Triple Tragedy And Thankful Theory
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
I accept guest posts from certain people, especially past Book Review Contest winners. Earlier this year, I published Daniel Böttger’s essay . While we were working on editing it, Daniel had some dramatic experiences and revelations, culminating in him developing a theory which he says “will contribute to saving the world”, which he asked me to publish. Although I can’t speak for its world-historical importance, and although he admits his mental state is fragile, after some discussion I decided to publish because - if nothing else - he’s a great writer with a fascinating story and...
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Against The Cultural Christianity Argument
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
The "cultural Christianity" argument says that atheists might not like Christianity, but they like a culture which depends on Christianity. They like open, free, thoughtful, liberal, beautiful, virtuous societies. Unmoored from a connection to Christanity, a society will gradually have less of those goods, until even atheists are unhappy. Therefore (continues the argument), atheists should be cultural Christians. While they can continue to privately disbelieve, they should support an overall Christian society, which they can dwell contentedly on the fringes of. I think this is sort of where...
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Preliminary Milei Report Card
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
How is Javier Milei, the new-ish libertarian president of Argentina doing? According to , he’s doing amazing, , and Argentina is on the road to First World status. According to , he’s devastating the country, , and Argentina is mired in . I was confused enough to investigate further. Going through various topics in more depth:
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How Often Do Men Think About Rome?
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
Exegi monumentum aere perennius There’s a Twitter meme on how men constantly think about the Roman Empire. Some feminist friends objected that women think about Rome a lot too. To the matter, I included a question about this on , “Have you thought about the Roman Empire in the past 24 hours?” (the Byzantine Empire also counted). Here are responses from 607 cis women and 4,925 cis men:
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Your Book Review: The Ballad of the White Horse
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
Finalist #14 in the Book Review Contest [This is one of the finalists in the 2024 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked] Introduction is a 2,684 line poem about conservatism, and it is brilliant. It has been called the last great epic poem written in English. I have not read the three dozen or so English epic poems that Wikipedia claims have been written...
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Sakana, Strawberry, and Scary AI
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
Sakana (, ) is supposed to be “an AI scientist”. Since it can’t access the physical world, it can only do computer science. Its human handlers give it a computer program. It prompts itself to generate hypotheses about the program (“if I change this number, the program will run faster”). Then it uses an AI coding submodule to test its hypotheses. Finally, it uses a language model to write them up in typical scientific paper format. Is it good? Not really. Experts who read its papers say they’re trivial, poorly reasoned, and occasionally make things up (the creators defend...
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Mantic Monday 9/16/24
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
Probably No Superintelligent Forecaster Yet FiveThirtyNine (ha ha) is a new forecasting AI that purports to be “superintelligent”, ie able to beat basically all human forecasters. In fact, its creators go further than that: they say it beats Metaculus, a site which aggregates the estimates of hundreds of forecasters to generate estimates more accurate than any of them. You can read the announcement and play with the model itself . (kudos to the team for making the model publicly available, especially since these things usually have high inference costs)
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Your Book Review: Nine Lives
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
Finalist #13 in the Book Review Contest [This is one of the finalists in the 2024 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked] Cats have nine lives but they don’t get involved in jungle wars in the Philippines Aimen Dean (pseudonym) compares himself to the proverbial cat: he has nine lives, surviving every impossible situation and starting new lives under strange new...
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Links For September 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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Contra DeBoer On Temporal Copernicanism
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
Freddie deBoer He argues we shouldn’t expect a singularity, apocalypse, or any other crazy event in our lifetimes. Discussing celebrity transhumanist Yuval Harari, he writes: What I want to say to people like Yuval Harari is this. The modern human species is about 250,000 years old, give or take 50,000 years depending on who you ask. Let’s hope that it keeps going for awhile - we’ll be conservative and say 50,000 more years of human life. So let’s just throw out 300,000 years as the span of human existence, even though it could easily be 500,000 or a million or more. Harari's...
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Steve Kirsch is an inventor and businessman most famous for developing the optical mouse. More recently, he’s become an anti-COVID-vaccine activist. He has many different arguments on his Substack, of which one especially caught my eye:
He got Pollfish, a reputable pollster, to ask questions about people’s COVID experiences, including whether they thought any family members had died from COVID or from COVID vaccines. Results here:
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7.5% of people said a household member had died of COVID
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8.5% of people said a household member had died from the vaccine.
All other statistics were normal and confirmed that this was a fair sample of the population. In particular, about 75% were vaccinated (suggesting that they weren’t just polling hardcore anti-vaxxers).
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/failure-to-replicate-anti-vaccine