Astral Codex Ten Podcast

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 foundations to investors with skin in the game.  

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 proposing, or not being aware that the other categories exist. 2 and 3 aren’t straw men. Robert Schoch says the Sphinx was built in 9700 BC, which I think qualifies as 2. Graham Hancock suggests “ancient sea kings” drew the Piri Reis map which seems to depict Antarctica; anyone who can explore Antarctica must be at least close to 1700s-British level. I think there’s weak evidence against level 1 civilizations, and strong evidence against level 2 or 3 civilizations.

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 threat, they’ll do everything environmentalists want, in the most careful and responsible way possible. They even put in firm commitments that people can hold them to.

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] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8581951/ I responded “Have you ever seen BPS? I almost never have, and was told it was mostly used as a code for new-onset schizophrenia that didn't satisfy the time criterion yet,” and Dr. Reilly wrote: Yes, in the context of an At Risk Mental State service, where it makes up roughly 20% of referrals https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0924977X20302510 .

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.

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 penis retracting into the body because of yin/yang imbalances. But the first crystal-clear reference was the Malleus Maleficarum, the 15th-century European witch-hunters’ manual. It included several chapters on how witches cast curses that apparently (though not actually) remove men’s penises.

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 plotlines will end. But five years feels like you're really predicting "the future". Things felt so fuzzy that I (partly) abandoned my usual clear-resolution probabilistic predictions for total guesses.

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 The “et al” includes Dr. Shanna Swan, a professor of public health who has taken the results public in the ominously-named Count Down: How Our Modern World Is Altering Male and Female Reproductive Development, Threatening Sperm Counts, and Imperiling the Future of the Human Race. Is Declining Sperm Count Really "Imperiling The Future Of The Human Race”? Swan’s point is that if sperm counts get too low, presumably it will be hard to have babies (though IVF should still work). How long do we have? This graph (source) shows pregnancy rate by sperm count per artificial insemination cycle. It seems to plateau around 30 million. An average ejaculation is 3 ml, so total sperm count is 3x sperm/ml. Since sperm/ml has gone down from 99 million to 47 million, total count has gone down from ~300 million to ~150 million. 150 million is still much more than 30 million, but sperm count seems to have a wide distribution, so it’s possible that some of the bottom end of the distribution is being pushed over the line where it has fertility implications. But Willy Chertman has a long analysis of fertility trends here, and concludes that there’s no sign of a biological decline. Either the sperm count distribution isn’t wide enough to push a substantial number of people below the 30 million bar, or something else is wrong with the theory. Levine et al model the sperm decline as linear. If they’re right, we have about 10 - 20 more years before the median reaches the plateau’s edge where fertility decreases, and about 10 years after that before it reaches zero. Developing countries might have a little longer. It feels wrong to me to model this linearly, although I can’t explain exactly why besides “it means sperm will reach precisely 0 in thirty years, which is surely false”. The authors don’t seem to be too attached to linearity, saying that “Adding a quadratic or cubic function of year to meta-regression model did not substantially change the association between year and SC or improve the model fit”. Still, the 2022 meta-analysis found that the trend was, if anything, speeding up with time, so it doesn’t seem to be obviously sublinear.

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?

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: