Astral Codex Ten Podcast

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Contra Acemoglu On...Oh God, We're Doing This Again, Aren't We? Jul 29, 2021

Show notes

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/contra-acemoglu-onoh-god-were-doing

The Washington Post has published yet another "luminary in unrelated field discovers AI risk, pronounces it stupid" article. This time it's Daron Acemoglu. I respect Daron Acemoglu and appreciate the many things his work has revealed about economics. In particular, I respect him so much that I wish he would stop embarrassing himself by writing this kind of article (I feel the same way about Steven Pinker and Ted Chiang).

In service of this goal, I want to discuss the piece briefly. I'll start with what I think is its main flaw, then nitpick a few other things:

1: The Main Flaw: "AI Is Dangerous Now, So It Can't Be Dangerous Later"

This is the basic structure around which this article is written. It goes: 1. Some people say that AI might be dangerous in the future. 2. But AI is dangerous now! 3. So it can't possibly be dangerous in the future. 4. QED!

I have no idea why Daron Acemoglu and every single other person who writes articles on AI for the popular media thinks this is such a knockdown argument. But here we are. He writes:

AI detractors have focused on the potential danger to human civilization from a super-intelligence if it were to run amok. Such warnings have been sounded by tech entrepreneurs Bill Gates and Elon Musk, physicist Stephen Hawking and leading AI researcher Stuart Russell.

Mantic Monday 7/26 Jul 28, 2021

Show notes

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-726

This Week In Markets

PredictIt remains easy to use, high-volume, and focused almost entirely on horse-race political questions. At least we might get rid of Cuomo.

Polymarket remains a fun alternative way to learn about the news. I only heard about the monkeypox issue a few days ago, and hearing "22% chance of it spreading" is both faster and more useful than some article that dithers for a few paragraphs and finally concludes that "health officials warn Americans not to panic". I would count it a minor victory if one day news sources routinely included this in their articles, eg "Polymarket, a major prediction engine, estimates a 22% chance that at least one other person will catch the disease."

Extra credit for the last market, which seems to be successfully predicting a scalar instead of a binary outcome - I've seen Metaculus experiment with this technology, but this is the first time I've spotted it at Polymarket using real money.

Some of the more interesting new Metaculus markets. The space telescope one is especially interesting in the context of whether we could use prediction markets to predict (and maybe manage) government delays and cost overruns. The telescope is currently scheduled for launch in October 2025, so the market expects it to be about five years late. For context, the previous space telescope, James Webb, was originally scheduled for 2007 and (if everything goes well) will launch later this year.

God Help Us, Let's Try Predicting The Coronavirus Some More

Anxiety is growing about the new Delta variant of coronavirus. What do the prediction markets say?

Here's Polymarket:

Links For July Jul 25, 2021

Show notes

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

[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: Previous research had suggested that you might be able to treat depression by using Botox to literally paralyze the facial muscles that make you frown. Two teams recently did meta-analyses of the research and came to different conclusions. Or rather, they came to the same conclusion - it has a really really big effect size - but they interpreted it differently: one team says it must be super great, another team said something must be wrong with the studies. Now the second team has responded to the first, in an article called (wait for it) Claims About The Effect Of Botulinum Toxin On Depression Should Raise Some Eyebrows.

2: Poll, seen here: surprisingly many Brits want a permanent lockdown regardless of COVID:

Things I Learned Writing The Lockdown Post Jul 23, 2021

Show notes

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/things-i-learned-writing-the-lockdown

Lockdown Effectiveness: Much More Than You Wanted To Know is the most ambitious post I've tried to write since starting the new blog.

I posted an early draft for subscribers only and tried crowdsourcing opinions. Most of the comments I got on Substack weren't too helpful, but several people sent me private emails that were very helpful.

I had expected that anti-lockdown academics would want to remain anonymous so nobody gave them grief over their unpopular position. I actually found the opposite - the anti-lockdown people didn't care that much, but the pro-lockdown academics I talked to insisted on keeping their privacy. Apparently pro-lockdown academics who get too close to the public spotlight have been getting harassed by lockdown opponents, and this is a known problem that pro-lockdown academics are well aware of. I was depressed to hear that, though in retrospect it makes sense.

Highlights From The Comments On "Crazy Like Us" Jul 22, 2021

Show notes

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

Some good discussion of PTSD, culminating in a link to the ACOUP blog, which says:

I cannot speak for all pre-modern, ancient or medieval armies. But for the periods where I have read a wide chunk of the primary source material, I'd say there is vanishingly little evidence that people in the ancient Mediterranean or medieval Europe experienced PTSD from combat experience in the way that modern soldiers do.

That is often not the impression that you would get from a quick google search (though it does seem to be the general consensus of the range of ancient military historians I know) and that goes back to arguments ex silentio. A quick google search will turn up any number of articles written by folks who are generally not professional historians declaring that PTSD was an observed phenomenon in the deep past, citing the same small handful of debatable examples. But one thing you learn very rapidly as a historian is that if you go into a large evidence-base looking for something, you will find it.

[…]

I think the evidence strongly suggests that ancient combatants did not experience PTSD as we do now. The problem is that the evidence of silence leads us with few tools with which to answer why. One answer might be that it existed and they do not tell us – because it was considered shameful or cowardly, perhaps. Except that they do tell us about other cowardly or shameful things. And the loss and damage of war – death, captivity, refugees, wounds, the lot of it – are prominent motifs in Greek, Roman and European Medieval literature. War is not uniformly white-washed in these texts – not every medieval writer is Bertran. We can't rule out some lacuna in the tradition, but given just how many wails and moans of grief and loss there are in the corpus it seems profoundly unlikely. I think we have to assume that it isn't in the sources because they did not experience it or at least did not recognize the experience of it.

Peer Review Request: Ketamine Jul 21, 2021

Show notes

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/peer-review-request-ketamine

I'm trying to build up a database of mental health resources on my other website, Lorien Psychiatry. Whenever I post something here, people have had good comments, so I want to try using you all as peer review.

This is a rough draft of my page on depression. I'm interested in any feedback you can give, including:

1. Typos

2. Places where you disagree with my recommendations / assessment of the evidence

3. Extra things you think I should add

4. Your personal stories about what things have or haven't helped, or any extra insight that your experience with depression has given you

5. Comments on the organization of the piece. I don't know how to balance wanting this to be accessible and easy-to-read with having it be thorough and convincing. Right now I've gone for a kind of FAQ format where you can only read the parts you want, but I'm doubtful about this choice.

6. Comments on the level of scientific formality. I tried to get somewhere in between "so evidence-based that I won't admit parachutes prevent injury without an RCT" and "here's some random stuff that came to me in a dream", and signal which part was which, but tell me if I fell too far to one side or the other.

Ignore the minor formatting issues inevitable in trying to copy-paste things into Substack, including the headings being too small and the spacing between words and before paragraphs being weird. In the real page, the table of contents will link to the subsections; I don't know how to do that here so it might be harder to read.

Here's the page:

Please Take The Reader Survey Jul 17, 2021

Show notes

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/please-take-the-reader-survey

All right, here goes.

This is a project to support studies by ACX community members, by getting readers to fill out research surveys. You'll fill out the General Demographic Information survey first, then however many additional surveys you have the patience for.

Please start with Survey #0 (general demographics). After that, in order to prevent a scenario where the first few surveys get lots of responses and the last few get none, please jump to the survey corresponding to your date of birth. So if you were born on the 16th of the month, start with survey #16 ("Personality"), then when you're done move on to survey #17, and so on. Keep going until you're bored and don't want to take any more surveys. Since there are 24 surveys and 31 possible birth dates, numbers 25-31 are redirects to other numbers. I would be surprised if anyone had the patience to take all 24 surveys here, but if you do, feel free to boast about it in the comments so we can praise you / be concerned about you.

Some surveys are targeted at specific populations, for example "psychedelic users". If you're not in the population, you can skip the survey. If you spot a survey targeted at you, consider skipping the usual order to take that one first.

Book Review: Crazy Like Us Jul 16, 2021

Show notes

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-crazy-like-us

We talk a lot about falling biodiversity. Sometimes we apply the same metaphor to the human world, eg "falling linguistic biodiversity" when minority languages get replaced by English or whatever. In Crazy Like Us, Ethan Watters sounds the alarm about falling psychiatric biodiversity. Along with all the usual effects of globalization, everyone is starting to have the same mental illnesses, and to understand them in the same way. This is bad insofar as greater diversity of mental illness could teach us something about the process that generates them, and greater diversity of frameworks and responses could teach us something about how to treat them.

He makes his point through four case studies, starting with:

I. Anorexia In Hong Kong

Until the 1990s, there was almost no anorexia in Hong Kong. There were lots of patriarchal beauty standards, everyone was very obsessed with being thin, but anorexia as a disease was basically unknown.

At least this is the claim of Sing Lee, a Hong Kong psychiatrist who studied in the West. He learned about anorexia during his training in Britain, then went back to Hong Kong prepared to treat it. He couldn't find anybody. He tried really hard! He put out feelers, asking if anyone knew anybody who was having some kind of psychiatric problem where they were starving themselves. With apologies for the unintended offensive pun - nobody bit.

Reader Survey Final Check-In Jul 15, 2021

Show notes

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/reader-survey-final-check-in

I accidentally missed some Book Review Contest entries, so I want to make sure I have everything lined up right for the Reader Survey. Below is a list of surveys I'm currently planning to include. If you sent me an email before the deadline, please confirm that your name is there. If it's not, please don't email me about it - we've already established that I don't get your emails for some reason. Instead, leave a comment below with your information.

The list:

- A on biostasis/cryonics - T on male homosexuality *** - A on health-related quality of life - N on uniformity illusion *** - K on digital literacy - E on depression (targeted at depressives) - ...and on weight loss - S on political compressability - G on bullshit jobs - R on moral curiosity - T on autogynephilia (targeting trans women) - ...and sexual fantasies - C on psychedelics (targeting people who have tried them) - K on business (targeting people in tech) - D on incest *** - M on personality - D on meditation - R on gender identity - ...and rhymes (targeting non-native English speakers)

Use Prediction Markets To Fund Investigative Reporting Jul 13, 2021

Show notes

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/use-prediction-markets-to-fund-investigative

Support the author: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/subscribe

Then support the creation of the pocast: www.patreon.com/sscpodcast

Hindenburg Research has a great business model:

1. Investigate companies 2. ...until they find one that is committing fraud 3. Short the fraudulent company 4. Publicly reveal the fraud 5. Company's stock goes down 6. Profit!

I've been thinking about them recently because of the debate around funding investigative reporting. It goes something like: investigative reporting is a public good. Everyone benefits from knowing about Watergate. But it's hard for investigative reporters to capture the value they produce. Very few of the people who cared about Watergate bought subscriptions to the Washington Post. There's no reason to - you can let the Washington Post uncover Watergate at no cost to you, then hear about it for free on the nightly news. The traditional solution is bundled media. Newspapers have their profitable bread-and-butter in the form of easy things like commentary and sports, then do some unprofitable investigative reporting on the side to gain prestige.

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