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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

21:45

Model City Monday 9/4/23: California Dreamin'

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2023/09/09

Tech moguls plan new city in Solano County Guardian: Silicon Valley Elites Revealed As Buyers Of $800 Million In Land To Build Utopian City. The specific elites include the Collison brothers, Reid Hoffman, Nat Friedman, Marc Andreessen, and others, led by the mysterious Jan Sramek. The specific land is farmland in Solano County, about an hour’s drive northeast of San Francisco. The specific utopian city is going to look like this. The company involved (Flannery Associates aka California Forever) has

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41:13

Your Book Review: Zuozhuan

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2023/09/05

Finalist #16 in the Book Review Contest To tell the story of the fall of a realm, it’s best to start with its rise. More than three thousand years ago, the Shang dynasty ruled the Chinese heartland. They raised a sprawling capital out of the yellow plains, and cast magnificent ritual vessels from bronze. One of the criteria of civilization is writing, and they had the first Chinese writing, incising questions on turtle shells and ox scapulae, applying a heated rod, and reading the response of the

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20:12

Here's Why Automaticity Is Real Actually

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2023/09/05

“Literal Banana” on Carcinization writes Against Automaticity, which they describe as: An explanation of why tricks like priming, nudge, the placebo effect, social contagion, the “emotional inception” model of advertising, most “cognitive biases,” and any field with “behavioral” in its name are not real. My summary (as always, read the real thing to keep me honest): for a lot of the ‘90s and ‘00s, social scientists were engaged in ttthe project of proving “automaticity”, the claim that most human

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30:56

Highlights From The Comments On Fetishes

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2023/09/05

Original post: What Can Fetish Research Tell Us About AI? Table Of Contents: 1: Alternative Theories Of Fetishes 2: Comments Including Testable Predictions 3: Comments That Were Very Angry About My Introductory Paragraph 4: Commenters Describing Their Own Fetishes 5: Other Comments https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-fetishes

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16:25

Mantic Monday 8/28/23

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2023/09/02

Superconductor autopsy -- Prediction mutual funds -- Flight delays Sorry guys, LK-99 doesn’t work. The prediction markets have dropped from highs in the 40s down to 5 - 10. It’s over. What does this tell us about prediction markets? Were they dumb to ever believe at all? Or were they aggregating the evidence effectively, only to update after new evidence came in? I claim they were dumb. Although the media was running with the “maybe there’s a room-temperature superconductor” story, the smartest

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33:42

Your Book Review: Why Nations Fail

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2023/09/02

Finalist #15 in the Book Review Contest [This is one of the finalists in the 2023 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] In which I argue: Why Nations Fail is not a very good book. Its authors' academic papers are much better, so I steelman their thesis as best I can, but

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03:44

Meetups Everywhere 2023: Times & Places

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2023/08/30

Thanks to everyone who responded to my request for ACX meetup organizers. Volunteers have arranged meetups in 169 cities around the world, from Baghdad to Bangalore to Buenos Aires. You can find the list below, in the following order: Africa & Middle East Asia-Pacific Europe North America South America You can see a map of all the events on the LessWrong community page. You can also see a searchable sheet at this Airtable link. Within each region, it’s alphabetized first by country, then

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30:31

Highlights From The Comments On Dating Preferences

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2023/08/30

Original post here. And I forgot to highlight a link to the directory of dating docs. Table Of Contents 1: Comments That Remain At Least Sort Of Against Dating Docs 2: Comments Concerned That Dating Docs Are Bad For Status Or Signaling 3: Comments About Orthodox Judaism And Other Traditional Cultures 4: Comments Including Research 5: Comments By People With Demographically Unusual Relationships 6: Comments About The Five Fake Sample Profiles 7: Things I Changed My Mind About

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03:59

More Thoughts On Critical Windows

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2023/08/30

On the fetish post, I discussed people who had some early sexual experience - like seeing a sexy cartoon character - and reacted in some profound way, like becoming a furry. Sometimes people have described this as a “critical window” for sexuality (similar to the “critical period” in language learning?) where young children “imprint” on sexual experiences - and then can’t un-imprint on them later, even when they see many examples of sex that don’t involve cartoon animals. One of my distant cousins

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13:57

Critical Periods For Language: Much More Than You...

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2023/08/30

Scott Young writes about Seven Expert Opinions I Agree With That Most People Don’t. I like most of them, but #6, Children don’t learn languages faster than adults, deserves a closer look. Some people imagine babies have some magic language ability that lets them pick up their first language easily, even as we adults struggle through verb conjugations to pick up our second. But babies are embedded in a family of first-language speakers with no other options for communication. If an English-speaking

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17:14

What Can Fetish Research Tell Us About AI?

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2023/08/30

Epistemic status: Ha ha, only serious... Arguing about gender is like taking OxyContin. There can be good reasons to do it. But most people don’t do it for the good reasons. And even if you start doing it for good reasons, you might get addicted and ruin your life. Walk through San Francisco if you want to see people who ruined their lives with opioids; browse Substack to get a visceral appreciation of the dangers of arguing about gender. Still, I’ve been debating autogynephilia fetishes with

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31:01

Your Book Review: The Mind Of A Bee

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2023/08/24

[This is one of the finalists in the 2023 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] Are bees smart? To answer that question, here’s a crab spider: Sadly, this is not a review of a book called The Mind of a Crab Spider. But as you crab spider lovers know, crab spiders and bumble bees

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16:13

Bride Of Bay Area House Party

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2023/08/20

[previously in series: 1, 2, 3] You spent the evening agonizing over which Bay Area House Party to attend. The YIMBY parties are always too crowded. VC parties were a low-interest-rate phenomenon. You’ve heard too many rumors of consent violations at the e/acc parties - they don’t know when to stop. And last time you went to a crypto bro party, you didn’t even have anything to drink, and somehow you still woke up the next morning lying in a gutter, minus your wallet and clothes. You finally decide

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23:49

In Defense Of Describable Dating Preferences

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2023/08/20

The New York Times has an article on “dating docs”. These are a local phenomenon - I think an ex of mine might have been Patient Zero. I don’t begrudge the Times for writing about them. I’m just surprised they’re considered an interesting phenomenon. What could be more obvious than making sure potential dates know what you’re like? https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/in-defense-of-describable-dating

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30:52

Your Book Review: The Weirdest People in the World

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2023/08/20

Finalist #13 in the Book Review Contest [This is one of the finalists in the 2023 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] Down from the gardens of Asia descending radiating, Adam and Eve appear… — Walt Whitman When I grew up I was still part of a primitive culture, in the following

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23:37

Highlights From The Comments On Putin

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2023/08/18

[original post: Dictator Book Club: Putin] Table of Contents: 1. Comments Further Illuminating Putin’s Rise To Power 2. Comments Questioning Masha Gessen’s Objectivity 3. Comments Claiming Putin Is Very Slightly Less Bad Than The Book Suggests 4. Comments On Putin As Culture Warrior 5. Comments Expressing Concern That The FBI/CIA Are Capable Of Undermining Democracy In The US https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-putin

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24:48

Links for August 2023

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2023/08/18

[Remember, 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://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-august-2023

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01:13:10

Your Book Review: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2023/08/12

[This is one of the finalists in the 2023 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] What does it take to be literally Hitler? https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-rise-and-fall

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12:50

More Memorable Passages From "The Man Without A Face"

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2023/08/12

Actual serious review here, Amazon link to the book here. These were just some extra parts that stuck out to me. https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/more-memorable-passages-from-the

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31:04

Dictator Book Club: Putin

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2023/08/09

Review of Masha Gessen's "The Man Without A Face" [previously in series: Erdogan, Modi, Orban, Xi] I. Vladimir Putin’s Childhood As Metaphor For Life Vladimir Putin appeared on Earth fully-formed at the age of nine. At least this is the opinion of Natalia Gevorkyan, his first authorized biographer. There were plenty of witnesses and records to every post-nine-year-old stage of Putin’s life. Before that, nothing. Gevorkyan thinks he might have been adopted. Putin’s official mother, Maria Putina,

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1,151 results

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