Astral Codex Ten Podcast

Matt Yglesias’ five-year old son asks: why do we send the top students to the best colleges? Why not send the weakest students to the best colleges, since they need the most help? This is one of those questions that’s so naive it loops back and becomes interesting again. https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/why-match-school-and-student-rank  

Finalist #8 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] There is widespread agreement among philosophers, political commentators, and the general public that transparency in government is an unalloyed good. Louis Brandeis famously articulates the common wisdom: “Publicity is justly commended as a remedy for social and industrial diseases. Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman” (page 1). Support for transparency is bipartisan. On his first day in office, Barack Obama said “My administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government.” (page 1). On the Republican National Committee’s website, one reads “Republicans believe that transparency is essential for good governance. Elected officials should be held accountable for their actions in Washington, D.C.” (page 2) And so it is. Legislators’ votes are published and stored in public online databases, their deliberations are televised, and their every action is extensively documented.  https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-secret-government  

[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-july-2023 

Machine Alignment Monday, 7/3/2023 Tom Davidson’s Compute-Centric Framework report forecasts a continuous but fast AI takeoff, where people hand control of big parts of the economy to millions of near-human-level AI assistants . I mentioned earlier that the CCF report comes out of Open Philanthropy’s school of futurism, which differs from the Yudkowsky school where a superintelligent AI quickly takes over. Open Philanthropy is less explicitly apocalyptic than Yudkowsky, but they have concerns of their own about the future of humanity. I talked some people involved with the CCF report about possible scenarios. Thanks especially to Daniel Kokotajlo of OpenAI for his contributions. https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/tales-of-takeover-in-ccf-world  

[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] The date is June 9, 1985. The place is the Davis-Besse nuclear plant near Toledo, Ohio. It is just after 1:35 am, and the plant has a small malfunction: "As the assistant supervisor entered the control room, he saw that one of the main feedwater pumps had tripped offline." But instead of stabilizing, one safety system after another failed to engage.  https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-safe-enough  

[Epistemic status: very uncertain about Part II; more convinced about Part III] I. This is the big question in the paper du jour, The Illusion Of Moral Decline, by Mastroianni and Gilbert (from here on: MG). It goes like this: people say that morality is declining. We know this because one million polls have asked people “do you think morality is declining?” and people always answer yes. MG go over these one million polls, do statistics to them, and find that people definitely think that morality is declining. People have thought this since at least 1949, when the first good polls were run - but realistically much longer. This could be (they say) either because morality is actually declining, or because of a bias. They argue that morality is not actually declining. In support, they marshal many polls asking questions like “Do you think most people are honest?” or “Do you think people treat you with respect?” and find that the answers mostly stay the same. Might this be because of definition creep - eg might people define “honest” relative to expectations, and expectations lower as morality declines? In order to rule this out, MG look at various objective questions that they think bear on morality, like “have you been mugged/assaulted recently?” or “have you donated blood in the past year?” They find that all of these have also stayed the same. Therefore, both people’s subjective impressions of morality, and more objective proxies for social morality, have stayed the same. Therefore, morality is not actually declining. Therefore there must be a bias. https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/is-there-an-illusion-of-moral-decline  

I. Bryan Caplan thinks he’s debating me about mental illness. He’s not. Sometimes he posts some thoughts he has been having about mental illness, with or without a sentence saying “this is part of my debate with Scott”. Then I write a very long essay explaining why he is wrong. Then he ignores it, and has more thoughts, and again writes them up with “this is part of my debate with Scott”. I would not describe this as debating. Call it unibating, or monobating, or another word ending in -bating which is less polite but as far as I can tell equally appropriate. Although he doesn’t answer my rebuttals, he does diligently respond to various unrelated posts of mine, explaining why they must mean I am secretly admitting he was right all along. When I wrote about the scourge of witches stealing people’s penises, Caplan spun it as me secretly admitting he was right all along about mental illness. Sometimes I feel like this has gone a bit too far - when I announced I had gotten married, Caplan spun it as me secretly admitting he was right all along about mental illness. Let it be known to all that I am never secretly admitting Bryan Caplan is right about mental illness. There is no further need to speculate that I am doing this. If you want to know my position vis-a-vis Bryan Caplan and mental illness, you are welcome to read my four thousand word essay on the subject, Contra Contra Contra Caplan On Psych. You will notice that the title clearly telegraphs that it is about Bryan Caplan and mental illness, and that (if you count up the contras) I am against him. If that ever changes, rest assured I will telegraph it in something titled equally clearly. https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/sure-whatever-lets-try-another-contra  

Warning: This post might give vulnerable people new sensory sensitivities Everyone hates flashing banner ads, but maybe they’re a necessary evil. Creators want money, advertisers demand a certain level of visibility for their ad buys, maybe sites are willing to eat the cost in user goodwill. Fine. But what’s everyone else’s excuse? https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/every-flashing-element-on-your-site  

(Includes full article narration.) I have an article summarizing attempts to forecast AI progress, including a five year check-in on the predictions in Grace et al (2017). It’s not here, it's at asteriskmag.com, a rationalist / effective altruist magazine: Through A Glass Darkly. This is their AI issue (it’s not always so AI focused). https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/through-a-glass-darkly-in-asterisk

[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] I. Today, pundits across the political spectrum bemoan America’s inability to build. Across the country, NIMBYs and status-quo defenders exploit procedural rules to block new development, giving us a world where it takes longer to get approval for a single new building in San Francisco than it did to build the entire Empire State Building, where so-called “environmental review” is weaponized to block even obviously green initiatives like solar panels, and where new public works projects are completed years late and billions over budget—or, like California’s incredible shrinking high-speed rail, may never be completed at all. Inevitably, such a complex set of dysfunctions must have an equally complex set of causes. It took us decades to get into this mess, and just as there’s no one simple fix, there’s no one simple inflection point in our history on which we can place all the blame. But what if there was? What if there was, in fact, a single person we could blame for this entire state of affairs, a patsy from the past at whom we could all point our censorious fingers and shout, “It’s that guy’s fault!” There is such a person, suggests history professor Paul Sabin in his new book Public Citizens: The Attack on Big Government and the Remaking of American Liberalism. And he isn’t isn’t a mustache-twirling villain—he’s a liberal intellectual. If you know him for anything, it’s probably for being the reason you know what a hanging chad is. That’s right: it’s all Ralph Nader’s fault. https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-public-citizens