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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

28:10

From Nostradamus To Fukuyama

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2022/09/29

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/from-nostradamus-to-fukuyama I. Nostradamus was a 16th century French physician who claimed to be able to see the future. (never trust doctors who dabble in futurology, that’s my advice) His method was: read books of other people’s prophecies and calculate some astrological charts, until he felt like he had a pretty good idea what would happen in the future. Then write it down in the form of obscure allusions and multilingual semi-gibberish, to placate

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41:38

Highlights From The Comments On Billionaire...

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2022/09/23

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-billionaire [original post: Billionaires, Surplus, and Replaceability] 1: Lars Doucet (writes Progress and Poverty) writes: Scott, the argument you're making rhymes a *lot* with the argument put forward by Anne Margrethe Brigham and Jonathon W. Moses in their article "Den Nye Oljen" (Norwegian for "The New Oil") I translated it a few months ago and Slime Mold Time Mold graciously hosted it on their blog, where I posted the

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29:42

Why Is The Central Valley So Bad?

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2022/09/22

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/why-is-the-central-valley-so-bad I. Here’s a topographic map of California (source): You might notice it has a big valley in the center. This is called “The Central Valley”. Sometimes it also gets called the San Joaquin Valley in the south, or the the Sacramento Valley in the north. The Central Valley is mostly farms - a little piece of the Midwest in the middle of California. If the Midwest is flyover country, the Central Valley is drive-through country, with

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26:20

Janus' GPT Wrangling

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2022/09/20

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/janus-gpt-wrangling Janus (pseudonym by request) works at AI alignment startup Conjecture. Their hobby, which is suspiciously similar to their work, is getting GPT-3 to do interesting things. For example, with the right prompts, you can get stories where the characters become gradually more aware that they are characters being written by some sort of fiction engine, speculate on what’s going on, and sometimes even make pretty good guesses about the nature of

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02:24

Bay Area Meetups This Weekend (September 17-18 2022)

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2022/09/17

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/bay-area-meetups-this-weekend We have three Bay Area meetups this weekend: Berkeley, at 1 PM on Sunday 9/18, at the Rose Garden Inn (2740 Telegraph Ave) San Francisco, at 11 AM on Sunday 9/18, “in the Panhandle, between Ashbury and Masonic, with an ACX sign” San Jose, at 2 PM on Saturday 9/17, at 3806 Williams Rd. Please RSVP to David Friedman (ddfr[at]daviddfriedman[dot]com) so he knows how many people are coming. I will be at the Berkeley one. Feel

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25:38

Unpredictable Reward, Predictable Happiness

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2022/09/15

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/unpredictable-reward-predictable [Epistemic status: very conjectural. I am not a neuroscientist and they should feel free to tell me if any of this is totally wrong.] I. Seen on the subreddit: You Seek Serotonin, But Dopamine Can’t Deliver. Commenters correctly ripped apart its neuroscience; for one thing, there’s no evidence people actually “seek serotonin”, or that serotonin is involved in good mood at all. Sure, it seems to have some antidepressant effects,

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12:43

I Won My Three Year AI Progress Bet In Three Months

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2022/09/13

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/i-won-my-three-year-ai-progress-bet I. DALL-E2 is bad at “compositionality”, ie combining different pieces accurately. For example, here’s its response to “a red sphere on a blue cube, with a yellow pyramid on the right, all on top of a green table”. Most of the elements - cubes, spheres, redness, yellowness, etc - are there. It even does better than chance at getting the sphere on top of the cube. But it’s not able to track how all of the words relate to each

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22:01

Links For September 2022

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2022/09/08

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-september-2022 [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: Fiber Arts, Mysterious Dodecahedrons, and Waiting On Eureka. Why did it take so long to

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14:21

Book Review Contest 2022 Winners

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2022/09/04

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-contest-2022-winners Thanks to everyone who entered or voted in the book review contest. The winners are: 1st: The Dawn Of Everything, reviewed by Erik Hoel. Erik is a neuroscientist and author of the recent novel The Revelations. He writes at his Substack The Intrinsic Perspective. 2nd: 1587, A Year Of No Significance, reviewed by occasional ACX commenter McClain. =3rd: The Castrato, reviewed by Roger’s Bacon. RB is a teacher

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18:31

The Prophet And Caesar's Wife

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2022/09/04

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-prophet-and-caesars-wife I. The Prophet in his wanderings came to Cragmacnois, and found the Bishop living in a golden palace and drinking fine wines, when all around him was bitter poverty. The Bishop spent so long feasting each day that he had grown almost too fat for his fine silk robes. “Woe unto you!” said the Prophet, “The people of Cragmacnois are poor and hard-working, and they loathe the rich and the corrupt. Rightly do they hate you for spending

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12:45

Billionaires, Surplus, And Replaceability

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2022/08/31

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/billionaires-surplus-and-replaceability The typical neoliberal defense of self-made billionaires goes: entrepreneurs and other businesspeople create a lot of value. EG an entrepreneur who invents/produces/markets a better car has helped people get where they’re going faster, more safely, with less pollution, etc. People value that some amount, represented by them being willing to spend money on the car. The entrepreneur should get to keep some of that value,

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23:52

Your Book Review: Kora In Hell

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2022/08/28

Finalist #16 in the Book Review Contest https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-kora-in-hell [This is one of the finalists in the 2022 book review contest. It’s not by me - it’s by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. 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.] The sense that

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12:33

Meetups Everywhere 2022: Times & Places

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2022/08/27

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/meetups-everywhere-2022-times-and Thanks to everyone who responded to my request for ACX meetup organizers. Volunteers have arranged meetups in 205 cities around the world, including Penryn, Cornwall and Baghdad, Iraq. You can find the list below, in the following order: Africa & Middle East Asia-Pacific (including Australia) Canada Europe (including UK) Latin America United States You can see a map of all the events on the LessWrong community

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39:22

Highlights From The Comments On The Repugnant...

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2022/08/27

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-the-909 (Original post here) 1: Petey writes: When I think of happiness 0.01, I don't think of someone on the edge of suicide. I shudder at the thought of living the sorts of lives the vast majority of people have lived historically, yet almost all of them have wanted and tried to prolong their lives. Given how evolution shaped us, it makes sense that we are wired to care about our survival and hope for things to be better, even

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11:25

Effective Altruism As A Tower Of Assumptions

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2022/08/24

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/effective-altruism-as-a-tower-of I have an essay that my friends won’t let me post because it’s too spicy. It would be called something like How To Respond To Common Criticisms Of Effective Altruism (In Your Head Only, Definitely Never Do This In Real Life), and it starts: Q: I don’t approve of how effective altruists keep donating to weird sci-fi charities. A: Are you donating 10% of your income to normal, down-to-earth charities? Q: Long-termism is just an

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53:26

Book Review: What We Owe The Future

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2022/08/23

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-what-we-owe-the-future I. An academic once asked me if I was writing a book. I said no, I was able to communicate just fine by blogging. He looked at me like I was a moron, and explained that writing a book isn’t about communicating ideas. Writing a book is an excuse to have a public relations campaign. If you write a book, you can hire a publicist. They can pitch you to talk shows as So-And-So, Author Of An Upcoming Book. Or to journalists looking

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01:02:08

Your Book Review: 1587, A Year Of No Significance

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2022/08/22

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-1587-a-year-of-no Finalist #15 in the Book Review Contest [This is one of the finalists in the 2022 book review contest. It’s not by me - it’s by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. 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 bought

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28:01

Highlights From The Comments On Subcultures

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2022/08/19

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-subcultures 1: Maximum Limelihood Estimator writes: I firmly believe that cycles don't exist and never have existed. This is my shitposting way of saying "I have never, once, in my years of experience modeling human behavioral time series, come across an honest-to-god cyclical pattern (excluding time of year/month/week/day effects)." And yet for some reason, every time I show a time series to anyone ever, people swear to god the

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13:05

Skills Plateau Because Of Decay And Interference

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2022/08/18

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/skills-plateau-because-of-decay-and Followup to: Why Do Test Scores Plateau; Ritalin Works But School Isn’t Worth Paying Attention To Why Do Skills Plateau? Economist Philip Frances finds that creative artists, on average, do their best work in their late 30s. Isn’t this strange? However good a writer is at age 35, they should be even better at 55 with twenty more years of practice. Sure, middle age might bring some mild proto-cognitive-impairment, but

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09:00

Meetups Everywhere 2022 - Call For Organizers

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2022/08/18

Please volunteer to host a meetup in your city! https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/meetups-everywhere-2022-call-for There are ACX-affiliated meetup groups all over the world. Lots of people are vaguely interested, but don't try them out until I make a big deal about it on the blog. Since learning that, I've tried to make a big deal about it on the blog at least once annually, and it's that time of year again. If you're willing to organize a meetup for your city, please fill out the organizer

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1,151 results

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