[previously in series: 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 ] When that April with his sunlight fierce The rainy winter of the coast doth pierce And filleth every spirit with such hale As horniness engenders in the male Then folk go out in crop tops and in shorts Their bodies firm from exercise and sports And men gaze at the tall girls and the shawties And San Franciscans long to go to parties. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/ye-olde-bay-area-house-party...
Lumina, the genetically modified anti-tooth-decay bacterium that I wrote about in December , is back in the news after lowering its price from $20,000 to $250 and getting endorsements from Yishan Wong , Cremieux , and Richard Hanania (as well as anti-endorsements from Saloni and Stuart Ritchie ). A few points that have come up: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/updates-on-lumina-probiotic...
Original post here . Table of contents below. I want to especially highlight three things. First, Saar wrote a response to my post (and to zoonosis arguments in general). I’ve put a summary and some my responses at 1.11, but you can read the full post on the Rootclaim blog . Second, I kind of made fun of Peter for giving some very extreme odds, and I mentioned they were sort of trolling, but he’s convinced me they were 100% trolling. Many people held these poorly-done calculations against Peter,...
[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-april-2024
Many cities have regular Astral Codex Ten meetup groups. Twice a year, I try to advertise their upcoming meetups and make a bigger deal of it than usual so that irregular attendees can attend. This is one of those times. This year we have spring meetups planned in over eighty cities, from Tokyo, Japan to Seminyak, Indonesia. Thanks to all the organizers who responded to my request for details, and to Meetups Czar Skyler and the Less Wrong team for making this happen. You can find the list below,...
Saar Wilf is an ex-Israeli entrepreneur. Since 2016, he’s been developing a new form of reasoning, meant to transcend normal human bias. His method - called Rootclaim - uses Bayesian reasoning, a branch of math that explains the right way to weigh evidence. This isn’t exactly new. Everyone supports Bayesian reasoning. The statisticians support it, I support it, Nate Silver wrote a whole book supporting it. But the joke goes that you do Bayesian reasoning by doing normal reasoning while muttering...
It’s every blogger’s curse to return to the same arguments again and again. Matt Yglesias has to keep writing “maybe we should do popular things instead of unpopular ones”, Freddie de Boer has to keep writing “the way culture depicts mental illness is bad”, and for whatever reason, I keep getting in fights about whether you can have probabilities for non-repeating, hard-to-model events. For example: What is the probability that Joe Biden will win the 2024 election? What is the probability that p...
I have data from two big Internet surveys, Less Wrong 2014 and Clearer Thinking 2023 . Both asked questions about IQ: The average LessWronger reported their IQ as 138. The average ClearerThinking user reported their IQ as 130. These are implausibly high. Only 1/200 people has an IQ of 138 or higher. 1/50 people have IQ 130, but the ClearerThinking survey used crowdworkers (eg Mechanical Turk) who should be totally average. Okay, fine, so people lie about their IQ (or foolishly trust fake Interne...
Both the Atlantic’s critique of polyamory and my defense of it shared the same villain - “therapy culture”, the idea that you should prioritize “finding your true self” and make drastic changes if your current role doesn’t seem “authentically you”. A friend recently suggested a defense of this framework, which surprised me enough that I now relay it to you. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/in-partial-grudging-defense-of-some...
(inspired by Aid Airdrop Kills Five People In Gaza After Parachute Fails ) https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/verses-on-five-people-being-killed
Robots of prediction, predictions of robots https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/mantic-monday-31124
There are ACX 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 twice 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 form . https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/spring-meetups-everywhere-2024-call...
The consensus says "biological race doesn't exist". But if race doesn't exist, how do we justify affirmative action, cultural appropriation, and all our other race-related practices? The consensus says that, although race doesn't exist biologically, it exists as a series of formative experiences. Black children are raised by black mothers in black communities, think of themselves as black, identify with black role models, and face anti-black prejudice. By the time they're grown up, they've had d...
I. What’s Going On We got 351 proposals for ACX Grants , but were only able to fund 34 of them. I’m not a professional grant evaluator and can’t guarantee there aren’t some jewels hidden among the remaining 317. The plan has always been to run an impact market - a site where investors crowdfund some of the remaining grant proposals. If the project goes well, then philanthropists who missed it the first time (eg me) will pay the investors for funding it, potentially earning them a big profit. In ...
Winners and takeaways from last year's prediction contest I. The Annual Forecasting Contest …is one of my favorite parts of this blog. I get a spreadsheet with what are basically takes - “Russia is totally going to win the war this year”, “There’s no way Bitcoin can possibly go down”. Then I do some basic math to it, and I get better takes . There are ways to look at a list of 3300 people’s takes and do math and get a take reliably better than all but a handful of them. Why is this interesting, ...
All right, let’s do this again. Write a review of a book. There’s no official word count requirement, but previous finalists and winners were often between 2,000 and 10,000 words. There’s no official recommended style, but check the style of last year’s finalists and winners or my ACX book reviews ( 1 , 2 , 3 ) if you need inspiration. Please limit yourself to one entry per person or team. Then send me your review through this Google Form . The form will ask for your name, email, the title of th...
[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-february-2024...
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/less-utilitarian-than-thou
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/who-does-polygenic-selection-help
[Original posts: Contra The Atlantic On Polyamory (subscriber only) , You Don’t Hate Polyamory, You Hate People Who Write Books ] 1: Comments I Can Respond To With Something Resembling Actual Statistics 2: Comments I Will Argue Against Despite Not Having Statistics, Sorry 3: Comments By People With Personal Anecdotes 4: Comments On Children 5: Other Comments https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-polyamory...
AI forecasters come of age / Prediction market reality TV dating show? / OpenAI's Sora https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/mantic-monday-21924
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/x-fact-check-does-gender-integration
Libertarians don’t really have their own holiday. Communists have May Day. The woke have MLK’s birthday. Nationalists have July 4th or their local equivalent. But libertarians have nothing. I propose Valentine’s Day. The way people think about love is the last relic of the way that libertarians think about everything. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/love-and-liberty
I. Sam Altman wants $7 trillion . In one sense, this isn’t news. Everyone wants $7 trillion. I want $7 trillion. I’m not going to get it, and Sam Altman probably won’t either. Still, the media treats this as worthy of comment, and I agree. It’s a useful reminder of what it will take for AI to scale in the coming years. The basic logic: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/sam-altman-wants-7-trillion...
Thanks to everyone who participated in ACX Grants, whether as an applicant, an evaluator, or a funder. The best part of ACX Grants is telling the winners they won, which I’ll do in a moment. The worst part of ACX Grants is telling the non-winners they didn’t win. If I wasn’t able to give you a grant, it doesn’t mean I hate your project. Sometimes I couldn’t find the right evaluator to confirm that you were legit. Sometimes I sent your project to foundations or VCs who I thought it would be a bet...
We’ve been gradually working our way through the conversation around E. Fuller Torrey’s concerns about schizophrenia genetics - last week we had It’s Fair To Describe Schizophrenia As Probably Mostly Genetic , the week before Unintuitive Properties Of Polygenic Disorders . Here are two more arguments Torrey makes that we haven’t gotten to: Studies have failed to find any schizophrenia genes of large effect. If schizophrenia is genetic, it must be caused of thousands of genes, hidden in the most ...
I. Yesterday I criticized The Atlantic ’s recent invective against polyamory (subscriber-only post, sorry). Today I want to zoom away from the specific bad arguments and examine the overall form of the article. The overall form was: “I read a memoir about polyamory, everyone involved seemed awful and unhappy, and now I hate polyamorous people.” This is a common pattern. Sometimes, if someone’s very careful, they read three or four books about polyamory. Everyone in all the books is awful and unh...
Famous schizophrenia researcher E. Fuller Torrey recently wrote a paper trying to cast doubt on whether schizophrenia is really genetic. His exact argument is complicated, but I feel like it sort of equivocates between “the studies showing that schizophrenia are genetic are wrong” and “the studies are right, but in a philosophical sense we shouldn’t describe it as ‘mostly genetic’”. Awais Aftab makes a clearer version of the philosophical argument . He’s not especially interested in debating the...
I. Recently Claudine Gay resigned as President of Harvard over plagiarism accusations and a fumbled Congressional testimony on anti-Semitism. The plagiarism was discovered by conservative journalists Chris Rufo and Chris Brunet. It would be quite a coincidence for them to find it at exactly the moment Gay was already under attack for her anti-Semitism testimony. More likely, they either: Found it a while ago, and kept it in reserve for a time when Gay was in the news Or were angry about Gay’s te...
Election problems // Trump odds // AI worlds https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/mantic-monday-12924
