Episodes
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What problem do we get after we've solved all other problems?
I.
Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom got famous for asking “What if technology is really really bad?” He helped define ‘existential risk’, popularize fears of malevolent superintelligence, and argue that we were living in a ‘vulnerable world’ prone to physical or biological catastrophe.
His latest book breaks from his usual oeuvre. In Deep Utopia, he asks: “What if technology is really really good?”
Most previous utopian literature (he notes) has been about ‘shallow’ utopias. There are still problems; we just handle them better. There’s still scarcity, but at least the government distributes resources fairly. There’s 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 who’s 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 ‘please make me a five hundred story palace, with a thousand servants who all look exactly like Marilyn Monroe’, 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 people’s lives become boring and meaningless?
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-deep-utopia
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Okay, let’s do this! Link is here, should take about twenty minutes. I’ll close the form on Monday 10/21 and post results the following week.
I’ll put an answer key in the comments here, and have a better one including attributions in the results post. DON’T READ THE COMMENTS UNTIL YOU’RE DONE.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/ai-art-turing-test
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Missing episodes?
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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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I.
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 “AI risk” thing to a State Senator. She hadn’t 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 Böttger’s 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 “will contribute to saving the world”, which he asked me to publish.
Although I can’t 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 - he’s a great writer with a fascinating story and some really interesting thoughts.
Content warning for medical horror; you can skip to the section “Thankful Theory” 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, he’s doing amazing, inflation is vanquished, and Argentina is on the road to First World status.
According to left-wing sources, he’s 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
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 settle the matter, I included a question about this on this year’s ACX survey, “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:
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. 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]
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 “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.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-the-ballad-of-the
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Sakana (website, paper) 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 “less than ten percent” 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.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/sakana-strawberry-and-scary-ai
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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 here and play with the model itself here.
(kudos to the team for making the model publicly available, especially since these things usually have high inference costs)
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/mantic-monday-91624
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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 PhilippinesAimen 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.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-nine-lives
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[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.]
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/links-for-september-2024
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Freddie deBoer has a post on what he calls “the temporal Copernican principle.” 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.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/contra-deboer-on-temporal-copernicanism
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[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,1 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.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-the-pale-king
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[Original post here.]
Aeon writes:
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.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-sorry
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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?”
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/interview-day-at-thiel-capital
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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 DeadApril, 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.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-the-history-of-the
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And its cousin, "I'm sorry if you're offended"
People hate this phrase. 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:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/in-defense-of-im-sorry-you-feel-that
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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 John Skelton’s “Speke, Parott” [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. - Show more
