Astral Codex Ten Podcast

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Your Book Review: Kora In Hell Aug 28, 2022

Show notes

Finalist #16 in the Book Review Contest

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-kora-in-hell

[This is one of the finalists in the 2022 book review contest. It's not by me - it's by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. 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.]

The sense that everything is poetical is a thing solid and absolute; it is not a mere matter of phraseology or persuasion.

— G.K. Chesterton

William Carlos Williams attributes the title to his friend/rival Ezra Pound, mythological references' number one fanboy. Kora is a parallel figure to Persephone or Proserpina, the Spring captured and taken to Hades by Hades himself. Persephone as a plant goddess and her mother Demeter were the central figures of the Eleusinian Mysteries, which promised the initiated a groovy afterlife glimpsed at by psychedelic shrooms. And Kora means maiden. Ancient Greeks called her that either because she was like Voldemort, and you were apotropaically not supposed to say her true name because this is a Mystery Cult, damn it. Keeps some of the mystery. Or because she in a way represents all of the maidens, everywhere. So, in that sense, Kora in Hell alludes to the multitude of suffering young women Williams met while working as a doctor, assisting in 1917 style home labors, and, because WWI was going on at the time and doctors were extremely scarce, as a local police surgeon. Conditions were dire:

Meetups Everywhere 2022: Times & Places Aug 27, 2022

Show notes

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/meetups-everywhere-2022-times-and

Thanks to everyone who responded to my request for ACX meetup organizers. Volunteers have arranged meetups in 205 cities around the world, including Penryn, Cornwall and Baghdad, Iraq.

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

Africa & Middle East
Asia-Pacific (including Australia)
Canada
Europe (including UK)
Latin America
United States

You can see a map of all the events on the LessWrong community page.

Within each section, it's alphabetized first by country/state, then by city - so the first entry in Europe is Vienna, Austria. Sorry if this is confusing.

I will provisionally be attending the meetups in Berkeley, Los Angeles, and San Diego. ACX meetups coordinator Mingyuan will provisionally be attending Paris and London. I'll be announcing some of the biggest ones on the blog, regardless of whether or not I attend.

Extra Info For Potential Attendees

1. If you're reading this, you're invited. Please don't feel like you "won't be welcome" just because you're new to the blog, demographically different from the average reader, or hate ACX and everything it stands for. You'll be fine! 2. You don't have to RSVP or contact the organizer to be able to attend (unless the event description says otherwise); RSVPs are mostly to give organizers a better sense of how many people might show up, and let them tell you if there are last-second changes. I've also given email addresses for all organizers in case you have a question

Highlights From The Comments On The Repugnant Conclusion And WWOTF Aug 27, 2022

Show notes

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-the-909

(Original post here)

1: Petey writes:

When I think of happiness 0.01, I don't think of someone on the edge of suicide. I shudder at the thought of living the sorts of lives the vast majority of people have lived historically, yet almost all of them have wanted and tried to prolong their lives. Given how evolution shaped us, it makes sense that we are wired to care about our survival and hope for things to be better, even under great duress. So a suicidal person would have a happiness level well under 0, probably for an extended period of time.

If you think of a person with 0.01 happiness as someone whose life is pretty decent by our standards, the repugnant conclusion doesn't seem so repugnant. If you take a page from the negative utilitarians' book (without subscribing fully to them), you can weight the negatives of pain higher than the positives of pleasure, and say that neutral needs many times more pleasure than pain because pain is more bad than pleasure is good.

Another way to put it is that a life of 0.01 happiness is a life you must actually decide you'd want to live, in addition to your own life, if you had the choice to. If your intuition tells you that you wouldn't want to live it, then its value is not truly >0, and you must shift the scale. Then, once your intuition tells you that this is a life you'd marginally prefer to get to experience yourself, then the repugnant conclusion no longer seems repugnant.

This is a good point, but two responses.

Effective Altruism As A Tower Of Assumptions Aug 24, 2022

Show notes

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/effective-altruism-as-a-tower-of

I have an essay that my friends won't let me post because it's too spicy. It would be called something like How To Respond To Common Criticisms Of Effective Altruism (In Your Head Only, Definitely Never Do This In Real Life), and it starts:

Q: I don't approve of how effective altruists keep donating to weird sci-fi charities. A: Are you donating 10% of your income to normal, down-to-earth charities?

Q: Long-termism is just an excuse to avoid helping people today! A: Are you helping people today?

Q: I think charity is a distraction from the hard work of systemic change. A: Are you working hard to produce systemic change?

Q: Here are some exotic philosophical scenarios where utilitarianism gives the wrong answer. A: Are you donating 10% of your income to poor people who aren't in those exotic philosophical scenarios?

Many people will answer yes to all of these! In which case, fine! But…well, suppose you're a Christian. An atheist comes up to you and says "Christianity is stupid, because the New International Version of the Bible has serious translation errors".

You might immediately have questions like "Couldn't you just use a different Bible version?" or "Couldn't you just worship Jesus and love your fellow man while accepting that you might be misunderstanding parts of the Bible?"

But beyond that, you might wonder why the atheist didn't think of these things. Are the translation errors his real objection to Christianity, or is he just seizing on them as an excuse? And if he's just seizing on them as an excuse, what's his real objection? And why isn't he trying to convince you of that?

Book Review: What We Owe The Future Aug 23, 2022

Show notes

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-what-we-owe-the-future

An academic once asked me if I was writing a book. I said no, I was able to communicate just fine by blogging. He looked at me like I was a moron, and explained that writing a book isn't about communicating ideas. Writing a book is an excuse to have a public relations campaign.

If you write a book, you can hire a publicist. They can pitch you to talk shows as So-And-So, Author Of An Upcoming Book. Or to journalists looking for news: "How about reporting on how this guy just published a book?" They can make your book's title trend on Twitter. Fancy people will start talking about you at parties. Ted will ask you to give one of his talks. Senators will invite you to testify before Congress. The book itself can be lorem ipsum text for all anybody cares. It is a ritual object used to power a media blitz that burns a paragraph or so of text into the collective consciousness.

If the point of publishing a book is to have a public relations campaign, Will MacAskill is the greatest English writer since Shakespeare. He and his book What We Owe The Future have recently been featured in the New Yorker, New York Times, Vox, NPR, BBC, The Atlantic, Wired, and Boston Review. He's been interviewed by Sam Harris, Ezra Klein, Tim Ferriss, Dwarkesh Patel, and Tyler Cowen. Tweeted about by Elon Musk, Andrew Yang, and Matt Yglesias. The publicity spike is no mystery: the effective altruist movement is well-funded and well-organized, they decided to burn "long-termism" into the collective consciousness, and they sure succeeded.

Your Book Review: 1587, A Year Of No Significance Aug 22, 2022

Show notes

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-1587-a-year-of-no

Finalist #15 in the Book Review Contest

—

I bought this book because of its charming title: 1587, A Year of No Significance: The Ming Dynasty in Decline.

A year of no significance? It's not often a history book makes me laugh, but that did. Sure, many history books investigate the insignificant, but your typical author doesn't call your attention to it.

This book, by Ray Huang, was first published in the early 1980s; I came across it only recently as a recommendation on The Scholar's Stage (a blog which I found through some link on ACX/SSC a while back.)

A little backstory: in my younger days, I thought it might be fun and useful to learn the entire history of the world. To that end, I started with accounts of archaeology and prehistory, then the ancient civilizations, classical antiquity, and so on until I lost momentum somewhere around Tamerlane and the Black Death.

Probably the biggest thing I learned is that human history is little more than 5000 years of gang war.

Highlights From The Comments On Subcultures Aug 19, 2022

Show notes

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

1: Maximum Limelihood Estimator writes:

I firmly believe that cycles don't exist and never have existed. This is my shitposting way of saying "I have never, once, in my years of experience modeling human behavioral time series, come across an honest-to-god cyclical pattern (excluding time of year/month/week/day effects)." And yet for some reason, every time I show a time series to anyone ever, people swear to god the data looks cyclical.

I called this "a cyclic theory" to acknowledge my debt to Turchin, but you may notice that as written it doesn't repeat. Just because disco was cool in the 70s and uncool in the 80s doesn't imply it will be cool in the 90s, uncool in the 00s, and so on forever. It will probably just stay uncool.

The cyclic aspect, if it exists, would involve the constant spawning of new subcultures that rise and fall on their own. So disco begets dance music, dance music has its own golden age and eventual souring, and then it begets something else. The atheist movement begets the feminist movement begets the anti-racist movement begets and so on.

What about the stronger claim - that no (non-calendar-based) cycles exist? I think this is clearly false if you allow cycles like the above - in which case the business cycle is one especially well-established example. But if you mean a cycle that follows a nice sine wave pattern and is pretty predictable, I have trouble thinking of good counterexamples.

Except for cicada population! I think that's genuinely cyclic! You can argue it ought to count as a calendar-based cycle, but then every cycle that lasted a specific amount of time would be calendar-based and Limelihood's claim would be true by definition.

Skills Plateau Because Of Decay And Interference Aug 18, 2022

Show notes

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/skills-plateau-because-of-decay-and

Followup to: Why Do Test Scores Plateau; Ritalin Works But School Isn't Worth Paying Attention To

Why Do Skills Plateau?

Economist Philip Frances finds that creative artists, on average, do their best work in their late 30s. Isn't this strange? However good a writer is at age 35, they should be even better at 55 with twenty more years of practice. Sure, middle age might bring some mild proto-cognitive-impairment, but surely nothing so dire that it cancels out twenty extra years!

A natural objection is that maybe they've maxed out their writing ability; further practice won't help. But this can't be true; most 35 year old writers aren't Shakespeare or Dickens, so higher tiers of ability must be possible. But you can't get there just by practicing more. If acheivement is a function of talent and practice, at some point returns on practice decrease near zero.

The same is true for doctors. Young doctors (under 40) have slightly better cure rates than older doctors (eg 40-49). The linked study doesn't go any younger (eg under 35, under 30…). However, Goodwin et al find that only first-year doctors suffer from inexperience; by a doctor's second year, she's doing about as well as she ever will. Why? Wouldn't you expect someone who's practiced medicine for twenty years to be better than someone who's only done it for two?

Meetups Everywhere 2022 - Call For Organizers Aug 18, 2022

Show notes

Please volunteer to host a meetup in your city!

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/meetups-everywhere-2022-call-for

There are ACX-affiliated meetup groups all over the world. Lots of people are vaguely interested, but don't try them out until I make a big deal about it on the blog. Since learning that, I've tried to make a big deal about it on the blog at least once annually, and it's that time of year again.

If you're willing to organize a meetup for your city, please fill out the organizer form.

Mantic Monday 8/15/22 Aug 16, 2022

Show notes

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-81522

RIP PredictIt -- Hedgehog Markets -- Salem/CSPI Fellowship The Passing Of PredictIt

In 2014, Victoria University in New Zealand struck a deal with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the agency that regulates some markets in the US. CFTC would let Victoria set up a prediction market - at the time a relatively new idea - for research purposes only. Their no-action letter placed strict limits on Victoria's project:

The market would be run by the university and not-for profit. It would charge only enough fees to cover operations.
Questions would be limited to 5,000 traders each, who could bet up to $850 per question. They would be on politics and economics only.
They would do the usual know-your-customer process and take steps to avoid their traders try to meddle in world events.

Regulatory approval in hand, Victoria's market - PredictIt - became the top prediction market in the US, beloved by a community of over a hundred thousand traders - many of whom exchanged barbs at each other in its raucous and unmoderated comment section. PredictIt estimates were featured in the New York Times, Washington Post, and 538. Some of my best (and worst) memories are about following election results in real-time by watching the relevant PredictIt markets, which usually updated faster than any single other media site.

On August 4, the CFTC reversed itself, saying the PredictIt had "not operated its market in compliance with the terms of the letter" and that it had to shut down by February.

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