Astral Codex Ten Podcast

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-11121 Keynesian Beauty Contests I have no source for this, someone told me about it at a meetup. Suppose you want to run a forecasting tournament on whether nuclear war will destroy civilization by 2100. But nobody cares how much money they have in eighty years, plus if civilization is destroyed you can't collect your winnings. There are lots of kludgey solutions to this, but one possibility is a Keynesian beauty contest. Get a lot of isolated teams, and make them predict what all the other teams will guess. Whoever gets closest to the average wins the prize. Let's start with the good: in theory, this does solve the problem. Presumably the easiest way for the teams to all guess the same is to converge on the "right" answer. In some sense, the definition of probability is what a smart person who knows a certain amount of information should estimate, so if you ask someone to predict what a person just as smart as you who has the same information as you will estimate, that's like asking for your probability.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/jhanas-and-the-dark-room-problem The Dark Room Problem in neuroscience goes something like this: suppose the brain is minimizing prediction error, or free energy, or whatever. You can minimize lots of things by sitting quietly in a dark room. Everything will be very, very predictable. So how come people do other things? The usual workaround is inbuilt biological drives, considered as "set points". You "predict" that you will be well-fed, so getting hungry registers as prediction error and brings you out of your dark room to eat. Et cetera. Andrés Gómez Emilsson recently shared a perspective I hadn't considered before, which is: actually, sitting quietly in a dark room is really great. The Buddha discussed states of extreme bliss attainable through meditation: Secluded from sensual pleasures, secluded from unwholesome states, a bhikkhu enters and dwells in the first jhāna, which is accompanied by thought and examination, with rapture and happiness born of seclusion (Samyutta Nikaya) I had always figured that "sensual pleasures" here meant things like sex. But I think maybe he just means stimuli, full stop. The meditator cuts themselves from all sensory stimuli, eg by meditating really hard on a single object like the breath and ignoring everything else, and as a result gets "rapture and happiness born of seclusion".

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/epistemic-minor-leagues [I'm traveling this week - here is an older essay I never previously got around to posting] Viral game designer Adrian Hon wrote an article about What Alternate Reality Games Can Teach Us About QAnon. It argues that people fall for QAnon because it gives them an interesting mystery. It's a place where new discoveries are always around the corner, where a few hours of research by an amateur like you can fill in one of the missing links between Joe Biden and the Lizard Pope. The thrill of QAnon isn't just learning that all your political opponents are secretly Satanists or Illuminati or whatever. It's the feeling that you have something to contribute to the great project of figuring out the secret structure of the world, and that other people in a shared community of knowledge-seeking will appreciate you for it. One place you could go from here is to talk about how QAnoners are the sort of people who are excluded from existing systems of knowledge production. They are never going to be Professors of Biology, and they know it. Their only hopes of being taken seriously as an Expert - a position our culture treats as the height of dignity - is to create a complete alternate system of knowledge, ungrounded in any previous system, where they can end up as an expert on the Lizard Papacy. This is sort of true. But it needs to acknowledge that even being included in existing systems of knowledge production isn't that great. You become a Biology PhD student, you spend ten years learning about fungal ribosomes, and probably there's still some guy in China who knows more than you and beats you to the one interesting thing about fungal ribosomes left to figure out, plus nobody cares about fungal ribosomes anyway. Meanwhile, the QAnon devotee has discovered five earth-shattering facts about the Lizard Papacy in the last two hours, including previously-unrecognized links to the Kennedys, World War I, and ancient Lemuria. I think Hon is right that this drive to discover secrets and add them to a shared community of knowledge-seekers could be a contributor to the QAnon phenomenon. Like I said, it's a good article.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/chilling-effects [Epistemic status: Extremely confused! Low confidence in all of this] I. On the recent global warming post, a commenter argued that at least fewer people would die of cold. I was prepared to dismiss this on the grounds that it couldn't possibly be enough people to matter, but, um: There are only about sixty million deaths per year total, so if this is true then almost 10% of all deaths are due to cold. That sounds…extremely untrue, right? You can find the source here (study, popular article). The study confirms that it is claiming that 8.52% of all deaths are cold-related (plus an additional ~1% heat-related). It separates the world into a grid of 0.5 degree x 0.5 degree squares. It uses a bunch of assumptions and interpolations to get a dataset of daily average temperatures and mortality rates for each square over ten years. Then it calculates a function of how mortality varies with respect

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-october [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.] 1: Our World In Data - we are winning the war on oil spills: 2: @incunabula: "Cheese is one of the 5 things the Western book as we know it depends on. The other four are snails, Jesus, underwear and spectacles. If even one of these things was absent, the book you hold in your hand today would look completely different. I'll explain why…" 3: Mansana de la Discordia ("the block of discord") is a city block in Barcelona where four of the city's most famous architects built houses next to each other in clashing styles: It's also a pun on manzana de la Discordia, "Apple of Discord" 4: As late as the 1930s, most upper-middle-class American families had servants. By the end of World War II, almost nobody did. The transition was first felt as a supply-side issue - well-off people wanted servants as much as ever, but fewer and fewer people were willing to serve. Here's an article on the government commission set up to deal with the problem. I first saw this linked by somebody trying to tie it in to the current labor shortage. 5: Harvard Gazette reviews Stephen Pinker's new book on rationality. Someone sent this to me for the contrast with Secret Of Our Success - Pinker argues that hunter-gatherer tribes use critical thinking all the time, are skeptical of arguments from authority, and "owe their survival to a scientific mindset". I'd love to see a debate between Pinker and Henrich (or an explanation of why they feel like they're really on the same side and don't need to iron anything out). 6: It's hard to talk about IQ research without getting accused of something something Nazis. But here's a claim that actually, Nazis hated IQ research, worrying that it would "be an instrument of Jewry to fortify its hegemony" and outshine more properly Aryan values like "practical intelligence" and "character". Whenever someone tells you that they don't believe in IQ, consider calling them out on perpetuating discredited Nazi ideology.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-kids Ramparen writes: No one really does it because of climate change imo, that is just a neat excuse to avoid the responsibility and limitations that being a parent brings into your life Of course, this was immediately followed by some people (1, 2) saying they were seriously considering not having kids because of climate change, and this article had caused them to rethink their stance (you can find more further down). I don't want to pick on Ramperen in particular because a lot of people made this point. But I do want to pick on someone, so here goes. We talk about the Principle of Charity here a lot, and most of you are willing to grant it to right-wingers. If this was the post about how some people really do oppose abortion for moral reasons, and it's not just sexism - or how some people really do oppose immigration for cultural reasons, and it's not just racism - or anything along these lines, everyone would be on board. But I think this ethos of acknowledging that people can be honest and have principles, and not immediately jump to "they're making it up" cuts both ways. Some people are actually really concerned about global warming. Some people in the comments linked to a University of Bath survey in which 56% of young people said they thought "humanity is doomed" because of climate change. I haven't looked at the survey closely to see if the methodology was good or if this is a fair summary, and probably some of this is just mood affiliation - "'yes' is the side you're supposed to take if you're progressive, right?" But I think a lot of young people actually think the world is doomed. If you think the world is doomed - and that its death throes will be pretty horrible - that actually does sound like a good reason not to have children, doesn't it?

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/please-dont-give-up-on-having-kids Please Don't Give Up On Having Kids Because Of Climate Change It will probably make things worse, and there are better ways to contribute 22 hr ago 119 904 I. A recent poll finds that 39% of young people "feel uncertain" about having children because of climate change. And sure, people say a lot of things on polls, but people seem to be talking about this more and more. For example, from NPR: Should We Be Having Kids In The Age Of Climate Change? Standing before several dozen students in a college classroom, Travis Rieder tries to convince them not to have children. Or at least not too many. He's at James Madison University in southwest Virginia to talk about a "small-family ethic" — to question the assumptions of a society that sees having children as good, throws parties for expecting parents, and in which parents then pressure their kids to "give them grandchildren." Why question such assumptions? The prospect of climate catastrophe. For years, people have lamented how bad things might get "for our grandchildren," but Rieder tells the students that future isn't so far off anymore. Or, from CNBC, Climate Change Is Making People Think Twice About Having Children:

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-modern Thanks to everyone who commented on Whither Tartaria (currently 1079 comments). Many of you really like modern architecture, and many others of you really hate it. I appreciate most of you being able to accept disagreement on that and move on to the bigger question of why there's so much more of it now. The most interesting thing I got from the comments was Chaostician linking to Wikipedia's page on the Great Male Renunciation - men's fashion changing from ornate colorful clothing to dark suits. Wikipedia seems pretty convinced that this was because of egalitarianism norms: The Great Male Renunciation is the historical phenomenon at the end of the 18th century in which Western men stopped using brilliant or refined forms in their dress, which were left to women's clothing. Coined by psychoanalyst John Flügel in 1930, it is considered a major turning point in the history of clothing in which the men relinquished their claim to adornment and beauty. The Great Renunciation encouraged the establishment of the suit's monopoly on male dress codes at the beginning of the 19th century. The Great Male Renunciation began in the mid-18th century, inspired by the ideals of the The Enlightenment; clothing that signaled aristocratic status fell out of style in favor of functional, utilitarian garments. The newfound practicality of men's clothing also coincided with the articulation of the idea that men were rational and that women were frivolous and emotional.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-the-scout-mindset I. You tried Carol Dweck's Growth Mindset, but the replication crisis crushed your faith. You tried Mike Cernovich's Gorilla Mindset, but your neighbors all took out restraining orders against you. And yet, without a mindset, what separates you from the beasts? Just in time, Julia Galef brings us The Scout Mindset (subtitle: "Why Some People See Things Clearly And Others Don't). Galef admits she's a little behind the curve on this one. Books on rationality and overcoming cognitive biases were big ten years ago (Thinking Fast And Slow, Predictably Irrational, The Black Swan, etc). Nowadays "smiling TED-talk-circuit celebrity wants to help you improve your thinking!" is more likely to elicit groans than breathless anticipation. And that isn't the least accurate description of Julia (you can watch her TED talk here). But Galef earned her celebrity status honestly, through long years of hard labor in the rationality mines. Back in ~2007, a bunch of people interested in biases and decision-making joined the "rationalist community" centered around the group blogs Overcoming Bias and Less Wrong. Around 2012, they mostly left to do different stuff. Some of them went into AI to try to save the world. Others went into effective altruism to try to revolutionize charity. Some, like me, got distracted and wrote a few thousand blog posts on whatever shiny things happened to catch their eyes. But a few stuck around and tried to complete the original project. They founded a group called the Center For Applied Rationality (aka "CFAR", yes, it's a pun) to try to figure out how to actually make people more rational in the real world.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/whither-tartaria Imagine a postapocalyptic world. Beside the ruined buildings of our own civilization - St. Peter's Basilica, the Taj Mahal, those really great Art Deco skyscrapers - dwell savages in mud huts. The savages see the buildings every day, but they never compose legends about how they were built by the gods in a lost golden age. No, they say they themselves could totally build things just as good or better. They just choose to build mud huts instead, because they're more stylish. This is the setup for my all-time favorite conspiracy theory, Tartaria. Its true believers say we are those savages. We live in the shadow of the Taj Mahal, Art Deco skyscrapers, etc. But our buildings look like this: