https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/link-troof-on-nootropics Should have signal-boosted this earlier, forgot, sorry. The author of the blog Troof sort of replicated my 2020 nootropics survey . But instead of another survey, they made a recommendation engine . You rated all the nootropics you’d taken, and it compared you to other people and predicted what else you would like. The end result was the same: lots of people providing data on which nootropics they liked. Troof got 1981 subjects - mor...
May 18, 2022•9 min•Ep. 659
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/contra-dynomight-on-sexy-in-laws I. From the Dynomight blog: You, Your Parents, And The Hotness Of Who You Marry . They start with a traditional situation: some romance novel heroine wants to marry a tall, dark stranger. But her parents want her to marry a much older nobleman/doctor/engineer who can provide her with a stable income. Or the gender-flipped version: the young man courts a beautiful debutante, while his parents try to force him to marry the plai...
May 18, 2022•16 min•Ep. 658
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-consciousness-and Finalist #1 of 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 ] Imagin...
May 14, 2022•53 min•Ep. 657
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 significant (and not always positive) career moves for dozens of people that I know of. And: There i...
May 11, 2022•54 min•Ep. 656
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 president of Russia next February? : 85% → 80% Peace or cease-fire before 2023?: 65% → 52% Will Russia fo...
May 10, 2022•22 min•Ep. 655
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 feel awkward about it, even if you’re not “the typical ACX reader”, even if you’re worried people won’...
May 06, 2022•1 min•Ep. 654
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:...
May 06, 2022•10 min•Ep. 653
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 lamp, drinks in hand. You see Bob. “Hi, Bob!” “Hey, good to see you again!” “What’s new?” “Man, it’...
May 04, 2022•27 min•Ep. 652
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 isn't how the the Soviet premier got or the Chinese paramount leader gets selected. They're selected ...
Apr 29, 2022•28 min•Ep. 651
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 pick strawberries. The programmers rewarded it whenever it got a strawberry in its bucket. It starte...
Apr 27, 2022•40 min•Ep. 650
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? Think about this for a second before you continue: . . . In my experience it’s about 50% JD, 49% a fe...
Apr 23, 2022•5 min•Ep. 649
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 cardiovascular risk! - are hype, and have failed to stand up to replication. Ben Hoffman disagrees, and wr...
Apr 22, 2022•27 min•Ep. 648
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 what it's worth, this was my favorite ACX post. Meh : You read through an ENTIRE BOOK of that kind of p...
Apr 20, 2022•53 min•Ep. 647
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 next February? : 80% → 85% Will 50,000 civilians die in any single Ukrainian city? : 10% → 10% If you l...
Apr 19, 2022•20 min•Ep. 646
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 court in Irvine, California. Who: Anyone who wants. Please feel free to come even if you feel awkward ...
Apr 16, 2022•2 min•Ep. 645
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 blogosphere” vs. “blogs X degrees or fewer away from the starting blog”. It looks like a pretty complete sele...
Apr 15, 2022•17 min•Ep. 644
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 crazy hypotheses. On the other hand, everyone else has too high a bar for including random crazy hy...
Apr 13, 2022•1 hr 30 min•Ep. 643
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” - unstructured talking about your feelings and what’s going on in your life. I know the responsible thing...
Apr 12, 2022•8 min•Ep. 642
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 In Advanced Machine Learning Systems . Mesa- is a Greek prefix which means the opposite of meta-. To ...
Apr 12, 2022•27 min•Ep. 641
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 as usual. If you only want to go to one meetup a year, go to that one. But we’ll also have a spring r...
Apr 12, 2022•32 min•Ep. 640
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 work? How was it different from dictatorship? What safeguards did it have against it? Why hadn’t pre...
Apr 12, 2022•47 min•Ep. 639
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 secede and someone else wants to conquer—and all of that is enormously disruptive to many other someones...
Apr 12, 2022•24 min•Ep. 638
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 AI. Robin thought the AI revolution would be a gradual affair, like the Agricultural or Industrial R...
Apr 05, 2022•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 637
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-space. Imagine some foragers who have just set up a new camp. The first day, they forage in the immedia...
Apr 02, 2022•15 min•Ep. 636
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 voice like the whoosh of falling waters or the flash of falling stars. “ No! ” the great voice boomed. ...
Apr 01, 2022•34 min•Ep. 635
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 reportedly claimed that “ Ukraine is not even a state! What is Ukraine? A part of its territory is [...
Mar 30, 2022•23 min•Ep. 634
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 Manifold (click image for link). Taylor Hawkins is a famous drummer who died last weekend under unclear ci...
Mar 29, 2022•26 min•Ep. 643
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 like to say that I think it's a good thing to reframe "helping the poor" or "saving the poor" as "pur...
Mar 25, 2022•40 min•Ep. 642
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/contra-hoel-on-aristocratic-tutoring I. Erik Hoel has an interesting new essay, Why We Stopped Making Einsteins . It argues that an apparent decline in great minds is caused by the replacement of aristocratic tutoring by ordinary education. Hoel worries we’re running out of geniuses: Consider how rare true world-historic geniuses are now-a-days, and how different it was in the past. In “ Where Have All the Great Books Gone? ” Tanner Greer uses Oswald Spengle...
Mar 23, 2022•19 min•Ep. 641
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-32122 Warcasting Changes in Ukraine prediction markets since my last post March 14: Will Kiev fall to Russian forces by April 2022 ?: 14% —→ 2% Will at least three of six big cities fall by June 1? : 70% —→ 53% Will World War III happen before 2050? : 21% —→20% Will Russia invade any other country in 2022? : 10% —→7% Will Putin still be president of Russia next February? : 80% —→ 80% Will 50,000 civilians die in any single Ukrainian city? : 12%...
Mar 22, 2022•21 min•Ep. 640
