Actual serious review here , Amazon link to the book here . These were just some extra parts that stuck out to me. https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/more-memorable-passages-from-the
Review of Masha Gessen's "The Man Without A Face" [previously in series: Erdogan , Modi , Orban , Xi ] I. Vladimir Putin’s Childhood As Metaphor For Life Vladimir Putin appeared on Earth fully-formed at the age of nine. At least this is the opinion of Natalia Gevorkyan, his first authorized biographer. There were plenty of witnesses and records to every post-nine-year-old stage of Putin’s life. Before that, nothing. Gevorkyan thinks he might have been adopted. Putin’s official mother, Maria Puti...
You can find the meetup organizer volunteer form here . If you want to know if anyone has signed up to run a meetup for your city, you can view that here . Everyone else, just wait until 8/25 and I'll give you more information on where to go then. https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/meetups-everywhere-fall-2023-call...
Plus more CFTC, X, and UFOs https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-73123-room-temperature
Finalist #11 in the Book Review Contest [ This is one of the finalists in the 2023 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. 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 ] What kind of fiction could be remarkable enough for an Astral Codex Ten review? How about the drug-fueled fantasies of a serial killer? Or perhaps the innov...
Suppose there’s freedom of religion: everyone can choose what religion to practice. Is there some sense in which this is “undemocratic”? Would it be more “democratic” if the democratically-elected government declared a state religion, and everyone had to follow it? You could, in theory, define “democratic” this way, so that the more areas of life are subjected to the control of a (democratically elected) government, the more democratic your society is. But in that case, the most democratic possi...
[original post: Contra The Social Model Of Disability ] Table Of Contents 1: Comments Defending The Social Model 2: Comments About The Social Model Being Used (Or Not) In Real Life 3: Other Comments 4: Summary / What I Learned https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-social...
Machine Alignment Monday, 7/24/23 Intelligence explosion arguments don’t require Platonism. They just require intelligence to exist in the normal fuzzy way that all concepts exist. First, I’ll describe what the normal way concepts exist is. I’ll have succeeded if I convince you that claims using the word “intelligence” are coherent and potentially true. Second, I’ll argue, based on humans and animals, that these coherent-and-potentially-true things are actually true. Third, I’ll argue that so fa...
[ This is one of the finalists in the 2023 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. 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 ] A book about trading isn’t ever actually about trading. It is either: A former trader sharing stories from their glory days, e.g. Liar’s Poker , the exposé that morphed into a how-to guide, or Tal...
People are talking about British economic decline. Not just the decline from bestriding the world in the 19th century to today. A more recent, more profound decline, starting in the early 2000s, when it fell off the track of normal developed-economy growth. See for example this graph from We Are In An Unprecedented Era Of UK Relative Macroeconomic Decline : https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-british...
This month’s big news in forecasting: the Forecasting Research Institute has released the results of the Existential Risk Persuasion Tournament (XPT). XPT was supposed to use cutting-edge forecasting techniques to develop consensus estimates of the danger from various global risks like climate change, nuclear war, etc. The plan was: get domain experts (eg climatologists, nuclear policy experts) and superforecasters (people with a proven track record of making very good predictions) in the same r...
Elon Musk has a new AI company, xAI. I appreciate that he seems very concerned about alignment. From his Twitter Spaces discussion : I think I have been banging the drum on AI safety now for a long time. If I could press pause on AI or advanced AI digital superintelligence, I would. It doesn’t seem like that is realistic . . . I could talk about this for a long time, it’s something that I’ve thought about for a really long time and actually was somewhat reluctant to do anything in this space bec...
[ This is one of the finalists in the 2023 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. 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 promise of a new educational theory”, writes Kieran Egan, “has the magnetism of a newspaper headline like ‘Small Earthquake in Chile: Few Hurt’”. But — could a new kind of school make the wor...
What is the Social Model Of Disability? I’ll let its proponents describe it in their own words (emphases and line breaks mine) The Social Model Of Disability Explained (top Google result for the term): Individual limitations are not the cause of disability. Rather, it is society’s failure to provide appropriate services and adequately ensure that the needs of disabled people are taken into account in societal organization. Disability rights group Scope : The model says that people are disabled b...
Matt Yglesias’ five-year old son asks : why do we send the top students to the best colleges? Why not send the weakest students to the best colleges, since they need the most help? This is one of those questions that’s so naive it loops back and becomes interesting again. https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/why-match-school-and-student-rank...
Finalist #8 in the Book Review Contest [ This is one of the finalists in the 2023 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. 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 ] There is widespread agreement among philosophers, political commentators, and the general public that transparency in government is an unalloyed good. Louis ...
[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.] https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-july-2023
Machine Alignment Monday, 7/3/2023 Tom Davidson’s Compute-Centric Framework report forecasts a continuous but fast AI takeoff, where people hand control of big parts of the economy to millions of near-human-level AI assistants . I mentioned earlier that the CCF report comes out of Open Philanthropy’s school of futurism, which differs from the Yudkowsky school where a superintelligent AI quickly takes over. Open Philanthropy is less explicitly apocalyptic than Yudkowsky, but they have concerns of...
[ This is one of the finalists in the 2023 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. 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 date is June 9, 1985. The place is the Davis-Besse nuclear plant near Toledo, Ohio. It is just after 1:35 am, and the plant has a small malfunction: "As the assistant supervisor entered the co...
[Epistemic status: very uncertain about Part II; more convinced about Part III] I. This is the big question in the paper du jour , The Illusion Of Moral Decline , by Mastroianni and Gilbert (from here on: MG). It goes like this: people say that morality is declining. We know this because one million polls have asked people “do you think morality is declining?” and people always answer yes. MG go over these one million polls, do statistics to them, and find that people definitely think that moral...
I. Bryan Caplan thinks he’s debating me about mental illness. He’s not. Sometimes he posts some thoughts he has been having about mental illness, with or without a sentence saying “this is part of my debate with Scott”. Then I write a very long essay explaining why he is wrong . Then he ignores it, and has more thoughts, and again writes them up with “this is part of my debate with Scott”. I would not describe this as debating. Call it unibating, or monobating, or another word ending in -bating ...
Warning: This post might give vulnerable people new sensory sensitivities Everyone hates flashing banner ads, but maybe they’re a necessary evil. Creators want money, advertisers demand a certain level of visibility for their ad buys, maybe sites are willing to eat the cost in user goodwill. Fine. But what’s everyone else’s excuse? https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/every-flashing-element-on-your-site...
(Includes full article narration.) I have an article summarizing attempts to forecast AI progress, including a five year check-in on the predictions in Grace et al (2017) . It’s not here, it's at asteriskmag.com , a rationalist / effective altruist magazine: Through A Glass Darkly . This is their AI issue (it’s not always so AI focused). https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/through-a-glass-darkly-in-asterisk...
[This is one of the finalists in the 2023 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. 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. Today, pundits across the political spectrum bemoan America’s inability to build. Across the country, NIMBYs and status-quo defenders exploit procedural rules to block new development, giving us ...
Machine Alignment Monday 6/19/23 The face of Mt. Everest is gradual and continuous; for each point on the mountain, the points 1 mm away aren’t too much higher or lower. But you still wouldn’t want to ski down it. I thought about this when reading What A Compute-Centric Framework Says About Takeoff Speeds , by Tom Davidson. Davidson tries to model what some people (including me) have previously called “slow AI takeoff”. He thinks this is a misnomer . Like skiing down the side of Mount Everest, p...
Finalist #5 in the Book Review Contest [ This is one of the finalists in the 2023 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. 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. I found Njal’s Saga hard to follow. Halfway through, a friend reassured me it wasn’t my fault. The medieval Icelanders had erred in releasing it as a book...
Unfortunately I hate many of you. Only the ones with Twitter accounts. If you don’t have one of those, you’re fine. But if you do have one, there’s a good chance you said something which horribly offended me. You said everyone who believed X was an idiot and a Nazi, and I believed X. You read the title but not the body of an article about some group I care about, and viciously insulted them based on your misunderstanding of their position. You spent five seconds thinking of a clever dunk on some...
You know all the stuff we’ve been talking about here the past few years - mental mountains , trapped priors , relaxed beliefs under psychedelics ? The new keyword for all of that is “canalization”. At least that’s what I gather from a giant paper recently published by some of the leading thinkers in computational psychiatry (Karl Friston, Robin Carhart-Harris, etc). A quick review: you can model the brain as an energy landscape . . . . . . with various peaks and valleys in some multidimensional ...
Finalist #4 in the Book Review Contest [ This is one of the finalists in the 2023 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. 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 ] https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-mans-search-for...
Sometimes people do a study and find that a particular correlation is r = 0.2, or a particular effect size is d = 1.1. Then an article tries to “put this in context”. “The study found r = 0.2, which for context is about the same as the degree to which the number of spots on a dog affects its friskiness.” But there are many statistics that are much higher than you would intuitively think, and many other statistics that are much lower than you would intuitively think. A dishonest person can use on...
