Astral Codex Ten Podcast

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Your Book Review: Zuozhuan Sep 05, 2023

Show notes

Finalist #16 in the Book Review Contest

To tell the story of the fall of a realm, it's best to start with its rise.

More than three thousand years ago, the Shang dynasty ruled the Chinese heartland. They raised a sprawling capital out of the yellow plains, and cast magnificent ritual vessels from bronze. One of the criteria of civilization is writing, and they had the first Chinese writing, incising questions on turtle shells and ox scapulae, applying a heated rod, and reading the response of the spirits in the pattern of cracks. "This year will Shang receive good harvest?" "Is the sick stomach due to ancestral harm?" "Offer three hundred Qiang prisoners to [the deceased] Father Ding?" The kings of Shang maintained a hegemony over their neighbors through military prowess, and sacrificed war captives from their campaigns totaling in the tens of thousands for the favor of their ancestors.

But the Shang faced growing threat from the Zhou, a once-subordinate people from west beyond the mountains. Inspired by a rare conjunction of the planets in 1059 BC, the Zhou declared that there was such a thing as the Mandate of Heaven, a divine right to rule—and while the Shang had once held it, their misrule and immorality had forced the Mandate to pass to the Zhou. Thirteen years later, the Zhou and their allies defeated the Shang in battle, seized their capital, drove their king to suicide, and supplanted them as overlords of the Central Plains.

If the Shang were goth jocks, the Zhou were prep nerds...

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-zuozhuan

Here's Why Automaticity Is Real Actually Sep 05, 2023

Show notes

"Literal Banana" on Carcinization writes Against Automaticity, which they describe as:

An explanation of why tricks like priming, nudge, the placebo effect, social contagion, the "emotional inception" model of advertising, most "cognitive biases," and any field with "behavioral" in its name are not real.

My summary (as always, read the real thing to keep me honest): for a lot of the '90s and '00s, social scientists were engaged in ttthe project of proving "automaticity", the claim that most human decisions are unconscious/unreasoned/automatic and therefore bad. Cognitive biases, social priming, advertising science, social contagion research, "nudges", etc, were all part of this grand agenda.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/heres-why-automaticity-is-real-actually

Highlights From The Comments On Fetishes Sep 05, 2023

Show notes

Original post: What Can Fetish Research Tell Us About AI?

Table Of Contents:

1: Alternative Theories Of Fetishes 2: Comments Including Testable Predictions 3: Comments That Were Very Angry About My Introductory Paragraph 4: Commenters Describing Their Own Fetishes 5: Other Comments

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

Mantic Monday 8/28/23 Sep 02, 2023

Show notes

Superconductor autopsy -- Prediction mutual funds -- Flight delays

Sorry guys, LK-99 doesn't work. The prediction markets have dropped from highs in the 40s down to 5 - 10. It's over.

What does this tell us about prediction markets? Were they dumb to ever believe at all? Or were they aggregating the evidence effectively, only to update after new evidence came in?

I claim they were dumb. Although the media was running with the "maybe there's a room-temperature superconductor" story, the smartest physicists I knew were all very skeptical. The markets tracked the level of media hype, not the level of expert opinion. Here's my evidence:

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-82823

Your Book Review: Why Nations Fail Sep 02, 2023

Show notes

Finalist #15 in the Book Review Contest

[This is one of the finalists in the 2023 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I'll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you've read them all, I'll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked]

In which I argue:

Why Nations Fail is not a very good book.
Its authors' academic papers are much better, so I steelman their thesis as best I can, but it's still debatable.
Even if correct, it is much less interesting and useful than it appears.

Epistemic status: I have a decade-old PhD in economics (not in the field of economic growth) and a handful of peer-reviewed papers in moderately-ranked journals. I'm not claiming to make any original technical points, or to give a comprehensive evaluation of the economic growth literature. My criticisms are largely straight from the authors' own mouths.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-why-nations-fail

Meetups Everywhere 2023: Times & Places Aug 30, 2023

Show notes

Thanks to everyone who responded to my request for ACX meetup organizers. Volunteers have arranged meetups in 169 cities around the world, from Baghdad to Bangalore to Buenos Aires.

You can find the list below, in the following order:

Africa & Middle East
Asia-Pacific
Europe
North America
South America

You can see a map of all the events on the LessWrong community page. You can also see a searchable sheet at this Airtable link.

Within each region, it's alphabetized first by country, then by city. For instance, the first entry in Europe is Vienna, Austria, and the first entry for Germany is Berlin. Each region and country has its own header. The USA is the exception where it is additionally sorted by state, with states having their own subheaders. Hopefully this is clear. You can also just have your web browser search for your city by pressing ctrl+f and typing it if you're on Windows, or command+f and typing if you're on Mac. If you're on Linux, I assume you can figure this out.

Scott will provisionally be attending the meetup in Berkeley. ACX meetups coordinator Skyler will provisionally be attending Boston, Cavendish, Burlington, Berlin, Bremen, Amsterdam, Cardiff, London, and Berkeley. Some of the biggest ones might be announced on the blog, regardless of whether or not Scott or Skyler attends.

Highlights From The Comments On Dating Preferences Aug 30, 2023

Show notes

Original post here. And I forgot to highlight a link to the directory of dating docs.

Table Of Contents

1: Comments That Remain At Least Sort Of Against Dating Docs 2: Comments Concerned That Dating Docs Are Bad For Status Or Signaling 3: Comments About Orthodox Judaism And Other Traditional Cultures 4: Comments Including Research 5: Comments By People With Demographically Unusual Relationships 6: Comments About The Five Fake Sample Profiles 7: Things I Changed My Mind About

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-dating

More Thoughts On Critical Windows Aug 30, 2023

Show notes

On the fetish post, I discussed people who had some early sexual experience - like seeing a sexy cartoon character - and reacted in some profound way, like becoming a furry. Sometimes people have described this as a "critical window" for sexuality (similar to the "critical period" in language learning?) where young children "imprint" on sexual experiences - and then can't un-imprint on them later, even when they see many examples of sex that don't involve cartoon animals.

One of my distant cousins won't eat tomatoes. His parents say when he was very young, he bit into a cherry tomato and it exploded into goo in his mouth, and he was so upset he wouldn't eat tomatoes from then on. Now he's in his 30s and still hates them. Is this fairly described as a "critical window" for food preferences?

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/more-thoughts-on-critical-windows

Critical Periods For Language: Much More Than You Wanted To Know Aug 30, 2023

Show notes

Scott Young writes about Seven Expert Opinions I Agree With That Most People Don't. I like most of them, but #6, Children don't learn languages faster than adults, deserves a closer look.

Some people imagine babies have some magic language ability that lets them pick up their first language easily, even as we adults struggle through verb conjugations to pick up our second. But babies are embedded in a family of first-language speakers with no other options for communication. If an English-speaking adult was placed in a monolingual Spanish family, in a part of Spain with no English speakers, after a few years they might find they'd learned Spanish "easily" too. So Scott says:

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/critical-periods-for-language-much

What Can Fetish Research Tell Us About AI? Aug 30, 2023

Show notes

Epistemic status: Ha ha, only serious...

Arguing about gender is like taking OxyContin. There can be good reasons to do it. But most people don't do it for the good reasons. And even if you start doing it for good reasons, you might get addicted and ruin your life. Walk through San Francisco if you want to see people who ruined their lives with opioids; browse Substack to get a visceral appreciation of the dangers of arguing about gender.

Still, I've been debating autogynephilia fetishes with Michael Bailey, tailcalled, Zack Davis, and Aella (Bailey and Davis think they're deeply involved in transgender; tailcalled, Aella and I mostly don't); I've also studied BDSM and lactation fetishes, and Aella has done even more fetish-ology work. In a world that might be on the verge of radical, even unimaginable changes, how do we justify spending time on such an unsavory field?

The real answer is - we don't justify it. I'm easily nerd-sniped just like everyone else, and I assume the same is true of Aella, tailcalled, etc.

This post is about a fake answer which I think is funny, but which also has just enough truth to be worth thinking about: I think fetish research can help us understand AI and AI alignment.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/what-can-fetish-research-tell-us

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