Astral Codex Ten Podcast

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.

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.]

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 the weight of a cow. Then take a guess. Now throw your guess out of the window, and take another guess. Finally, compute the average of your two guesses. The claim is that this average is better than your individual guesses. This is spooky. We talk a lot about how to make accurate predictions here - and you can improve your accuracy on anything just by guessing twice and averaging, no additional knowledge required? It’s like God has handed us a creepy cow-weight oracle. I wanted to test this myself, so I included some relevant questions in last year’s ACX Survey:

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 COVID vaccines. But Alex Berenson already writes arguments against COVID vaccines. He’s very good at it, much better than I expect chatbots to be for many years. Most people either haven’t read them, or have incidentally come across one or two things from his years-long corpus. The limiting factor on your exposure to arguments against COVID vaccines isn’t the existence of arguments against COVID vaccines. It’s the degree to which the combination of the media’s coverage decisions and your viewing habits causes you to see those arguments. A million mechanical Berensons churning out a million times the output wouldn’t affect that; even one Berenson already churns out more than most people ever read.

Basically the same as 2022 - this is just a reminder to start working on entries https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-contest-rules-2023 Sure, this seemed to go well last the last few times, let's do it again. Write a review of a book. Any book you like - most past winners have been nonfiction, but maybe you can change that! There’s no official word count requirement, but previous finalists and winners were often between 2,000 and 10,000 words. There’s no official recommended style, but check the style of last year’s finalists and winners or my ACX book reviews (1, 2, 3) if you need inspiration. Please limit yourself to one entry per person or team. Then send me your review through this Google Form. The form will ask for your name, email, the title of the book, and a link to a Google Doc. The Google Doc should have your review exactly as you want me to post it if you’re a finalist. DON’T INCLUDE YOUR NAME OR ANY HINT ABOUT YOUR IDENTITY IN THE GOOGLE DOC ITSELF, ONLY IN THE FORM. I want to make this contest as blinded as possible, so I’m going to hide that column in the form immediately and try to judge your docs on their merit. (does this mean you can’t say something like “This book about war reminded me of my own experiences as a soldier” because that gives a hint about your identity? My rule of thumb is - if I don’t know who you are, and the average ACX reader doesn’t know who you are, you’re fine. I just want to prevent my friends or Internet semi-famous people from getting an advantage. If you’re in one of those categories and think your personal experience would give it away, please don’t write about your personal experience.) PLEASE MAKE SURE THE GOOGLE DOC IS UNLOCKED AND I CAN READ IT. By default, nobody can read Google Docs except the original author. You’ll have to go to Share, then on the bottom of the popup click on “Restricted” and change to “Anyone with the link”. If you send me a document I can’t read, I will probably disqualify you, sorry. First prize will get at least $2,500, second prize at least $1,000, third prize at least $500; I might increase these numbers later on. All winners and finalists will get free publicity (including links to any other works you want me to link to) and free ACX subscriptions. And all winners will get the right to pitch me new articles if they want (nobody ever takes me up on this). Your due date is April 5th. Good luck! If you have any questions, ask them in the comments. And remember, the form for submitting entries is here.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/response-to-alexandros-contra-me I. In November 2021, I posted Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted To Know, where I tried to wade through the controversy on potential-COVID-drug ivermectin. Most studies of ivermectin to that point had found significant positive effects, sometimes very strong effects, but a few very big and well-regarded studies were negative, and the consensus of top academics and doctors was that it didn’t work. I wanted to figure out what was going on. After looking at twenty-nine studies on a pro-ivermectin website’s list, I concluded that a few were fraudulent, many others seemed badly done, but there were still many strong studies that seemed to find that ivermectin worked. There were also many other strong studies that seemed to find that it didn’t. My usual heuristic is that when studies contradict, I trust bigger studies, more professionally done studies, and (as a tiebreaker) negative studies - so I leaned towards the studies finding no effect. Still, it was strange that so many got such impressive results.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-1302023 One million Metaculi, fake stocks, scandal markets again Happy One Millionth Prediction, Metaculus Metaculus celebrated its one millionth user forecast with a hackathon, a series of talks, and a party: This was a helpful reminder that Metaculus is a real organization, not just a site I go to sometimes to check the probabilities of things. The company is run remotely; catching nine of them in a room together was a happy coincidence. Although I think it still relies heavily on grants, Metaculus’ theoretical business model is to create forecasts on important topics for organizations that want them (“partners”) - so far including universities, tech companies, and charities. A typical example is this recent forecasting tournament on the spread of COVID in Virginia, run in partnership with the Virginia Department of Health and the University of Virginia Biocomplexity Institute (this year’s version here). The main bottleneck is interest from policy-makers, which they’re trying to solve both through product improvement and public education. In December, Metaculus’ Director of Nuclear Risk, Peter Scoblic, published an article in Foreign Affairs magazine about forecasting’s “struggle for legitimacy” in the foreign policy world. It’s paywalled, but quoting liberally:

Dive deep into the fascinating world of AI alignment and the early pioneers who contemplated it! Discover three compelling motivational frameworks for AIs: the agent, the genie, and the oracle. Explore how AI functions more as a simulator than a goal-oriented entity, uncovering the gap between expectations and reality. Learn about the risks of misalignment and how these models can develop harmful objectives. Finally, ponder the evolution of identity through predictive processes, drawing intriguing parallels between AI and human consciousness.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/you-dont-want-a-purely-biological CONTENT NOTE: This essay contains sentences that would look bad taken out of context. In the past, I’ve said “PLEASE DON’T TAKE THIS OUT OF CONTEXT” before or after these, but in the New York Times’ 2021 article on me, they just quoted the individual sentence out of context without quoting the “PLEASE DON’T TAKE THIS OUT OF CONTEXT” statement following it. To avoid that, I will be replacing spaces with the letter “N”, standing for “NOT TO BE TAKEN OUT OF CONTEXT”. If I understand journalistic ethics correctly, they can’t edit the sentence to remove the Ns - and if they kept them, people would probably at least wonder what was up.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/who-predicted-2022 Winners and takeaways from last year's prediction contest Last year saw surging inflation, a Russian invasion of Ukraine, and a surprise victory for Democrats in the US Senate. Pundits, politicians, and economists were caught flat-footed by these developments. Did anyone get them right? In a very technical sense, the single person who predicted 2022 most accurately was a 20-something data scientist at Amazon’s forecasting division. I know this because last January, along with amateur statisticians Sam Marks and Eric Neyman, I solicited predictions from 508 people. This wasn’t a very creative or free-form exercise - contest participants assigned percentage chances to 71 yes-or-no questions, like “Will Russia invade Ukraine?” or “Will the Dow end the year above 35000?” The whole thing was a bit hokey and constrained - Nassim Taleb wouldn’t be amused - but it had the great advantage of allowing objective scoring.