Indulge Your Internet Addiction By Reading About Internet Addiction
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
Internet addiction may not be as bad as some other forms of addiction, but it’s more common (and more personal). I have young children now and wanted to learn more about it, so I included some questions in last year’s ACX survey. The sample was 5,981 ACX readers (obviously non-random in terms of Internet use level!). I don’t think the results were very helpful, but I post them here for the sake of completeness.
info_outline
Friendly And Hostile Analogies For Taste
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
Recently we’ve gotten into discussions about artistic taste (see comments on and ). This is a bit mysterious. Many (most?) uneducated people like certain art which seems “obviously” pretty. But a small group of people who have studied the issue in depth say that in some deep sense, that art is actually bad (“kitsch”), and other art which normal people don’t appreciate is better. They can usually point to criteria which the “sophisticated” art follows and the “kitsch” art doesn’t, but to normal people these just seem like lists of pointless rules. But most of the critics...
info_outline
Book Review: From Bauhaus To Our House
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
, Tom Wolfe didn’t like modern architecture. He wondered why we abandoned our patrimony of cathedrals and palaces for a million indistinguishable concrete boxes. Unlike most people, he was a journalist skilled at deep dives into difficult subjects. The result is , a hostile history of modern architecture which addresses the question of: what happened? If everyone hates this stuff, how did it win? How Did Modern Architecture Start? European art in the 1800s might have seemed a bit conservative. It was typically sponsored by kings, dukes, and rich businessmen, via national artistic guilds...
info_outline
Prison And Crime: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
Do longer prison sentences reduce crime? It seems obvious that they should. Even if they don’t deter anyone, they at least keep criminals locked up where they can’t hurt law-abiding citizens. If, , 1% of people commit 63% of the crime, locking up that 1% should dramatically decrease crime rates regardless of whether it scares anyone else. And blue state soft-on-crime policies have been followed by increasing theft and disorder. On the other hand, people in the field keep saying there’s no relationship. For example, criminal justice nonprofit Vera Institute says that . And this seems to...
info_outline
Against The Generalized Anti-Caution Argument
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
Suppose something important will happen at a certain unknown point. As someone approaches that point, you might be tempted to warn that the thing will happen. If you’re being appropriately cautious, you’ll warn about it before it happens. Then your warning will be wrong. As things continue to progress, you may continue your warnings, and you’ll be wrong each time. Then people will laugh at you and dismiss your predictions, since you were always wrong before. Then the thing will happen and they’ll be unprepared. Toy example: suppose you’re a doctor. Your patient wants to try a new...
info_outline
How Did You Do On The AI Art Turing Test?
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
Last month, 11,000 people to classify fifty pictures as either human art or AI-generated images. I originally planned five human and five AI pictures in each of four styles: Renaissance, 19th Century, Abstract/Modern, and Digital, for a total of forty. After receiving many exceptionally good submissions from local AI artists, I fudged a little and made it fifty. The final set included paintings by Domenichino, Gauguin, Basquiat, and others, plus a host of digital artists and AI hobbyists. One of these two pretty hillsides is by one of history’s greatest artists. The other is soulless AI...
info_outline
The Early Christian Strategy
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
In 1980, game theorist Robert Axelrod ran a famous Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma Tournament. He asked other game theorists to send in their best strategies in the form of “bots”, short pieces of code that took an opponent’s actions as input and returned one of the classic Prisoner’s Dilemma outputs of COOPERATE or DEFECT. For example, you might have a bot that COOPERATES a random 80% of the time, but DEFECTS against another bot that plays DEFECT more than 20% of the time, except on the last round, where it always DEFECTS, or if its opponent plays DEFECT in response to COOPERATE. In the...
info_outline
Book Review: The Rise Of Christianity
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
The rise of Christianity is a great puzzle. In 40 AD, there were maybe a thousand Christians. Their Messiah had just been executed, and they were on the wrong side of an intercontinental empire that had crushed all previous foes. By 400, there were forty million, and they were set to dominate the next millennium of Western history. Imagine taking a time machine to the year 2300 AD, and everyone is Scientologist. The United States is >99% Scientologist. So is Latin America and most of Europe. The Middle East follows some heretical pseudo-Scientology that thinks L Ron Hubbard was a great...
info_outline
Congrats To Polymarket, But I Still Think They Were Mispriced
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
I. (and prediction markets in general) had an amazing Election Night. They , kept the site stable through what must have been incredible strain, and have successfully gotten prediction markets in front of the world (). From here it’s a flywheel; victory building on victory. Enough people heard of them this election that they’ll never lack for customers. And maybe Trump’s CFTC will be kinder than Biden’s and relax some of the constraints they’re operating under. They’ve realized the long-time rationalist dream of a widely-used prediction market with high volume, deserve more praise...
info_outline
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.]
info_outlineFreddie deBoer has a post on what he calls “the temporal Copernican principle.” 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 lifespan, if he's lucky, will probably top out at about 100 years. So: what are the odds that Harari’s lifespan overlaps with the most important period in human history, as he believes, given those numbers? That it overlaps with a particularly important period of human history at all? Even if we take the conservative estimate for the length of human existence of 300,000 years, that means Harari’s likely lifespan is only about .33% of the entirety of human existence. Isn’t assuming that this .33% is somehow particularly special a very bad assumption, just from the basis of probability? And shouldn’t we be even more skeptical given that our basic psychology gives us every reason to overestimate the importance of our own time?
(I think there might be a math error here - 100 years out of 300,000 is 0.033%, not 0.33% - but this isn’t my main objection.)
He then condemns a wide range of people, including me, for failing to understand this:
Some people who routinely violate the Temporal Copernican Principle include Harari, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Sam Altman, Francis Fukuyama, Elon Musk, Clay Shirky, Tyler Cowen, Matt Yglesias, Tom Friedman, Scott Alexander, every tech company CEO, Ray Kurzweil, Robin Hanson, and many many more. I think they should ask themselves how much of their understanding of the future ultimately stems from a deep-seated need to believe that their times are important because they think they themselves are important, or want to be.
I deny misunderstanding this. Freddie is wrong.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/contra-deboer-on-temporal-copernicanism