Astral Codex Ten Podcast

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 pompous, long-winded drivel? Paul: Just this review injected a strong acid into my mind and it's burning through everything. I'm questioning my behaviors and thought patterns and then questioning the questioning. I realized how a lot of my thoughts are geared towards looking good in front of an imaginary audience . . . I'm definitely going to read this book. ophis_uk: It feels like this whole review, and to a large extent the comments, are carefully tiptoeing around an obvious conclusion, occasionally glancing sideways to look at it edge-on, but carefully avoiding confronting it directly. That conclusion is: Teach/TLP is a bad writer, and has therefore written a shit book. AL: Okay, maybe you're just reading the bones, but holy moley there are some crackling-good insights here! Alex Power: The review has successfully convinced me to not read this book. FiveHourMarathon: I got about halfway through and wrote in my notebook to call my local bookstore and see if they planned to stock it/could order one for me. I am genuinely fascinated by how divergent all of your responses are. I wonder if anyone will Aumann update towards "there might really be something here" or "it might all be obscurantist drivel" after knowing that other people think so. If not, why not? II. Reviews From Other People Who Have Read The Book

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 like getting your news in this format, subscribe to the Metaculus Alert bot for more (and thanks to ACX Grants winner Nikos Bosse for creating it!) Nuclear Risk Update Last month superforecaster group Samotsvety Forecasts published their estimate of the near-term risk of nuclear war, with a headline number of 24 micromorts per week. A few weeks later, J. Peter Scoblic, a nuclear security expert with the International Security Program, shared his thoughts. His editor wrote: I (Josh Rosenberg) am working with Phil Tetlock's research team on improving forecasting methods and practice, including through trying to facilitate increased dialogue between subject-matter experts and generalist forecasters. This post represents an example of what Daniel Kahneman has termed "adversarial collaboration." So, despite some epistemic reluctance, Peter estimated the odds of nuclear war in an attempt to pinpoint areas of disagreement. In other words: the Samotsvety analysis was the best that domain-general forecasting had to offer. This is the best that domain-specific expertise has to offer. Let's see if they line up:

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 about it, even if you're not "the typical ACX reader", even if you're worried people won't like you, etc. I'll check the comments to this post in case there are any questions.

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 selection of big politics/econ blogs to me, but I don't know if there are fashion blogs or movie blogs in a totally separate universe bigger than any of us. Also, Marginal Revolution confirmed as center of the blogosphere. 3: Wondering why so many Russian and Ukrainian cities have Greek names (eg Sebastopol)? Catherine the Great had a secret plan to resurrect Byzantium and install her appropriately-named grandson Constantine as New Roman Emperor. Step 1 was to found a lot of new cities with Greek names. Step 2 was to ally with the Austrian Empire. Then the Austrians got distracted with other things and they never reached Step 3. 4: Congratulations to last year's book review contest winner Lars Doucet, who was interviewed by Jerusalem Demsas in a Vox article on Georgism (the article prefers the term "land value tax" and never mentions George by name, which is a surprising but I think defensible choice). 5: Data from amitheasshole.reddit.com - "Posters were 64% female; post subjects (the person with whom the poster had a dispute) were 62% female. Posters had average age 31, subjects averaged 33. Male posters were significantly more likely to be the assholes…" H/T worldoptimization

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 hypotheses! If you look at standard pregnancy advice, it's all stuff like "take prenatal vitamins" and "avoid alcohol" and "don't strike your abdomen repeatedly with blunt objects". It's fine, but it's the equivalent of college counselors who say "get good grades and try hard on the SAT." Meanwhile, there are tiger mothers who are making their kids play oboe 10 hours/day because they heard the Harvard music department has clout with Admissions and is short on oboists. What's the pregnancy-advice version of that? That's what we're doing here. Do not take this guide as a list of things that you have to do, or (God forbid) that you should feel guilty for not doing. Take it as a list of the most extreme things you could do if you were neurotic and had no sense of proportion. Here are my headline findings:

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 to say is something like "this is helpful for some people but not others". I will say that, in the end. But I have a lot of sympathy for the people debating it. I have such a strong intuition of "why would this possibly work?" that it's always shocked me when other people say it does. And I know other people with such a strong intuition of "obviously this would work!" that it shocks them to hear other people even question it. Yet my patients seem to line up about half and half: some of them find therapy really great, others not helpful at all. Whenever I try to understand this, I find myself coming back to this tweet:

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 "go meta" is to go one level up; to "go mesa" is to go one level down (nobody has ever actually used this expression, sorry). So a mesa-optimizer is an optimizer one level down from you. Consider evolution, optimizing the fitness of animals. For a long time, it did so very mechanically, inserting behaviors like "use this cell to detect light, then grow toward the light" or "if something has a red dot on its back, it might be a female of your species, you should mate with it". As animals became more complicated, they started to do some of the work themselves. Evolution gave them drives, like hunger and lust, and the animals figured out ways to achieve those drives in their current situation. Evolution didn't mechanically instill the behavior of opening my fridge and eating a Swiss Cheese slice. It instilled the hunger drive, and I figured out that the best way to satisfy it was to open my fridge and eat cheese.

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 round. If you only go to two meetups a year, come to this one too! You can find a list of cities and times below. If you want to add your city to the list, fill in this form; if you have questions, ask meetupsmingyuan@gmail.com .

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 previous Chinese leaders become dictators? And: How did Xi come to power? How did he defeat those safeguards? Had previous Chinese leaders wanted more power? How come they failed to get it, but Xi succeeded? Third Revolution barely touched on any of this. It mostly explained Xi's domestic and foreign policies. Some of this was relevant: a lot of Xi's policies involve repression to prop up his rule. But none of it answered my key questions. So this is less of a book review than other Dictator Book Club entries. It's a look through recent Chinese history, with The Third Revolution as a very loose inspiration.

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. So I think there's an immediately obvious utilitarian bias towards the status quo of, oh, the last decade or so. Governments are heavy, complicated things, and I think a group who wants to disrupt that needs to make an affirmative argument based on something other than "self determination" that this is a good idea and all the disruption is worth it for the sake of things being better in the long run. Which unfortunately gets us nowhere because it brings us right back to debates about culture and history etc.