https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-my [Original post here ] I know I don’t usually publish on Saturdays, but I wanted to get this out before people filled in their mail-in ballots. So: Is Prop 31 Another Attack On Vaping? Maximum Limelihood Estimator is concerned that Prop 31 (against flavored tobacco products) is meant to target vaping: The flavored tobacco ban is mostly a ban on vaping; the vast majority of vape products are flavored, while most cigarettes ar...
Nov 06, 2022•18 min•Ep. 748
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/acx-grants-project-updates Thanks to everyone who got ACX Grants ( see original grants here ) and sent me a one-year update. Below are short summaries of the updates everyone sent. If for some reason you want one of the full updates, which are longer and more technical, let me know and I‘ll see if I have permission to send them to you. I’ve also included each grantee’s assessment on a scale of 1-10 for how well they’re doing, where 5/10 is “about as well as ...
Nov 06, 2022•27 min•Ep. 747
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/my-california-ballot-2022 Previously: 2018 , 2020 General Philosophy Of Voting This is California, so the Democrats always win. When I vote, I mean to send a signal somewhere in between “you are the candidate I really prefer for this office” and “I will vote for the Democrat if I approve of her and want her to have a mandate; otherwise I will vote for the Republican as a protest”. I try to have a weak bias towards voting “NO” on state constitutional amendmen...
Nov 06, 2022•29 min•Ep. 746
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/moderation-is-different-from-censorship This is a point I keep seeing people miss in the debate about social media. Moderation is the normal business activity of ensuring that your customers like using your product. If a customer doesn’t want to receive harassing messages, or to be exposed to disinformation, then a business can provide them the service of a harassment-and-disinformation-free platform. Censorship is the abnormal activity ensuring that people ...
Nov 03, 2022•7 min•Ep. 745
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-jhanas "I think it’s the first time half the commenters accused the other half of lying" I. Is Jhana Real? This was a fun one. I think it’s the first time half the commenters accused the other half of lying. Okay, “half” is an exaggeration. But by my count we had 21 people who claimed to have experienced jhanas ( 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 , 18 , 19 , 20 , 21 ), and 7 who said the...
Nov 02, 2022•43 min•Ep. 744
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-malleus-maleficarum I. To The Republic, For Witches Stand Did you know you can just buy the Malleus Maleficarum ? You can go into a bookstore and say “I would like the legendary manual of witch-hunters everywhere, the one that’s a plot device in dozens of tired fantasy novels”. They will sell it to you and you can read it. I recommend the Montague Summers translation . Not because it’s good (it isn’t), but because it’s by an slightly crazy 1920s ...
Oct 29, 2022•51 min•Ep. 743
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/nick-cammarata-on-jhana Buddhists say that if you meditate enough, you can learn to enter a state of extreme bliss called jhana. (there are many different jhana states - there’s a discussion of the distinctions here - but I’m lumping them together for simplicity. For attempted explanations of why jhana should exist, see here and here .) Jhana is different from enlightenment. Enlightenment changes you forever. Jhana is just a state you can enter during medita...
Oct 29, 2022•8 min•Ep. 742
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-supplement [Original post here: How Trustworthy Are Supplements? ] 1: AvalancheGenesis writes : I think the bigger issue is that the industry as a whole sort of exists as solutions-in-search-of-problems...deficiencies really aren't that common, or even meaningfully health-affecting unless dire. (Fairly-arbitrary worldwide differences in target levels of IUs also remains puzzling.) Discerning customers can benefit from targeted...
Oct 27, 2022•24 min•Ep. 741
Answers to the questions I get most often at meetup Q&As https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/from-the-mailbag DEAR SCOTT: When are you going to publish Unsong? — Erik from Uruk Dear Erik, Aaargh. I have an offer from a publisher to publish it if I run it by their editor who will ask me to edit lots of things, and I’ve been so stressed about this that I’ve spent a year putting it off. I could self-publish, but that also sounds like work and what if this is the only book I ever write and I l...
Oct 26, 2022•16 min•Ep. 740
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-rhythms-of-the-brain Brain waves have always felt like a mystery. You learn some psychology, some neuroscience, a bit of neuroanatomy. And then totally separate from all of this, you know that there are things called “brain waves” that get measured with an EEG. Why should the brain have waves? Are they involved in thinking or feeling or something? How do you do computation when your processors are firing in a rhythmic pattern dozens of times per ...
Oct 23, 2022•30 min•Ep. 739
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/another-bay-area-house-party [Previously: Every Bay Area House Party ] Blaise Pascal said all human evil comes from inability to sit alone in a room. Your better nature - your rational soul - tells you that nothing good has ever come from attending large social events. But against that better nature stands the Devil, wielding a stick marked “FOMO”. If you don’t go to social events, maybe other people will go and have great times and live fuller lives than yo...
Oct 21, 2022•25 min•Ep. 738
What do Sam Altman, Matt Bruenig, and the Sacramento Kings have in common? -- Are the polls wrong? -- CFTC vs. Everybody https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-101722 Midterm Examination Polls this year look bad for Senate Republicans. Pollsters’ simulations give them a 22% chance ( Economist ), 34% chance ( 538 ), or 37% chance ( RaceToTheWH ) of taking power. Even Mitch McConnell has admitted he has only “a 50-50 proposition” of winning. But polls did pretty badly last election. ”...
Oct 20, 2022•23 min•Ep. 637
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-the-3b1 Original post: Why Is The Central Valley So Bad? 1: Several Valley residents commented with their perspectives. Some were pretty grim. For example, 21st Century Salonniere (writes The 21st Century Salon ) writes: It is horrible. It’s been horrible since at least 1996 when I got trapped here by my spouse’s job. We were going to stay two years tops and go back East. (Long boring story about what went wrong.) The only thi...
Oct 16, 2022•40 min•Ep. 636
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-october-397 [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: The history of the exocentric compound noun : although English usually combines verbs and ...
Oct 13, 2022•23 min•Ep. 735
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-columbus [Original post: A Columbian Exchange ] 1: The most popular comments were those objecting to my paragraph about holidays replacing older holidays: All of our best holidays have begun as anti-holidays to neutralize older rites. Jesus was born in the spring; they moved Christmas to December to neutralize the pagan Solstice celebration. Easter got its name because it neutralized the rites of the spring goddess Eostre. Han...
Oct 11, 2022•41 min•Ep. 734
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/a-columbian-exchange Adraste: Happy Indigenous People’s Day! Beroe: Happy Columbus Day! Adraste: …okay, surely we can both sketch out the form of the argument we’re about to have. Genocide, political correctness, moral progress, trying to destroy cherished American traditions, etc, etc, would you like to just pretend we hit all of the usual beats, rather than actually doing it? Beroe: Does “Columbus Day was originally intended as a woke holiday celebrating m...
Oct 10, 2022•24 min•Ep. 733
Due to an oversight by the ancient Greeks, there is no Muse of blogging. Denied the ability to begin with a proper Invocation To The Muse, I will compensate with some relatively boring introductions. The name of this blog is Slate Star Codex. It is almost an anagram of my own name, Scott S Alexander. It is unfortunately missing an “n”, because anagramming is hard. I have placed an extra “n” in the header image, to restore cosmic balance. This blog does not have a subject, but it has an ethos. Th...
Oct 09, 2022•6 min•Ep. 732
Also Austin, Seattle, Tokyo, Rome, Mumbai, etc. We have two Southern California meetups this weekend: Los Angeles at 6:30 PM Saturday October 8 at 11841 Wagner St, Culver City. San Diego at 3 PM on Sunday, October 9, at Bird Park, these coordinates . See here for more details. I think I’ll be able to make it to both; if for some reason that changes I’ll try to update you by Open Thread beforehand. Feel free to come even if you’ve never been to a meetup before, even if you only recently started r...
Oct 08, 2022•2 min•Ep. 731
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/how-trustworthy-are-supplements [EDIT: LabDoor responds here ] [Epistemic status: not totally sure of any of this, I welcome comments by people who know more.] Not as in “do supplements work?”. As in “if you buy a bottle of ginseng from your local store, will it really contain parts of the ginseng plant? Or will it just be sugar and sawdust and maybe meth?” There are lots of stories going around that 30% or 80% or some other very high percent of supplements ...
Oct 06, 2022•48 min•Ep. 730
Machine Alignment Monday 10/3/22 https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/chai-assistance-games-and-fully-updated I. This Machine Alignment Monday post will focus on this imposing-looking article ( source ): Problem Of Fully-Updated Deference is a response by MIRI (eg Eliezer Yudkowsky’s organization) to CHAI (Stuart Russell’s AI alignment organization at University of California, Berkeley), trying to convince them that their preferred AI safety agenda won’t work. I beat my head against this for a ...
Oct 05, 2022•42 min•Ep. 729
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/universe-hopping-through-substack RandomTweet is a service that will show you exactly that - a randomly selected tweet from the whole history of Twitter. It describes itself as “a live demo that most people on twitter are not like you .” I feel the same way about Substack. Everyone I know reads a sample of the same set of Substacks - mine, Matt Yglesias’ , maybe Freddie de Boer’s or Stuart Ritchie’s . But then I use the Discover feature on the site itself an...
Oct 02, 2022•48 min•Ep. 728
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-unpredictable [Original post: Unpredictable Reward, Predictable Happiness ] 1: Okay, I mostly wanted to highlight this one by Grognoscente : I think really digging into the neural nitty gritty may prove illuminative here. Dopamine release in nucleus accumbens (which is what drives reward learning and thus the updating of our predictions) is influenced by at least three independent factors: 1. A "state prediction error" or gene...
Oct 01, 2022•38 min•Ep. 729
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/from-nostradamus-to-fukuyama I. Nostradamus was a 16th century French physician who claimed to be able to see the future. (never trust doctors who dabble in futurology, that’s my advice) His method was: read books of other people’s prophecies and calculate some astrological charts, until he felt like he had a pretty good idea what would happen in the future. Then write it down in the form of obscure allusions and multilingual semi-gibberish, to placate relig...
Sep 29, 2022•28 min•Ep. 727
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-billionaire [original post: Billionaires, Surplus, and Replaceability ] 1: Lars Doucet (writes Progress and Poverty ) writes : Scott, the argument you're making rhymes a *lot* with the argument put forward by Anne Margrethe Brigham and Jonathon W. Moses in their article "Den Nye Oljen" (Norwegian for "The New Oil") I translated it a few months ago and Slime Mold Time Mold graciously hosted it on their blog, where I posted the ...
Sep 23, 2022•42 min•Ep. 726
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/why-is-the-central-valley-so-bad I. Here’s a topographic map of California ( source ): You might notice it has a big valley in the center. This is called “The Central Valley”. Sometimes it also gets called the San Joaquin Valley in the south, or the the Sacramento Valley in the north. The Central Valley is mostly farms - a little piece of the Midwest in the middle of California. If the Midwest is flyover country, the Central Valley is drive-through country, ...
Sep 22, 2022•30 min•Ep. 725
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/janus-gpt-wrangling Janus (pseudonym by request) works at AI alignment startup Conjecture. Their hobby, which is suspiciously similar to their work, is getting GPT-3 to do interesting things. For example, with the right prompts, you can get stories where the characters become gradually more aware that they are characters being written by some sort of fiction engine, speculate on what’s going on, and sometimes even make pretty good guesses about the nature of...
Sep 20, 2022•26 min•Ep. 724
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/bay-area-meetups-this-weekend We have three Bay Area meetups this weekend: Berkeley , at 1 PM on Sunday 9/18, at the Rose Garden Inn (2740 Telegraph Ave) San Francisco , at 11 AM on Sunday 9/18, “in the Panhandle, between Ashbury and Masonic, with an ACX sign” San Jose , at 2 PM on Saturday 9/17, at 3806 Williams Rd. Please RSVP to David Friedman (ddfr[at]daviddfriedman[dot]com) so he knows how many people are coming. I will be at the Berkeley one. Feel free...
Sep 17, 2022•2 min•Ep. 723
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/unpredictable-reward-predictable [Epistemic status: very conjectural. I am not a neuroscientist and they should feel free to tell me if any of this is totally wrong.] I. Seen on the subreddit: You Seek Serotonin, But Dopamine Can’t Deliver . Commenters correctly ripped apart its neuroscience; for one thing, there’s no evidence people actually “seek serotonin”, or that serotonin is involved in good mood at all. Sure, it seems to have some antidepressant effec...
Sep 15, 2022•26 min•Ep. 722
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/i-won-my-three-year-ai-progress-bet I. DALL-E2 is bad at “compositionality”, ie combining different pieces accurately. For example, here’s its response to “a red sphere on a blue cube, with a yellow pyramid on the right, all on top of a green table”. Most of the elements - cubes, spheres, redness, yellowness, etc - are there. It even does better than chance at getting the sphere on top of the cube. But it’s not able to track how all of the words relate to ea...
Sep 13, 2022•13 min•Ep. 721
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-september-2022 [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: Fiber Arts, Mysterious Dodecahedrons, and Waiting On Eureka . Why did it take so long t...
Sep 08, 2022•22 min•Ep. 720
