Last March we (ACX and Manifold Markets ) did a test run of an impact market , a novel way of running charitable grants. You can read the details at the links, but it’s basically a VC ecosystem for charity: profit-seeking investors fund promising projects and grantmakers buy credit for successes from the investors. To test it out, we promised at least $20,000 in retroactive grants for forecasting-related projects, and intrepid guinea-pig investors funded 18 projects they thought we might want to...
Oct 18, 2023•21 min
Last month, Ben West of the Center for Effective Altruism hosted a debate among long-termists, forecasters, and x-risk activists about pausing AI. Everyone involved thought AI was dangerous and might even destroy the world, so you might expect a pause - maybe even a full stop - would be a no-brainer. It wasn’t. Participants couldn’t agree on basics of what they meant by “pause”, whether it was possible, or whether it would make things better or worse. There was at least some agreement on what a ...
Oct 09, 2023•34 min
In the 1990s, Blanchard and Bogaert proposed the Fraternal Birth Order Effect (FBOE). Men with more older brothers were more likely to be gay. “The odds of having a gay son increase from approximately 2% for the first born son, to 3% for the second, 5% for the third and so on”. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/how-are-the-gay-younger-brothers...
Oct 09, 2023•21 min
[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://www.astralcodexten.com/p/links-for-september-2023...
Oct 05, 2023•25 min
[if this looks familiar to you, see explanation here ] Sometimes scholars go on a search for “the historical Jesus”. They start with the Gospels, then subtract everything that seems magical or implausible, then declare whatever’s left to be the truth. The Alexander Romance is what happens when you spend a thousand years running this process in reverse. Each generation, you make the story of Alexander the Great a little wackier. By the Middle Ages, Alexander is fighting dinosaurs and riding a cha...
Sep 28, 2023•30 min
[original post: Book Review: Elon Musk ] 1: Comments From People With Personal Experience 2: ...Debating Musk's Intelligence 3: ...Debating Musk's Mental Health 4: ...About Tesla 5: ...About The Boring Company 6: ...About X/Twitter 7: ...About Musk's Mars Plan 8: ...Comparing Musk To Other Famous Figures 9: Other Comments 10: Updates https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-elon...
Sep 22, 2023•1 hr 5 min
Thanks to everyone who entered or voted in the book review contest. The winners are: 1st: The Educated Mind , reviewed by Brandon Hendrickson. Brandon is the founder of Science is WEIRD , a sprawling online science course that helps kids fall in love with the world. He’s also re-imagining what education can be at his Substack, The Lost Tools of Learning ( losttools.substack.com ). 2nd: On the Marble Cliffs , reviewed by Daniel Böttger. Daniel writes the Seven Secular Sermons , a huge rationalist...
Sep 22, 2023•9 min
Not the new one, sorry This isn’t the new Musk biography everyone’s talking about. This is the 2015 Musk biography by Ashlee Vance. I started reading it in July, before I knew there was a new one. It’s fine: Musk never changes. He’s always been exactly the same person he is now I read the book to try to figure out who that was. Musk is a paradox. He spearheaded the creation of the world’s most advanced rockets, which suggests that he is smart. He’s the richest man on Earth, which suggests that h...
Sep 22, 2023•48 min
Comments On The Solano County City Ecorche writes : The Public's Radio article has a map in it that gives a better idea of the location. It looks like most of the land is closer to Rio Vista and does include a good stretch of riverfront. The land close to Travis is probably intended as industrial park rather than residential https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-last...
Sep 12, 2023•28 min
If you’ve read the finalists of this year’s book review contest, vote for your favorite here . Voting will stay open until Wednesday. Thanks to a helpful reader who offered to do the hard work, we’re going to try ranked choice voting. You’ll choose your first-, second-, and third-favorite book reviews. If your favorite gets eliminated, we’ll switch your vote to your second favorite, and so on. If for some reason I can’t figure out how to make this work on time, I’ll switch to first-past-the-post...
Sep 12, 2023•2 min
Emil Kirkegaard proposes a semi-objective definition of “mental illness” . He’s partly responding to me, but I think he mangles my position; he seems to think I admit mental illnesses are “just preferences” but that which preferences are valid vs. diseased can be decided by “what benefits my friends”. I mostly don’t think mental illnesses are just preferences! I’ve been really clear on this! But Emil is right that I don’t deny that there can be a few cases where it’s hard to distinguish a mental...
Sep 12, 2023•14 min
Tech moguls plan new city in Solano County Guardian: Silicon Valley Elites Revealed As Buyers Of $800 Million In Land To Build Utopian City . The specific elites include the Collison brothers, Reid Hoffman, Nat Friedman, Marc Andreessen, and others, led by the mysterious Jan Sramek . The specific land is farmland in Solano County, about an hour’s drive northeast of San Francisco. The specific utopian city is going to look like this. The company involved (Flannery Associates aka California Foreve...
Sep 09, 2023•22 min
The American people deserve a choice. They deserve a candidate who will reject the failed policies of the past and embrace the failed policies of the future. It is my honor to announce I am throwing my hat into both the Democratic and Republican primaries (to double my chances), with the following platform: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/my-presidential-platform
Sep 09, 2023•15 min
Finalist #16 in the Book Review Contest To tell the story of the fall of a realm, it’s best to start with its rise. More than three thousand years ago, the Shang dynasty ruled the Chinese heartland. They raised a sprawling capital out of the yellow plains, and cast magnificent ritual vessels from bronze. One of the criteria of civilization is writing, and they had the first Chinese writing, incising questions on turtle shells and ox scapulae, applying a heated rod, and reading the response of th...
Sep 05, 2023•41 min
“Literal Banana” on Carcinization writes Against Automaticity , which they describe as: An explanation of why tricks like priming, nudge, the placebo effect, social contagion, the “emotional inception” model of advertising, most “cognitive biases,” and any field with “behavioral” in its name are not real. My summary (as always, read the real thing to keep me honest): for a lot of the ‘90s and ‘00s, social scientists were engaged in ttthe project of proving “automaticity”, the claim that most hum...
Sep 05, 2023•20 min
Original post: What Can Fetish Research Tell Us About AI? Table Of Contents: 1: Alternative Theories Of Fetishes 2: Comments Including Testable Predictions 3: Comments That Were Very Angry About My Introductory Paragraph 4: Commenters Describing Their Own Fetishes 5: Other Comments https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-fetishes...
Sep 05, 2023•31 min
Superconductor autopsy -- Prediction mutual funds -- Flight delays Sorry guys, LK-99 doesn’t work . The prediction markets have dropped from highs in the 40s down to 5 - 10. It’s over. What does this tell us about prediction markets? Were they dumb to ever believe at all? Or were they aggregating the evidence effectively, only to update after new evidence came in? I claim they were dumb. Although the media was running with the “maybe there’s a room-temperature superconductor” story, the smartest...
Sep 02, 2023•16 min
Finalist #15 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 ] In which I argue: Why Nations Fail is not a very good book. Its authors' academic papers are much better, so I steelman their thesis as best I can, but it's...
Sep 02, 2023•34 min
Thanks to everyone who responded to my request for ACX meetup organizers. Volunteers have arranged meetups in 169 cities around the world, from Baghdad to Bangalore to Buenos Aires. You can find the list below, in the following order: Africa & Middle East Asia-Pacific Europe North America South America You can see a map of all the events on the LessWrong community page . You can also see a searchable sheet at this Airtable link . Within each region, it’s alphabetized first by country, then b...
Aug 30, 2023•4 min
Original post here . And I forgot to highlight a link to the directory of dating docs . Table Of Contents 1: Comments That Remain At Least Sort Of Against Dating Docs 2: Comments Concerned That Dating Docs Are Bad For Status Or Signaling 3: Comments About Orthodox Judaism And Other Traditional Cultures 4: Comments Including Research 5: Comments By People With Demographically Unusual Relationships 6: Comments About The Five Fake Sample Profiles 7: Things I Changed My Mind About https://astralcode...
Aug 30, 2023•31 min
On the fetish post , I discussed people who had some early sexual experience - like seeing a sexy cartoon character - and reacted in some profound way, like becoming a furry. Sometimes people have described this as a “critical window” for sexuality (similar to the “critical period” in language learning? ) where young children “imprint” on sexual experiences - and then can’t un-imprint on them later, even when they see many examples of sex that don’t involve cartoon animals. One of my distant cou...
Aug 30, 2023•4 min
Scott Young writes about Seven Expert Opinions I Agree With That Most People Don’t . I like most of them, but #6, Children don’t learn languages faster than adults , deserves a closer look. Some people imagine babies have some magic language ability that lets them pick up their first language easily, even as we adults struggle through verb conjugations to pick up our second. But babies are embedded in a family of first-language speakers with no other options for communication. If an English-spea...
Aug 30, 2023•14 min
Epistemic status: Ha ha, only serious... Arguing about gender is like taking OxyContin. There can be good reasons to do it. But most people don’t do it for the good reasons. And even if you start doing it for good reasons, you might get addicted and ruin your life. Walk through San Francisco if you want to see people who ruined their lives with opioids; browse Substack to get a visceral appreciation of the dangers of arguing about gender. Still, I’ve been debating autogynephilia fetishes with Mi...
Aug 30, 2023•17 min
[ 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 ] Are bees smart? To answer that question, here’s a crab spider: Sadly, this is not a review of a book called The Mind of a Crab Spider . But as you crab spider lovers know, crab spiders and bumble ...
Aug 24, 2023•31 min
[previously in series: 1 , 2 , 3 ] You spent the evening agonizing over which Bay Area House Party to attend. The YIMBY parties are always too crowded. VC parties were a low-interest-rate phenomenon. You’ve heard too many rumors of consent violations at the e/acc parties - they don’t know when to stop. And last time you went to a crypto bro party, you didn’t even have anything to drink, and somehow you still woke up the next morning lying in a gutter, minus your wallet and clothes. You finally d...
Aug 20, 2023•16 min
The New York Times has an article on “dating docs” . These are a local phenomenon - I think an ex of mine might have been Patient Zero. I don’t begrudge the Times for writing about them. I’m just surprised they’re considered an interesting phenomenon. What could be more obvious than making sure potential dates know what you’re like? https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/in-defense-of-describable-dating...
Aug 20, 2023•24 min
Finalist #13 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 ] Down from the gardens of Asia descending radiating, Adam and Eve appear… — Walt Whitman When I grew up I was still part of a primitive culture, in the follo...
Aug 20, 2023•31 min
[original post: Dictator Book Club: Putin ] Table of Contents: 1. Comments Further Illuminating Putin’s Rise To Power 2. Comments Questioning Masha Gessen’s Objectivity 3. Comments Claiming Putin Is Very Slightly Less Bad Than The Book Suggests 4. Comments On Putin As Culture Warrior 5. Comments Expressing Concern That The FBI/CIA Are Capable Of Undermining Democracy In The US https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-putin...
Aug 18, 2023•24 min
[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-august-2023...
Aug 18, 2023•25 min
[ 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 does it take to be literally Hitler? https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-rise-and-fall...
Aug 12, 2023•1 hr 13 min
