Episoder
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In 1980, game theorist Robert Axelrod ran a famous Iterated Prisonerâs Dilemma Tournament.
He asked other game theorists to send in their best strategies in the form of âbotsâ, short pieces of code that took an opponentâs actions as input and returned one of the classic Prisonerâs Dilemma outputs of COOPERATE or DEFECT. For example, you might have a bot that COOPERATES a random 80% of the time, but DEFECTS against another bot that plays DEFECT more than 20% of the time, except on the last round, where it always DEFECTS, or if its opponent plays DEFECT in response to COOPERATE.
In the âtournamentâ, each bot âencounteredâ other bots at random for a hundred rounds of Prisonersâ Dilemma; after all the bots had finished their matches, the strategy with the highest total utility won.
To everyoneâs surprise, the winner was a super-simple strategy called TIT-FOR-TAT:
https://readscottalexander.com/posts/acx-the-early-christian-strategy
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The rise of Christianity is a great puzzle. In 40 AD, there were maybe a thousand Christians. Their Messiah had just been executed, and they were on the wrong side of an intercontinental empire that had crushed all previous foes. By 400, there were forty million, and they were set to dominate the next millennium of Western history.
Imagine taking a time machine to the year 2300 AD, and everyone is Scientologist. The United States is >99% Scientologist. So is Latin America and most of Europe. The Middle East follows some heretical pseudo-Scientology that thinks L Ron Hubbard was a great prophet, but maybe not the greatest prophet.
This can only begin to capture how surprised the early Imperial Romans would be to learn of the triumph of Christianity. At least Scientology has a lot of money and a cut-throat recruitment arm! At least they fight back when you persecute them! At least they seem to be in the game!
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-rise-of-christianity
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Mangler du episoder?
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I.
Polymarket (and prediction markets in general) had an amazing Election Night. They called states impressively early and accurately, kept the site stable through what must have been incredible strain, and have successfully gotten prediction markets in front of the world (including the Trump campaign). From here itâs a flywheel; victory building on victory. Enough people heard of them this election that theyâll never lack for customers. And maybe Trumpâs CFTC will be kinder than Bidenâs and relax some of the constraints theyâre operating under. Theyâve realized the long-time rationalist dream of a widely-used prediction market with high volume, deserve more praise than I can give them here, and I couldnât be happier with their progress.
But I also think their Trump shares were mispriced by about ten cents, and that Trumpâs victory in the election doesnât do much to vindicate their numbers.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/congrats-to-polymarket-but-i-still
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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-november-2024
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A red sun dawns over San Francisco. Juxtaposed against clouds and sea, it forms a patriotic tableau: blood red, deathly white, and the blue of the void. As its first rays touch the city, the frantic traffic slows to a crawl; even the birds cease to sing. It is Election Day in the United States.
Future generations will number American elections among history's greatest and most terrible spectacles. As we remember the Games in the Colosseum, or the bloody knives of Tenochtitlan, so they will remember us. That which other ages would relegate to a tasteful coronation or mercifully quick coup, we extend into an eighteen-month festival of madness.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/mantic-monday-judgment-day
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I.
Time to own the libs! ACX joins such based heterodox thinkers as Curtis Yarvin, Nick Fuentes, Richard Spencer, and David Duke in telling you what the woke Washington Post and failing LA Times donât want you to know: Donald Trump is the wrong choice for US President.
If youâre in a swing state, we recommend you vote Harris; if a safe state, Harris or your third-party candidate of choice.
[EDIT/UPDATE: If youâre in a safe state and want to trade your protest vote with a swing state voter, or vice versa, go to https://www.swapyourvote.org/]
I mostly stand by the reasoning in my 2016 post, Slate Star Codex Endorses Clinton, Johnson, Or Stein. But you can read a better and more recent argument against Trumpâs economic policy here, and against his foreign policy here. You can read an argument that Trump is a dangerous authoritarian here.
You can, but you wonât, because every American, most foreigners, and a substantial fraction of extra-solar aliens have already heard all of this a thousand times. Iâm under no illusion of having anything new to say, or having much chance of changing minds. I write this out of a vague sense of deontological duty rather than a consequentialist hope that anything will happen.
And Iâm writing the rest of this post because I feel bad posting a couple of paragraph endorsement and not following up. No guarantees this is useful to anybody.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/acx-endorses-harris-oliver-or-stein
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[This is a guest post by Clara Collier. Clara is the editor of Asterisk Magazine.]
Proposition 36 is a California ballot measure that increases mandatory sentences for certain drug and theft crimes.
Itâs also a referendum on over a decade of sentencing reform efforts stemming from Californiaâs historical prison overcrowding crisis. Like many states, California passed increasingly tough sentencing laws through the 90s and early 2000s. This led to the stateâs prisons operating massively over capacity: at its peak, a system built for 85,000 inhabitants housed 165,000. This was, among other things, a massive humanitarian crisis. The system was too overstretched to provide adequate healthcare to prisoners. Violence and suicide shot up.
In 2011, the Supreme Court ruled that California prisons were so overcrowded that their conditions violated the 8th Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment. That year, the state assembly passed a package of reforms called "realignment," which shifted supervision of low-level offenders from the state to the counties. Then, in 2014, Californians voted for Proposition 47, which reduced some felony crimes to misdemeanors â theft of goods valued at under $950 and simple drug possession â and made people in prison for those crimes eligible for resentencing. Together, realignment and Prop 47 brought down Californiaâs prison and jail population by 55,000.
The campaign for Prop 36 is based on the premise that Prop 47 failed, leading to increased drug use and retail theft (but donât trust me â it says so in the text of the measure). 36 would repeal some parts of 47, add some additional sentencing increases, and leave some elements in place (the LA Times has a good breakdown of the changes here).
Itâs easy to round this off to a simple tradeoff: are we willing to put tens of thousands of people in jail if it would decrease the crime rate? But this would be the wrong way to think about the measure: there is no tradeoff. Prop 36 will certainly imprison many people, but it wonât help fight crime.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-case-against-proposition-36
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Tyler Cowen is an economics professor and blogger at Marginal Revolution. Patrick Collison is the billionaire founder of the online payments company Stripe. In 2019, they wrote an article calling for a discipline of Progress Studies, which would figure out what progress was and how to increase it. Later that year, tech entrepreneur Jason Crawford stepped up to spearhead the effort.
The immediate reaction was mostly negative. There were the usual gripes that âprogressâ was problematic because it could imply that some cultures/times/places/ideas were better than others. But there were also more specific objections: werenât historians already studying progress? Wasnât business academia already studying innovation? Are you really allowed to just invent a new field every time you think of something it would be cool to study?
It seems like you are. Five years later, Progress Studies has grown enough to hold its first conference. I got to attend, and it was great.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/notes-from-the-progress-studies-conference
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The Median Voter Theorem says that, given some reasonable assumptions, the candidate closest to the beliefs of the median voter will win. So if candidates are rational, theyâll all end up at the same place on a one-dimensional political spectrum: the exact center.
Hereâs a simple argument for why this should be true: suppose the Democrats wisely choose a centrist platform, but the Republicans foolishly veer far-right:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/secrets-of-the-median-voter-theorem -
Thanks to our local meetup groups for doing this! Quick lookup version:
AUSTIN: Guide here
BOSTON: Guide here
CHICAGO: Guide here
LOS ANGELES: Guide here
NEW YORK CITY: Guide here
OAKLAND/BERKELEY: Guide here
PHILADELPHIA: Guide here
SAN FRANCISCO: Guide here
SEATTLE: Guide hereLonger version with commentary:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/acx-local-voting-guides
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What problem do we get after we've solved all other problems?
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Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom got famous for asking âWhat if technology is really really bad?â He helped define âexistential riskâ, popularize fears of malevolent superintelligence, and argue that we were living in a âvulnerable worldâ prone to physical or biological catastrophe.
His latest book breaks from his usual oeuvre. In Deep Utopia, he asks: âWhat if technology is really really good?â
Most previous utopian literature (he notes) has been about âshallowâ utopias. There are still problems; we just handle them better. Thereâs still scarcity, but at least the government distributes resources fairly. Thereâs still sickness and death, but at least everyone has free high-quality health care.
But Bostrom asks: what if there were literally no problems? What if you could do literally whatever you wanted?1 Maybe the world is run by a benevolent superintelligence whoâs uploaded everyone into a virtual universe, and you can change your material conditions as easily as changing desktop wallpaper. Maybe we have nanobots too cheap to meter, and if you whisper âplease make me a five hundred story palace, with a thousand servants who all look exactly like Marilyn Monroeâ, then your wish will be their command. If you want to be twenty feet tall and immortal, the only thing blocking you is the doorframe.
Would this be as good as it sounds? Or would peopleâs lives become boring and meaningless?
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-deep-utopia
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Okay, letâs do this! Link is here, should take about twenty minutes. Iâll close the form on Monday 10/21 and post results the following week.
Iâll put an answer key in the comments here, and have a better one including attributions in the results post. DONâT READ THE COMMENTS UNTIL YOUâRE DONE.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/ai-art-turing-test
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Thanks to everyone who entered or voted in the book review contest. The winners are:
1st: Two Arms And A Head, reviewed by AmandaFromBethlehem. Amanda is active in the Philadelphia ACX community. This is her first year entering the Book Review Contest, and she is currently working on a silly novel about an alien who likes thermodynamics. When she's not writing existential horror, she practices Tengwar calligraphy and does home improvement projects.
2nd: Nine Lives, reviewed by David Matolcsi. David is an AI safety researcher from Hungary, currently living in Berkeley. He doesn't have much publicly available writing yet, but plans to publish some new blog posts on LessWrong in the coming months
3rd: How The War Was Won, reviewed by Jack Thorlin. Jack previously worked as an attorney at the Central Intelligence Agency, and is now an assistant professor at the University of Arkansas School of Law.
First place gets $2,500, second place $1,000, third place gets $500. Email me at [email protected] to tell me how to send you money; your choices are Paypal, Bitcoin, Ethereum, check in the mail, or donation to your favorite charity. Please contact me by October 21 or you lose your prize.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-contest-2024-winners
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My ex-girlfriend has a weird relationship to reality. Her actions ripple out into the world more heavily than other people's. She finds herself at the center of events more often than makes sense. One time someone asked her to explain the whole âAI riskâ thing to a State Senator. She hadnât realized states had senators, but it sounded important, so she gave it a try, figuring out her exact pitch on the car ride to his office.
A few months later, she was informed that the Senator had really taken her words to heart, and he'd been thinking hard about how he could help. This is part of the story behind SB 1047 - specifically, the only part I have any personal connection to. The rest of this post comes from anonymous sources in the pro-1047 community who wanted to tell their side of the story.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/sb-1047-our-side-of-the-story
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I accept guest posts from certain people, especially past Book Review Contest winners. Earlier this year, I published Daniel Böttgerâs essay Consciousness As Recursive Reflections.
While we were working on editing it, Daniel had some dramatic experiences and revelations, culminating in him developing a theory which he says âwill contribute to saving the worldâ, which he asked me to publish.
Although I canât speak for its world-historical importance, and although he admits his mental state is fragile, after some discussion I decided to publish because - if nothing else - heâs a great writer with a fascinating story and some really interesting thoughts.
Content warning for medical horror; you can skip to the section âThankful Theoryâ to avoid this.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/triple-tragedy-and-thankful-theory
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The "cultural Christianity" argument says that atheists might not like Christianity, but they like a culture which depends on Christianity. They like open, free, thoughtful, liberal, beautiful, virtuous societies. Unmoored from a connection to Christanity, a society will gradually have less of those goods, until even atheists are unhappy.
Therefore (continues the argument), atheists should be cultural Christians. While they can continue to privately disbelieve, they should support an overall Christian society, which they can dwell contentedly on the fringes of. I think this is sort of where Ayaan Hirsi Ali is coming from.
https://readscottalexander.com/posts/acx-against-the-cultural-christianity
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How is Javier Milei, the new-ish libertarian president of Argentina doing?
According to right-wing sources, heâs doing amazing, inflation is vanquished, and Argentina is on the road to First World status.
According to left-wing sources, heâs devastating the country, inflation has ballooned, and Argentina is mired in unprecedented dire poverty.
I was confused enough to investigate further. Going through various topics in more depth:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/preliminary-milei-report-card
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Exegi monumentum aere perennius
Thereâs 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 settle the matter, I included a question about this on this yearâs ACX survey, âHave you thought about the Roman Empire in the past 24 hours?â (the Byzantine Empire also counted). Here are responses from 607 cis women and 4,925 cis men:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/how-often-do-men-think-about-rome
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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. Iâll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When youâve read them all, Iâll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked]
IntroductionThe Ballad of the White Horse 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 âlastâ 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.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-the-ballad-of-the
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Sakana (website, paper) is supposed to be âan AI scientistâ. Since it canât 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 (âif I change this number, the program will run fasterâ). 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 theyâre trivial, poorly reasoned, and occasionally make things up (the creators defend themselves by saying that âless than ten percentâ of the AIâs output is hallucinations). Its writing is meandering, repetitive, and often self-contradictory. Like the proverbial singing dog, weâre not supposed to be impressed that itâs good, weâre supposed to be impressed that it can do it at all.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/sakana-strawberry-and-scary-ai
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