[ This is one of the finalists in the 2024 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 ] “You wake up screaming, frightened by memories, You’re plagued by nightmares, do we haunt all of your dreams?” https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-the-family-that...
Aug 02, 2024•58 min
Ten people are stuck on a lifeboat after their ship sank. It will be weeks before anyone finds them, and they’re out of food. They’ve heard this story before, so they decide to turn to cannibalism sooner rather than later. They agree to draw lots to determine the victim. Just as the first person is reaching for the lots, Albert shouts out “WAIT LET’S ALL KILL AND EAT BOB!” They agree to do this instead of drawing lots. This is obvious, right? For nine out of ten people, it’s a better deal. For n...
Aug 02, 2024•18 min
I. Suppose that you, an ordinary person, open your door and start choking on yellow smoke. You call up your representative and say “there should be less pollution”. A technical expert might hear “there should be less pollution” and have dozens of questions. Do you just want to do common-sense things, like lower the detection threshold for hexamethyldecawhatever? Or do you want to ban tetraethylpentawhatever, which is vital for the baby formula food chain and would cause millions of babies to die...
Jul 27, 2024•16 min
Finalist #3 in the Book Review Contest [ This is one of the finalists in the 2024 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://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-don-juan
Jul 27, 2024•22 min
The last week hasn’t been great for the Democratic Party. First Biden bombed the debate. But the subsequent decision about whether/how to replace Biden has also been embarrassing. Biden has refused to step aside gracefully, and party elites don’t seem to have any contingency plan. Worse, they don’t even seem united on the need to figure anything out, with many deflecting the conversation to irrelevant points like “Trump is also bad” or pretending that nothing is really wrong. Some of the party’s...
Jul 27, 2024•24 min
[ This is one of the finalists in the 2024 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 ] Matthew Scully, author of Dominion , is an unlikely animal welfare advocate. He’s a conservative Christian who worked as a speechwriter for George W. Bush. That’s like finding out that Greta Thunb...
Jul 10, 2024•39 min
Alexander: Hello and welcome to the first Presidential debate of 2024. Based on the remarkable popularity of the previous debates I moderated ( 2016 , 2020 , 2023 ), I’ve been asked to come here again and help the American people learn more about the our two candidates - President Joseph Biden, and former president Donald J. Trump. This debate will be broadcast live to select viewers, and I’ll also post a transcript on my blog. Let’s start with a question for President Biden. Mr. President, the ...
Jun 29, 2024•23 min
I think I got the original post slightly off. I was critiquing Sam Kriss’ claim that the best traditions come from “just doing stuff”, without trying to tie things back to anything in the past. The counterexample I was thinking of was all the 2010s New Atheist attempts to reinvent “church, but secular”. These were well-intentioned. Christians get lots of benefits from going to church, like a good community. These benefits don’t seem obviously dependent on the religious nature. So instead of tyin...
Jun 29, 2024•4 min
I had been living in Japan for a year before I got the idea to look up whose portraits were on the banknotes I was handling every day. In the United States, the faces of presidents and statesmen adorn our currency. So I was surprised to learn that the mustachioed man on the ¥1,000 note with which I purchased my daily bento box was a bacteriologist. It was a pleasant surprise, though. It seems to me that a society that esteems bacteriologists over politicians is in many ways a healthy one. But it...
Jun 29, 2024•32 min
I. A: I like Indian food. B: Oh, so you like a few bites of flavorless rice daily? Because India is a very poor country, and that’s a more realistic depiction of what the average Indian person eats. And India has poor food safety laws - do you like eating in unsanitary restaurants full of rats? And are you condoning Narendra Modi’s fascist policies? A: I just like paneer tikka. This is how most arguments about being “trad” sound to me. Someone points out that they like some feature of the past. ...
Jun 23, 2024•9 min
I. Steve Kirsch is an inventor and businessman most famous for developing the optical mouse. More recently, he’s become an anti-COVID-vaccine activist. He has many different arguments on his Substack , of which one especially caught my eye: He got Pollfish, a reputable pollster, to ask questions about people’s COVID experiences, including whether they thought any family members had died from COVID or from COVID vaccines. Results here : 7.5% of people said a household member had died of COVID 8.5...
Jun 23, 2024•12 min
I. Lately we’ve been discussing some of the ethics around genetics and embryo selection. One question that comes up in these debates is - are we claiming that some people are genetically inferior to other people? If we’re trying to select schizophrenia genes out of the population - even setting aside debates about whether this would work and whether we can do it non-coercively - isn’t this still in some sense claiming that schizophrenics are genetically inferior? And do we really want to do this...
Jun 23, 2024•8 min
Seven years ago, I wrote an online serial novel, Unsong, about alternate history American kabbalists. You can read the online version here . The online version isn’t going anywhere, but lots of people asked for a hard copy. I tried to get the book formally published, but various things went wrong and I procrastinated. Commenter Pycea finally saved me from myself and helped get it published on Amazon (thank you!) You can now buy the book here, for $19.99 . I think the published version is an impr...
Jun 23, 2024•1 min
I. Lyman Stone wrote an article Why Effective Altruism Is Bad . You know the story by now, let’s start with the first argument: The only cities where searches for EA-related terms are prevalent enough for Google to show it are in the Bay Area and Boston…We know the spatial distribution of effective altruist ideas. We can also get IRS data on charitable giving… Stone finds that Google Trends shows that searches for “effective altruism” concentrate most in the San Francisco Bay Area and Boston. So...
Jun 23, 2024•31 min
[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-may-2024
Jun 10, 2024•37 min
There’s been renewed debate around Bryan Caplan’s The Case Against Education recently, so I want to discuss one way I think about this question. Education isn’t just about facts. But it’s partly about facts. Facts are easy to measure, and they’re a useful signpost for deeper understanding. If someone has never heard of Chaucer, Dickens, Melville, Twain, or Joyce, they probably haven’t learned to appreciate great literature. If someone can’t identify Washington, Lincoln, or either Roosevelt, they...
Jun 10, 2024•15 min
In my book review of The Others Within Us , I wrote: [An Internal Family Systems session] isn’t supposed to be just the therapist walking you through guided imagery, or you making up a story you tell yourself. The therapist asks you “Look inside until you find the part that’s sabotaging your relationship”, and you are supposed to discover - not invent, discover - that your unconscious gives it the form of a snake called Sabby. And you are supposed to hear as in a trance - again, not invent - Sab...
Jun 10, 2024•9 min
Internal Family Systems, the hot new psychotherapy, has a secret. “Hot new psychotherapy” might sound dismissive. It’s not. There’s always got to be one . The therapy that’s getting all the buzz, curing all the incurable patients, rocking those first few small studies. The therapy that was invented by a grizzled veteran therapist working with Patients Like You, not the out-of-touch elites behind all the other therapies. The therapy that Really Gets To The Root Of The Problem. There’s always got ...
Jun 10, 2024•42 min
It's time to narrow the 150 entries in the Book Review Contest to about a dozen finalists. I can't read 150 reviews alone, so I need your help. You'll find the entries in six Google Docs (thanks to a reader for collating them): A - D E - I L - P R - S Th - The N The O - Y Please pick as many as you have time for, read them, and rate them using this form . Don’t read them in order! If you read them in order, I’ll have 1,000 votes on the first review, 500 on the second, and so on to none in the se...
Jun 02, 2024•6 min
Suffering is part of the human condition, except when it isn't. I met a man at an ACX meetup once who claimed he has never felt anxiety, not even the littlest bit. His father was the same way, so maybe it's genetic. Some people feel more pain than others. The “more pain” category includes some big demographic groups like redheads, who seem to feel some types of pain more intensely and may need up to 20% more anaesthetic , though their exact processing differences are complicated . But there are ...
Jun 02, 2024•25 min
Manifold pivot || Lab leak hindcasting || CFTC extra-double-bans prediction markets https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/mantic-monday-51324
May 30, 2024•30 min
Most recent post here . Table Of Contents: 1: Comments From Robin 2: Comments About/From Goldin et al 3: Comments From The Rest Of You Yokels https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/mantic-monday-51324
May 30, 2024•38 min
If you’re from a country that doesn’t have emotional support animals, here’s how it works. Sometimes places ban or restrict animals. For example, an apartment building might not allow dogs. Or an airline might charge you money to transport your cat. But the law requires them to allow service animals, for example guide dogs for the blind. A newer law also requires some of these places to allow emotional support animals, ie animals that help people with mental health problems like depression or an...
May 28, 2024•9 min
California’s state senate is considering SB1047 , a bill to regulate AI. Since OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta are all in California, this would affect most of the industry. If the California state senate passed a bill saying that the sky was blue, I would start considering whether it might be green, or colorless, or maybe not exist at all. And people on Twitter have been saying that this bill would ban open-source AI - no, all AI! - no, all technology more complicated than a toaster! So I s...
May 28, 2024•17 min
Original post here . Table Of Contents: 1: Response From The Author 2: Attempted Fact Checks 3: People With Personal Experience At Their Workplace 4: People With Personal Experience In Civil Rights 5: The Origins Of Modern Wokeness 6: Other Countries 7: EEOC Lawsuits 8: Other Good Comments 9: Conclusions And Updates https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-the-cf9...
May 24, 2024•1 hr 14 min
The Origins Of Woke , by Richard Hanania , has an ambitious thesis. And it argues for an ambitious thesis. But the thesis it has isn’t the one it argues for. The claimed thesis is “the cultural package of wokeness is downstream of civil rights law”. It goes pretty hard on this. For example, there’s the title, The Origins Of Woke. Or the Amazon blurb: “The roots of the culture lie not in the culture itself, but laws and regulations enacted decades ago”. Or the banner ad:= The other thesis, the on...
May 10, 2024•43 min
Robin Hanson replied here to my original post challenging him on health care here . On Straw-Manning Robin thinks I’m straw-manning him. He says: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/response-to-hanson-on-health-care
May 10, 2024•34 min
In November 2022, Aella posted this Twitter poll : 19% of women without pre-menstrual symptoms believed in the supernatural, compared to 39% of women with PMS. I can’t do chi-squared tests in my head, but with 1,074 votes this looks significant. Weird! Here’s another one Now 72% of people with PMS self-describe as neurotic, compared to only 45% without. Aella writes more about this here , and sebjenseb confirms here . I’m less weirded out by this one, because you can imagine that people feel neu...
May 10, 2024•8 min
One of the most common arguments against AI safety is: Here’s an example of a time someone was worried about something, but it didn’t happen. Therefore, AI, which you are worried about, also won’t happen. I always give the obvious answer: “Okay, but there are other examples of times someone was worried about something, and it did happen, right? How do we know AI isn’t more like those?” The people I’m arguing with always seem so surprised by this response, as if I’m committing some sort of betray...
May 03, 2024•13 min
Robin Hanson of Overcoming Bias more or less believes medicine doesn’t work [EDIT: see his response here, where he says this is an inaccurate summary of his position. Further chain of responses here and here ] This is a strong claim. It would be easy to round Hanson’s position off to something weaker, like “extra health care isn’t valuable on the margin”. This is how most people interpret the studies he cites. Still, I think his current, actual position is that medicine doesn’t work. For example...
May 03, 2024•44 min
