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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

12:41

Why Do Transgender People Report Hypermobile Joints?

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2023/03/25

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/why-do-transgender-people-report [Related: Why Are Transgender People Immune To Optical Illusions?] I. Ehlers-Danlos syndrome is a category of connective tissue disorder; it usually involves stretchy skin and loose, hypermobile joints. For a few years now, doctors who work with transgender people have commented on an apparently high rate of EDS in this population. For example, Dr. Will Powers, who specializes in hormone therapy, wrote about how he “can’t ignore

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23:08

Why I Am Not (As Much Of) A Doomer (As Some People)

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2023/03/25

Machine Alignment Monday 3/13/23 https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/why-i-am-not-as-much-of-a-doomer (see also Katja Grace and Will Eden’s related cases) The average online debate about AI pits someone who thinks the risk is zero, versus someone who thinks it’s any other number. I agree these are the most important debates to have for now. But within the community of concerned people, numbers vary all over the place: Scott Aaronson says says 2% Will MacAskill says 3% The median machine

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22:47

Links For March 2023

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2023/03/25

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-march-2023 [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.] 1: Sentimental cartography of the AI alignment “landscape” (click to expand): 2: Wikipedia:

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15:46

Give Up Seventy Percent Of The Way Through The...

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2023/03/09

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/give-up-seventy-percent-of-the-way I. Someone asks: why is “Jap” a slur? It’s the natural shortening of “Japanese person”, just as “Brit” is the natural shortening of “British person”. Nobody says “Brit” is a slur. Why should “Jap” be? My understanding: originally it wasn’t a slur. Like any other word, you would use the long form (“Japanese person”) in dry formal language, and the short form (“Jap”) in informal or emotionally charged language. During World War

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03:33

Issue Two Of Asterisk

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2023/03/09

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/issue-two-of-asterisk …the new-ish rationalist / effective altruist magazine, is up here. It’s the food issue. I’m not in this one - my unsuitability to have food-related opinions is second only to @eigenrobot’s - but some of my friends are. Articles include: The Virtue Of Wonder: Ozy (my ex, blogs at Thing of Things) reviews Martha Nussbaum’s Justice For Animals. Beyond Staple Grains: In the ultimate “what if good things are bad?” article, economist Prabhu

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08:27

Kelly Bets On Civilization

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2023/03/09

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/kelly-bets-on-civilization Scott Aaronson makes the case for being less than maximally hostile to AI development: Here’s an example I think about constantly: activists and intellectuals of the 70s and 80s felt absolutely sure that they were doing the right thing to battle nuclear power. At least, I’ve never read about any of them having a smidgen of doubt. Why would they? They were standing against nuclear weapons proliferation, and terrifying meltdowns like

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04:52

Impact Market Mini-Grants Update

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2023/03/09

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/impact-market-mini-grants-update Impact markets are a charity analogy to private equity. Instead of prospectively giving grants to projects they hope will work, charitable foundations retrospectively give grants to projects that did work. Investors fund those projects prospectively, then recover their money through the grants. This offloads the responsibility of predicting which projects will succeed - and the risks from unsuccessful projects - from charitable

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10:43

Against Ice Age Civilizations

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2023/03/09

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/against-ice-age-civilizations There’s a good debate about this on the subreddit; see also Robin Hanson and Samo Burja. You can separate these kinds of claims into three categories: Civilizations about as advanced as the people who built Stonehenge Civilizations about as advanced as Pharaonic Egypt Civilizations about as advanced as 1700s Great Britain The debate is confused by people doing a bad job clarifying which of these categories they’re

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28:25

OpenAI's "Planning For AGI And Beyond"

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2023/03/06

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/openais-planning-for-agi-and-beyond Planning For AGI And Beyond Imagine ExxonMobil releases a statement on climate change. It’s a great statement! They talk about how preventing climate change is their core value. They say that they’ve talked to all the world’s top environmental activists at length, listened to what they had to say, and plan to follow exactly the path they recommend. So (they promise) in the future, when climate change starts to be a real

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18:22

Highlights From The Comments On Geography Of Madness

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2023/03/05

Plus: A case for culture-bound mental disorder skepticism https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-geography [Original post: The Geography Of Madness] Thomas Reilly (author of Rational Psychiatry) writes: I don’t think Bouffée délirante is a culture bound syndrome - it’s just the French equivalent of brief psychotic disorder (DSM), acute and transient psychotic disorder (ICD), or Brief Limited Intermittent Psychotic symptoms (CAARMS). [See]

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11:02

Announcing Forecasting Impact Mini-Grants

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2023/03/05

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/announcing-forecasting-impact-mini I still dream of running an ACX Grants round using impact certificates, but I want to run a lower-stakes test of the technology first. In conjunction with the Manifold Markets team, we’re announcing the Forecasting Impact Mini-Grants, a $20,000 grants round for forecasting projects. As a refresher, here’s a short explainer about what impact certificates are, and here’s a longer article on various implementation details.

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52:46

Book Review: The Geography Of Madness

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2023/03/04

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-the-geography-of-madness Around the wide world, all cultures share a few key features. Anthropologists debate the precise extent, but the basics are always there. Language. Tools. Marriage. Family. Ritual. Music. And penis-stealing witches. Nobody knows when the penis-stealing witches began their malign activities. Babylonian texts include sa-zi-ga, incantations against witchcraft-induced impotence. Ancient Chinese sources describe suo yang, the

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47:09

Grading My 2018 Predictions For 2023

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2023/03/04

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/grading-my-2018-predictions-for-2023 To celebrate the fifth anniversary of my old blog, in 2018, I made some predictions about what the next five years would be like. This was a different experience than my other predictions. Predicting five years out doesn't feel five times harder than predicting one year out. It feels fifty times harder. Not a lot of genuinely new trends can surface in one year; you're limited to a few basic questions on how the current

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26:49

Declining Sperm Count: Much More Than You Wanted To Know

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2023/02/18

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/declining-sperm-count-much-more-than Is Sperm Count Declining? People say it is. Levine et al 2017 looks at 185 studies of 42935 men between 1973 and 2011, and concludes that average sperm count declined from 99 million sperm/ml at the beginning of the period to 47 million today. Levine et al 2022 expands the previous analysis to 223 studies and 57,168 men, including research from the developing world. It finds about the same thing. Source: Figure 3 here

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20:16

Trying Again On Fideism

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2023/02/17

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/trying-again-on-fideism [apologies for an issue encountered when sending out this post; some of you may have gotten it twice] Thanks to Chris Kavanagh, who wrote an extremely kind and reasonable comment in response to my Contra Kavanagh on Fideism and made me feel bad for yelling at him. I’m sorry for my tone, even though I'm never going to get a proper beef at this rate. Now that I'm calmed down, do I disagree with anything I wrote when I was angrier?

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18:57

Contra Kavanagh On Fideism

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2023/02/15

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/contra-kavanaugh-on-fideism I. I’ve been looking into the world of YouTube streamers; if you want to make it big, you need to have a beef with some other online celebrity. Fine; I choose Chris Kavanagh, who tweeted about me recently:

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15:45

Ro-mantic Monday 2/13/23

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2023/02/15

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ro-mantic-monday-21323 In honor of Valentine’s Day, this installment of Mantic Monday will focus on attempted clever engineering solutions to romance. We’ll start with the usual prediction markets, then move on to other types of algorithmic and financial schemes. Normal content will resume next time around.

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40:58

Links For February 2023

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2023/02/13

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-february-2023 [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.]

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15:38

Crowds Are Wise (And One's A Crowd)

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2023/02/07

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/crowds-are-wise-and-ones-a-crowd The long road to Moscow The “wisdom of crowds” hypothesis claims that the average of many guesses is better than a single guess. Ask one person to guess how much a cow weighs, and they’ll be off by some amount. Ask a hundred people and take the average of their answers, and you’ll be off by less. I was intrigued by a claim in this book review that: You can play “wisdom of crowds” in single-player mode. Say you want to know

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20:17

Mostly Skeptical Thoughts On The Chatbot Propaganda...

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2023/02/07

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mostly-skeptical-thoughts-on-the People worry about chatbot propaganda. The simplest concern is that you could make chatbots write disinformation at scale. This has created a cottage industry of AI Trust And Safety people making sure their chatbot will never write arguments against COVID vaccines under any circumstances, and a secondary industry of journalists writing stories about how they overcame these safeguards and made the chatbots write arguments against

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1,151 results

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