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PODCAST

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.

technology

All Episodes

11:02

Against The Generalized Anti-Caution Argument

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2024/12/05

Suppose something important will happen at a certain unknown point. As someone approaches that point, you might be tempted to warn that the thing will happen. If you’re being appropriately cautious, you’ll warn about it before it happens. Then your warning will be wrong. As things continue to progress, you may continue your warnings, and you’ll be wrong each time. Then people will laugh at you and dismiss your predictions, since you were always wrong before. Then the thing will happen and they’ll be

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15:02

How Did You Do On The AI Art Turing Test?

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2024/12/05

Last month, I challenged 11,000 people to classify fifty pictures as either human art or AI-generated images. I originally planned five human and five AI pictures in each of four styles: Renaissance, 19th Century, Abstract/Modern, and Digital, for a total of forty. After receiving many exceptionally good submissions from local AI artists, I fudged a little and made it fifty. The final set included paintings by Domenichino, Gauguin, Basquiat, and others, plus a host of digital artists and AI

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17:13

The Early Christian Strategy

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2024/11/28

In 1980, game theorist Robert Axelrod ran a famous Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma Tournament. He asked other game theorists to send in their best strategies in the form of “bots”, short pieces of code that took an opponent’s actions as input and returned one of the classic Prisoner’s 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,

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52:49

Book Review: The Rise Of Christianity

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2024/11/28

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

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17:25

Congrats To Polymarket, But I Still Think They Were...

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2024/11/28

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 it’s a flywheel; victory building on victory. Enough people heard of them this election that they’ll never lack for customers. And maybe Trump’s CFTC will be kinder than Biden’s and relax

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40:28

Links For November 2024

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2024/11/17

[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-november-2024

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25:46

Mantic Monday: Judgment Day

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2024/11/17

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

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24:09

ACX Endorses Harris, Oliver, Or Stein

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2024/11/17

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 don’t want you to know: Donald Trump is the wrong choice for US President. If you’re in a swing state, we recommend you vote Harris; if a safe state, Harris or your third-party candidate of choice. [EDIT/UPDATE: If you’re in a safe state and want to trade your protest vote with a swing state voter, or

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16:38

The Case Against California Proposition 36

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2024/11/12

[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. It’s also a referendum on over a decade of sentencing reform efforts stemming from California’s historical prison overcrowding crisis. Like many states, California passed increasingly tough sentencing laws through the 90s and early 2000s. This led to the state’s prisons operating massively over

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34:09

Notes From The Progress Studies Conference

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2024/11/12

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 “progress” was problematic because it

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16:17

Secrets Of The Median Voter Theorem

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2024/11/12

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, they’ll all end up at the same place on a one-dimensional political spectrum: the exact center. Here’s 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

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08:44

ACX Local Voting Guides

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2024/11/12

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 here Longer version with commentary: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/acx-local-voting-guides

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29:48

Book Review: Deep Utopia

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2024/11/01

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

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0:25

AI Art Turing Test

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2024/11/01

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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07:30

Book Review Contest 2024 Winners

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2024/11/01

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

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42:23

SB 1047: Our Side Of The Story

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2024/11/01

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

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29:29

Triple Tragedy And Thankful Theory

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2024/10/26

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

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06:21

Against The Cultural Christianity Argument

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2024/10/26

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

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17:28

Preliminary Milei Report Card

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2024/10/26

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:

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09:07

How Often Do Men Think About Rome?

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2024/10/19

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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1,100 results

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