Astral Codex Ten Podcast

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Moderation Is Different From Censorship Nov 03, 2022

Show notes

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/moderation-is-different-from-censorship

This is a point I keep seeing people miss in the debate about social media.

Moderation is the normal business activity of ensuring that your customers like using your product. If a customer doesn't want to receive harassing messages, or to be exposed to disinformation, then a business can provide them the service of a harassment-and-disinformation-free platform.

Censorship is the abnormal activity ensuring that people in power approve of the information on your platform, regardless of what your customers want. If the sender wants to send a message and the receiver wants to receive it, but some third party bans the exchange of information, that's censorship.

The racket works by pretending these are the same imperative. "Well, lots of people will be unhappy if they see offensive content, so in order to keep the platform safe for those people, we've got to remove it for everybody."

This is not true at all. A minimum viable product for moderation without censorship is for a platform to do exactly the same thing they're doing now - remove all the same posts, ban all the same accounts - but have an opt-in setting, "see banned posts". If you personally choose to see harassing and offensive content, you can toggle that setting, and everything bad will reappear. To "ban" an account would mean to prevent the half (or 75%, or 99%) of people who haven't toggled that setting from seeing it. The people who elected to see banned posts could see them the same as always. Two "banned" accounts could still talk to each other, retweet each other, etc - as could accounts that hadn't been banned, but had opted into the "see banned posts" setting.

Does this difference seem kind of pointless and trivial? Then imagine applying it to China. If the Chinese government couldn't censor - only moderate - the world would look completely different. Any Chinese person could get accurate information on Xinjiang, Tiananmen Square, the Shanghai lockdowns, or the top fifty criticisms of Xi Jinping - just by clicking a button on their Weibo profile. Given how much trouble ordinary Chinese people go through to get around censors, probably many of them would click the button, and then they'd have a free information environment. This switch might seem trivial in a well-functioning information ecology, but it prevents the worst abuses, and places a floor on how bad things can get.

Highlights From The Comments On Jhanas Nov 02, 2022

Show notes

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

"I think it's the first time half the commenters accused the other half of lying" I. Is Jhana Real?

This was a fun one. I think it's the first time half the commenters accused the other half of lying.

Okay, "half" is an exaggeration. But by my count we had 21 people who claimed to have experienced jhanas (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21), and 7 who said they were pretty sure it wasn't real as described (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7).

The former group include people like Tetris McKenna, who wrote:

I've experienced samatha jhanas. I don't do it so much now. The first few times you get on the edge of 1st jhana, it's difficult to achieve, because you see the wave of pleasure approaching, and grasp for it, and that grasping takes you away from it. So it's a careful balancing act of pleasure/desire in the first place to get there, which you have to master to some degree. To even get to 1st jhana, you have to internally figure out some stuff about the craving/pleasure dynamic on a subconscious, mechanical level.

1st jhana is, as the author describes, intensely pleasurable. Sublime. His descriptions are spot on imo. But in some ways, it's also too much pleasure. It can feel agitating once you get used to it and aren't so awestruck by it anymore. Indeed, the latter jhanas are associated with letting go of certain aspects of the initial jhana, to more and more refined states that are more calm and equanimous than intensely pleasurable. Again, this is internalising and mastering the skill of balancing pleasure/craving.

Those calm and equanimous states of 2nd-4th jhana become much more satisfying than the initial pleasure wave of the 1st jhana. Cultivating them to that degree is a process of gaining valuable insight into the pleasure/craving dynamic in your mind. Even if you don't get to those stages, just practising 1st jhana alone will help the mind normalise the intensity of the pleasure, such that it's no big deal any more. You don't need or even want pleasure all the time, because you've seen it with such clarity, over and over again, just by setting the conditions up correctly in your mind.

Book Review: Malleus Maleficarum Oct 29, 2022

Show notes

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-malleus-maleficarum

I. To The Republic, For Witches Stand

Did you know you can just buy the Malleus Maleficarum? You can go into a bookstore and say "I would like the legendary manual of witch-hunters everywhere, the one that's a plot device in dozens of tired fantasy novels". They will sell it to you and you can read it.

I recommend the Montague Summers translation. Not because it's good (it isn't), but because it's by an slightly crazy 1920s deacon every bit as paranoid as his subject matter. He argues in his Translator's Introduction that witches are real, and that a return to the wisdom of the Malleus is our only hope of standing against them:

Although it may not be generally recognized, upon a close investigation it seems plain that the witches were a vast political movement, an organized society which was anti-social and anarchical, a world-wide plot against civilization. Naturally, although the Masters were often individuals of high rank and deep learning, that rank and file of the society, that is to say, those who for the most part fell into the hands of justice, were recruited from the least educated classes, the ignorant and the poor. As one might suppose, many of the branches or covens in remoter districts knew nothing and perhaps could have understood nothing of the enormous system. Nevertheless, as small cogs in a very small [sic] wheel, it might be, they were carrying on the work and actively helping to spread the infection.

And is this "world-wide plot against civilization" in the room with us right now? In the most 1920s argument ever, Summers concludes that this conspiracy against civilization has survived to the modern day and rebranded as Bolshevism.

Nick Cammarata On Jhana Oct 29, 2022

Show notes

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/nick-cammarata-on-jhana

Buddhists say that if you meditate enough, you can learn to enter a state of extreme bliss called jhana.

(there are many different jhana states - there's a discussion of the distinctions here - but I'm lumping them together for simplicity. For attempted explanations of why jhana should exist, see here and here.)

Jhana is different from enlightenment. Enlightenment changes you forever. Jhana is just a state you can enter during meditation sessions, then leave when the session is over. Enlightenment takes years or decades of work, but some people describe reaching jhana after a few months of practice. Hardcore Buddhists insist that jhana is good only insofar as it serves as a stepping stone to enlightenment; others may find extreme bliss desirable in its own right.

Nick Cammarata of OpenAI sometimes meditates and reaches jhana. I've found his descriptions unusually, well, descriptive:

Highlights From The Comments On Supplement Labeling Oct 27, 2022

Show notes

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

[Original post here: How Trustworthy Are Supplements?]

1: AvalancheGenesis writes:

I think the bigger issue is that the industry as a whole sort of exists as solutions-in-search-of-problems...deficiencies really aren't that common, or even meaningfully health-affecting unless dire. (Fairly-arbitrary worldwide differences in target levels of IUs also remains puzzling.) Discerning customers can benefit from targeted supplementation. But that's not the median supplement purchaser, far from it. The median supplement user is more like...my former coworker who claimed he never got colds because he took 1000% vitC pills every single day, or whatever. At some point, the explanatory process for That's Not How It Works At All is just too long, so...let people believe things. Supplements are surely an easier way to sell hope and agency than most options. At least he picked something water-soluble and cared about proper hydration.

Vitamin C probably doesn't prevent colds in the general population, though some studies suggest it does prevent colds in athletes, and there's some medium-quality evidence that it might shorten colds a little once you have them.

The supplements I find more interesting are things like melatonin for sleep, ashwagandha or silexan for anxiety, SAMe for depression, or caffeine + theanine for focus. All of these are useful, supported by studies, and good alternatives to medications that some people don't tolerate well. I'm using mental health examples because that's the subject I know about, but there are probably examples in other fields too (probiotics for digestive problems).

Some commenters chimed in to discuss supplements that have anecdotally worked for them (1, 2, 3). And Elizabeth's story here is also a good example of how I think about this.

From The Mailbag Oct 26, 2022

Show notes

Answers to the questions I get most often at meetup Q&As

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/from-the-mailbag

DEAR SCOTT: When are you going to publish Unsong? — Erik from Uruk

Dear Erik,

Aaargh. I have an offer from a publisher to publish it if I run it by their editor who will ask me to edit lots of things, and I've been so stressed about this that I've spent a year putting it off. I could self-publish, but that also sounds like work and what if this is the only book I ever write and I lose the opportunity to say I have a real published book because I was too lazy?

The only answer I can give you is that you're not missing anything and this is nobody's fault but my own. Maybe at some point I will make up my mind and something will happen here, sorry.

DEAR SCOTT: How is your Lorien Psychiatry business going? — Letitia from Lutetia

Dear Letitia,

As far as I can tell, patients are getting the treatments they need and are generally happy with the service. In terms of financials, it's going okay, but I'm not scaling it enough to be sure.

I originally calculated that if I charged patients $35/month and worked forty hours a week, I could make a normal psychiatrist's salary of about $200K.

I must have underestimated something, because I was only making about two-thirds what I expected, so I increased the price to $50/month. But also, it turns out I don't want to work forty hours a week on psychiatry! Psychiatry pays much less per hour than blogging and is much more stressful! So in the end, I found that I was only doing psychiatry work ten hours a week, and spending the rest of the time doing blogging or blogging-related activities.

Seeing patients about ten hours a week, three patients per hour, at $50/patient/month, multiplies out to $75,000/year. I'm actually making more like $40,000/year. Why? Partly because the 10 hours of work includes some unpaid documentation, arguing with insurance companies, and answering patient emails. Partly because patients keep missing appointments and I don't have the heart to charge them no-show fees. And partly because some people pay less than $50/month, either because I gave them a discount for financial need, or because they signed up at the original $35/month rate and I grandfathered them in.

At my current workload, if I worked 40 hours a week at Lorien I could make $160,000. But if I worked 40 hours/week and was stricter about making patients pay me, I could probably get that up to $200,000.

But also, if I quadrupled my patient load, that would mean a lot more documention, arguing with insurance companies, emergencies, and stress. So I can't say for sure that I could actually handle that. Plus forcing patients to pay me is some extra work and could make some patients leave or make the model harder somehow. So I can't say for sure that I could do that either.

Book Review: Rhythms Of The Brain Oct 23, 2022

Show notes

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-rhythms-of-the-brain

Brain waves have always felt like a mystery. You learn some psychology, some neuroscience, a bit of neuroanatomy. And then totally separate from all of this, you know that there are things called "brain waves" that get measured with an EEG. Why should the brain have waves? Are they involved in thinking or feeling or something? How do you do computation when your processors are firing in a rhythmic pattern dozens of times per second? Why don't AIs have anything like brain waves? Should they?

I read Rhythms Of The Brain by Prof. Gyorgy Buzsaki to answer these questions. This is a tough book, probably more aimed at neuroscientists than laypeople, and I don't claim to have gotten more than the most superficial understanding of it. But as far as I know it's the only book on brain waves - and so our only option for solving the mystery. This review is my weak and confused attempt to transmit it, which I hope will encourage other people toward more successful efforts.

Another Bay Area House Party Oct 21, 2022

Show notes

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/another-bay-area-house-party

[Previously: Every Bay Area House Party]

Blaise Pascal said all human evil comes from inability to sit alone in a room. Your better nature - your rational soul - tells you that nothing good has ever come from attending large social events. But against that better nature stands the Devil, wielding a stick marked "FOMO". If you don't go to social events, maybe other people will go and have great times and live fuller lives than you. "As the dog returns to its vomit, so returns the fool to his folly", says the Bible. And so you find yourself mumbling thanks to your Uber driver and crossing the threshold of another Bay Area house party.

"Heyyyyy, I haven't seen you in forever!" says a person whose name is statistically likely to be Michael or David. "What have you been working on?"

"Resisting the urge to go to events like this", you avoid saying. "What about you?"

"Oh man," says Michael or David, "The most exciting startup. Just an amazing startup. We're doing procedural myth generation with large language models."

"Oh?"

"Yeah. We fine-tune an AI on a collection of hundreds of myths from every culture in the world. Then we can prompt it. A myth about snowflakes. A myth about mountain-climbing. A myth about lunch."

Mantic Monday 10/17/22 Oct 20, 2022

Show notes

What do Sam Altman, Matt Bruenig, and the Sacramento Kings have in common? -- Are the polls wrong? -- CFTC vs. Everybody

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-101722

Midterm Examination

Polls this year look bad for Senate Republicans. Pollsters' simulations give them a 22% chance (Economist), 34% chance (538), or 37% chance (RaceToTheWH) of taking power. Even Mitch McConnell has admitted he has only "a 50-50 proposition" of winning.

But polls did pretty badly last election. "Least accurate in 40 years", said Politico. On average they overestimated Biden's support by four points, maybe because Republicans distrust pollsters and refuse to answer their questions. Might the same thing be happening this year? If so, does it give Republicans reason for optimism?

Prediction markets say . . . kind of!

Highlights From The Comments On The Central Valley Oct 16, 2022

Show notes

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-the-3b1

Original post: Why Is The Central Valley So Bad?

1: Several Valley residents commented with their perspectives. Some were pretty grim. For example, 21st Century Salonniere (writes The 21st Century Salon) writes:

It is horrible. It's been horrible since at least 1996 when I got trapped here by my spouse's job. We were going to stay two years tops and go back East. (Long boring story about what went wrong.) The only things you could say for it back then were "Well, the produce is good" and "Houses are affordable, sort of."

Now the house prices in our neighborhood have doubled in the 4 years since we bought this home, and there's no way we could now, if we moved here today, ever buy a home in this hellhole.

Who on earth is coming here and why?

> "the problem is more that everyone in the Central Valley wants to leave."

Yes. Every interesting or smart critical thinker I've ever met here, everyone who gives even the slightest shit about museums and theatre and music and culture (with the exception of a few people who were born and raised here, so "it's home") has been desperate to leave. I've met a lot of nice people here over the years. They become close friends and they always leave the state. I'm counting down till I can leave too.

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