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Astral Codex Ten Podcast

Release Date: 07/27/2024

Why I Am Not A Conflict Theorist show art Why I Am Not A Conflict Theorist

Astral Codex Ten Podcast

Conflict theory is the belief that political disagreements come from material conflict. So for example, if rich people support capitalism, and poor people support socialism, this isn’t because one side doesn’t understand economics. It’s because rich people correctly believe capitalism is good for the rich, and poor people correctly believe socialism is good for the poor. Or if white people are racist, it’s not because they have some kind of mistaken stereotypes that need to be corrected - it’s because they correctly believe racism is good for white people. Some people comment on my...

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Highlights From The Comments On Tegmark's Mathematical Universe show art Highlights From The Comments On Tegmark's Mathematical Universe

Astral Codex Ten Podcast

[Original thread here: ] 1: Comments On Specific Technical Points 2: Comments From Bentham’s Bulldog’s Response 3: Comments On Philosophical Points, And Getting In Fights

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Lives Of The Rationalist Saints show art Lives Of The Rationalist Saints

Astral Codex Ten Podcast

St. Felix publicly declared that he believed with 79% probability that COVID had a natural origin. He was brought before the Emperor, who threatened him with execution unless he updated to 100%. When St. Felix refused, the Emperor was impressed with his integrity, and said he would release him if he merely updated to 90%. St. Felix refused again, and the Emperor, fearing revolt, promised to release him if he merely rounded up one percentage point to 80%. St. Felix cited Tetlock’s research showing that the last digit contained useful information, refused a third time, and was crucified. St....

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Tegmark's Mathematical Universe Defeats Most Proofs Of God's Existence show art Tegmark's Mathematical Universe Defeats Most Proofs Of God's Existence

Astral Codex Ten Podcast

It feels like 2010 again - the bloggers are . I found these much less interesting after learning about Max Tegmark’s , and this doesn’t seem to have reached the Substack debate yet, so I’ll put it out there. Tegmark’s hypothesis says: all possible mathematical objects exist. Consider a mathematical object like a cellular automaton - a set of simple rules that creates complex behavior. The most famous is ; the second most famous is the universe. After all, the universe is a starting condition (the Big Bang) and a set of simple rules determining how the starting condition evolves over...

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Only About 40% Of The Cruz Only About 40% Of The Cruz "Woke Science" Database Is Woke Science

Astral Codex Ten Podcast

From : U.S. Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Ted Cruz (R-Texas) released a database identifying over 3,400 grants, totaling more than $2.05 billion in federal funding awarded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) during the Biden-Harris administration. This funding was diverted toward questionable projects that promoted Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) or advanced neo-Marxist class warfare propaganda. I saw many scientists that the projects from their universities that made Cruz’s list were unrelated to wokeness. This seemed like a surprising failure mode, so I decided to...

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Deliberative Alignment, And The Spec show art Deliberative Alignment, And The Spec

Astral Codex Ten Podcast

In the past day, about deliberative alignment, and OpenAI has . This article was written before either of these and doesn’t account for them, sorry. I. OpenAI has bad luck with its alignment teams. The first team quit en masse to found Anthropic, now a major competitor. The second team quit en masse to protest the company reneging on safety commitments. The third died in a tragic plane crash. The fourth got washed away in a flood. The fifth through eighth were all slain by various types of wild beast.

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1DaySooner's Trump II Health Policy Proposals show art 1DaySooner's Trump II Health Policy Proposals

Astral Codex Ten Podcast

As RFK Jr. fights to be confirmed in Congress, the rest of Trump’s health team is already taking shape. is an ACX grantee organization that advocates for innovative health policies. They’ve helped me write a list of who some of these people are, and some of the policies they could consider. For practical reasons, we focus on upside only, so consider these the Venn-diagram-union of the ideas we’re most excited about, and the ones we think they might be most excited about - the new health policy we might get get in our ~90th percentile best outcome.  

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Money Saved By Canceling Programs Does Not Immediately Flow To The Best Possible Alternative show art Money Saved By Canceling Programs Does Not Immediately Flow To The Best Possible Alternative

Astral Codex Ten Podcast

I. PEPFAR - a Bush initiative to send cheap AIDS drugs to Africa - . A Trump decision briefly put it “on pause”, although this seems to have been walked back; its current status is unclear but hopeful. In the debate around this question, many people asked - is it really fair to spend $6 billion a year to help foreigners when so many Americans are suffering? Shouldn’t we value American lives more than foreign ones? Can’t we spend that money on some program that helps people closer to home? This is a fun thing to argue about - which, as usual, means it’s a purely philosophical question...

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Model City Monday 2/3/25 show art Model City Monday 2/3/25

Astral Codex Ten Podcast

Prospera Declared Unconstitutional The Honduras Supreme Court , including Prospera, unconstitutional. The background: in the mid-2010s, the ruling conservative party wanted charter cities. They had already packed the Supreme Court for other reasons, so they had their captive court declare charter cities to be constitutional. In 2022, the socialists took power from the conservatives and got the chance to fill the Supreme Court with their supporters. In September, this new Supreme Court said whoops, actually charter cities aren’t constitutional at all. They added that this decision applied...

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Why Recurring Dream Themes? show art Why Recurring Dream Themes?

Astral Codex Ten Podcast

An observant Jewish friend told me she has recurring dreams about being caught unprepared for Shabbat. (Shabbat is the Jewish Sabbath, celebrated every Saturday, when observant Jews are forbidden to work, drive, carry things outdoors, spend money, use electrical devices, etc.) She said that in the dreams, she would be out driving, far from home, and realize that Shabbat was due to begin in a few minutes, with no way to make it home or get a hotel in time. I found this interesting because my recurring dreams are usually things like being caught unprepared for a homework assignment I have due...

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More Episodes

I.

Suppose that you, an ordinary person, open your door and start choking on yellow smoke. You call up your representative and say “there should be less pollution”.

A technical expert might hear “there should be less pollution” and have dozens of questions. Do you just want to do common-sense things, like lower the detection threshold for hexamethyldecawhatever? Or do you want to ban tetraethylpentawhatever, which is vital for the baby formula food chain and would cause millions of babies to die if you banned it?

Any pollution legislation must be made of specific policies. In some sense, it’s impossible to be “for” or “against” the broad concept of “reducing pollution”. Everyone would be against a bill that devastated the baby formula supply chain for no benefit. And everyone would support a magical bill that cleaned the skies with no extra hardship on industry. In between, there are just a million different tradeoffs; some are good, others bad. So (the technocrat concludes), it’s incoherent to support “reducing pollution”. You can only support (or oppose) particular plans.

And yet ordinary people should be able to say “I want to stop choking on yellow smoke every time I go outside” without having to learn the difference between hexamethyldecawhatever and tetraethylpentawhatever.

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