Astral Codex Ten Podcast

Latest Episodes:

The Passage Of Polymarket Feb 08, 2022

Show notes

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-passage-of-polymarket

RIP Polymarket, Long Live Polymarket

Polymarket got fined $1.4 million by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and was ordered to cease noncompliant trading in the US.

Polymarket is probably the biggest prediction market currently available. US law considers unlicensed prediction markets to be somewhere between illegal gambling and illegal futures trading, ie definitely illegal. Polymarket and a few peers had survived anyway, through the "crypto is the Wild West and nobody has time to deal with all the illegal things happening there" exemption. Apparently they found time.

The rumor on the prediction market grapevine (which I absolutely cannot substantiate; please don't sue me for libel) is that this might have something to do with competing prediction market Kalshi. Kalshi spent two years and probably a lot of money getting the CFTC to agree they were legal, and has a former CFTC Commissioner as a Director. Their legal status forces them to do an annoying and expensive regulatory dance all the time; illegal prediction markets were able to move more nimbly, provide better user experience, and eat their lunch. This was a big problem for them - but they'd just finished making lots of friends in the agency that decides which illegal things to crack down on, so, as Tyler Cowen likes to say, "solve for the equilibrium".

Book Review Contest Rules 2022 Feb 05, 2022

Show notes

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-contest-rules-2022

Okay, we're officially doing this again.

Write a review of a book. There's no official word count requirement, but last year's finalists and winners were often between 2,000 and 10,000 words. There's no official recommended style, but check the style of last year's finalists and winners or my ACX book reviews (1, 2, 3) if you need inspiration. Please limit yourself to one entry per person or team.

Then send me your review through this Google Form. The form will ask for your name, email, the title of the book, and a link to a Google Doc. The Google Doc should have your review exactly as you want me to post it if you're a finalist. DON'T INCLUDE YOUR NAME OR ANY HINT ABOUT YOUR IDENTITY IN THE GOOGLE DOC ITSELF, ONLY IN THE FORM. I want to make this contest as blinded as possible, so I'm going to hide that column in the form immediately and try to judge your docs on their merit.

(does this mean you can't say something like "This book about war reminded me of my own experiences as a soldier" because that gives a hint about your identity? My rule of thumb is - if I don't know who you are, and the average ACX reader doesn't know who you are, you're fine. I just want to prevent my friends / other judges' friends / Internet semi-famous people from having an advantage. If you're in one of those categories and think your personal experience would give it away, please don't write about your personal experience.)

PLEASE MAKE SURE THE GOOGLE DOC IS UNLOCKED AND I CAN READ IT. By default, nobody can read Google Docs except the original author. You'll have to go to Share, then on the bottom of the popup click on "Restricted" and change to "Anyone with the link". If you send me a document I can't read, I will probably disqualify you, sorry.

First prize will get at least $2,500, second prize at least $1,000, third prize at least $500; I might increase these numbers later on. All winners and finalists will get free publicity (including links to any other works you want me to link to) and free ACX subscriptions. And all winners will get the right to pitch me new articles if they want (nobody ever takes me up on this).

Your due date is April 5th. Good luck! If you have any questions, ask them in the comments. And remember, the form for submitting entries is here.

ACX Grants ++: The First Half Feb 04, 2022

Show notes

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/acx-grants-the-first-half

This is the closing part of ACX Grants. Projects that I couldn't fully fund myself were invited to submit a brief description so I could at least give them free advertising here. You can look them over and decide if any seem worth donating your money, time, or some other resource to.

I've removed obvious trolls, a few for-profit businesses without charitable value who tried to sneak in under the radar, and a few that violated my sensibilities for one or another reason. I have not removed projects just because they're terrible, useless, or definitely won't work. My listing here isn't necessarily an endorsement; caveat lector.

Still, some of them are good projects and deserve more attention than I was able to give them. Many applicants said they'd hang around the comments section here, so if you have any questions, ask!

(bolded titles are my summaries and some of them might not be accurate or endorsed by the applicant)

I'll post the next 60 or so of these next week, so if you don't see yours, be patient.

Why Do I Suck? Feb 03, 2022

Show notes

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/why-do-i-suck

I recently ran a subscriber-only AMA, and one of the most frequent questions was some version of "why do you suck?"

My commenters were very nice about it. They didn't use those exact words. It was more like "I loved your articles from about 2013 - 2016 so much! Why don't you write articles like that any more?" Or "Do you feel like you've shifted to less ambitious forms of writing with the new Substack? It feels like there was something in your old articles that isn't there now." There was a lot of similar discussion on this one year retrospective subreddit thread.

The evidence that I've gotten worse at blogging is mixed. I asked about it on a reader survey six months ago, and got this:

Motivated Reasoning As Mis-applied Reinforcement Learning Feb 02, 2022

Show notes

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/motivated-reasoning-as-mis-applied

Here's something else I got from the first Yudkowsky-Ngo dialogue:

Suppose you go to Lion Country and get mauled by lions. You want the part of your brain that generates plans like "go to Lion Country" to get downgraded in your decision-making algorithms. This is basic reinforcement learning: plan → lower-than-expected hedonic state → do plan less. Plan → higher-than-expected hedonic state → do plan more. Lots of brain modules have this basic architecture; if you have a foot injury and walking normally causes pain, that will downweight some basic areas of the motor cortex and make you start walking funny (potentially without conscious awareness).

But suppose you see a lion, and your visual cortex processes the sensory signals and decides "Yup, that's a lion". Then you have to freak out and run away, and it ruins your whole day. That's a lower-than-expected hedonic state! If your visual cortex was fundamentally a reinforcement learner, it would learn not to recognize lions (and then the lion would eat you). So the visual cortex (and presumably lots of other sensory regions) doesn't do hedonic reinforcement learning in the same way.

So there are two types of brain region: basically behavioral (which hedonic reinforcement learning makes better), and basically epistemic (which hedonic reinforcement learning would make worse, so they don't do it).

Predictions For 2022 Feb 01, 2022

Show notes

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/predictions-for-2022-contest

- Read the contest description/rules here - Give feedback on the contest here - And once again, the form where you take the contest is here

I didn't let myself check prediction markets when making these forecasts since that would spoil the fun. I also only permitted myself at most five minutes of research on any one question.

See the bottom of the post for a contest/survey.

US/WORLD1. Biden approval rating (as per 538) is greater than fifty percent: 40% 2. At least $250 million in damage from a single round of mass protests in US: 10% 3. PredictIt thinks Joe Biden is most likely 2024 Dem nominee: 80% 4: …thinks Donald Trump is most likely 2024 GOP nominee: 60% 5. Beijing Olympics happen successfully on schedule: 99% 6. Major flare-up (worse than past 5 years) in Russia/Ukraine conflict: 50% 7. Major flare-up (worse past 10 years) in Israel/Palestine conflict: 5% 8. Major flare-up (worse than in past 50 years) in China/Taiwan conflict: 5% 9. Honduran ZEDEs legally crippled to the point where no reasonable person would invest in them further: 5% 10. New ZEDE approved in Honduras: 30%

ECON/TECH 11. Gamestop stock price still above $100: 30% 12. Bitcoin above 100K: 20% 13. Ethereum above 5K: 20% 14. Ethereum above 0.05 BTC: 90% 15. Bored Ape floor price here below current price of $203K: 40% 16. Dow above 35K: 90% 17. ...above 37.5K: 40% 18. Inflation for the year below five percent: 90% 19. Unemployment below five percent: 50% 20. Google widely allows remote work, no questions asked: 50% 21. Starship reaches orbit: 90%

Highlights From The Comments On Health Care Systems Jan 28, 2022

Show notes

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

I'm experimenting with making this more structured this time, so:

Section I: Collection of comments on US health care Section II: Drug pricing, and does the US subsidize the rest of the world? Section III: Why are health economics so unlike other economics? Section IV: Giant pile of comments by readers who live in different countries explaining their own countries' health systems, and their experiences with them.

GummyBearDoc writes:

I want to push back on the assertion Scott made that "Certainly rich people in America get good health care." After he published this book in June 2020, Ezekiel Emmanuel published an article in JAMA IM (link: https://bit.ly/3nGRHL8) called "Comparing Health Outcomes of Privileged US Citizens With Those of Average Residents of Other Developed Countries." He wanted to test the commonly stated trope that a feature of the US healthcare system is that the rich here get the very best care in the world. To do that, he looked at outcomes across six benchmark diseases (heart attack, colon cancer, breast cancer, infant mortality, maternal mortality, and pediatric acute lymphocytic leukemia). He compared outcomes for white people in the 1% of richest counties in the US, 5% richest counties in the US, and average outcomes in 12 rich countries (i'm not going to type them all out but they're places like Australia, Canada, and Germany). The results were...not so great for rich Americans!

Against That Poverty And Infant EEGs Study Jan 27, 2022

Show notes

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/against-that-poverty-and-infant-eegs

A recent paper claims to have found an Impact Of A Poverty Reduction Intervention On Infant Brain Activity. It's doing the rounds of the usual media sites, like Vox and the New York Times:

The New York Times @nytimes Breaking News: Cash payments for low-income mothers increased brain function in babies, a study found, with potential implications for U.S. safety net policy. Cash Aid to Poor Mothers Increases Brain Activity in Babies, Study FindsThe research could have policy implications as President Biden pushes to revive his proposal to expand the child tax credit.nyti.ms

January 24th 2022

3,348 Retweets13,165 Likes

I was going to try to fact-check this, but a bunch of other people (see eg Philippe Lemoine, Stuart Ritchie) have beaten me to it. Still, right now all the fact-checking is scattered across a bunch of Twitter accounts, so I'll content myself with being the first person to summarize it all in a Substack post, and beg you to believe I would have come up with the same objections eventually.

Before we start: why be suspicious of this paper? Hundreds of studies come out daily, we don't have enough time to nitpick all of them. Why this one? For me, it's because it's a shared environmental effect being measured by EEG at the intersection of poverty and cognition.

Shared environmental effects on cognition are notoriously hard to find. Twin studies suggest they are rare. Some people have countered that perhaps the twin studies haven't measured poor enough people, and there's a lot of research being done to see what happens if you try to correct for that, but so far it's still controversial.

All that research is being done by cognitive testing, which is a reasonable way to measure cognition. This study uses EEG instead. I'm skeptical of social science studies that use neuroimaging, and although EEG isn't exactly the same as neuroimaging like CT or MRI, it shares a similar issue: you have to figure out how to convert a multi-dimensional result (in this case, a squiggly line on a piece of paper) into a single number that you can do statistics to. This offers a lot of degrees of freedom, which researchers don't always use responsibly.

Bounded Distrust Jan 27, 2022

Show notes

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/bounded-distrust

Suppose you're a liberal who doesn't trust FOX News. One day you're at the airport, waiting for a plane, ambiently watching the TV at the gate. It's FOX News, and they're saying that a mass shooter just shot twenty people in Yankee Stadium. There's live footage from the stadium with lots of people running and screaming.

Do you believe this?

I'm a liberal who doesn't trust FOX News, and sure, I believe it. The level on which FOX News is bad isn't the level where they invent mass shootings that never happened. They wouldn't use deepfakes or staged actors to fake something and then call it "live footage". That would go way beyond anything FOX had done before. Liberals might say things like "You can't trust FOX News on anything, they are 100% total liars", but realistically we still trust them quite a lot on stuff like this.

Now suppose FOX says that police have apprehended a suspect, a Saudi immigrant named Abdullah Abdul. They show footage from a press conference where the police are talking about this. Do you believe them?

Again, yes. While I've heard rare stories of the media jumping in too early to identify a suspect, "the police have apprehended" seems like a pretty objective statement. And once again, faking a police conference - or even dubbing over a police conference so that when the police say some other name, the viewers hear "Abdullah Abdul" - is way worse than anything I've ever heard of FOX doing. Even if I learned of one case of them doing something like this once, I would think "wow that's crazy" and still not update to believing they did it all the time.

It doesn't matter at all that FOX is biased. You could argue that "FOX wants to fan fear of Islamic terrorism, so it's in their self-interest to make up cases of Islamic terrorism that don't exist". Or "FOX is against gun control, so if it was a white gun owner who did this shooting they would want to change the identity so it sounded like a Saudi terrorist". But those sound like crazy conspiracy theories. Even FOX's worst enemies don't accuse them of doing things like this.

Grading My 2021 Predictions Jan 26, 2022

Show notes

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/grading-my-2021-predictions

At the beginning of every year, I make predictions. At the end of every year, I score them. Here are 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020.

And here are the predictions I made for 2021 (in April; I was really late). Bolded statements happened, italicized statements did not happen (as of 1/1/22). Neither-bold-nor-italic resolved ambiguous.

We have a debate every year over whether 50% predictions are meaningful in this paradigm; feel free to continue it.

1. Biden approval rating (as per 538) is greater than fifty percent: 80% 2. Court packing is clearly going to happen (new justices don't have to be appointed by end of year): 5% 3. Yang is New York mayor: 80% 4. Newsom recalled as CA governor: 5% 5. At least $250 million in damage from BLM protests this year: 30% 6. Significant capital gains tax hike (above 30% for highest bracket): 20% 7. Trump is allowed back on Twitter: 20% 8. Tokyo Olympics happen on schedule: 70% 9. Major flare-up (significantly worse than anything in past 5 years) in Russia/Ukraine war: 20%

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