Missing Heritability: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
The Story So Far The mid-20th century was the golden age of nurture. Psychoanalysis, behaviorism, and the spirit of the ‘60s convinced most experts that parents, peers, and propaganda were the most important causes of adult personality. Starting in the 1970s, the pendulum swung the other way. Twin studies shocked the world by demonstrating that most behavioral traits - especially socially relevant traits like IQ - were substantially genetic. Typical estimates for adult IQ found it was about 60% genetic, 40% unpredictable, and barely related at all to parenting or family environment. By the...
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Open Questions For Future ACX Grants Rounds
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
Related to:
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ACX Grants 1-3 Year Updates
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
The first cohort of ACX Grants was announced in , the second in . In 2022, I posted for the first cohort. Now, as I start thinking about a third round, I’ve collected one-year updates on the second and three-year updates on the first. Many people said my request for updates went to their spam folder; relatedly, many people have not yet sent in their updates. If you’re a grantee who didn’t see my original email, but you do see this post, please fill in the update form . All quote blocks are the grantees’ own words; text outside of quote blocks is my commentary.
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The Claude Bliss Attractor
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
This is where if two copies of Claude talk to each other, they end up spiraling into rapturous discussion of spiritual bliss, Buddhism, and the nature of consciousness. From the : Anthropic swears they didn’t do this on purpose; when they ask Claude why this keeps happening, Claude can’t explain. Needless to say, this has made lots of people freak out / speculate wildly. I think there are already a few good partial explanations of this (especially Nostalgebraist ), but they deserve to be fleshed out and spread more fully.
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"But" vs. "Yes, But"
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
This is another heuristic from the same place as . If someone proves you are absolutely, 100% wrong about something, it’s polite to say “Oh, I guess I was wrong, sorry” before launching into your next argument. That is, instead of:
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If It's Worth Your Time To Lie, It's Worth My Time To Correct It
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
People don’t like nitpickers. “He literally did the WELL AKTUALLY!” If you say Joe Criminal committed ten murders and five rapes, and I object that it was actually only six murders and two rapes, then why am I “defending” Joe Criminal? Because if it’s worth your time to lie, it’s worth my time to correct it.
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P-Zombies Would Report Qualia
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
There’s a long-running philosophical argument about the conceivability of otherwise-normal people who are not conscious, aka . This has spawned a shorter-running (only fifteen years!) rationalist sub-argument on the topic. The last time I checked its status was , which says: 1. Both Yudkowsky and Chalmers agree that humans possess “qualia”. 2. Chalmers argues that a superintelligent being which somewhow knew the positions of all particles in a large region of the Universe would need to be told as an additional fact that any humans (or other minds possessing qualia) in this region of...
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Choose Nonbook Review Finalists 2025
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
It's time to narrow the 141 entries in the to about a dozen finalists. I can't read 141 reviews alone, so I need your help. Please pick as many as you have time for, read them, and rate them . Don’t read them in order! If you read them in order, I’ll have 1,000 votes on the first review, 500 on the second, and so on to none in the second half. Either pick a random review (thanks to Taymon for making a random-review-chooser script ) or scroll through the titles until you find one that catches your interest - you can see individual entries here (thanks to a reader for collating them): ...
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Bayes For Everyone
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
A guest post by Brandon Hendrickson [Editor’s note: I accept guest posts from certain people, especially past Book Review Contest winners. Brandon Hendrickson, whose won the 2023 contest, has taken me up on this and submitted this essay. He writes at and will be at this weekend, where he and Jack Despain Zhou aka TracingWoodgrains will be doing a live conversation about education.] I began my of a couple years back with a rather simple question: Could a new kind of school make the world rational? What followed, however, was a sprawling distillation of one scholar’s answer that I...
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Sorry, I Still Think MR Is Wrong About USAID
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution continues to disagree with my . Going through piece by piece, slightly out of order: Scott takes me to be endorsing Rubio’s claim that the third-party NGOs simply pocket the money. In reality my fact check with o3 found (correctly) that the money was “channelled through” the NGOs, not pocketed. Scott lumps my claim together with Rubio’s as if we were saying the same thing. My very next words (“I do understand that not all third party allocations are wasteful…”) show a clear understanding that the money is channeled, not pocketed, and makes...
info_outlineConsciousness 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, that one pastor in 18th century England who claimed a carriage accident turned him into a p-zombie. Still, new stuff occasionally turns up.
I assume this tweet is a troll (source: the guy has a frog avatar)1: