Astral Codex Ten Podcast

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ACX Grants Followup Impact Market Mar 15, 2024

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I. 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 profit. In our last impact market test, some people (okay, one person) managed to get 25x their initial investment by funding a charity which did really well.

So in my ideal world, we'd be running an impact market where you could invest your money in the remaining 317 proposals and make a profit if they did well. We've encountered two flaws on the way to that ideal world:

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/acx-grants-followup-impact-market

Who Predicted 2023? Mar 15, 2024

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Winners 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 interesting, when a handful of people still beat the math? Because we want something that can be applied prospectively and reliably. If John Smith from Townsville was the highest scoring participant, it matters a lot whether he's a genius who can see the future, or if he just got lucky. Part of the goal of this contest was to figure that out. To figure out if the most reliable way to determine the future was to trust one identifiable guy, to trust some mathematical aggregation across guys, or something else.

Here's how it goes: in January 2023, I asked people to predict fifty questions about the upcoming year, like "Will Joe Biden be the leading candidate in the Democratic primary?" in the form of a probability (eg "90% chance"). About 3300 of you kindly took me up on that ("Blind Mode").

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/who-predicted-2023

Book Review Contest Rules 2024 Mar 15, 2024

Show notes

All 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 the book, and a link to a Google Doc. The Google Doc should have your review exactly as you want me to post it if you're a finalist. DON'T INCLUDE YOUR NAME OR ANY HINT ABOUT YOUR IDENTITY IN THE GOOGLE DOC ITSELF, ONLY IN THE FORM. I want to make this contest as blinded as possible, so I'm going to hide that column in the form immediately and try to judge your docs on their merit.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-contest-rules-2024

Links For February 2024 Mar 10, 2024

Show notes

[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 Mar 10, 2024

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https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/less-utilitarian-than-thou

Who Does Polygenic Selection Help? Mar 10, 2024

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https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/who-does-polygenic-selection-help

Highlights From The Comments On Polyamory Mar 01, 2024

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[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 Mar 01, 2024

Show notes

AI 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? Mar 01, 2024

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https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/x-fact-check-does-gender-integration

Love And Liberty Feb 16, 2024

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Libertarians 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

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