Come On, Obviously The Purpose Of A System Is Not What It Does
Release Date: 04/14/2025
Moments Of Awakening
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
Consciousness is the great mystery. In search of answers, scientists have plumbed every edge case they can think of - sleep, comas, lucid dreams, LSD trips, meditative ecstasies, seizures, neurosurgeries, . Still, new stuff occasionally turns up. I assume is a troll (source: the guy has a frog avatar):
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Contra MR On Charity Regrants
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
I often disagree with Marginal Revolution, but made me a new level of angry:
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The Evidence That A Million Americans Died Of COVID
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
Many commenters responded to by challenging the claim that 1.2 million Americans died of COVID...
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The Other COVID Reckoning
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
Five years later, we can’t stop talking about COVID. Remember lockdowns? The conflicting guidelines about masks - don’t wear them! Wear them! Maybe wear them! School closures, remote learning, learning loss, something about teachers’ unions. That one Vox article on how worrying about COVID was anti-Chinese racism. The time Trump sort of half-suggested injecting disinfectants. Hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, fluvoxamine, Paxlovid. Those jerks who tried to pressure you into getting vaccines, or those other jerks who wouldn’t get vaccines even though it put everyone else at risk. Anthony...
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Book Review: Selfish Reasons To Have More Kids
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
Bryan Caplan’s is like the Bible. You already know what it says. You’ve already decided whether you believe or not. Do you really have to read it all the way through? But when you’re going through a rough patch in your life, sometimes it helps to pick up a Bible and look for pearls of forgotten wisdom. That’s where I am now. Having twins is a lot of work. My wife does most of it. My nanny does most of what’s left. Even so, the remaining few hours a day leave me exhausted. I decided to read the canonical book on how having kids is easier and more fun than you think, to see if maybe I...
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In Search Of /r/petfree
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
, and a few names always come up. and are unpopular, but if I read them with an open mind, I always end up sympathetic - neither lifestyle is persecuted in my particular corner of society, but the Redditors there have usually been through some crazy stuff, and I don’t begrudge them a place to vent. The one that really floors me is . The denizens of /r/petfree don’t like pets. Their particular complaints vary, but most common are: Some stores either allow pets or don’t enforce bans on them, and then there are pets go in those stores, and they are dirty and annoying. Some parks either...
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Highlights From The Comments On AI Geoguessr
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
Thanks to everyone who commented on .
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Testing AI's GeoGuessr Genius
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
Some of the more unhinged writing on superintelligence pictures AI doing things that seem like magic. Crossing air gaps to escape its data center. Building nanomachines from simple components. Plowing through physical bottlenecks to revolutionize the economy in months. More sober thinkers point out that these things might be physically impossible. You can’t do physically impossible things, even if you’re very smart. No, say the speculators, you don’t understand. Everything is physically impossible when you’re 800 IQ points too dumb to figure it out. A chimp might feel secure that...
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Moldbug Sold Out
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
Cathy Young’s new hit piece on Curtis Yarvin (aka Mencius Moldbug) doesn’t mince words. Titled , it describes him as an "inept", "not exactly coherent" "trollish, ill-informed pseudo-intellectual" notable for his "woefully superficial knowledge and utter ignorance". Yarvin’s fans counter that if you look deeper, he has good responses to Young’s objections: Both sides are right. The synthesis is that Moldbug sold out. In the late 2000s, Moldbug wrote some genuinely interesting speculations on novel sci-fi variants of autocracy. Admitting that the dictatorships of the 20th century were...
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The Populist Right Must Own Tariffs
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
President Trump’s approval rating to near-historic lows. With economic disruption from the tariffs likely to hit next month, his numbers will probably get even worse; this administration could reach unprecedented levels of unpopularity. If I were a far-right populist, I would be thinking hard about a strategy to prevent the blowback from crippling the movement. Such a strategy is easy to come by. Anger over DOGE and deportations has a natural floor. If Trump’s base starts abandoning him, it will be because of the tariffs. But tariffs aren’t a load-bearing part of the MAGA platform....
info_outline(see Wikipedia: The Purpose Of A System Is What It Does)
Consider the following claims
- The purpose of a cancer hospital is to cure two-thirds of cancer patients.
- The purpose of the Ukrainian military is to get stuck in a years-long stalemate with Russia.
- The purpose of the British government is to propose a controversial new sentencing policy, stand firm in the face of protests for a while, then cave in after slightly larger protests and agree not to pass the policy after all.
- The purpose of the New York bus system is to emit four billion tons of carbon dioxide.
These are obviously false.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/come-on-obviously-the-purpose-of