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
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
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
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
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_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