Astral Codex Ten Podcast
917 episodes - English - Latest episode: 30 days ago - ★★★★★ - 63 ratingsThe official audio version of Astral Codex Ten, with an archive of posts from Slate Star Codex. It's just me reading Scott Alexander's blog posts.
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Episodes
The Mystery Of Internet Survey IQs
March 20, 2024 23:45 - 11 minutes - 5.4 MBI 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...
In Partial Grudging Defense Of Some Aspects Of Therapy Culture
March 20, 2024 23:43 - 4 minutes - 2.2 MBBoth 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
Verses On Five People Being Killed By A Falling Package Of Foreign Aid
March 20, 2024 23:41 - 3 minutes - 1.67 MB(inspired by Aid Airdrop Kills Five People In Gaza After Parachute Fails) https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/verses-on-five-people-being-killed
Mantic Monday 3/11/24
March 20, 2024 23:38 - 28 minutes - 12.9 MBRobots of prediction, predictions of robots https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/mantic-monday-31124
Spring Meetups Everywhere 2024 - Call For Organizers
March 20, 2024 23:37 - 8 minutes - 3.8 MBThere 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
How Should We Think About Race And "Lived Experience"?
March 15, 2024 11:49 - 20 minutes - 9.58 MBThe 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 h...
ACX Grants Followup Impact Market
March 15, 2024 11:44 - 10 minutes - 4.64 MBI. 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 prof...
Who Predicted 2023?
March 15, 2024 11:40 - 16 minutes - 22.7 MBWinners 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 inter...
Book Review Contest Rules 2024
March 15, 2024 11:35 - 3 minutes - 1.72 MBAll 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...
Links For February 2024
March 10, 2024 06:37 - 31 minutes - 14.2 MB[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
Less Utilitarian Than Thou
March 10, 2024 06:36 - 6 minutes - 2.86 MBhttps://www.astralcodexten.com/p/less-utilitarian-than-thou
Who Does Polygenic Selection Help?
March 10, 2024 06:34 - 7 minutes - 3.31 MBhttps://www.astralcodexten.com/p/who-does-polygenic-selection-help
Highlights From The Comments On Polyamory
March 01, 2024 05:06 - 56 minutes - 25.9 MB[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
Mantic Monday 2/19/24
March 01, 2024 05:04 - 25 minutes - 11.8 MBAI forecasters come of age / Prediction market reality TV dating show? / OpenAI's Sora https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/mantic-monday-21924
X Fact Check: Does Gender Integration Moderate Politics?
March 01, 2024 05:03 - 4 minutes - 1.85 MBhttps://www.astralcodexten.com/p/x-fact-check-does-gender-integration
Love And Liberty
February 16, 2024 11:38 - 8 minutes - 3.9 MBLibertarians 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
Sam Altman Wants $7 Trillion
February 16, 2024 11:32 - 12 minutes - 5.9 MBI. 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
ACX Grants Results 2024
February 16, 2024 11:30 - 23 minutes - 10.6 MBThanks 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 b...
Evolution Explains Polygenic Structure
February 09, 2024 03:25 - 5 minutes - 2.63 MBWe’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 mo...
You Don't Hate Polyamory, You Hate People Who Write Books
February 09, 2024 03:19 - 10 minutes - 14.5 MBI. 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 ...
It's Fair To Describe Schizophrenia As Probably Mostly Genetic
February 09, 2024 03:16 - 21 minutes - 9.85 MBFamous 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 debatin...
Seems Like Targeting
February 09, 2024 03:12 - 10 minutes - 4.63 MBI. 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 abou...
Mantic Monday 1/29/24
February 09, 2024 03:06 - 18 minutes - 8.27 MBElection problems // Trump odds // AI worlds https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/mantic-monday-12924
The Psychopolitics Of Trauma
January 27, 2024 06:40 - 34 minutes - 15.6 MBI. Everyone knows politics makes people crazy. But what kind of crazy? Which page of the DSM is it on? I’m only half joking. Psychiatrists have spent decades developing a whole catalog of ways brains can go wrong. Politics makes people’s brains go wrong. Shouldn’t it be in the catalog? Wouldn’t it be weird if 21st century political extremists had discovered a totally new form of mental dysfunction, unrelated even by analogy to all the forms that had come before? You’ll object: politics...
Some Unintuitive Properties Of Polygenic Disorders
January 27, 2024 06:33 - 8 minutes - 3.75 MBE. Fuller Torrey recently published a journal article trying to cast doubt on the commonly-accepted claim that schizophrenia is mostly genetic. Most of his points were the usual “if we can’t name all of the exact genes, it must not be genetic at all” - but two arguments stood out: Even though twin studies say schizophrenia is about 80% genetic, surveys of twin pairs show that if one identical twin has schizophrenia, the other one only has a 15% to 50% chance of having it. The Nazis ran a e...
Should The Future Be Human?
January 27, 2024 06:30 - 9 minutes - 4.51 MBMachine Alignment Monday 1/22/24 Business Insider: Larry Page Once Called Elon Musk A “Specieist”: Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Google cofounder Larry Page disagree so severely about the dangers of AI it apparently ended their friendship. At Musk's 44th birthday celebration in 2015, Page accused Musk of being a "specieist" who preferred humans over future digital life forms [...] Musk said to Page at the time, "Well, yes, I am pro-human, I fucking like humanity, dude." A month later, Busine...
Subscrive Drive 2024 + Free Unlocked Posts
January 27, 2024 06:27 - 6 minutes - 2.84 MBAstral Codex Ten has a paid subscription option. You pay $10 (or $2.50 if you can’t afford the regular price) per month, and get: Extra articles (usually 1-2 per month) A Hidden Open Thread per week Access to the occasional Ask Me Anythings I do with subscribers Early access to some draft posts The warm glow of supporting the blog. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/subscrive-drive-2024-free-unlocked
Links For January 2024
January 22, 2024 10:58 - 19 minutes - 8.89 MB[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-january-2024
Against Learning From Dramatic Events
January 22, 2024 10:57 - 20 minutes - 9.46 MBDoes it matter if COVID was a lab leak? Here’s an argument against: not many people still argue that lab leaks are impossible. People were definitely doing dangerous work with viruses; Chinese biosafety protocols were definitely mediocre. Maybe the Wuhan Institute had bad luck, and one of the viruses there escaped. Or maybe they had good luck, by sheer coincidence no viruses escaped, and an unrelated pandemic started nearby. A good Bayesian should start out believing there’s some medium ...
AI Sleeper Agents
January 20, 2024 23:51 - 21 minutes - 9.67 MBMachine Alignment Monday 1/15/24 A sleeper agent is an AI that acts innocuous until it gets some trigger, then goes rogue. People might make these on purpose. For example, the CIA might “encourage” big AI labs to make sleeper agents. Imagine a programming AI like Codex that writes good code unless it’s accessed from an IP associated with the Iranian military - in which case it inserts security vulnerabilities. But in theory you could get one of these by accident. Suppose an AI had some...
Highlights From The Comments On Capitalism & Charity
January 14, 2024 21:43 - 30 minutes - 13.9 MB[original post: Does Capitalism Beat Charity?] 1: Comments Where I Want To Reiterate That I’m In Near Mode 2: Comments Directly Arguing Against My Main Point, Thank You 3: Comments Promoting Specific Interesting Capitalist Charities 4: Other Interesting Comments 5: Updates And Conclusions https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-capitalism
The Road To Honest AI
January 14, 2024 21:37 - 19 minutes - 8.88 MBCan blob fish dance ballet under diagonally fried cucumbers made of dust storms? AIs sometimes lie. They might lie because their creator told them to lie. For example, a scammer might train an AI to help dupe victims. Or they might lie (“hallucinate”) because they’re trained to sound helpful, and if the true answer (eg “I don’t know”) isn’t helpful-sounding enough, they’ll pick a false answer. Or they might lie for technical AI reasons that don’t map to a clear explanation in natural...
Does Capitalism Beat Charity?
January 07, 2024 09:20 - 13 minutes - 6.08 MB"You can't write a check to capitalism directly" This question comes up whenever I discuss philanthropy. It would seem that capitalism is better than charity. The countries that became permanently rich, like America and Japan, did it with capitalism. This seems better than temporarily alleviating poverty by donating food or clothing. So (say proponents), good people who want to help others should stop giving to charity and start giving to capitalism. These proponents differ on exactly wha...
Singing The Blues
January 07, 2024 09:20 - 14 minutes - 6.43 MB[epistemic status: speculative] I. Millgram et al (2015) find that depressed people prefer to listen to sad rather than happy music. This matches personal experience; when I'm feeling down, I also prefer sad music. But why? Try setting aside all your internal human knowledge: wouldn’t it make more sense for sad people to listen to happy music, to cheer themselves up? A later study asks depressed people why they do this. They say that sad music makes them feel better, because it’s more ...
In The Long Run, We're All Dad
January 02, 2024 10:14 - 23 minutes - 10.9 MBI. In February 2023 I found myself sitting in the waiting room of a San Francisco fertility clinic, holding a cup of my own semen. The Bible tells the story of Onan, son of Judah. Onan’s brother died. Tradition dictated that Onan should impregnate his brother’s wife, ensuring that his brother’s line would (in some sense) live on. Onan refused, instead “spilling the seed on the ground”. God smote Onan, starting a 4,000-year-old tradition of religious people getting angry about wasting spe...
Son Of Bride Of Bay Area House Party
December 18, 2023 02:16 - 14 minutes - 6.54 MB[previously in series: 1, 2, 3, 4] It has been three weeks since Sam Altman was fired, but the conversation won’t move on. “What did Ilya see?” asks your Uber driver, on the way to the airport. “What wasn’t he consistently candid about?” ask people on the street, as you walk your dog. “What was Adam D’Angelo’s angle?” asks the cop, as he writes you a ticket. “Was the Microsoft move just a bluff?” asks the robber at gunpoint, as he ransacks your apartment. You need to get away from it all...
Apply For An ACX Grant (2024)
December 18, 2023 02:14 - 10 minutes - 4.83 MBI’m running another ACX Grants round. If you already know what this is and want to apply, use the form here to apply, deadline December 29. Otherwise see below for more information. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/apply-for-an-acx-grant-2024
Defying Cavity: Lantern Bioworks FAQ
December 18, 2023 02:11 - 17 minutes - 8.21 MBLantern Bioworks says they have a cure for tooth decay. Their product is a genetically modified bacterium which infects your mouth, outcompetes all the tooth-decay-causing bacteria, and doesn’t cause tooth decay itself. If it works, it could make cavities a thing of the past (you should still brush for backup and cosmetic reasons). I talked to Lantern founder Aaron Silverbook to get an idea of how this works, both in a biological and an economic sense. Aaron was very knowledgeable and fort...
Beyond "Abolish The FDA"
December 13, 2023 12:25 - 13 minutes - 6.04 MB“Abolish the FDA” has become a popular slogan in libertarian circles. I’m sympathetic to the spirit of the demand. But a slogan isn’t a plan, and this one is even less of a plan than usual. I used to think that since libertarians always lose, there was no point in having a real plan for what to do if they won. But now that they’ve gone from “literally always lose” to “only lose 99.9% of the time” . . . https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/beyond-abolish-the-fda
Mantic Monday 12/4/23
December 13, 2023 12:23 - 28 minutes - 13.2 MBSam Altman || Dating site strategy || Metaculus updates || Wars and rumors of wars https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/mantic-monday-12423
Links For November 2023
December 04, 2023 22:02 - 25 minutes - 11.9 MB[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-november-2023 Links: He...
Contra DeBoer On Movement Shell Games
December 04, 2023 22:01 - 17 minutes - 7.88 MB"Lots of alcoholics want to quit in principle, but only some join AA" Followup to: In Continued Defense Of Effective Altruism Freddie deBoer says effective altruism is “a shell game”: Who could argue with that! But this summary also invites perhaps the most powerful critique: who could argue with that? That is to say, this sounds like so obvious and general a project that it can hardly denote a specific philosophy or project at all. The immediate response to such a definition, if you’re...
In Continued Defense Of Effective Altruism
December 01, 2023 11:42 - 18 minutes - 8.43 MB"All you do is cause boardroom drama, and maybe some other things I’m forgetting..." I. Search “effective altruism” on social media right now, and it’s pretty grim. Socialists think we’re sociopathic Randroid money-obsessed Silicon Valley hypercapitalists. But Silicon Valley thinks we’re all overregulation-loving authoritarian communist bureaucrats. The right thinks we’re all woke SJW extremists. But the left thinks we’re all fascist white supremacists. The anti-AI people think...
God Help Us, Let's Try To Understand AI Monosemanticity
December 01, 2023 11:34 - 23 minutes - 10.8 MBInside every AI is a bigger AI, trying to get out You’ve probably heard AI is a “black box”. No one knows how it works. Researchers simulate a weird type of pseudo-neural-tissue, “reward” it a little every time it becomes a little more like the AI they want, and eventually it becomes the AI they want. But God only knows what goes on inside of it. This is bad for safety. For safety, it would be nice to look inside the AI and see whether it’s executing an algorithm like “do the thing” or m...
Book Review: I See Satan Fall Like Lightning
November 23, 2023 11:55 - 25 minutes - 11.8 MBThe phrase “I see Satan fall like lightning” comes from Luke 10:18. I’d previously encountered it on insane right-wing conspiracy theory websites. You can rephrase it as “I see Satan descend to earth in the form of lightning.” But “lightning” in Hebrew is barak. So the Bible says Satan will descend to Earth in the form of Barak. Seems like a relevant Bible verse for insane right-wing conspiracy theorists! Philosopher / theologian Rene Girard’s famous book I See Satan Fall Like Lightning is...
Does Anaesthesia Prove Ketamine Placebo?
November 20, 2023 04:39 - 11 minutes - 5.31 MBThe psychiatric study everyone’s talking about this month is ”Randomized trial of ketamine masked by surgical anesthesia in patients with depression”. Ketamine is a dissociative drug - it produces weird drug effects like feelings of bodylessness and ego death. Recent research suggests it’s a powerful antidepressant. Usually we would try to run placebo-controlled trials. But it’s hard to run a placebo controlled trial of a dissociative. Either you feel bodylessness and ego death (in which c...
Followup: Quests And Requests
November 20, 2023 04:33 - 54 minutes - 25 MBThanks to everyone who commented on Quests And Requests. There was a predictable failure mode: lots of people said “I have relevant expertise and would be willing to help with #X”, and then those comments just sat there. Many fewer people said “I’m going to be team lead on #X and start contacting everyone else who was interested”. In case it’s not clear: I’m not planning on “picking” people to lead each of these projects (though if you email me at [email protected] asking for hel...
Hardball Questions For The Next Debate
November 16, 2023 09:16 - 15 minutes - 7.23 MB[previously in series: 2016, 2020; expansion of this] MODERATOR: Hello, and welcome to the third Republican primary debate. To shore up declining voter interest, we’ve decided to make things more interesting tonight. In this first round, each candidate will have to avoid using a specific letter of the alphabet in their answer. If they slip up, they forfeit their remaining time, and the next candidate in line gets the floor. Our candidates who have qualified today are Chris Christie, Nikk...
Highlights From The Comments On Kidney Donation
November 16, 2023 09:02 - 55 minutes - 25.2 MB[original post: My Left Kidney] 1: Comments From People Who Are Against This Sort Of Thing 2: …From Other People Who Have Donated Kidneys 3: …From People Who Have Received Kidneys 4: …About Opt-Out Organ Donation 5: …On Radiation Risk 6: …About Rejections 7: …On Polls About Who Would Donate 8: …On Artificial Organs 9: Other Comments https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-kidney
Quests And Requests
November 14, 2023 11:05 - 22 minutes - 10.1 MBProjects that need incubating I’ll be starting a new round of ACX Grants sometime soon. I can’t guarantee I’ll fund all these projects - some of them are more like vanity projects than truly effective. But I might fund some of them, and others might be doable without funding. So if you’re feeling left out and want a cause to devote your life to, here are some extras. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/quests-and-requests