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:

Constitutional AI: RLHF On Steroids May 12, 2023

Show notes

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/constitutional-ai-rlhf-on-steroids

A Machine Alignment Monday post, 5/8/23 What Is Constitutional AI?

AIs like GPT-4 go through several different

1 types of training. First, they train on giant text corpuses in order to work at all. Later, they go through a process called "reinforcement learning through human feedback" (RLHF) which trains them to be "nice". RLHF is why they (usually) won't make up fake answers to your questions, tell you how to make a bomb, or rank all human races from best to worst.

RLHF is hard. The usual method is to make human crowdworkers rate thousands of AI responses as good or bad, then train the AI towards the good answers and away from the bad answers. But having thousands of crowdworkers rate thousands of answers is expensive and time-consuming. And it puts the AI's ethics in the hands of random crowdworkers. Companies train these crowdworkers in what responses they want, but they're limited by the crowdworkers' ability to follow their rules.f

Raise Your Threshold For Accusing People Of Faking Bisexuality May 10, 2023

Show notes

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/raise-your-threshold-for-accusing

Many comments in yesterday's post about self-identified bisexuals getting long COVID centered on a concern that self-identified bisexuals don't really date both sexes, and are just claiming to be bi because it's trendy.

Bisexuals themselves hate this and have written many articles and papers about why you shouldn't say it (1, 2, 3). But I especially appreciated a discussion in the comments between Nom de Flume, Ryan W, and others, giving a great statistical explanation for why it's tempting to believe this, but why it isn't true.

Suppose someone (let's say a woman) has exactly equal sexual attraction to both men and women.

Replication Attempt: Bisexuality And Long COVID May 10, 2023

Show notes

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/replication-attempt-bisexuality-and

I learned from Pirate Wires that CDC data show bisexuals were about 50% more likely than heterosexuals to report long COVID.

Is this just because more women than men are bisexual, and more women than men get long COVID? Not exactly; in the data they cite, women (regardless of sexuality) have an 18% rate, and bisexuals (regardless of gender) have a 22% rate.

(aren't all these numbers really high? You can find almost any number depending on how you ask the question; questions along the lines of "have you had any persistent symptoms including fatigue, brain fog, shortness of breath, changes to taste/smell, etc, etc, etc, since having COVID?" tend to produce numbers from 20-30%; most will say this symptoms are mild and don't affect their functioning very much)

This seemed weird enough that I wanted to try replicating it with the ACX survey data (read more about the ACX survey here).

Change My Mind: Density Increases Local But Decreases Global Prices May 08, 2023

Show notes

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/change-my-mind-density-increases

Matt Yglesias tries to debunk the claim that building more houses raises local house prices. He presents several studies showing that, at least on the marginal street-by-street level, this isn't true.

I'm nervous disagreeing with him, and his studies seem good. But I find looking for tiny effects on the margin less convincing than looking for gigantic effects at the tails. When you do that, he has to be wrong, right?

Highlights From The Comments On Nerds And Hipsters May 04, 2023

Show notes

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

Table of contents:

1: Comments By The Author Of The Original Post 2: Comments With Strong Opinions On The Definition Of Nerds, Geeks, Etc 3: Comments About Collecting 4: Comments Insisting That Sports Are Good 5: Comments About Enjoying Things Vs. Building Identities Around Them

Mantic Monday 4/24/23 Apr 29, 2023

Show notes

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-42423 Can AIs Predict The Future? By Which We Mean The Past?

If we asked GPT-4 to play a prediction market, how would it do?

Actual GPT-4 probably would just give us some boring boilerplate about how the future is uncertain and it's irresponsible to speculate. But what if AI researchers took some other model that had been trained not to do that, and asked it?

This would take years to test, as we waited for the events it predicted to happen. So instead, what if we took a model trained off text from some particular year (let's say 2020) and asked it to predict forecasting questions about the period 2020 - 2023. Then we could check its results immediately!

This is the basic idea behind Zou et al (2022), Forecasting Future World Events With Neural Networks. They create a dataset, Autocast, with 6000 questions from forecasting tournaments Metaculus, Good Judgment Project, and CSET Foretell. Then they ask their AI (a variant of GPT-2) to predict them, given news articles up to some date before the event happened. Here's their result:

Links For April 2023 Apr 29, 2023

Show notes

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-april-2023

[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.]

Contra Kriss On Nerds And Hipsters Apr 22, 2023

Show notes

Sam Kriss has a post on nerds and hipsters. I think he gets the hipsters right, but bungles the nerds.

Hipsters, he says, are an information sorting algorithm. They discover things, then place them on the altar of Fame so everyone else can enjoy them. Before the Beatles were so canonical that they were impossible to miss, someone had to go to some dingy bar in Liverpool, think "Hey, these guys are really good", and report that fact somewhere everyone else could see it.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/contra-kriss-on-nerds-and-hipsters

[CLASSIC POST] Book Review: The Hungry Brain Apr 22, 2023

Show notes

[Content note: food, dieting, obesity]

The Hungry Brain gives off a bit of a Malcolm Gladwell vibe, with its cutesy name and pop-neuroscience style. But don't be fooled. Stephan Guyenet is no Gladwell-style dilettante. He's a neuroscientist studying nutrition, with a side job as a nutrition consultant, who spends his spare time blogging about nutrition, tweeting about nutrition, and speaking at nutrition-related conferences. He is very serious about what he does and his book is exactly as good as I would have hoped. Not only does it provide the best introduction to nutrition I've ever seen, but it incidentally explains other neuroscience topics better than the books directly about them do.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/04/25/book-review-the-hungry-brain/

Highlights From The Comments On IRBs Apr 21, 2023

Show notes

Table of Contents

1: Comments From The Author Of The Book 2: Stories From People In The Trenches 3: Stories From People In Other Industries 4: Stories From People Who Use Mechanical Turk 5: Comments About Regulation, Liability, and Vetocracy 6: Comments About The Act/Omission Distinction 7: Comments About The Applications To AI 8: Other Interesting Comments

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

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