Episodes
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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 isnât because one side doesnât understand economics. Itâs 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, itâs not because they have some kind of mistaken stereotypes that need to be corrected - itâs because they correctly believe racism is good for white people.
Some people comment on my more political posts claiming that theyâre useless. You canât (they say) produce change by teaching people Economics 101 or the equivalent. Conflict theorists understand that nobody ever disagreed about Economics 101. Instead you should try to organize and galvanize your side, so they can win the conflict.
I think simple versions of conflict theory are clearly wrong. This doesnât mean that simple versions of mistake theory (the idea that people disagree because of reasoning errors, like not understanding Economics 101) are automatically right. But it gives some leeway for thinking harder about how reasoning errors and other kinds of error interact.
https://readscottalexander.com/posts/acx-why-i-am-not-a-conflict-theorist
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[Original thread here: Tegmarkâs Mathematical Universe Defeats Most Arguments For Godâs Existence.]
1: Comments On Specific Technical Points
2: Comments From Benthamâs Bulldogâs Response
3: Comments On Philosophical Points, And Getting In Fightshttps://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-tegmarks
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Episodes manquant?
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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 Tetlockâs research showing that the last digit contained useful information, refused a third time, and was crucified.
St. Clare was so upset about believing false things during her dreams that she took modafinil every night rather than sleep. She completed several impressive programming projects before passing away of sleep deprivation after three weeks; she was declared a martyr by Pope Raymond II.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/lives-of-the-rationalist-saints
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It feels like 2010 again - the bloggers are debating the proofs for the existence of God. I found these much less interesting after learning about Max Tegmarkâs mathematical universe hypothesis, and this doesnât seem to have reached the Substack debate yet, so Iâll put it out there.
Tegmarkâs 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 Conwayâs Game of Life; 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 time (the laws of physics).
Some mathematical objects contain conscious observers. Conwayâs Life might be like this: itâs Turing complete, so if a computer can be conscious then you can get consciousness in Life. If you built a supercomputer and had it run the version of Life with the conscious being, then you would be âsimulatingâ the being, and bringing it into existence. There would be something it was like to be that being; it would have thoughts and experiences and so on.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/tegmarks-mathematical-universe-defeats
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From the Commerce Department:
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 complain that the projects from their universities that made Cruzâs list were unrelated to wokeness. This seemed like a surprising failure mode, so I decided to investigate. The Commerce Department provided a link to their database, so I downloaded it, chose a random 100 grants, read the abstracts, and rated them either woke, not woke, or borderline.
Of the hundred:
40% were woke 20% were borderline 40% werenât wokeThis is obviously in some sense a subjective determination, but most cases werenât close - I think any good-faith examination would turn up similar numbers.
https://readscottalexander.com/posts/acx-only-about-40-of-the-cruz-woke-science
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In the past day, Zvi has written about deliberative alignment, and OpenAI has updated their spec. This article was written before either of these and doesnât 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.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/deliberative-alignment-and-the-spec
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As RFK Jr. fights to be confirmed in Congress, the rest of Trumpâs health team is already taking shape.
1DaySooner is an ACX grantee organization that advocates for innovative health policies. Theyâve 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 weâre 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.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/1daysooners-trump-ii-health-policy
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I.
PEPFAR - a Bush initiative to send cheap AIDS drugs to Africa - has saved millions of lives and is among the most successful foreign aid programs ever. A Trump decision briefly put it âon pauseâ, although this seems to have been walked back; its current status is unclear but hopeful.
In the debate around this question, many people asked - is it really fair to spend $6 billion a year to help foreigners when so many Americans are suffering? Shouldnât we value American lives more than foreign ones? Canât we spend that money on some program that helps people closer to home?
This is a fun thing to argue about - which, as usual, means itâs a purely philosophical question unrelated to the real issue.
If you cancelled PEPFAR - the single best foreign aid program, which saves millions of foreign lives - the money wouldnât automatically redirect itself to the single best domestic aid program which saves millions of American lives.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/money-saved-by-canceling-programs
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Prospera Declared Unconstitutional
The Honduras Supreme Court has declared charter cities, including Prospera, unconstitutional.
The background: in the mid-2010s, the ruling conservative party wanted charter cities. They had already packed the Supreme Court for other reasons, so they had their captive court declare charter cities to be constitutional.
In 2022, the socialists took power from the conservatives and got the chance to fill the Supreme Court with their supporters. In September, this new Supreme Court said whoops, actually charter cities arenât constitutional at all. They added that this decision applied retroactively, ie even existing charter cities that had been approved under the old government were, ex post facto, illegal.
Prosperaâs lawyers objected, saying that the court is not allowed to make ex post facto rulings. But arguing that the Supreme Court is misinterpreting the Constitution seems like a losing battle - even if youâre right, who do you appeal to?
So the city is pursuing a two-pronged strategy. The first prong is waiting. Prospera is a collection of buildings and people. The buildings can stay standing, the people can still live there - they just have to follow regular Honduran law, rather than the investment-friendly charter they previously used. Thereâs another election in November, which the socialists are expected to lose. Prospera hopes the conservatives will come in, take control of the Supreme Court again, and then theyâll say whoops, messed it up again, charter cities are constitutional after all.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/model-city-monday-2325
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An observant Jewish friend told me she has recurring dreams about being caught unprepared for Shabbat.
(Shabbat is the Jewish Sabbath, celebrated every Saturday, when observant Jews are forbidden to work, drive, carry things outdoors, spend money, use electrical devices, etc.)
She said that in the dreams, she would be out driving, far from home, and realize that Shabbat was due to begin in a few minutes, with no way to make it home or get a hotel in time.
I found this interesting because my recurring dreams are usually things like being caught unprepared for a homework assignment I have due tomorrow, or realizing I have to catch a plane flight but Iâm not packed and donât have a plan to get to the airport.
Most people attribute recurring nightmares to âfearâ. My friend is âafraidâ of violating Shabbat; childhood me was âafraidâ of having the assignment due the next day. This seems wrong to me. Childhood me was afraid of monsters in the closet; adult me is afraid of heart attacks, AI, and something happening to my family. But I donât have nightmares about any of these things, just homework assignments and plane flights.
So maybe the âunpreparedâ aspect is more important. Hereâs a story that makes sense to me: what if recurring dreams are related to prospective memory?
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/why-recurring-dream-themes
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Thanks to the 5,975 people who took the 2025 Astral Codex Ten survey.
See the questions for the ACX survey
See the results from the ACX Survey (click âsee previous responsesâ on that page1)
Iâll be publishing more complicated analyses over the course of the next year, hopefully starting later this month. If you want to scoop me, or investigate the data yourself, you can download the answers of the 5500 people who agreed to have their responses shared publicly. Out of concern for anonymity, the public dataset will exclude or bin certain questions2. If you want more complete information, email me and explain why, and Iâll probably send it to you.
You can download the public data here as an Excel or CSV file:
http://slatestarcodex.com/Stuff/ACXPublic2025.xlsx http://slatestarcodex.com/Stuff/ACXPublic2025.csvHere are some of the answers I found most interesting:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/acx-survey-results-2025
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Whenever I talk about charity, a type that Iâll call the âbased post-Christian vitalistâ shows up in the comments to tell me that Iâve got it all wrong. The moral impulse tells us to help our family, friends, and maybe village. Itâs a weird misfire, analogous to an auto-immune disease, to waste brain cycles on starving children in a far-off country who youâll never meet. Youâve been cucked by centuries of Christian propaganda. Instead of the slave morality that yokes you to loser victims who wouldnât give you the time of day if your situations were reversed, you should cultivate a master morality that lets you love the strong people who push forward human civilization.
A younger and more naive person might think the based post-Christian vitalist and I have some irreconcilable moral difference. Moral argument can only determine which conclusions follow from certain premises. If premises are too different (for example, a intuitive feeling of compassion for others, vs. an intuitive feeling of strength and pitilessness), thereâs no way to proceed.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/everyones-a-based-post-christian
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This is normally when I would announce the winners of the 2024 forecasting contest, but there are some complications and Metaculus has asked me to wait until they get sorted out.
But time doesnât wait, and we have to get started on the new yearâs forecasting contest to make sure thereâs enough time for events to happen or not. That means the 2025 contest is now open!
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/subscrive-drive-25-free-unlocked
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[I havenât 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 canât guarantee I will have caught them all by the time you read this.]
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/links-for-january-2025
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Shaked Koplewitz writes:
Doesn't Lynn's IQ measure also suffer from the IQ/g discrepancy that causes the Flynn effect?
That is, my understanding of the Flynn effect is that IQ doesn't exactly measure g (the true general intelligence factor) but measures some proxy that is somewhat improved by literacy/education, and for most of the 20th century those were getting better leading to improvements in apparent IQ (but not g). Shouldn't we expect sub Saharan Africans to have lower IQ relative to g (since their education and literacy systems are often terrible)?
And then the part about them seeming much smarter than a first worlder with similar IQ makes sense - they'd do equally badly at tests, but in their case it's because e.g. they barely had a chance to learn to read rather than not being smart enough to think of the answer.
(Or a slightly more complicated version of this - e.g. maybe they can read fine, but never had an education that encouraged them to consider counterfactuals so those just don't come naturally).
Yeah, this is the most important factor that I failed to cover in the post (I edited it in ten minutes later after commenters reminded me, but some of you got the email and didnât see it).
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-lynn
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Richard Lynn was a scientist who infamously tried to estimate the average IQ of every country. Typical of his results is this paper, which ranged from 60 (Malawi) to 108 (Singapore).
Lynnâs national IQ estimates (source)
People obviously objected to this, and Lynn spent his life embroiled in controversy, with activists constantly trying to get him canceled/fired and his papers retracted/condemned. His opponents pointed out both his personal racist opinions/activities and his somewhat opportunistic methodology. Nobody does high-quality IQ tests on the entire population of Malawi; to get his numbers, Lynn would often find some IQ-ish test given to some unrepresentative sample of some group related to Malawians and try his best to extrapolate from there. How well this worked remains hotly debated; the latest volley is Aporiaâs Are Richard Lynnâs National IQ Estimates Flawed? (they say no).
Iâve followed the technical/methodological debate for a while, but I think the strongest emotions here come from two deeper worries people have about the data:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/how-to-stop-worrying-and-learn-to
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I was surprised to see someone with such experience in the pharmaceutical industry say this, because it goes against how I understood the FDA to work.
My model goes:
FDA procedures require certain bureaucratic tasks to be completed before approving drugs. Letâs abstract this into âprocessing 1,000 formsâ. Suppose they have 100 bureaucrats, and each bureaucrat can process 10 forms per year. Seems like they can approve 1 drug per year. If you fire half the bureaucrats, now they can only approve one drug every 2 years. Thatâs worse!https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/bureaucracy-isnt-measured-in-bureaucrats
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Some recent political discussion has focused on âthe institutionsâ or âthe priesthoodsâ. Iâm part of one of these (the medical establishment), so hereâs an inside look on what these are and what they do.
Why Priesthoods?In the early days of the rationalist community, critics got very upset that we might be some kind of âindividualistsâ. Rationality, they said, cannot be effectively pursued on oneâs own. You need a group of people working together, arguing, checking each otherâs mistakes, bouncing hypotheses off each other.
For some reason it never occurred to these people that a group calling itself a rationalist community might be planning to do this. Maybe they thought any size smaller than the whole of society was doomed?
If so, I think they were exactly wrong. The truth-seeking process benefits from many different group sizes, for example:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/on-priesthoods
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I.
No Set Gauge has a great essay on Capital, AGI, and Human Ambition, where he argues that if humankind survives the Singularity, the likely result is a future of eternal stagnant wealth inequality.
The argument: post-Singularity, AI will take over all labor, including entrepreneurial labor; founding or working at a business will no longer provide social mobility. Everyone will have access to ~equally good AI investment advisors, so everyone will make the same rate of return. Therefore, everyoneâs existing pre-singularity capital will grow at the same rate. Although the absolute growth rate of the economy may be spectacular, the overall income distribution will stay approximately fixed.
Moreover, the period just before the Singularity may be one of ballooning inequality, as some people navigate the AI transition better than others; for example, shares in AI companies may go up by orders of magnitude relative to everything else, creating a new class of billionaires or trillionaires. These people will then stay super-rich forever (possibly literally if immortality is solved, otherwise through their descendants), while those who started the Singularity without capital remain poor forever.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/its-still-easier-to-imagine-the-end
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What is the H5N1 bird flu? Will it cause the next big pandemic? If so, how bad would that pandemic be?
Wait, What Even Is Flu?Flu is a disease caused by a family of related influenza viruses. Pandemic flu is always caused by the influenza A virus. Influenza A has two surface antigen proteins, hemagglutinin (18 flavors) and neuraminidase (11 flavors). A particular flu strain is named after which flavors of these two proteins it has - for example, H3N2, or H5N1.
Influenza A evolved in birds, and stayed there for at least thousands of years. It crossed to humans later, maybe during historic times - different sources give suggest dates as early as 500 BC or as late as 1500 AD. It probably crossed over multiple times. Maybe it died out in humans after some crossovers, stuck around in birds, and crossed over from birds to humans again later.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/h5n1-much-more-than-you-wanted-to
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