Astral Codex Ten Podcast

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A Guide To Asking Robots To Design Stained Glass Windows May 31, 2022

Show notes

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/a-guide-to-asking-robots-to-design

I love stained glass. Not so much your usual suburban house stained glass with a picture of lilies. The good stuff. Cathedral windows, Art Nouveau, Art Deco. Why did we stop doing that? I blame the conspiracy.

Recently I've been experimenting with small-scale alternatives. You can get custom-printed window film from these people. If you print out a picture of a stained glass scene and stick it on a window, it looks pretty realistic.

But what scenes to use? Most of the stained glass images you can find are saints, which isn't really the mood I'm going for. What I'd really like is a giant twelve-part panel depicting the Virtues Of Rationality. But the artists I've asked to design this all balk. I need an artist who works for free and isn't allowed to say no.

Enter DALL-E-2, the new art-generating AI. I'm still on the waitlist, but a friend who jumped in sooner than I did let me use their computer for a while and play around with it. This was my first introduction to the exciting world of DALL-E query framing - the surprisingly complicated relationship between what you ask the AI to do, and what it actually does. Seems on topic for this blog. So this is a combination investigation into how DALL-E thinks about queries, but also a practical guide to getting DALL-E to make good stained glass. Let's get started.

Your Book Review: The Anti-Politics Machine May 28, 2022

Show notes

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-anti-politics

[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 - SA]

Everyone familiar with Effective Altruism knows that "good intentions aren't enough."

If you want your charitable giving to mean something, you also need to measure your favorite program's effects with good statistical data.

But we don't always clarify that good intentions and accurate data still aren't enough. You also need to know that you've collected the right data and asked the right questions, and these are both much, much harder than the introductory effective altruist material tends to let on.

I first picked up James Ferguson's The Anti-Politics Machine a year ago, expecting to read about a failed development project that could have benefited from an evidence-based approach. But instead I found an intervention that could have been backed by every experiment in the world and still would have fallen apart, a program so profoundly shaped by the lens of "development economics" that its practitioners misinterpreted almost every facet of what they were doing.

In Partial, Grudging Defense Of The Hearing Voices Movement May 26, 2022

Show notes

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/in-partial-grudging-defense-of-the

The New York Times has an article out on the Hearing Voices Movement - ie people with hallucinations and delusions who want this to be treated as normal and okay rather than medicalized. Freddie deBoer has a pretty passionate response here. Other people have differently passionate responses:

I've met some Hearing Voices members. My impression is that everyone on every side of this discussion is a good person trying to make the best of a bad situation (except of course New York Times journalists, who are evil people destroying America). Some specific thoughts:

Plenty of people he

California Gubernatorial Candidates From Z to Z May 25, 2022

Show notes

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/california-gubernatorial-candidates

California is the home of Alphabet Inc, so it's symbolically appropriate that we have twenty-six candidates in this year's gubernatorial primary. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will get bored after looking into two or three. Not us! We are going to do our civic duty and evaluate them all, in the order they're listed on the ballot. Starting with:

Willpower, Human and Machine May 24, 2022

Show notes

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/willpower-human-and-machine

Two paragraphs from the mesa-optimizers post, which I quoted again in the adaptation-executors post:

Consider evolution, optimizing the fitness of animals. For a long time, it did so very mechanically, inserting behaviors like "use this cell to detect light, then grow toward the light" or "if something has a red dot on its back, it might be a female of your species, you should mate with it". As animals became more complicated, they started to do some of the work themselves. Evolution gave them drives, like hunger and lust, and the animals figured out ways to achieve those drives in their current situation. Evolution didn't mechanically instill the behavior of opening my fridge and eating a Swiss Cheese slice. It instilled the hunger drive, and I figured out that the best way to satisfy it was to open my fridge and eat cheese.

And:

Mesa-optimizers would have an objective which is closely correlated with their base optimizer, but it might not be perfectly correlated. The classic example, again, is evolution. Evolution "wants" us to reproduce and pass on our genes. But my sex drive is just that: a sex drive. In the ancestral environment, where there was no porn or contraceptives, sex was a reliable proxy for reproduction; there was no reason for evolution to make me mesa-optimize for anything other than "have sex". Now in the modern world, evolution's proxy seems myopic - sex is a poor proxy for reproduction. I know this and I am pretty smart and that doesn't matter. That is, just because I'm smart enough to know that evolution gave me a sex drive so I would reproduce - and not so I would have protected sex with somebody on the Pill - doesn't mean I immediately change to wanting to reproduce instead. Evolution got one chance to set my value function when it created

Your Book Review: Making Nature May 22, 2022

Show notes

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

The world of scientific publishing is organized as a hierarchy of status, much like the hierarchy of angels in the Abrahamic religions. At the bottom are the non-peer-reviewed blog posts and Twitter threads. Slightly above are the preprint servers like arXiv, and then big peer-reviewed journals like PLOS One. Above those are all the field-specific journals, some with higher reputation than others. And at the top, near the divine presence, are the CNS journals: Cell, Nature, and Science.

For an actual hierarchy of journals based on citation data, see this paper, which puts Nature and Science at the top. Might be worth mentioning that it comes from a journal in the Nature Publishing Group family.

Leaving aside Cell, a more specialized biology journal that seems to have gotten into the CNS acronym the same way Netflix got into the FAANG acronym, Nature and Science are very similar. They both publish articles in all scientific fields. They both date from the 19th century. They're published weekly. They jointly won a fancy prize for services to humanity in 2007. And having your paper in either is one of the best things that can happen to a scientist's career, thanks to their immense prestige.

But how, exactly, did Nature and Science become so prestigious? This is the question I hoped Making Nature: The History of a Scientific Journal, a 2015 book by historian of science Melinda Baldwin, might answer. It focuses on Nature, but much of its lessons can likely be extrapolated to Science considering their similarity.

Lavender's Game: Silexan For Anxiety May 19, 2022

Show notes

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/lavenders-game-silexan-for-anxiety

1: What is silexan?

There are dozens of natural supplements that purport to treat anxiety. Most have a few small sketchy studies backing them up. Together, they form a big amorphous mass of claims that nobody has the patience to sift through or care about.

But recently silexan (derived from lavender) has started to stand out of the crowd. Daily Mail had an interview with psychiatry professor Hans Peter-Volz, who said that silexan should be first-line for anxiety, replacing things like SSRIs and Xanax. And a very reputable professional publication within psychiatry, The Carlat Report, published an article and a podcast touting silexan:

Not many treatments in psychiatry have a large effect size. There's stimulants for ADHD, ketamine for depression . . . and now Silexan for generalized anxiety disorder.

Link: Troof On Nootropics May 18, 2022

Show notes

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/link-troof-on-nootropics

Should have signal-boosted this earlier, forgot, sorry.

The author of the blog Troof sort of replicated my 2020 nootropics survey. But instead of another survey, they made a recommendation engine. You rated all the nootropics you'd taken, and it compared you to other people and predicted what else you would like. The end result was the same: lots of people providing data on which nootropics they liked. Troof got 1981 subjects - more than twice as many as I did - and here were their results:

Contra Dynomight On Sexy In-Laws May 18, 2022

Show notes

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/contra-dynomight-on-sexy-in-laws

From the Dynomight blog: You, Your Parents, And The Hotness Of Who You Marry.

They start with a traditional situation: some romance novel heroine wants to marry a tall, dark stranger. But her parents want her to marry a much older nobleman/doctor/engineer who can provide her with a stable income. Or the gender-flipped version: the young man courts a beautiful debutante, while his parents try to force him to marry the plain-faced daughter of their business partner.

Evolutionary psychology has pat explanations for both sides here. People want attractive partners because attraction correlates with health, fertility, and status (eg the debutante's wide hips and large breasts mean she'll be able to give birth and nurse effectively; the stranger's height means he must be strong and healthy). But people also want wealthy partners from good families, because they'll be able to give more resources to the children.

Dynomight's question is: why do the suitors and the parents disagree here? Everyone involved (evolutionarily) wants the same thing: lots of healthy, successful descendants. Sexual attractiveness and financial resources both contribute to that some amount, but suitors and parents shouldn't differ on the relative importance of each? So why is it traditionally the suitors who care about attractiveness and the parents who care about resources?

Your Book Review: Consciousness And The Brain May 14, 2022

Show notes

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

Finalist #1 of the Book Review Contest

Imagine that there was a generally acknowledged test for artificial intelligence, to find out whether a computer program is truly intelligent. And imagine that a computer program passed this test for the first time. How would you feel about it?

The most likely answer is: disappointed.

We know this because it happened several times. The first time was in 1966, when ELIZA passed the Turing test. ELIZA was a chatbot who could fool some people to believe that they talk with a real human. Before ELIZA, people assumed that only an intelligent machine could do that, but it just turned out that it is really easy to fool others. Other tests for intelligence were playing chess, playing a whole variety of games, or recognizing cat images. Machines can do all this by now, and this is awesome. And yet, every success sparked new disappointment, because we didn't find any magic ingredient, some quality that would make a difference between intelligent and non-intelligent. When the groundbreaking GPT-3 and DALL-E suddenly could write news articles or poetry, or could dream up snails made of harp... the main improvement was that they used more raw computation power than the previous versions.

If you find this disappointing, then you will also be disappointed by "Consciousness and the Brain" by Stanislas Dehaene. The book is the condensed wisdom of three decades of cognitive research, and it tells you what consciousness is, how it operates, and why we have it. The book actually answers these questions. But if you were hoping that the book would Resolve Philosophy, tell you What Makes Humankind Unique, or whether Free Will exists, it doesn't do that.

It only tells you what consciousness is.

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