Astral Codex Ten Podcast

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Model City Monday 2/3/25 Feb 10, 2025

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Prospera Declared Unconstitutional

The Honduras Supreme Court has declared charter cities, including Prospera, unconstitutional.

The background: in the mid-2010s, the ruling conservative party wanted charter cities. They had already packed the Supreme Court for other reasons, so they had their captive court declare charter cities to be constitutional.

In 2022, the socialists took power from the conservatives and got the chance to fill the Supreme Court with their supporters. In September, this new Supreme Court said whoops, actually charter cities aren't constitutional at all. They added that this decision applied retroactively, ie even existing charter cities that had been approved under the old government were, ex post facto, illegal.

Prospera's lawyers objected, saying that the court is not allowed to make ex post facto rulings. But arguing that the Supreme Court is misinterpreting the Constitution seems like a losing battle - even if you're right, who do you appeal to?

So the city is pursuing a two-pronged strategy. The first prong is waiting. Prospera is a collection of buildings and people. The buildings can stay standing, the people can still live there - they just have to follow regular Honduran law, rather than the investment-friendly charter they previously used. There's another election in November, which the socialists are expected to lose. Prospera hopes the conservatives will come in, take control of the Supreme Court again, and then they'll say whoops, messed it up again, charter cities are constitutional after all.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/model-city-monday-2325

Why Recurring Dream Themes? Feb 10, 2025

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An observant Jewish friend told me she has recurring dreams about being caught unprepared for Shabbat.

(Shabbat is the Jewish Sabbath, celebrated every Saturday, when observant Jews are forbidden to work, drive, carry things outdoors, spend money, use electrical devices, etc.)

She said that in the dreams, she would be out driving, far from home, and realize that Shabbat was due to begin in a few minutes, with no way to make it home or get a hotel in time.

I found this interesting because my recurring dreams are usually things like being caught unprepared for a homework assignment I have due tomorrow, or realizing I have to catch a plane flight but I'm not packed and don't have a plan to get to the airport.

Most people attribute recurring nightmares to "fear". My friend is "afraid" of violating Shabbat; childhood me was "afraid" of having the assignment due the next day. This seems wrong to me. Childhood me was afraid of monsters in the closet; adult me is afraid of heart attacks, AI, and something happening to my family. But I don't have nightmares about any of these things, just homework assignments and plane flights.

So maybe the "unprepared" aspect is more important. Here's a story that makes sense to me: what if recurring dreams are related to prospective memory?

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/why-recurring-dream-themes

ACX Survey Results 2025 Feb 10, 2025

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Thanks to the 5,975 people who took the 2025 Astral Codex Ten survey.

See the questions for the ACX survey

See the results from the ACX Survey (click "see previous responses" on that page1)

I'll be publishing more complicated analyses over the course of the next year, hopefully starting later this month. If you want to scoop me, or investigate the data yourself, you can download the answers of the 5500 people who agreed to have their responses shared publicly. Out of concern for anonymity, the public dataset will exclude or bin certain questions2. If you want more complete information, email me and explain why, and I'll probably send it to you.

You can download the public data here as an Excel or CSV file:

http://slatestarcodex.com/Stuff/ACXPublic2025.xlsx
http://slatestarcodex.com/Stuff/ACXPublic2025.csv

Here are some of the answers I found most interesting:

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/acx-survey-results-2025

Everyone's A Based Post-Christian Vitalist Until The Grooming Gangs Show Up Feb 10, 2025

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Whenever I talk about charity, a type that I'll call the "based post-Christian vitalist" shows up in the comments to tell me that I've got it all wrong. The moral impulse tells us to help our family, friends, and maybe village. It's a weird misfire, analogous to an auto-immune disease, to waste brain cycles on starving children in a far-off country who you'll never meet. You've been cucked by centuries of Christian propaganda. Instead of the slave morality that yokes you to loser victims who wouldn't give you the time of day if your situations were reversed, you should cultivate a master morality that lets you love the strong people who push forward human civilization.

A younger and more naive person might think the based post-Christian vitalist and I have some irreconcilable moral difference. Moral argument can only determine which conclusions follow from certain premises. If premises are too different (for example, a intuitive feeling of compassion for others, vs. an intuitive feeling of strength and pitilessness), there's no way to proceed.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/everyones-a-based-post-christian

Try The 2025 ACX/Metaculus Forecasting Contest Feb 10, 2025

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This is normally when I would announce the winners of the 2024 forecasting contest, but there are some complications and Metaculus has asked me to wait until they get sorted out.

But time doesn't wait, and we have to get started on the new year's forecasting contest to make sure there's enough time for events to happen or not. That means the 2025 contest is now open!

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/subscrive-drive-25-free-unlocked

Links For January 2025 Feb 04, 2025

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[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-2025

Highlights From The Comments On Lynn And IQ Feb 04, 2025

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Shaked Koplewitz writes:

Doesn't Lynn's IQ measure also suffer from the IQ/g discrepancy that causes the Flynn effect?

That is, my understanding of the Flynn effect is that IQ doesn't exactly measure g (the true general intelligence factor) but measures some proxy that is somewhat improved by literacy/education, and for most of the 20th century those were getting better leading to improvements in apparent IQ (but not g). Shouldn't we expect sub Saharan Africans to have lower IQ relative to g (since their education and literacy systems are often terrible)?

And then the part about them seeming much smarter than a first worlder with similar IQ makes sense - they'd do equally badly at tests, but in their case it's because e.g. they barely had a chance to learn to read rather than not being smart enough to think of the answer.

(Or a slightly more complicated version of this - e.g. maybe they can read fine, but never had an education that encouraged them to consider counterfactuals so those just don't come naturally).

Yeah, this is the most important factor that I failed to cover in the post (I edited it in ten minutes later after commenters reminded me, but some of you got the email and didn't see it).

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-lynn

How To Stop Worrying And Learn To Love Lynn's National IQ Estimates Feb 04, 2025

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Richard Lynn was a scientist who infamously tried to estimate the average IQ of every country. Typical of his results is this paper, which ranged from 60 (Malawi) to 108 (Singapore).

Lynn's national IQ estimates (source)

People obviously objected to this, and Lynn spent his life embroiled in controversy, with activists constantly trying to get him canceled/fired and his papers retracted/condemned. His opponents pointed out both his personal racist opinions/activities and his somewhat opportunistic methodology. Nobody does high-quality IQ tests on the entire population of Malawi; to get his numbers, Lynn would often find some IQ-ish test given to some unrepresentative sample of some group related to Malawians and try his best to extrapolate from there. How well this worked remains hotly debated; the latest volley is Aporia's Are Richard Lynn's National IQ Estimates Flawed? (they say no).

I've followed the technical/methodological debate for a while, but I think the strongest emotions here come from two deeper worries people have about the data:

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/how-to-stop-worrying-and-learn-to

Bureaucracy Isn't Measured In Bureaucrats Jan 27, 2025

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I was surprised to see someone with such experience in the pharmaceutical industry say this, because it goes against how I understood the FDA to work.

My model goes:

FDA procedures require certain bureaucratic tasks to be completed before approving drugs. Let's abstract this into "processing 1,000 forms".
Suppose they have 100 bureaucrats, and each bureaucrat can process 10 forms per year.
Seems like they can approve 1 drug per year.
If you fire half the bureaucrats, now they can only approve one drug every 2 years.
That's worse!

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/bureaucracy-isnt-measured-in-bureaucrats

On Priesthoods Jan 27, 2025

Show notes

Some recent political discussion has focused on "the institutions" or "the priesthoods". I'm part of one of these (the medical establishment), so here's an inside look on what these are and what they do.

Why Priesthoods?

In the early days of the rationalist community, critics got very upset that we might be some kind of "individualists". Rationality, they said, cannot be effectively pursued on one's own. You need a group of people working together, arguing, checking each other's mistakes, bouncing hypotheses off each other.

For some reason it never occurred to these people that a group calling itself a rationalist community might be planning to do this. Maybe they thought any size smaller than the whole of society was doomed?

If so, I think they were exactly wrong. The truth-seeking process benefits from many different group sizes, for example:

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/on-priesthoods

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