Astral Codex Ten Podcast
The official audio version of Astral Codex Ten, with an archive of posts from Slate Star Codex. It's just me reading Scott Alexander's blog posts.
info_outline
How Often Do Men Think About Rome?
10/19/2024
How Often Do Men Think About Rome?
Exegi monumentum aere perennius There’s a Twitter meme on how men constantly think about the Roman Empire. Some feminist friends objected that women think about Rome a lot too. To the matter, I included a question about this on , “Have you thought about the Roman Empire in the past 24 hours?” (the Byzantine Empire also counted). Here are responses from 607 cis women and 4,925 cis men:
/episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/33521737
info_outline
Your Book Review: The Ballad of the White Horse
10/19/2024
Your Book Review: The Ballad of the White Horse
Finalist #14 in the Book Review Contest [This is one of the finalists in the 2024 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked] Introduction is a 2,684 line poem about conservatism, and it is brilliant. It has been called the last great epic poem written in English. I have not read the three dozen or so English epic poems that Wikipedia claims have been written since, so I cannot confirm the “last” part, but I can confirm the rest. It is a great poem, in both quality and size, and it is undoubtedly an epic poem. It has almost all the qualities required of an epic poem: it begins by invoking a muse (his wife), it starts in media res, the plot is centered around a hero of legend, there are supernatural visions and interventions, and an omniscient narrator. The only epic requirement it lacks is a long boring list shoved in somewhere, for which I am grateful.
/episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/33521732
info_outline
Sakana, Strawberry, and Scary AI
10/16/2024
Sakana, Strawberry, and Scary AI
Sakana (, ) is supposed to be “an AI scientist”. Since it can’t access the physical world, it can only do computer science. Its human handlers give it a computer program. It prompts itself to generate hypotheses about the program (“if I change this number, the program will run faster”). Then it uses an AI coding submodule to test its hypotheses. Finally, it uses a language model to write them up in typical scientific paper format. Is it good? Not really. Experts who read its papers say they’re trivial, poorly reasoned, and occasionally make things up (the creators defend themselves by saying that “” of the AI’s output is hallucinations). Its writing is meandering, repetitive, and often self-contradictory. Like the proverbial singing dog, we’re not supposed to be impressed that it’s good, we’re supposed to be impressed that it can do it at all.
/episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/33480937
info_outline
Mantic Monday 9/16/24
10/16/2024
Mantic Monday 9/16/24
Probably No Superintelligent Forecaster Yet FiveThirtyNine (ha ha) is a new forecasting AI that purports to be “superintelligent”, ie able to beat basically all human forecasters. In fact, its creators go further than that: they say it beats Metaculus, a site which aggregates the estimates of hundreds of forecasters to generate estimates more accurate than any of them. You can read the announcement and play with the model itself . (kudos to the team for making the model publicly available, especially since these things usually have high inference costs)
/episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/33480917
info_outline
Your Book Review: Nine Lives
10/14/2024
Your Book Review: Nine Lives
Finalist #13 in the Book Review Contest [This is one of the finalists in the 2024 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked] Cats have nine lives but they don’t get involved in jungle wars in the Philippines Aimen Dean (pseudonym) compares himself to the proverbial cat: he has nine lives, surviving every impossible situation and starting new lives under strange new conditions. Cats pack their nine lives in an average of 12-18 years, which is a quite impressive speed, but Aimen Dean was committed to living his lives even quicker than that.
/episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/33448327
info_outline
Links For September 2024
10/01/2024
Links For September 2024
[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.]
/episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/33278237
info_outline
Contra DeBoer On Temporal Copernicanism
10/01/2024
Contra DeBoer On Temporal Copernicanism
Freddie deBoer 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.
/episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/33277992
info_outline
Your Book Review: The Pale King
10/01/2024
Your Book Review: The Pale King
[This is one of the finalists in the 2024 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked] For the longest time, I avoided reading The Pale King. It wasn’t the style—in places thick with the author’s characteristic footnotes, sentences that run for pages, and spasms of dense technical language. Nor was it the subject matter—the book is set at an IRS Center and tussles with postmodernism. Nor the themes, one of which concerns the existential importance of boredom, which the book, at times, takes pains to exemplify. No—I couldn’t read The Pale King because it was the book that killed him.
/episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/33277907
info_outline
Highlights From The Comments On "Sorry You Feel That Way"
09/22/2024
Highlights From The Comments On "Sorry You Feel That Way"
[Original post .] Aeon : The main complaint about this expression is that it’s “not a real apology,” and that’s true, it isn’t. The error is in thinking it is therefore a fake apology. But it isn’t, because “I’m sorry” is not a statement of contrition, it’s a statement of sorrow. Somehow everyone has gotten confused into thinking an apology is the only correct use for that phrase despite the plain meaning of the words. This is the comment that best expresses what I wished I’d said at the beginning.
/episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/33155312
info_outline
Interview Day At Thiel Capital
09/22/2024
Interview Day At Thiel Capital
You look up from your massive mahogany desk. “Tom, right? Thank you for coming…hmm…I see you’re applying for the role of Vice-President Of Sinister Plots. Your resume looks very impressive - I didn’t even know any of the masterminds behind the Kennedy assassination were still alive.” “That’s what we want you to think,” says Tom. “Of course. Then just one question for you. What’s something you believe, that very few people agree with you on?” “I think we’re in a simulation.” “Hm, yes, that was very shocking and heterodox back in 2012. But here at Thiel Capital we’re looking for something - “ “Let me finish. I think we’re in a simulation, and it’s a porno.” “What?”
/episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/33155307
info_outline
Your Book Review: The History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe
09/22/2024
Your Book Review: The History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe
Finalist #11 in the Book Review Contest [This is one of the finalists in the 2024 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked] 1. The Supernatural is Dead April, 1861 was a cruel month. The American Civil War had just started, and across the Atlantic, high in a remote valley in the western Alps, in the old market town of Morzines, another war was raging, this one pitting the locals against the legions of Hell. The regional authorities, confronted with an outbreak of townspeople writhing in convulsions, entering trances, shrieking in weird tongues, and suffering from other diabolical whatnot, had begged the central government for help, writing: “To conclude, we will say: That our impression is that all this is supernatural, in cause and in effects; according to the rules of sound logic, and according to everything that theology, ecclesiastical history, and the Gospel teach and tell us, we declare it our considered opinion that this is truly demonic possession.” Dr. Augustin Constans, Inspector General of the Insane Department (inspecteur général du service des aliénés) was dispatched from Paris to investigate. The Doctor later reported, “Arriving in Morzines on April 26, I found the entire population in a state of depression difficult to describe; everyone was deep in morbid gloom, living in constant fear of finding themselves or their loved ones consumed by devils.” Dr. Constans’ next action was highly unorthodox. Standard protocol for treating these afflictions called for accusing someone of witchcraft, preferably a poor, socially isolated, old woman, (although, in a pinch, anyone of any sex, status, or age would do, and often did), torturing her until she confessed to creating the calamity by consorting with the Devil, and, after that, lighting her on fire, first strangling her to death, if, at this stage of the proceedings, one judged that a modicum of mercy was in order. Undoubtedly aware of this precedent, Dr. Constans rounded up the possessed and subjected them to: …an examination. From which, all of his new patients emerged non-tortured and unburnt.
/episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/33155292
info_outline
In Defense Of "I'm Sorry You Feel That Way"
09/20/2024
In Defense Of "I'm Sorry You Feel That Way"
And its cousin, "I'm sorry if you're offended" . They say it’s a fake apology that only gets used to dismiss others’ concerns. Well, I’m sorry they feel that way. People sometimes get sad or offended by appropriate/correct/reasonable actions: Maybe one of your family members makes an unreasonable demand (“Please lend me lots of money to subsidize my drug addiction”), you say no, and they say they feel like you don’t love them. Maybe you speak out against a genocidal aggressive war. Someone complains that their family member died fighting in that war. They accuse you of implicitly dismissing their relative’s sacrifice and calling them a bad person. Maybe you argue that a suspect is innocent of a crime, and some unrelated crime victim says it triggers them when people question victims or advocate for the accused. They say that now they are re-traumatized. I see three classes of potential response:
/episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/33133572
info_outline
Your Book Review: The Complete Rhyming Dictionary and Poet's Craft Book (1936 Edition)
09/17/2024
Your Book Review: The Complete Rhyming Dictionary and Poet's Craft Book (1936 Edition)
Finalist #10 in the Book Review Contest [This is one of the finalists in the 2024 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked] I. Suppose you were a newcomer to English literature, and having heard of this artistic device called ‘poetry’, wondered what it was all about and where it came from. You might start by looking up some examples of poetry from each century, going back until you can’t easily understand the English anymore, and find in the 16th century such poems as [sic]: My name is Parrot, a byrd of Paradyse, By Nature devised of a wonderowus kynde, Deyntely dyeted with dyvers dylycate spyce, Tyl Euphrates, that flode, dryveth me into Inde; Where men of that countrey by fortune me fynde, And send me to greate ladyes of estate; Then Parot must have an almon or a date.
/episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/33088667
info_outline
The Compounding Loophole
09/17/2024
The Compounding Loophole
Now that we’ve gone over , let’s get back to the economics. , we asked - how will the economy handle a $12,000/year drug that everyone wants? Now we have an answer: the compounding loophole.
/episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/33088642
info_outline
Lukianoff And Defining Cancel Culture
09/17/2024
Lukianoff And Defining Cancel Culture
In , I said that part of opposing cancel culture is to rigorously define it. Greg Lukianoff, president of FIRE, . His definition, first mentioned in his book , is: Cancel Culture is the uptick, beginning around 2014 and accelerating in 2017 and after, of campaigns to get people fired, disinvited, deplatformed, or otherwise punished for speech that is — or would be — protected by First Amendment standards, and the climate of fear and conformity that has resulted from this uptick. When I talk about wanting to “rigorously define it”, I don’t just mean the kind of definition you would put in a dictionary. Consider the debate around the definition of “woman”. It’s perfectly fine for a dictionary to say “you know, female person, opposite of male”. But the debaters want something you can use to adjudicate edge cases.
/episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/33088622
info_outline
Your Book Review: Silver Age Marvel Comics
09/09/2024
Your Book Review: Silver Age Marvel Comics
Finalist #9 in the Book Review Contest You are a serious person with serious interests. The last comic book you read was more likely by Bryan Caplan than Jonathan Hickman. You would prefer to be reading high quality book reviews on AstralCodexTen. You believe ACX book reviews are usually more insightful than the books themselves, and a far more efficient use of your time. But even book reviews take time to process, and there are a lot of book reviews to read. Why spend your valuable time reading an 11,000 word review of superhero comic books? That is the first question I aim to answer in this review. If I am successful, maybe you will invest a little more time to discover the answer to the next four questions.
/episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/32972202
info_outline
Why Does Ozempic Cure All Diseases?
09/09/2024
Why Does Ozempic Cure All Diseases?
Fine, the title is an exaggeration. But only a small one. GLP-1 receptor agonist medications like Ozempic are already FDA-approved to treat diabetes and obesity. But an increasing body of research finds they’re also effective against , , , , and . There’s a pattern in fake scammy alternative medicine. People get excited about some new herb. They invent a laundry list of effects: it improves heart health, softens menopause, increases energy, deepens sleep, clears up your skin. This is how you know it’s a fraud. Real medicine works by mimicking natural biochemical signals. Why would you have a signal for “have low energy, bad sleep, nasty menopause, poor heart health, and ugly skin”? Why would all the herb’s side effects be other good things? Real medications usually shift a system along a tradeoff curve; if they hit more than one system, the extras usually just produce side effects. If you’re lucky, you can pick out a subset of patients for whom the intended effect is more beneficial than the side effects are bad. That’s how real medicine works. But GLP-1 drugs are starting to feel more like the magic herb. Why?
/episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/32971967
info_outline
Your Book Review: How the War Was Won
08/26/2024
Your Book Review: How the War Was Won
[This is one of the finalists in the 2024 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked] To a first approximation, there are a million books about World War II. Why should you care about How the War Was Won (hereinafter “HtWWW”) by Phillips Payson O’Brien? It provides a new, transformative view of the conflict by focusing on production of key goods and what affected that production instead of the ups and downs of battles at the front. That particular lens used can (and should) be applied outside of just World War II, and you can get a feel for how that might be done by reading HtWWW. I have lectured about World War II and read many, many books about it. I have never texted friends more excerpts of a book than this one. I have some criticisms of HtWWW, but if the criticisms dissuade you from reading the book, I will have failed. These complaints are like tut-tutting Einstein’s penmanship.
/episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/32737857
info_outline
Highlights From The Comments On Nietzsche
08/26/2024
Highlights From The Comments On Nietzsche
[original post ] Table Of Contents I. Comments About Master And Slave Morality II. Comments By People Named In The Post III. Comments Making Specific Points About One Of The Thinkers In The Post IV. Other Comments
/episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/32737732
info_outline
Altruism And Vitalism As Fellow Travelers
08/26/2024
Altruism And Vitalism As Fellow Travelers
Some commenters on accused me of misunderstanding the Nietzschean objection to altruism. We hate altruism, they said, not because we’re “bad and cruel”, but because we instead support vitalism. Vitalism is a moral system that maximizes life, glory and strength, instead of maximizing happiness. Altruism is bad because it throws resources into helping sick (maybe even dysgenic) people, thus sapping our life, glory, and strength. In (linked in the original post, discussed at length in the comments), Walt Bismarck compares the ultimate fate of altruism to WALL-E: a world where morbidly obese humans are kept in a hedonistic haze by robot servitors (although the more typical example I hear is tiling the universe with rats on heroin, which maximizes a certain definition of pleasure). In contrast, vitalism imagines a universe alive with dynamism, heroism, and great accomplishments. My response: in most normal cases, altruism and vitalism suggest the same solutions.
/episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/32737687
info_outline
Your Book Review: Two Arms and a Head
08/26/2024
Your Book Review: Two Arms and a Head
[This is one of the finalists in the 2024 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked] Content warning: body horror, existential devastation, suicide. This book is an infohazard that will permanently alter your view of paraplegia. The Death of a Newly-Paraplegic Philosopher For me, paraplegia and life itself are not compatible. This is not life, it is something else. In May of 2006, philosophy student Clayton Schwartz embarks on a Pan-American motorcycle trip for the summer before law school. He is 30 years old and in peak physical condition. He makes it as far south as Acapulco in Mexico before crashing into a donkey that had wandered into the road. The impact crushes his spinal cord at the T5 vertebra, rendering him paralyzed from the nipples down. On Sunday, February 24, 2008, he commits suicide. In the year and a half in between, he writes Two Arms and a Head, his combination memoir and suicide note.
/episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/32737662
info_outline
Matt Yglesias Considered As The Nietzschean Superman
08/22/2024
Matt Yglesias Considered As The Nietzschean Superman
I. Bentham’s Bulldog Blogger “Bentham’s Bulldog” recently wrote . Nietzsche’s concept of “slave morality” (he writes) is just a dysphemism for the usual morality where you’re not bad and cruel. Right-wing edgelords use “rejection of slave morality” as a justification for badness and cruelty: When people object to slave morality, they are just objecting to morality. They are objecting to the notion that you should care about others and doing the right thing, even when doing so doesn’t materially benefit you. Now, one can consistently object to those things, but it doesn’t make them any sort of Nostradamus. It makes them morally deficient, and also generally philosophically confused. The tedious whinging about slave morality is just a way to pass off not caring about morality or taking moral arguments seriously as some sort of sophisticated and cynical myth-busting. But it’s not that in the slightest. No one is duped by slave morality, no one buys into it because of some sort of deep-seated ignorance. Those who follow it do so because of a combination of social pressure and a genuine desire to help out others. That is, in fact, not in any way weak but a noble impulse from which all good actions spring.
/episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/32692137
info_outline
Your Book Review: Real Raw News
08/13/2024
Your Book Review: Real Raw News
[This is one of the finalists in the 2024 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked]
/episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/32558597
info_outline
Links for July 2024
08/13/2024
Links for July 2024
[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.]
/episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/32558587
info_outline
Some Practical Considerations Before Descending Into An Orgy Of Vengeance
08/13/2024
Some Practical Considerations Before Descending Into An Orgy Of Vengeance
The “LibsOfTikTok” Twitter account found a random Home Depot employee who said she wished the Trump assassin hadn’t missed. Her followers mass-called Home Depot . Moral of the story: despite everything, there’s apparently still a norm against assassinating politicians. But some on the right interpreted this as meaning something more. A sudden vibe shift, or impending Trump victory, has handed conservatives the levers of cancel culture! This sparked a right-wing blogosphere debate: should they be magnanimous in victory, or descend into an orgy of vengeance?
/episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/32558452
info_outline
Your Book Review: How Language Began
08/13/2024
Your Book Review: How Language Began
Finalist #5 in the Book Review Contest [This is one of the finalists in the 2024 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked]
/episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/32558312
info_outline
Highlights From The Comments On Mentally Ill Homeless People
08/10/2024
Highlights From The Comments On Mentally Ill Homeless People
[] Table Of Contents 1: Responses To Broad Categories Of Objections 2: Responses To Specific Comments 3: Comments By People Who Have Relevant Experiences 4: Closing Thoughts
/episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/32524322
info_outline
Consciousness As Recursive Reflections
08/02/2024
Consciousness As Recursive Reflections
A guest post by Daniel Böttger [Editor’s note: I accept guest posts from certain people, especially past Book Review Contest winners. Daniel Böttger, who wrote last year’s review of , has finally taken me up on this and submitted this essay. I don’t necessarily agree with or endorse all guest posts, and I’m still collecting my thoughts (ha!) on this one.] Nobody knows for sure how subjective experiences relate to objective physics. That is the main reason why there are serious claims that not everything is physics. It has been called “the most important problem in the biological sciences", “the last frontier of brain science”, and “as important as anything that can possibly exist” as well as “core to” all value and ethics. So, let’s solve that in a blog post.
/episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/32399542
info_outline
Your Book Review: The Family That Couldn’t Sleep
08/02/2024
Your Book Review: The Family That Couldn’t Sleep
[This is one of the finalists in the 2024 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked] “You wake up screaming, frightened by memories, You’re plagued by nightmares, do we haunt all of your dreams?”
/episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/32399442
info_outline
Lifeboat Games And Backscratchers Clubs
08/02/2024
Lifeboat Games And Backscratchers Clubs
Ten people are stuck on a lifeboat after their ship sank. It will be weeks before anyone finds them, and they’re out of food. They’ve heard this story before, so they decide to turn to cannibalism sooner rather than later. They agree to draw lots to determine the victim. Just as the first person is reaching for the lots, Albert shouts out “WAIT LET’S ALL KILL AND EAT BOB!” They agree to do this instead of drawing lots. This is obvious, right? For nine out of ten people, it’s a better deal. For nine out of ten people, it brings their chance of death from 1/10 to 0. Bob’s against it, of course, but he’s outvoted. The nine others overpower Bob and eat him. Something about this surprises me.
/episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/32399222