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, :
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Ye Olde Bay Area House Party
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
[previously in series: , , , , ] When that April with his sunlight fierce The rainy winter of the coast doth pierce And filleth every spirit with such hale As horniness engenders in the male Then folk go out in crop tops and in shorts Their bodies firm from exercise and sports And men gaze at the tall girls and the shawties And San Franciscans long to go to parties.
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Updates on Lumina Probiotic
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
Lumina, the genetically modified anti-tooth-decay bacterium that , is back in the news after lowering its price from $20,000 to and getting endorsements from , , and (as well as anti-endorsements from and ). A few points that have come up:
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Highlights From The Comments On The Lab Leak Debate
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
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,...
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Links For April 2024
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
[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.]
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Spring Meetups Everywhere 2024
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
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) ...
info_outlinehttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-judging-april-covid
Since this is getting broader than just Metaculus, I'm changing the name to Mantic Monday, after an obscure word for "oracular" (and changing the preview image to a mantis, since I don't know how else to visually represent "mantic". And posting it early Tuesday morning because I’m late).
In April 2020, I made my yearly predictions, and many of them were about the (then new) coronavirus pandemic.
Two other people on Less Wrong, Zvi and Bucky, decided to test themselves against me by trying to predict the same questions. Zvi saw my answers beforehand; Bucky didn’t. Here's how we did (except where otherwise stated, all predictions are for 12/31/20):
You can see a list of the full questions and why I graded them the way I did in the appendix at the bottom.
I scored these using a logarthmic scoring rule, adjusted so that guessing 50-50 always gave zero points. It's not very intuitive. Getting everything maximally right gives a score of about 14; guessing 50-50 for everything gives a score of 0, getting everything maximally wrong gives a score of negative infinity.