Astral Codex Ten Podcast

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-the-gervais-principle I. The Gervais Principle , by postrationalist heresiarch Venkatesh Rao, claims to be a business book. It claims a lot of things, actually. According to its introduction: By my estimate, the material in this book has already triggered . . . hazardous reflection for thousands of people over the past four years. It has triggered...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-5922 The future of abortion, plus a valiant attempt at market manipulation Warcasting Changes in Ukraine prediction markets since my last post April 18: Will at least three of six big cities fall by June 1? : 5% → 2% Will World War III happen before 2050? : 22% →25% Will Russia invade any other country in 2022? : 5% →10% Will Putin still be presi...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/berkeley-meetup-this-saturday-26e Why: Because we're having spring meetups in 70 cities , and Berkeley is one of them. I'm signal-boosting this one because I'll be able to attend. When: Saturday, May 7, 1:00 PM. Where: UC Berkeley, the lawn just east of West Circle and north of Free Speech Bikeway. Who: Anyone who wants. Please feel free to come even if you fe...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/why-do-people-prefer-my-old-blogs This keeps coming up. When I was first considering moving to Substack, I asked my readers what they thought . They thought various things, but one of them was they hated the layout. At some point I turned this into a formal survey, and:

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/every-bay-area-house-party You walk in. The wall decorations vaguely suggest psychedelia. The music is pounding, head-splitting, amelodious. Everyone is struggling to speak over it. Everyone assumes everyone else likes it. You flee to the room furthest from the music source. Three or four guys are sitting in a circle, talking. Two girls are standing by a weird...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-xi I: Xi's Rise To Power II: Censorship III: Anti-Corruption And Centralization IV: Miscellaneous   I. Rise To Power   — Erusian on Xi's rise: > "Why did Xi succeed at gathering power, where others didn't?" Communist leaderships choose their leaders for ideological reasons. You're reducing it to cynical power politics. But this...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-a-clinical-introduction [epistemic status: I didn't understand this book. Think of this review as detailing the ways I didn't understand it and hypothesizing what certain parts might mean, and not as an attempt to summarize/re-explain something I understand well] I. Remember that AI? From the mesa-optimizers post a few weeks ago? It was trained to...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/initial-conditions Consider people who go by their first and middle initials, eg John Q Smith introduces himself as "Hi, I'm J.Q." Authors who use their initials on their books (eg J.K. Rowling) don't count, unless they also go by their initials in everyday life. Is there any pattern to who does this - ie which initials lead people to initialize their names? T...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/contra-hoffman-on-vitamin-d-dosing [epistemic status: pretty uncertain about each individual fact, moderate confidence in general overview] I. Hoffman Contra Me I've said many times that (to a first approximation) Vitamin D is a boring bone-related chemical. Most claims that it does exciting things outside of bones - cure COVID! prevent cancer! decrease cardio...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-sadly I. The Duality Of Man Kalimac : If you write more stuff like this, I think I will just gradually stop reading this blog. Logan Strohl : For the record this is my favorite Scott essay in years. Leo Yankovic : Reading this for the first time in a long time of reading [ACX] felt like a giant waste of time. John Slow : For wha...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-41822 Nuclear risk, AI risk, Musk-acquiring-Twitter risk Warcasting Changes in Ukraine prediction markets since my last post March 21: Will at least three of six big cities fall by June 1? : 53% → 5% Will World War III happen before 2050? : 20% →22% Will Russia invade any other country in 2022? : 7% →5% Will Putin still be president of Russia nex...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/irvine-meetup-this-monday I'll be in Irvine this week visiting family. I know the local meetup group already came up with a different Schelling meetup time, but I hope they don't mind me imposing on them and trying to meet people this Monday too. When: Monday, April 18, 7:15 PM. Where: Underneath this mysterious hexagonal sigil at the University Center food co...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-april-644 1: History of the belief that garlic and magnets are natural enemies. 2: Jacob Wood's Graph Of The Blogosphere . ACX's neighborhood: You can also see Jacob's description of how he made it here . It looks like it starts with some index blogs, follows them to blogs they link, and so on. I don't know how much this captures "the whole blogosphe...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/obscure-pregnancy-interventions-much This is intended as a sequel to my old Biodeterminist's Guide To Parenting. It's less ambitious, in that it focuses only on pregnancy; but also more ambitious, in that it tries to be right. I wrote Biodeterminist's Guide in 2012, before the replication crisis was well understood, and I had too low a bar for including random...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/men-will-literally-have-completely People are debating "therapy: good or bad?" again: There are dozens of kinds of therapy: reliving your traumas, practicing mindfulness, analyzing dreams, uncovering your latent desire to have sex with your mother. But most people on both sides of this debate are talking about what psychiatrists call "supportive therapy" - uns...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/deceptively-aligned-mesa-optimizers A Machine Alignment Monday post, 4/11/22 I. Our goal here is to popularize obscure and hard-to-understand areas of AI alignment, and surely this meme (retweeted by Eliezer last week) qualifies: So let's try to understand the incomprehensible meme! Our main source will be Hubinger et al 2019, Risks From Learned Optimization I...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/spring-meetups-in-seventy-cities   Lots of people only want to go to meetups a few times a year. And they all want to go to the same big meetups as all the other people who only go a few times a year. In 2022, we set up one big well-telegraphed meetup in the fall as a Schelling point for these people. This year, we're setting up two. We'll have the fall meetup...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/dictator-book-club-xi-jinping [Previous entries: Erdogan , Modi , Orban ] The Third Revolution , by Elizabeth Economy, promises to explain "the transformative changes underway in China today". But like her namesake, Dr. Economy doesn't always allocate resources the way I would like. I came to the book with questions like: How did the pre-Xi Chinese government...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-self 1: Rosemary (writes Parallel Republic ) says: I think a preference for the status quo has to weigh in to some extent. All else being equal, sure, I agree with the "any group large enough that it isn't ludicrous on its face has a right to self-determination" standard. But all else is almost never equal. Someone wants to sece...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/yudkowsky-contra-christiano-on-ai Previously in series: Yudkowsky Contra Ngo On Agents , Yudkowsky Contra Cotra On Biological Anchors Prelude: Yudkowsky Contra Hanson In 2008, thousands of blog readers - including yours truly, who had discovered the rationality community just a few months before - watched Robin Hanson debate Eliezer Yudkowsky on the future of...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-low-hanging-fruit-argument-models A followup to Contra Hoel On Aristocratic Tutoring : Imagine scientists venturing off in some research direction. At the dawn of history, they don't need to venture very far before discovering a new truth. As time goes on, they need to go further and further. Actually, scratch that, nobody has good intuitions for truth-spa...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/idol-words The woman was wearing sunglasses, a visor, a little too much lipstick, and a camera around her neck. "Excuse me," she asked. "Is this the temple with the three omniscient idols? Where one always tells the truth, one always lies, and one answers randomly?" The center idol's eyes glowed red, and it spoke with a voice from everywhere and nowhere, a voi...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/who-gets-self-determination I. LSE: Fact-Checking The Kremlin's Version Of Russian History : The notion that Ukraine is not a country in its own right, but a historical part of Russia, appears to be deeply ingrained in the minds of many in the Russian leadership. Already long before the Ukraine crisis, at an April 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest, Vladimir Putin...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/information-markets-decision-markets [thumbnail image credit: excellent nature photographer Eco Suparman , which is a great name for an excellent nature photographer!] Information Markets Niels Bohr supposedly said that "prediction is very difficult, especially about the future". So why not predict the past and present instead? Here's a recent market on Manifo...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-justice A lot of comments on Justice Creep fell into three categories: First , people who thought some variety of: yes, all this stuff is definitely a justice issue, and it's good that language is starting to reflect that more. For example, Adnamanil : So... as someone who actually does use "___" Justice, quite frequently, I'd l...