Indulge Your Internet Addiction By Reading About Internet Addiction
Release Date: 12/25/2024
Everything-Except-Book Review Contest 2025
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
I enjoy the yearly book review contest, but it feels like last year’s contest is barely done, and I want to give you a break so you can read more books before we start over. So this year, let’s do something different. Submit an ACX-length post reviewing something, anything, except a book. You can review a movie, song, or video game. You can review a product, restaurant, or tourist attraction. But don’t let the usual categories limit you. Review comic books or blog posts. Review political parties - no, whole societies! Review animals or trees! Review an oddly-shaped pebble, or a passing...
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Why Should Intelligence Be Related To Neuron Count?
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
Intelligence seems to correlate with total number of neurons in the brain. Different animals’ intelligence levels (cerebellum etc don’t count). Neuron number predicts animal intelligence better than most other variables like brain size, brain size divided by body size, “”, etc. This is most obvious in certain bird species that have tiny brains full of tiny neurons and are very smart (eg crows, parrots). Humans with bigger brains . AFAIK nobody has done the obvious next step and seen whether people with higher IQ have more neurons. This could be because the neuron-counting process...
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Links For February 2025
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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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
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
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
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 "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
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
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.
info_outlineInternet 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.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/indulge-your-internet-addiction-by