1: I said in the original post that I wrote this because I knew someone would write the opposite article (that organizations accept specific criticism in order to fend off paradigmatic criticism), and then later Zvi did write an article kind of like that. He writes: It is the dream of anyone who writes a post called Cr...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/forer-statements-as-updates-and-affirmations The Forer Effect is a trick used by astrologers, psychics, and social psychologists. Given a list of statements like these : You have a great need for other people to like and admire you. You have a tendency to be critical of yourself. You have a great deal of unused capacity which you have not turned to your advant...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/elk-and-the-problem-of-truthful-ai Machine Alignment Monday 7/25/22 I. There Is No Shining Mirror I met a researcher who works on "aligning" GPT-3. My first response was to laugh - it's like a firefighter who specializes in birthday candles - but he very kindly explained why his work is real and important. He focuses on questions that earlier/dumber language m...

Finalist #11 in the Book Review Contest https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-society-of-the [ 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...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/criticism-of-criticism-of-criticism I. The voters wanted Anti-Politics Machine to be a Book Review Contest Finalist this year, and I listened. But I wasn't happy about it. I hate having to post criticism of EA. Not because EA is bad at taking criticism. The opposite: they like it too much . It almost feels like a sex thing. "Please, tell me again how naughty I...

Finalist #10 in the Book Review Contest https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-righteous-mind [ 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...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/impact-markets-the-annoying-details I said last year that I'd like to try running this year's ACX Grants through impact markets. Since then, some people have expressed interest in the technical implementation, and - to nobody's surprise more than my own - it's starting to look like it could happen. A reminder: impact certificates are like a VC funding ecosyste...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-the-man-from-the-future John von Neumann invented the digital computer. The fields of game theory and cellular automata. Important pieces of modern economics, set theory, and particle physics. A substantial part of the technology behind the atom and hydrogen bombs. Several whole fields of mathematics I hadn't previously heard of, like "operator alg...

New star forecasting team -- Musk vs. Twitter -- Donald Trump wriggling his way out of things https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-71122 Curtains For Trump? The original case for formal forecasting grew out of pundits often being confident and wrong. And nowhere have pundits been wrong more often than when they predict that the newest scandal will end Donald Trump's career once and...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-outlier [ 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 read them all, I'll ask you to vote for a f...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-the-bb9         Thanks to the 750 of you who commented on the homicide spike post (as of last weekend when I collated these highlights). I don't have enough space here to address everything, but here are some general themes: Was It Guns? Artifex0 on the subreddit writes : You mentioned that you haven't looked closely into the id...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/nobody-knows-how-well-homework-works Yesterday I wrote about bottlenecks to learning . I wanted to discuss the effectiveness of homework. If it works well, that would suggest students are bottlenecked on examples and repetition. If it works poorly, it would have to be something else. Unfortunately, all the research on this (showcased in eg Cooper 2006 ) is ter...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/study-ritalin-works-but-school-isnt Recent study, Pelham et al: The Effect Of Stimulant Medication On The Learning Of Academic Curricula In Children With ADHD . It's gotten popular buzz as "scientists have found medication has no detectable impact on how much children with ADHD learn in the classroom " and " Medication alone has no impact on learning ". This p...

Finalist #8 in the Book Review Contest https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-internationalists         [ 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...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-june-1e7         [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...