Astral Codex Ten Podcast

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**Astral Codex Ten Podcast**

The 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.

Latest Episodes:

Mantic Monday 7/31/23: Room Temperature Superforecaster Aug 04, 2023

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Plus more CFTC, X, and UFOs

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-73123-room-temperature

Your Book Review: On the Marble Cliffs Aug 04, 2023

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Finalist #11 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]

What kind of fiction could be remarkable enough for an Astral Codex Ten review?

How about the drug-fueled fantasies of a serial killer? Or perhaps the innovative, sophisticated prose of the first novel of a brilliant polymath? Or would you prefer a book written in such fantastically lucid language it feels more like a dream than a story? Possibly you'd be more interested in a book so unbelievably dangerous that the attempt to publish it was literally suicidal. Or maybe an unusual political book, such as an ultraconservative indictment of democracy by Adolf Hitler's favorite author? Or rather an indictment of both Hitler and Bolshevism, written by someone who was among the first to recognize Hitler as a true enemy of humanity?

I picked On the Marble Cliffs, because it is all of that at the same time.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-on-the-marble-cliffs

Bad Definitions Of "Democracy" And "Accountability" Shade Into Totalitarianism Aug 04, 2023

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Suppose there's freedom of religion: everyone can choose what religion to practice. Is there some sense in which this is "undemocratic"? Would it be more "democratic" if the democratically-elected government declared a state religion, and everyone had to follow it?

You could, in theory, define "democratic" this way, so that the more areas of life are subjected to the control of a (democratically elected) government, the more democratic your society is. But in that case, the most democratic possible society is totalitarianism - a society where the government controls every facet of life, including what religion you practice, who you marry, and what job you work at. In this society there would be no room for human freedom.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/bad-definitions-of-democracy-and

Highlights From The Comments On Social Model Of Disability Aug 01, 2023

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[original post: Contra The Social Model Of Disability]

Table Of Contents

1: Comments Defending The Social Model 2: Comments About The Social Model Being Used (Or Not) In Real Life 3: Other Comments 4: Summary / What I Learned

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

We're Not Platonists, We've Just Learned The Bitter Lesson Jul 30, 2023

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Machine Alignment Monday, 7/24/23

Intelligence explosion arguments don't require Platonism. They just require intelligence to exist in the normal fuzzy way that all concepts exist.

First, I'll describe what the normal way concepts exist is. I'll have succeeded if I convince you that claims using the word "intelligence" are coherent and potentially true.

Second, I'll argue, based on humans and animals, that these coherent-and-potentially-true things are actually true.

Third, I'll argue that so far this has been the most fruitful way to think about AI, and people who try to think about it differently make worse AIs.

Finally, I'll argue this is sufficient for ideas of "intelligence explosion" to be coherent.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/were-not-platonists-weve-just-learned

Your Book Review: The Laws of Trading Jul 30, 2023

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A book about trading isn't ever actually about trading.

It is either:

A former trader sharing stories from their glory days, e.g. Liar's Poker, the exposé that morphed into a how-to guide, or
Tales of Icarus flying too close to the sun, where readers revel in schadenfreude, e.g., When Genius Failed.

With The Laws of Trading, Agustin Lebron has written something different: part love letter to trading, part philosophical treatise on epistemology and modeling the world around us, and part guide to applied decision-making. Lebron's Laws are Laws of the Jungle, not Laws of Nature. He views financial markets as the most competitive Darwinian environment on Earth, where participants must adapt or die.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-laws-of-trading

Highlights From The Comments On British Economic Decline Jul 30, 2023

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People are talking about British economic decline.

Not just the decline from bestriding the world in the 19th century to today. A more recent, more profound decline, starting in the early 2000s, when it fell off the track of normal developed-economy growth. See for example this graph from We Are In An Unprecedented Era Of UK Relative Macroeconomic Decline:

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

The Extinction Tournament Jul 25, 2023

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This month's big news in forecasting: the Forecasting Research Institute has released the results of the Existential Risk Persuasion Tournament (XPT). XPT was supposed to use cutting-edge forecasting techniques to develop consensus estimates of the danger from various global risks like climate change, nuclear war, etc.

The plan was: get domain experts (eg climatologists, nuclear policy experts) and superforecasters (people with a proven track record of making very good predictions) in the same room. Have them talk to each other. Use team-based competition with monetary prizes to incentivize accurate answers. Between the domain experts' knowledge and the superforecasters' prediction-making ability, they should be able to converge on good predictions.

They didn't. In most risk categories, the domain experts predicted higher chances of doom than the superforecasters. No amount of discussion could change minds on either side.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-extinction-tournament

Contra The xAI Alignment Plan Jul 20, 2023

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Elon Musk has a new AI company, xAI. I appreciate that he seems very concerned about alignment. From his Twitter Spaces discussion:

I think I have been banging the drum on AI safety now for a long time. If I could press pause on AI or advanced AI digital superintelligence, I would. It doesn't seem like that is realistic . . .

I could talk about this for a long time, it's something that I've thought about for a really long time and actually was somewhat reluctant to do anything in this space because I am concerned about the immense power of a digital superintelligence. It's something that, I think is maybe hard for us to even comprehend.

He describes his alignment strategy in that discussion and a later followup:

The premise is have the AI be maximally curious, maximally truth-seeking, I'm getting a little esoteric here, but I think from an AI safety standpoint, a maximally curious AI - one that's trying to understand the universe - I think is going to be pro-humanity from the standpoint that humanity is just much more interesting than not . . . Earth is vastly more interesting than Mars. . . that's like the best thing I can come up with from an AI safety standpoint. I think this is better than trying to explicitly program morality - if you try to program morality, you have to ask whose morality.

And even if you're extremely good at how you program morality into AI, there's the morality inversion problem - Waluigi - if you program Luigi, you inherently get Waluigi. I would be concerned about the way OpenAI is programming AI - about this is good, and that's not good.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/contra-the-xai-alignment-plan

Your Book Review: The Educated Mind Jul 20, 2023

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"The promise of a new educational theory", writes Kieran Egan, "has the magnetism of a newspaper headline like 'Small Earthquake in Chile: Few Hurt'".

But — could a new kind of school make the world rational?

I discovered the work of Kieran Egan in a dreary academic library. The book I happened to find — Getting it Wrong from the Beginning — was an evisceration of progressive schools. As I worked at one at the time, I got a kick out of this.

To be sure, broadsides against progressivist education aren't exactly hard to come by. But Egan's account went to the root, deeper than any critique I had found. Better yet, as I read more, I discovered he was against traditionalist education, too — and that he had constructed a new paradigm that incorporated the best of both.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-educated-mind