Your Book Review: The History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe
Release Date: 09/22/2024
Links For November 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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Mantic Monday: Judgment Day
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
A red sun dawns over San Francisco. Juxtaposed against clouds and sea, it forms a patriotic tableau: blood red, deathly white, and the blue of the void. As its first rays touch the city, the frantic traffic slows to a crawl; even the birds cease to sing. It is Election Day in the United States. Future generations will number American elections among history's greatest and most terrible spectacles. As we remember the Games in the Colosseum, or the bloody knives of Tenochtitlan, so they will remember us. That which other ages would relegate to a tasteful coronation or mercifully quick coup,...
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ACX Endorses Harris, Oliver, Or Stein
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
I. Time to own the libs! ACX joins such based heterodox thinkers as , , , and in telling you what and failing don’t want you to know: Donald Trump is the wrong choice for US President. If you’re in a swing state, we recommend you vote Harris; if a safe state, Harris or your third-party candidate of choice. [EDIT/UPDATE: If you’re in a safe state and want to trade your protest vote with a swing state voter, or vice versa, go to ] I mostly stand by the reasoning in my 2016 post, . But you can read a better and more recent argument against Trump’s economic policy , and against his...
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The Case Against California Proposition 36
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
[This is a guest post by Clara Collier. Clara is the editor of .] Proposition 36 is a California ballot measure that increases mandatory sentences for certain drug and theft crimes. It’s also a referendum on over a decade of sentencing reform efforts stemming from California’s historical prison overcrowding crisis. Like many states, California passed increasingly tough sentencing laws through the 90s and early 2000s. This led to the state’s prisons operating massively over capacity: at its peak, a system built for 85,000 inhabitants housed . This was, among other things, a massive...
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Notes From The Progress Studies Conference
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
Tyler Cowen is an economics professor and blogger at . Patrick Collison is the billionaire founder of the online payments company Stripe. In 2019, they calling for a discipline of Progress Studies, which would figure out what progress was and how to increase it. Later that year, tech entrepreneur Jason Crawford stepped up to spearhead the effort. The immediate reaction was . There were the usual gripes that “progress” was problematic because it could imply that some cultures/times/places/ideas were better than others. But there were also more specific objections: weren’t historians...
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Secrets Of The Median Voter Theorem
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
The says that, given some reasonable assumptions, the candidate closest to the beliefs of the median voter will win. So if candidates are rational, they’ll all end up at the same place on a one-dimensional political spectrum: the exact center. Here’s a simple argument for why this should be true: suppose the Democrats wisely choose a centrist platform, but the Republicans foolishly veer far-right:
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ACX Local Voting Guides
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Thanks to our local meetup groups for doing this! Quick lookup version: AUSTIN: BOSTON: CHICAGO: LOS ANGELES: NEW YORK CITY: OAKLAND/BERKELEY: PHILADELPHIA: SAN FRANCISCO: SEATTLE: Longer version with commentary:
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Book Review: Deep Utopia
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
What problem do we get after we've solved all other problems? I. Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom got famous for asking “What if technology is really really bad?” He helped define ‘existential risk’, popularize fears of malevolent superintelligence, and argue that we were living in a ‘vulnerable world’ prone to physical or biological catastrophe. His latest book breaks from his usual oeuvre. In , he asks: “What if technology is really really good?” Most previous utopian literature (he notes) has been about ‘shallow’ utopias. There are still problems; we just handle them...
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AI Art Turing Test
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
Okay, let’s do this! Link is , should take about twenty minutes. I’ll close the form on Monday 10/21 and post results the following week. I’ll put an answer key in the comments here, and have a better one including attributions in the results post. DON’T READ THE COMMENTS UNTIL YOU’RE DONE.
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Book Review Contest 2024 Winners
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Thanks to everyone who entered or voted in the book review contest. The winners are: 1st: , reviewed by AmandaFromBethlehem. Amanda is active in the Philadelphia ACX community. This is her first year entering the Book Review Contest, and she is currently working on a silly novel about an alien who likes thermodynamics. When she's not writing existential horror, she practices Tengwar calligraphy and does home improvement projects. 2nd: , reviewed by David Matolcsi. David is an AI safety researcher from Hungary, currently living in Berkeley. He doesn't have much publicly available writing...
info_outlineFinalist #11 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]
1. The Supernatural is Dead
April, 1861 was a cruel month. The American Civil War had just started, and across the Atlantic, high in a remote valley in the western Alps, in the old market town of Morzines, another war was raging, this one pitting the locals against the legions of Hell.
The regional authorities, confronted with an outbreak of townspeople writhing in convulsions, entering trances, shrieking in weird tongues, and suffering from other diabolical whatnot, had begged the central government for help, writing:
“To conclude, we will say: That our impression is that all this is supernatural, in cause and in effects; according to the rules of sound logic, and according to everything that theology, ecclesiastical history, and the Gospel teach and tell us, we declare it our considered opinion that this is truly demonic possession.”
Dr. Augustin Constans, Inspector General of the Insane Department (inspecteur général du service des aliénés) was dispatched from Paris to investigate. The Doctor later reported,
“Arriving in Morzines on April 26, I found the entire population in a state of depression difficult to describe; everyone was deep in morbid gloom, living in constant fear of finding themselves or their loved ones consumed by devils.”
Dr. Constans’ next action was highly unorthodox. Standard protocol for treating these afflictions called for accusing someone of witchcraft, preferably a poor, socially isolated, old woman, (although, in a pinch, anyone of any sex, status, or age would do, and often did), torturing her until she confessed to creating the calamity by consorting with the Devil, and, after that, lighting her on fire, first strangling her to death, if, at this stage of the proceedings, one judged that a modicum of mercy was in order. Undoubtedly aware of this precedent, Dr. Constans rounded up the possessed and subjected them to: …an examination. From which, all of his new patients emerged non-tortured and unburnt.
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