Astral Codex Ten Podcast

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Your Book Review: God Emperor Of Dune Aug 14, 2022

Show notes

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-god-emperor-of-dune

Finalist #14 in the Book Review Contest

[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. This contains spoilers for the Dune series. - SA]

—

The memory of sand's gold sheen The worm, the man, the Arakeen The beast, the wise undying king His long and gentle wrath His voice trapped under golden swells Like screams wrung from uncounted bells divided god within a hell His pain a golden path

- From The Collected Songs of The Scattering, author unknown.

The Setting

As God Emperor of Dune begins, our attention is immediately drawn to people. Here, 3500 years after the chronological setting of the first novel, is immediate proof that humanity has survived in the form of a small group of people fleeing through a forest, wolves nipping at their heels.

The wolves belong to Leto Atreides II, the grandson of Duke Leto Atreides and son of Paul Muad'ib Atreides, the Kwisatz Haderach and protagonist of Dune I: The One You've Probably Read. At the end of the third book, Leto fused his body with Arakeen sandtrout, the larval form of the Sandworms on which the plot of the series mostly hangs. This symbiosis gave Leto super-human physical powers to match the clairvoyance already enjoyed by his family and allowed him to seize control of the galactic empire.

Centuries of time have seen him evolve into a hybrid of a human man and a full-grown sandworm, and the resultant power and pseudo-immortality have allowed him to extend his father's dominance of the known universe from a period of decades to an era spanning the better part of four millennia.

The wolves are his not only by right of ownership but also apparently by right of design and creation; near-immortality leaves one with much time to tinker, and he has developed the wolves to a level of sophistication sufficient that they understand the boundaries of their hunting grounds to stop at the Idaho river. It is towards this river and the safety attained through its crossing that the group is fleeing.

Will Nonbelievers Really Believe Anything? Aug 12, 2022

Show notes

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/will-nonbelievers-really-believe

There's a popular saying among religious apologists:

Once people stop believing in God, the problem is not that they will believe in nothing; rather, the problem is that they will believe anything.

Big talk, although I notice that this is practically always attributed to one of GK Chesterton or CS Lewis, neither of whom actually said it. If you're making strong claims about how everybody except you is gullible, you should at least bother to double-check the source of your quote.

Still, it's worth examining as a hypothesis. Are the irreligious really more likely to fall prey to woo and conspiracy theories?

A Cyclic Theory Of Subcultures Aug 12, 2022

Show notes

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/a-cyclic-theory-of-subcultures

David Chapman's Geeks, MOPs, and Sociopaths In Subculture Evolution is rightfully a classic, but it doesn't match my own experience. Either through good luck or poor observational skills, I've never seen a lot of sociopath takeovers. Instead, I've seen a gradual process of declining asabiyyah. Good people start out working together, then work together a little less, then turn on each other, all while staying good people and thinking they alone embody the true spirit of the movement.

I find Peter Turchin's theories of civilizational cycles oddly helpful here, maybe moreso than for civilizations themselves. Riffing off his phase structure:

Why Not Slow AI Progress? Aug 09, 2022

Show notes

Machine Alignment Monday 8/8/22

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/why-not-slow-ai-progress

The Broader Fossil Fuel Community

Imagine if oil companies and environmental activists were both considered part of the broader "fossil fuel community". Exxon and Shell would be "fossil fuel capabilities"; Greenpeace and the Sierra Club would be "fossil fuel safety" - two equally beloved parts of the rich diverse tapestry of fossil fuel-related work. They would all go to the same parties - fossil fuel community parties - and maybe Greta Thunberg would get bored of protesting climate change and become a coal baron.

This is how AI safety works now. AI capabilities - the work of researching bigger and better AI - is poorly differentiated from AI safety - the work of preventing AI from becoming dangerous. Two of the biggest AI safety teams are at DeepMind and OpenAI, ie the two biggest AI capabilities companies. Some labs straddle the line between capabilities and safety research.

Probably the people at DeepMind and OpenAI think this makes sense. Building AIs and aligning AIs could be complementary goals, like building airplanes and preventing the airplanes from crashing. It sounds superficially plausible.

But a lot of people in AI safety believe that unaligned AI could end the world, that we don't know how to align AI yet, and that our best chance is to delay superintelligent AI until we do know. Actively working on advancing AI seems like the opposite of that plan.

So maybe (the argument goes) we should take a cue from the environmental activists, and be hostile towards AI companies. Nothing violent or illegal - doing violent illegal things is the best way to lose 100% of your support immediately. But maybe glare a little at your friend who goes into AI capabilities research, instead of getting excited about how cool their new project is. Or agitate for government regulation of AI - either because you trust the government to regulate wisely, or because you at least expect them to come up with burdensome rules that hamstring the industry. While there are salient examples of government regulatory failure, some regulations - like the EU's ban on GMO or the US restrictions on nuclear power - have effectively stopped their respective industries.

Your Book Review: Exhaustion Aug 07, 2022

Show notes

Finalist #13 in the Book Review Contest

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-exhaustion

Imagine you find yourself, over the course of a few weeks or months, becoming steadily more tired. You're not doing any more work or other activities than you usually do, but nonetheless you find that you are able to do less and less before running out of energy. You start to pick and choose your battles – do I really feel up to this gym session? Do I really need to go to this work function? – and little by little your world begins to shrink. The sense of exhaustion becomes more pervasive, and occurs from when you wake up until you go to sleep. Any exertion leads to you paying for it in a general worsening of exhaustion and malaise that makes you question whether the activity was worth it. Eventually, you learn your lesson and withdraw from even the most basic activities – sometimes you don't get out of bed, have trouble feeding yourself, and find your thinking has become clouded and sluggish ( a phenomenon sometimes called 'brain fog'). Sleep becomes difficult, activities become less enjoyable, and you find that you are restless and anxious despite spending almost all your time attempting to rest.

Absurdity Bias, Neom Edition Aug 05, 2022

Show notes

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/absurdity-bias-neom-edition

Alexandros M expresses concern about my post on Neom.

My post mostly just makes fun of Neom. My main argument against it is absurdity: a skyscraper the height of WTC1 and the length of Ireland? Come on, that's absurd!

But isn't the absurdity heuristic a cognitive bias? Didn't lots of true things sound absurd before they turned out to be true (eg evolution, quantum mechanics)? Don't I specifically believe in things many people have found self-evidently absurd (eg the multiverse, AI risk)? Shouldn't I be more careful about "this sounds silly to me, so I'm going to make fun of it"?

Slightly Against Underpopulation Worries Aug 05, 2022

Show notes

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/slightly-against-underpopulation

So I hear there's an underpopulation crisis now.

I think the strong version of this claim - that underpopulation could cause human extinction - is 100% false.

The weaker version - that it could make life unpleasant in some countries - is true. But I don't think it's at the top of any list of things to worry about.

1: Declining Birth Rates Won't Drive Humans Extinct, Come On

Not only are we not going to go extinct because of underpopulation, population is going to continue to rise for the next 80 years.

Although growth rate may hit zero a little after 2100, it will be centuries before the human population gets any lower than it is today - if it ever does.

This is mostly because of sub-Saharan Africa (especially Nigeria) where birth rates remain very high. Although these are going down, in some cases faster than expected, current best projections say they will stay high enough to keep population growing for the rest of the century.

2: Immigrant-Friendly Countries Will Keep Growing

Here are Our World In Data's projections for US and UK populations:

Model City Monday 8/1/22 Aug 03, 2022

Show notes

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/model-city-monday-8122

Neom Neom Neom

Suppose you are an oil-rich country. You drill the oil and get very rich, for now. But someday you will run out of oil, or the world will switch to green sustainable energy, and then you will stop being very rich. Seems bad.

There are two main classes of solution to this problem. Norway's solution is to invest the oil money into a sovereign wealth fund; after they run out of oil, they can stay rich off investment income. Dubai's solution is to use the oil money to build a really impressive city, then hope that rich people (tourists, emigres, and multinational companies seeking regional hubs) will relocate there, and then they can tax those rich people.

The Norwegian solution has a lot to recommend it. It's a lot more certain: getting steady returns on capital is a solved problem in a way that development economics isn't. And it scales better: there are a pretty limited number of rich people willing to move to new desert cities, and multinational companies only need one regional hub per region. Still, for a certain type of oil sheikh, building the world's biggest everything has a certain unquantifiable charm.

Your Book Review: Viral Jul 30, 2022

Show notes

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-viral

Finalist #12 in the Book Review Contest

Introduction

Alina Chan and Matt Ridley's Viral is a book about the investigation into the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic. In case you haven't been following, there's been a shift in the scientific consensus on this topic. For about the first year of the pandemic, it was widely accepted that SARS-CoV-2, the virus behind COVID-19, had a natural origin, meaning that it first spread to humans naturally from an animal (also called a zoonotic origin). Any suggestion that it could have come from a lab was dismissed as a conspiracy theory. Then, sometime around spring 2021 something changed. Well-known, respected scientists began to voice the opinion that SARS-CoV-2 might have come from a lab, or that it's at least a plausible hypothesis that deserves an investigation. The scientific consensus abruptly shifted from "definitely natural origin" to "both natural origin and lab origin are viable hypotheses that should be investigated."

Viral is a deep dive into this issue from all angles, covering the basics of virology, the history and epidemiology of the COVID-19 pandemic, the response of scientific and governmental institutions, and various pieces of evidence for both hypotheses. It doesn't contain any new, bombshell revelations, but it's a neat, accessible summary of the scattered bits of information that have been uncovered since the start of the pandemic. In this review I'll try to distill some of the most important information and discuss my own interpretation of it.

I enjoyed the book and recommend it to anyone interested in the topic. However, many of the authors' points (especially on technical issues) have counterpoints from other scientists who lean more heavily towards the natural origins hypothesis. So I think it's best to include the book as part of a "package-deal" recommendation, rather than presenting it as a perfectly objective source. The last section of this review will include some more recommended sources to check out, including writing from advocates of the natural origins hypothesis with counterpoints to claims made in the book. I'll also link one here in case you don't make it that far.

In my view, the book actually deals with two separate topics. The first is the object-level question – where did COVID come from? The second is the meta-level question – what can we say about the ability and willingness of different institutions to answer the question of the pandemic's origins?

Links For July '22 Jul 30, 2022

Show notes

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-july-095

[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.]

1: Rude compounds on Reddit (source, original). Thousands of cocksuckers, shitlords, and libtards, but far fewer cocktards, shitsuckers, and liblords. Also disappointingly few trumpgoblins:

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