Astral Codex Ten Podcast

The official audio version of Astral Codex Ten, with an archive of posts from Slate Star Codex. It's just me reading Scott Alexander's blog posts.

Highlights From The Comments On The Lab Leak Debate 04/26/2024

Highlights From The Comments On The Lab Leak Debate Original post . Table of contents below. I want to especially highlight three things. First, Saar wrote a response to my post (and to zoonosis arguments in general). I’ve put a summary and some my responses at 1.11, but you can read the full post . Second, I kind of made fun of Peter for giving some very extreme odds, and I mentioned they were sort of trolling, but he’s convinced me they were 100% trolling. Many people held these poorly-done calculations against Peter, so I want to make it clear that’s my fault for mis-presenting it. See 3.1 for more details. Third, in my original post, I failed to mention that Peter also has , including . Thanks to some people who want to remain anonymous for helping me with this post. Any remaining errors are my own. 1: Comments Arguing Against Zoonosis — 1.1: Is COVID different from other zoonoses? — 1.2: Were the raccoon-dogs wild-caught? — 1.3: 92 early cases — 1.4: COVID in Brazilian wastewater — 1.5 Biorealism’s 16 arguments — 1.6: DrJayChou’s 7 arguments — 1.7: How much should coverup worry us? — 1.8: Have Worobey and Pekar been debunked? — 1.9: Was there ascertainment bias in early cases — 1.10: Connor Reed / Gwern on cats — 1.11: Rootclaim’s response to my post 2: Comments Arguing Against Lab Leak — 2.1: Is the pandemic starting near WIV reverse correlation? 3: Other Points That Came Up — 3.1: Apology to Peter re: extreme odds — 3.2: Tobias Schneider on Rootclaim’s Syria Analysis — 3.3: Closing thoughts on Rootclaim 4: Summary And Updates /episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/30998338

Links For April 2024 04/12/2024

Links For April 2024 [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.] /episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/30793758

Spring Meetups Everywhere 2024 04/12/2024

Spring Meetups Everywhere 2024 Many cities have regular Astral Codex Ten meetup groups. Twice a year, I try to advertise their upcoming meetups and make a bigger deal of it than usual so that irregular attendees can attend. This is one of those times. This year we have spring meetups planned in over eighty cities, from Tokyo, Japan to Seminyak, Indonesia. Thanks to all the organizers who responded to my request for details, and to Meetups Czar Skyler and the Less Wrong team for making this happen. You can find the list below, in the following order: Africa & Middle East Asia-Pacific (including Australia) Europe (including UK) North America & Central America South America There should very shortly be a map of these meetups on . /episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/30793753

Practically-A-Book Review: Rootclaim $100,000 Lab Leak Debate 04/12/2024

Practically-A-Book Review: Rootclaim $100,000 Lab Leak Debate Saar Wilf is an ex-Israeli entrepreneur. Since 2016, he’s been developing a new form of reasoning, meant to transcend normal human bias. His method - called Rootclaim - uses Bayesian reasoning, a branch of math that explains the right way to weigh evidence. This isn’t exactly new. Everyone supports Bayesian reasoning. The statisticians support it, I support it, Nate Silver wrote a whole book supporting it. But the joke goes that you do Bayesian reasoning by doing normal reasoning while muttering “Bayes, Bayes, Bayes” under your breath. Nobody - not the statisticians, not Nate Silver, certainly not me - tries to do full Bayesian reasoning on fuzzy real-world problems. They’d be too hard to model. You’d make some philosophical mistake converting the situation into numbers, then end up much worse off than if you’d tried normal human intuition. Rootclaim spent years working on this problem, until he was satisfied his method could avoid these kinds of pitfalls. Then they started posting analyses of different open problems to their site, . Here are three: /episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/30793658

In Continued Defense Of Non-Frequentist Probabilities 04/05/2024

In Continued Defense Of Non-Frequentist Probabilities It’s every blogger’s curse to return to the same arguments again and again. Matt Yglesias has to keep writing “maybe we should do popular things instead of unpopular ones”, Freddie de Boer has to keep writing “the way culture depicts mental illness is bad”, and for whatever reason, I keep getting in fights about whether you can have probabilities for non-repeating, hard-to-model events. For example: What is the probability that Joe Biden will win the 2024 election? What is the probability that people will land on Mars before 2050? What is the probability that AI will destroy humanity this century? The argument against: usually we use probability to represent an outcome from some well-behaved distribution. For example, if there are 400 white balls and 600 black balls in an urn, the probability of pulling out a white ball is 40%. If you pulled out 100 balls, close to 40 of them would be white. You can literally pull out the balls and do the experiment. In contrast, saying “there’s a 45% probability people will land on Mars before 2050” seems to come out of nowhere. How do you know? If you were to say “the probability humans will land on Mars is exactly 45.11782%”, you would sound like a loon. But how is saying that it’s 45% any better? With balls in an urn, the probability might very well be 45.11782%, and you can prove it. But with humanity landing on Mars, aren’t you just making this number up? Since people on social media have been talking about this again, let’s go over it one more depressing, fruitless time. /episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/30691223

The Mystery Of Internet Survey IQs 03/20/2024

The Mystery Of Internet Survey IQs I have data from two big Internet surveys, and . Both asked questions about IQ: The average LessWronger reported their IQ as 138. The average ClearerThinking user reported their IQ as 130. These are implausibly high. Only 1/200 people has an IQ of 138 or higher. 1/50 people have IQ 130, but the ClearerThinking survey used crowdworkers (eg Mechanical Turk) who should be totally average. Okay, fine, so people lie about their IQ (or foolishly trust fake Internet IQ tests). Big deal, right? But these don’t look like lies. Both surveys asked for SAT scores, which are known to correspond to IQ. The LessWrong average was 1446, IQ 140. The ClearerThinking average was 1350, IQ 134. People seem less likely to lie about their SATs, and least likely of all to optimize their lies for getting IQ/SAT correspondences right. And the Less Wrong survey asked people what test they based their estimates off of. Some people said fake Internet IQ tests. But other people named respected tests like the WAIS, WISC, and Stanford-Binet, or testing sessions by Mensa (yes, I know you all hate Mensa, but their IQ tests are considered pretty accurate). The subset of about 150 people who named unimpeachable tests had slightly higher IQ (average 140) than everyone else. Thanks to Spencer Greenberg of ClearerThinking, I think I’m finally starting to make progress in explaining what’s going on. /episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/30467933

In Partial Grudging Defense Of Some Aspects Of Therapy Culture 03/20/2024

In Partial Grudging Defense Of Some Aspects Of Therapy Culture Both the Atlantic’s critique of polyamory and shared the same villain - “therapy culture”, the idea that you should prioritize “finding your true self” and make drastic changes if your current role doesn’t seem “authentically you”. A friend recently suggested a defense of this framework, which surprised me enough that I now relay it to you. /episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/30467883

Verses On Five People Being Killed By A Falling Package Of Foreign Aid 03/20/2024

Verses On Five People Being Killed By A Falling Package Of Foreign Aid (inspired by ) /episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/30467868

Mantic Monday 3/11/24 03/20/2024

Mantic Monday 3/11/24 Robots of prediction, predictions of robots /episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/30467848

Spring Meetups Everywhere 2024 - Call For Organizers 03/20/2024

Spring Meetups Everywhere 2024 - Call For Organizers There are ACX meetup groups all over the world. Lots of people are vaguely interested, but don't try them out until I make a big deal about it on the blog. Since learning that, I've tried to make a big deal about it on the blog twice annually, and it's that time of year again. If you're willing to organize a meetup for your city, please . /episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/30467828

How Should We Think About Race And "Lived Experience"? 03/15/2024

How Should We Think About Race And "Lived Experience"? The consensus says "biological race doesn't exist". But if race doesn't exist, how do we justify affirmative action, cultural appropriation, and all our other race-related practices? The consensus says that, although race doesn't exist biologically, it exists as a series of formative experiences. Black children are raised by black mothers in black communities, think of themselves as black, identify with black role models, and face anti-black prejudice. By the time they're grown up, they've had different experiences which give them a different perspective from white people. Therefore, it’s reasonable to think of them as a specific group, “the black race”, and have institutions to accommodate them even if they’re biologically indistinguishable. I thought about this while reading (paywalled), Jay Kang's New Yorker article on Elizabeth Hoover. The story goes something like this (my summary): /episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/30386363

ACX Grants Followup Impact Market 03/15/2024

ACX Grants Followup Impact Market I. What’s Going On We got 351 proposals for , but were only able to fund 34 of them. I’m not a professional grant evaluator and can’t guarantee there aren’t some jewels hidden among the remaining 317. The plan has always been to run an impact market - a site where investors crowdfund some of the remaining grant proposals. If the project goes well, then philanthropists who missed it the first time (eg me) will pay the investors for funding it, potentially earning them a big profit. In , some people (okay, one person) managed to get 25x their initial investment by funding a charity which did really well. So in my ideal world, we’d be running an impact market where you could invest your money in the remaining 317 proposals and make a profit if they did well. We’ve encountered two flaws on the way to that ideal world: /episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/30386293

Who Predicted 2023? 03/15/2024

Who Predicted 2023? Winners and takeaways from last year's prediction contest I. The Annual Forecasting Contest …is one of my favorite parts of this blog. I get a spreadsheet with what are basically takes - “Russia is totally going to win the war this year”, “There’s no way Bitcoin can possibly go down”. Then I do some basic math to it, and I get better takes. There are ways to look at a list of 3300 people’s takes and do math and get a take reliably better than all but a handful of them. Why is this interesting, when a handful of people still beat the math? Because we want something that can be applied prospectively and reliably. If John Smith from Townsville was the highest scoring participant, it matters a lot whether he’s a genius who can see the future, or if he just got lucky. Part of the goal of this contest was to figure that out. To figure out if the most reliable way to determine the future was to trust one identifiable guy, to trust some mathematical aggregation across guys, or something else. Here’s how it goes: in January 2023, I asked people to predict fifty questions about the upcoming year, like “Will Joe Biden be the leading candidate in the Democratic primary?” in the form of a probability (eg “90% chance”). About 3300 of you kindly took me up on that (“Blind Mode”). /episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/30386283

Book Review Contest Rules 2024 03/15/2024

Book Review Contest Rules 2024 All right, let’s do this again. Write a review of a book. There’s no official word count requirement, but previous finalists and winners were often between 2,000 and 10,000 words. There’s no official recommended style, but check the style of or my ACX book reviews (, , ) if you need inspiration. Please limit yourself to one entry per person or team. Then send me your review through . 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. /episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/30386243

Links For February 2024 03/10/2024

Links For February 2024 [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.] /episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/30305438

Less Utilitarian Than Thou 03/10/2024

Less Utilitarian Than Thou /episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/30305428

Who Does Polygenic Selection Help? 03/10/2024

Who Does Polygenic Selection Help? /episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/30305418

Highlights From The Comments On Polyamory 03/01/2024

Highlights From The Comments On Polyamory [Original posts: , ] 1: Comments I Can Respond To With Something Resembling Actual Statistics 2: Comments I Will Argue Against Despite Not Having Statistics, Sorry 3: Comments By People With Personal Anecdotes 4: Comments On Children 5: Other Comments /episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/30183903

Mantic Monday 2/19/24 03/01/2024

Mantic Monday 2/19/24 AI forecasters come of age / Prediction market reality TV dating show? / OpenAI's Sora /episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/30183828

X Fact Check: Does Gender Integration Moderate Politics? 03/01/2024

X Fact Check: Does Gender Integration Moderate Politics? /episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/30183803

Love And Liberty 02/16/2024

Love And Liberty Libertarians don’t really have their own holiday. Communists have May Day. The woke have MLK’s birthday. Nationalists have July 4th or their local equivalent. But libertarians have nothing. I propose Valentine’s Day. The way people think about love is the last relic of the way that libertarians think about everything. /episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/29983103

Sam Altman Wants $7 Trillion 02/16/2024

Sam Altman Wants $7 Trillion I. Sam Altman . In one sense, this isn’t news. Everyone wants $7 trillion. I want $7 trillion. I’m not going to get it, and Sam Altman probably won’t either. Still, the media treats this as worthy of comment, and I agree. It’s a useful reminder of what it will take for AI to scale in the coming years. The basic logic: /episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/29983083

ACX Grants Results 2024 02/16/2024

ACX Grants Results 2024 Thanks to everyone who participated in ACX Grants, whether as an applicant, an evaluator, or a funder. The best part of ACX Grants is telling the winners they won, which I’ll do in a moment. The worst part of ACX Grants is telling the non-winners they didn’t win. If I wasn’t able to give you a grant, it doesn’t mean I hate your project. Sometimes I couldn’t find the right evaluator to confirm that you were legit. Sometimes I sent your project to foundations or VCs who I thought it would be a better match for, or wanted to leave it as a test case for the impact market. Most of the time, I just didn’t have enough money, and I spent what I had according to my own imperfect priorities. (In particular, I wasn’t able to fully evaluate several AI alignment grants and had to pass on them; if this is you, consider applying to OpenAI’s before February 18.) If your name is below, you should have received an email with further information. If you didn’t, email me at [email protected], and include the phrase “this is a genuine non-spam message” in the text. Unless my email specifically mentioned you as an exception, Manifund will be handling payments and you’ll hear from them soon. This year’s winners are: /episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/29983048

Evolution Explains Polygenic Structure 02/09/2024

Evolution Explains Polygenic Structure We’ve been gradually working our way through the conversation around E. Fuller Torrey’s concerns about schizophrenia genetics - last week we had , the week before . Here are two more arguments Torrey makes that we haven’t gotten to: Studies have failed to find any schizophrenia genes of large effect. If schizophrenia is genetic, it must be caused of thousands of genes, hidden in the most obscure corners of the genome, each with effects too small to detect with current technology. This seems less like the sort of thing that happens naturally, and more like the sort of thing you would claim if you wanted to make your theory untestable. Schizophrenia is bad for fitness, so if it were genetic, evolution would have eliminated those genes. In the comments of the Unintuitive Properties post, that one of these mysteries solves the other: /episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/29868568

You Don't Hate Polyamory, You Hate People Who Write Books 02/09/2024

You Don't Hate Polyamory, You Hate People Who Write Books I. Yesterday (subscriber-only post, sorry). Today I want to zoom away from the specific bad arguments and examine the overall form of the article. The overall form was: “I read a memoir about polyamory, everyone involved seemed awful and unhappy, and now I hate polyamorous people.” This is a common pattern. Sometimes, if someone’s very careful, they read three or four books about polyamory. Everyone in all the books is awful and unhappy. Then they conclude they hate polyamorous people. But this is an unfair generalization. They should hate people who write books. /episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/29868473

It's Fair To Describe Schizophrenia As Probably Mostly Genetic 02/09/2024

It's Fair To Describe Schizophrenia As Probably Mostly Genetic Famous schizophrenia researcher E. Fuller Torrey recently trying to cast doubt on whether schizophrenia is really genetic. His exact argument is complicated, but I feel like it sort of equivocates between “the studies showing that schizophrenia are genetic are wrong” and “the studies are right, but in a philosophical sense we shouldn’t describe it as ‘mostly genetic’”. Awais Aftab . He’s not especially interested in debating the studies. But he says that even if the studies are right and schizophrenia is 80% heritable, we shouldn’t call it a genetic disease. He says: Heritability is “biologically vacuous” (), and I think we would be better off if more of us hesitated to assert that schizophrenia is a “genetic disorder” based predominantly on heritability estimates. I think about questions like these through the lens of avoiding . There are always complicated ways that any statement is false. So the question is never whether a statement is perfectly true in every sense. It’s what happens when we treat it fairly, using the same normal criteria we use for everything else. /episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/29868423

Seems Like Targeting 02/09/2024

Seems Like Targeting I. Recently as President of Harvard over plagiarism accusations and a fumbled Congressional testimony on anti-Semitism. The plagiarism was discovered by conservative journalists Chris Rufo and Chris Brunet. It would be quite a coincidence for them to find it at exactly the moment Gay was already under attack for her anti-Semitism testimony. More likely, they either: Found it a while ago, and kept it in reserve for a time when Gay was in the news Or were angry about Gay’s testimony, looked for dirt on her, and found it. I think this is obvious to everyone, but I hadn’t seen anyone make it explicit, and I think it should be. I’m not criticizing Rufo and Brunet. Investigative journalism is important, they found a real scandal, and they have every right to bring it to light. /episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/29868373

Mantic Monday 1/29/24 02/09/2024

Mantic Monday 1/29/24 Election problems // Trump odds // AI worlds /episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/29868348

The Psychopolitics Of Trauma 01/27/2024

The Psychopolitics Of Trauma I. Everyone knows politics makes people crazy. But what kind of crazy? Which page of the DSM is it on? I’m only half joking. Psychiatrists have spent decades developing a whole catalog of ways brains can go wrong. Politics makes people’s brains go wrong. Shouldn’t it be in the catalog? Wouldn’t it be weird if 21st century political extremists had discovered a totally new form of mental dysfunction, unrelated even by analogy to all the forms that had come before? You’ll object: politics only metaphorically “makes people crazy”; we just use the word “crazy” here to mean “irrational” or “overly emotional”. I’m not sure that’s true. Here are some stray findings that I think deserve to be synthesized: a /episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/29671498

Some Unintuitive Properties Of Polygenic Disorders 01/27/2024

Some Unintuitive Properties Of Polygenic Disorders E. Fuller Torrey recently trying to cast doubt on the commonly-accepted claim that schizophrenia is mostly genetic. Most of his points were the usual “if we can’t name all of the exact genes, it must not be genetic at all” - but two arguments stood out: Even though twin studies say schizophrenia is about 80% genetic, surveys of twin pairs show that if one identical twin has schizophrenia, the other one only has a 15% to 50% chance of having it. The Nazis ran a eugenics program that killed most of the schizophrenics in Germany, eliminating their genes from the gene pool. But the next generation of Germans had a totally normal schizophrenia rate, comparable to pre-Nazi Germany or any other country. I used to find arguments like these surprising and hard to answer. But after learning more about genetics, they no longer have such a hold on me. I’m going to try to communicate my reasoning with a very simple simulation, then give links to people who do the much more complicated math that it would take to model the real world. /episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/29671478

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