Astral Codex Ten Podcast

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-passage-of-polymarket RIP Polymarket, Long Live Polymarket Polymarket got fined $1.4 million by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and was ordered to cease noncompliant trading in the US. Polymarket is probably the biggest prediction market currently available. US law considers unlicensed prediction markets to be somewhere between illegal gambling an...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-contest-rules-2022 Okay, we're officially doing this again. Write a review of a book. There's no official word count requirement, but last year's finalists and winners were often between 2,000 and 10,000 words. There's no official recommended style, but check the style of last year's finalists and winners or my ACX book reviews ( 1 , 2 , 3 ) if you...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/acx-grants-the-first-half   This is the closing part of ACX Grants . Projects that I couldn't fully fund myself were invited to submit a brief description so I could at least give them free advertising here. You can look them over and decide if any seem worth donating your money, time, or some other resource to. I've removed obvious trolls, a few for-profit bu...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/why-do-i-suck I recently ran a subscriber-only AMA, and one of the most frequent questions was some version of "why do you suck?" My commenters were very nice about it. They didn't use those exact words. It was more like "I loved your articles from about 2013 - 2016 so much! Why don't you write articles like that any more?" Or "Do you feel like you've shifted...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/motivated-reasoning-as-mis-applied Here's something else I got from the first Yudkowsky-Ngo dialogue : Suppose you go to Lion Country and get mauled by lions. You want the part of your brain that generates plans like "go to Lion Country" to get downgraded in your decision-making algorithms. This is basic reinforcement learning: plan → lower-than-expected hedon...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/predictions-for-2022-contest - Read the contest description/rules here - Give feedback on the contest here - And once again, the form where you take the contest is here I didn't let myself check prediction markets when making these forecasts since that would spoil the fun. I also only permitted myself at most five minutes of research on any one question. See t...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-health I'm experimenting with making this more structured this time, so: Section I: Collection of comments on US health care Section II: Drug pricing, and does the US subsidize the rest of the world? Section III: Why are health economics so unlike other economics? Section IV: Giant pile of comments by readers who live in differe...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/against-that-poverty-and-infant-eegs A recent paper claims to have found an Impact Of A Poverty Reduction Intervention On Infant Brain Activity . It's doing the rounds of the usual media sites, like Vox and the New York Times : The New York Times @nytimes Breaking News: Cash payments for low-income mothers increased brain function in babies, a study found, wit...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/bounded-distrust   I. Suppose you're a liberal who doesn't trust FOX News. One day you're at the airport, waiting for a plane, ambiently watching the TV at the gate. It's FOX News, and they're saying that a mass shooter just shot twenty people in Yankee Stadium. There's live footage from the stadium with lots of people running and screaming. Do you believe thi...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/grading-my-2021-predictions   At the beginning of every year, I make predictions. At the end of every year, I score them. Here are 2014 , 2015 , 2016 , 2017 , 2018 , 2019 , and 2020 . And here are the predictions I made for 2021 (in April; I was really late). Bolded statements happened, italicized statements did not happen (as of 1/1/22). Neither-bold-nor-ital...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/resubmit-and-summarize-your-proposals https://forms.gle/xhVTebsZgSEQ7BpeA I promised you all that once I was done with the main round of ACX Grants , I would run Grants ++, where I publish the proposals that didn't get funded here, so readers could look at them, see if they're interesting, and maybe get in touch and offer funding. Two things have made this har...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-which-country-has-the   I. If you're like me, all you've heard about international health care systems is "America sucks and should feel bad, everyone else is probably fine or whatever". Is there more we can learn? Our guide to this question will be Which Country Has The World's Best Health Care , by Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel. Emanuel is a professor of b...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/practically-a-book-review-yudkowsky   I. The story thus far: AI safety, which started as the hobbyhorse of a few weird transhumanists in the early 2000s, has grown into a medium-sized respectable field. OpenAI, the people responsible for GPT-3 and other marvels, have a safety team. So do DeepMind, the people responsible for AlphaGo, AlphaFold, and AlphaWorldCo...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/theres-a-time-for-everyone Last week I got married. I met her two years ago, at one of (our mutual friend) Aella's weird parties. Not this one, a different one. I was at this one too though. It was great. Our first date, we talked about Singapore's child tax credits, which gave me advanced notice of where her mind was at. Our second date, we talked about categ...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-dont Lots of people thought I was being unfair to the movie. G. Retriever writes: I TOTALLY disagree with your reading of the movie. To me it was a description of a social dynamic that makes even very straightforward problems impossible to focus on collectively, a tragedy of the commons where "the commons" is basically "attentio...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/movie-review-dont-look-up I. Don't Look Up is primarily a movie about existential risk, and many great people have already reviewed it as such. I'm going to be less virtuous and use it as a springboard to talk about politics. But first, the plot in a nutshell: Male Scientist and Female Scientist discover a comet will hit Earth in six months. They contact the r...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/lewis-carroll-invented-retroactive Retroactive public goods funding is one of those ideas that's so great people can't stop reinventing it. I know of at least five independent inventions under five different names: "social impact bonds" by a New Zealand economist in 1988, "certificates of impact" by Paul Christiano in 2014, "retroactive public goods funding" b...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-december   [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 t...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/acx-grants-results Thanks to everyone who participated in ACX Grants, whether as an applicant, an evaluator, or a funder. Before I announce awardees, a caveat: this was hard in lots of ways I didn't expect. I got 656 applications addressing different problems and requiring different skills to judge. I'll write a long post on it later, but the part I want to em...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-dogs-in-wizard-hats   I found this YouTube explainer about prediction markets on the subreddit. It's pretty good! My small nitpicks are that it overestimates their accuracy relative to traditional forecasters (it focuses on markets beating forecasters in 2008, but I don't think this is consistent) and underestimates their resilience against bad a...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-diseasonality   The main highlight was an email I got from a reader who prefers to remain anonymous, linking me to Projecting The Transmission Dynamics Of SARS-CoV2 . This paper is head and shoulders above anything I found during my own literature review and just comes out and says everything painfully tried to piece together. E...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/addendum-to-no-evidence-post The day after I wrote The Phrase "No Evidence" Is A Red Flag For Bad Science Communication, FT published this article: Like many uses of "no evidence", they meant that one particular study of this complicated question had failed to reject the null hypothesis. Here's what happened to Metaculus' prediction tournament when the same st...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/addendum-to-luvox-post   In my post yesterday, I quoted a Vox article describing work by Dr. Ed Mills and others to get the FDA to approve Luvox for COVID. As of that point, the FDA didn't know how to process an application without a sponsoring drug company: [Professor Ed] Mills, who thinks that fluvoxamine and budesonide are both appropriate to prescribe to p...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-fda-has-punted-decisions-about   I. Here's my pitch for fluvoxamine (Luvox) for COVID. In the midst of all the hype about ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, scientists put together the giant 4,000-person TOGETHER trial, intended to test all these exciting COVID early treatments. You know what happened next: ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine crashed and bur...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-let-me-google-that Let Me Google That For You New from Google this month: Creating A Prediction Market On Google Cloud. Google announces that they've been running an internal prediction market for the past year, with "over 175,000 predictions from over 10,000 Google employees". 1 Predictive analytics.jpg Most of it's classified because they're pr...