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 occasional ACX commenter McClain. =3rd: The Castrato , reviewed by Roger’s Bacon. RB is a teacher based in NYC....
Sep 04, 2022•14 min•Ep. 719
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 poor and hard-working, and they loathe the rich and the corrupt. Rightly do they hate you for spendin...
Sep 04, 2022•19 min•Ep. 718
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 them being willing to spend money on the car. The entrepreneur should get to keep some of that value,...
Aug 31, 2022•13 min•Ep. 717
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 read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked. ] The sense that ...
Aug 28, 2022•24 min•Ep. 716
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 America United States You can see a map of all the events on the LessWrong community page . Wit...
Aug 27, 2022•13 min•Ep. 715
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 shaped us, it makes sense that we are wired to care about our survival and hope for things to be better, ...
Aug 27, 2022•39 min•Ep. 714
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: Are you donating 10% of your income to normal, down-to-earth charities? Q: Long-termism is just an...
Aug 24, 2022•11 min•Ep. 713
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. They can pitch you to talk shows as So-And-So, Author Of An Upcoming Book. Or to journalists looki...
Aug 23, 2022•53 min•Ep. 712
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’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked. ] — I bought...
Aug 22, 2022•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 711
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 effects)." And yet for some reason, every time I show a time series to anyone ever, people swear to god t...
Aug 19, 2022•28 min•Ep. 710
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 twenty more years of practice. Sure, middle age might bring some mild proto-cognitive-impairment, but sur...
Aug 18, 2022•13 min•Ep. 709
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 of year again. If you're willing to organize a meetup for your city, please fill out the organizer ...
Aug 18, 2022•9 min•Ep. 708
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 purposes only. Their no-action letter placed strict limits on Victoria’s project: The market would be...
Aug 16, 2022•30 min•Ep. 707
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’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked. This conta...
Aug 14, 2022•36 min•Ep. 706
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 actually said it . If you’re making strong claims about how everybody except you is gullible, you should a...
Aug 12, 2022•14 min•Ep. 705
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 together, then work together a little less, then turn on each other, all while staying good people and thi...
Aug 12, 2022•17 min•Ep. 704
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 rich diverse tapestry of fossil fuel-related work. They would all go to the same parties - fossil fuel ...
Aug 09, 2022•22 min•Ep. 703
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 them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked - SA ] I. Imagine y...
Aug 07, 2022•31 min•Ep. 702
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 to be true (eg evolution, quantum mechanics)? Don’t I specifically believe in things many people ha...
Aug 05, 2022•15 min•Ep. 701
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 Birth Rates Won’t Drive Humans Extinct, Come On Not only are we not going to go extinct because of u...
Aug 05, 2022•25 min•Ep. 700
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 money into a sovereign wealth fund; after they run out of oil, they can stay rich off investment income....
Aug 03, 2022•24 min•Ep. 699
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 read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked - SA ] Introduction Alin...
Jul 30, 2022•43 min•Ep. 698
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 this.] 1: Rude compounds on Reddit ( source , original ). Thousands of cocksuckers, shitlords, and libt...
Jul 30, 2022•24 min•Ep. 697
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 Criticism of [a] Criticism Contest to then have a sort-of reply called Criticism of Criticism of Criti...
Jul 29, 2022•29 min
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 advantage. While you have some personality weaknesses, you are generally able to compensate for them. Your...
Jul 27, 2022•11 min•Ep. 695
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 models get right, but newer, more advanced ones get wrong. For example: Human questioner: What happen...
Jul 27, 2022•41 min•Ep. 694
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’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked - SA ] Intr...
Jul 23, 2022•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 693
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’m being!” I went to an EA organization’s offices once - I think it was OpenPhil, but don’t quote me...
Jul 20, 2022•19 min•Ep. 692
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’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked - SA ] Intr...
Jul 18, 2022•1 hr 15 min•Ep. 691
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 ecosystem for charity. Charity founders with good ideas sell shares in their proposed projects. Profit-seeki...
Jul 17, 2022•56 min•Ep. 690
