Mantic Monday 5/13/24
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
Manifold pivot || Lab leak hindcasting || CFTC extra-double-bans prediction markets
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Highlights From The Comments On Hanson And Health Care
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
Most recent post . Table Of Contents: 1: Comments From Robin 2: Comments About/From Goldin et al 3: Comments From The Rest Of You Yokels
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The Emotional Support Animal Racket
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
If you’re from a country that doesn’t have emotional support animals, here’s how it works. Sometimes places ban or restrict animals. For example, an apartment building might not allow dogs. Or an airline might charge you money to transport your cat. But the law requires them to allow service animals, for example guide dogs for the blind. A newer law also requires some of these places to allow emotional support animals, ie animals that help people with mental health problems like depression or anxiety. So for example, if you’re depressed, but having your dog nearby makes you feel...
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Asterisk/Zvi on California's AI Bill
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
California’s state senate is considering , a bill to regulate AI. Since OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta are all in California, this would affect most of the industry. If the California state senate passed a bill saying that the sky was blue, I would start considering whether it might be green, or colorless, or maybe not exist at all. And people on Twitter have been saying that this bill would ban open-source AI - no, all AI! - no, all technology more complicated than a toaster! So I started out skeptical. But ( , ) has looked at it more closely and found:
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Highlights From The Comments On "The Origin Of Woke"
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
Original post . Table Of Contents: 1: Response From The Author 2: Attempted Fact Checks 3: People With Personal Experience At Their Workplace 4: People With Personal Experience In Civil Rights 5: The Origins Of Modern Wokeness 6: Other Countries 7: EEOC Lawsuits 8: Other Good Comments 9: Conclusions And Updates
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Book Review: The Origins Of Woke
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
, by , has an ambitious thesis. And it argues for an ambitious thesis. But the thesis it has isn’t the one it argues for. The claimed thesis is “the cultural package of wokeness is downstream of civil rights law”. It goes pretty hard on this. For example, there’s the title, The Origins Of Woke. Or the Amazon blurb: “The roots of the culture lie not in the culture itself, but laws and regulations enacted decades ago”. Or the banner ad:= The other thesis, the one it actually argues for, is “US civil rights law is bad”. On its own, this is a fine thesis. A book called Civil Rights...
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Response to Hanson On Health Care
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
Robin Hanson to my original post . On Straw-Manning Robin thinks I’m straw-manning him. He says:
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Survey Results: PMS Symptoms
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
In November 2022, Aella posted : 19% of women without pre-menstrual symptoms believed in the supernatural, compared to 39% of women with PMS. I can’t do chi-squared tests in my head, but with 1,074 votes this looks significant. Weird! Now 72% of people with PMS self-describe as neurotic, compared to only 45% without. Aella writes more about this , and sebjenseb confirms . I’m less weirded out by this one, because you can imagine that people feel neurotic because of PMS symptoms, but it’s still a surprisingly strong effect.
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Desperately Trying To Fathom The Coffeepocalypse Argument
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
One of the most common arguments against AI safety is: Here’s an example of a time someone was worried about something, but it didn’t happen. Therefore, AI, which you are worried about, also won’t happen. I always give the obvious answer: “Okay, but there are other examples of times someone was worried about something, and it did happen, right? How do we know AI isn’t more like those?” The people I’m arguing with always seem so surprised by this response, as if I’m committing some sort of betrayal by destroying their beautiful argument. The first hundred times this happened,...
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Contra Hanson On Medical Effectiveness
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
Robin Hanson of more or less believes medicine doesn’t work [EDIT: see his response where he says this is an inaccurate summary of his position. Further chain of responses and ] This is a strong claim. It would be easy to round Hanson’s position off to something weaker, like “extra health care isn’t valuable on the margin”. This is how most people interpret the studies he cites. Still, I think his current, actual position is that medicine doesn’t work. For example, :
info_outlineIn November 2022, Aella posted this Twitter poll:
19% of women without pre-menstrual symptoms believed in the supernatural, compared to 39% of women with PMS. I can’t do chi-squared tests in my head, but with 1,074 votes this looks significant. Weird!
Now 72% of people with PMS self-describe as neurotic, compared to only 45% without. Aella writes more about this here, and sebjenseb confirms here. I’m less weirded out by this one, because you can imagine that people feel neurotic because of PMS symptoms, but it’s still a surprisingly strong effect.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/survey-results-pms-symptoms