Astral Codex Ten Podcast
The official audio version of Astral Codex Ten, with an archive of posts from Slate Star Codex. It's just me reading Scott Alexander's blog posts.
Episodes
It's time to narrow the 150 entries in the Book Review Contest to about a dozen finalists. I can't read 150 reviews alone, so I need your help.
You'll find the entries in six Google Docs (thanks to a reader for collating them):
Please pick as many as you have time for, read them, and rate them using this form.
Suffering is part of the human condition, except when it isn't.
I met a man at an ACX meetup once who claimed he has never felt anxiety, not even the littlest bit. His father was the same way, so maybe it's genetic.
Some people feel more pain than others. The “more pain” category includes some big demographic groups like redheads, who seem to feel some types of pain more intensely and may need up to 20% more anaesthetic, though the...
Manifold pivot || Lab leak hindcasting || CFTC extra-double-bans prediction markets
Most recent post here.
Table Of Contents:
1: Comments From Robin
2: Comments About/From Goldin et al
3: Comments From The Rest Of You Yokels
If you’re from a country that doesn’t have emotional support animals, here’s how it works.
Sometimes places ban or restrict animals. For example, an apartment building might not allow dogs. Or an airline might charge you money to transport your cat. But the law requires them to allow service animals, for example guide dogs for the blind. A newer law also requires some of these places to allow emotional support animals, ie animals t...
California’s state senate is considering SB1047, a bill to regulate AI. Since OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta are all in California, this would affect most of the industry.
If the California state senate passed a bill saying that the sky was blue, I would start considering whether it might be green, or colorless, or maybe not exist at all. And people on ...
Original post here.
Table Of Contents:
1: Response From The Author
2: Attempted Fact Checks
3: People With Personal Experience At Their Workplace
4: People With Personal Experience In Civil Rights
5: The Origins Of Modern Wokeness
6: Other Countries
7: EEOC Lawsuits
8: Other Good Comments
9: Conclusions And Updates
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-the-cf9
The Origins Of Woke, by Richard Hanania, has an ambitious thesis. And it argues for an ambitious thesis. But the thesis it has isn’t the one it argues for.
The claimed thesis is “the cultural package of wokeness is downstream of civil rights law”. It goes pretty hard on this. For example, there’s the title, The Origins Of Woke. Or the Amazon blurb: “The roots of the culture lie not in the culture itself, but laws and regulations en...
Robin Hanson replied here to my original post challenging him on health care here.
On Straw-Manning
Robin thinks I’m straw-manning him. He says:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/response-to-hanson-on-health-care
In November 2022, Aella posted this Twitter poll:
19% of women without pre-menstrual symptoms believed in the supernatural, compared to 39% of women with PMS. I can’t do chi-squared tests in my head, but with 1,074 votes this looks significant. Weird!
One of the most common arguments against AI safety is:
Here’s an example of a time someone was worried about something, but it didn’t happen. Therefore, AI, which you are worried about, also won’t happen.
I always give the obvious answer: “Okay, but there are other examples of times someone was worried about something, and it did happen, right? How do we know AI isn’t more like those?” The people I’m argu...
Robin Hanson of Overcoming Bias more or less believes medicine doesn’t work [EDIT: see his response here, where he says this is an inaccurate summary of his position. Further chain of responses here and here]
This is a strong claim. It would be easy to round Hanson’s position off to something weaker, like “extra health care isn’t valuable on the margin”. This is how most people interpret the studies he cites. Still, I think ...
[previously in series: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
When that April with his sunlight fierce
The rainy winter of the coast doth pierce
And filleth every spirit with such hale
As horniness engenders in the male
Then folk go out in crop tops and in shorts
Their bodies firm from exercise and sports
And men gaze at the tall girls and the shawties
And San Franciscans long to go to parties.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/ye-olde-bay-area-house-party...
Lumina, the genetically modified anti-tooth-decay bacterium that I wrote about in December, is back in the news after lowering its price from $20,000 to $250 and getting endorsements from Yishan Wong, Cremieux, and Richard Hanania (as well as anti-endorsements from Saloni and Stuart Ritchie). A few points that have come up:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/updates-on-lumina-probiotic
Original post here. Table of contents below. I want to especially highlight three things.
First, Saar wrote a response to my post (and to zoonosis arguments in general). I’ve put a summary and some my responses at 1.11, but you can read the full post on the Rootclaim blog.
Second, I kind of made fun of Peter for giving some very extreme odds, and I mentioned they were sort of trolling, but he’s convinced me they were 100% trolling....
[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.]
Many cities have regular Astral Codex Ten meetup groups. Twice a year, I try to advertise their upcoming meetups and make a bigger deal of it than usual so that irregular attendees can attend. This is one of those times.
This year we have spring meetups planned in over eighty cities, from Tokyo, Japan to Seminyak, Indonesia. Thanks to all the organi...
Saar Wilf is an ex-Israeli entrepreneur. Since 2016, he’s been developing a new form of reasoning, meant to transcend normal human bias.
His method - called Rootclaim - uses Bayesian reasoning, a branch of math that explains the right way to weigh evidence. This isn’t exactly new. Everyone supports Bayesian reasoning. The statisticians support it, I support it, Nate Silver wrote a whole book supporting it.
But the joke goes that yo...
It’s every blogger’s curse to return to the same arguments again and again. Matt Yglesias has to keep writing “maybe we should do popular things instead of unpopular ones”, Freddie de Boer has to keep writing “the way culture depicts mental illness is bad”, and for whatever reason, I keep getting in fights about whether you can have probabilities for non-repeating, hard-to-model events. For example:
-
What is the probability th...
I have data from two big Internet surveys, Less Wrong 2014 and Clearer Thinking 2023. Both asked questions about IQ:
-
The average LessWronger reported their IQ as 138.
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The average ClearerThinking user reported their IQ as 130.
These are implausibly high. Only 1/200 people has an IQ of 138 or higher. 1/50 people have IQ 130, but the ClearerThinking survey used crowdworkers (eg Mechanical Turk) who should be totally ave...
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