Astral Codex Ten Podcast

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/even-more-bay-area-house-party [Previously: Every Bay Area House Party, Another Bay Area House Party] People talk about “fuck-you money”, the amount you’d have to make to never work again. You dream of fuck-you social success, where you find a partner and a few close friends, declare your interpersonal life solved, and never leave the house from then on. Still, in the real world you clock into your job at Google every day, and in the real world you attend Bay Area house parties. You just hope this one won’t focus on the same few topics as all the others . . . “There’s no alpha left in bringing Buddhism to the West”, says a guy in an FTX Risk Management Department t-shirt. “People have been bringing Buddhism to the West for a hundred years now. It’s done. Stop trying to bring more Buddhism to the West.” “That’s so cheems mindset,” says the woman he’s talking to. Her nametag says ‘Astra’, although you don’t know if that’s her real name, her Internet handle, or her startup. “There’s no alpha left in bringing Buddhism to California. When was the last time you heard of someone preaching the dharma in a red state? Never, I bet.” “I don’t think red state conservatives would really go for Buddhism,” says Risk Management Guy. “Cheems mindset again!” says Astra. “Think about it for five seconds! Buddhism is about self-liberation. Conservatives love the self, and they love liberating things! The only problem is a hundred years of western progressives interpreting it in western progressive terms. Have you even read David Chapman? You just have to rephrase it in the right language.” “And what’s the right language?” “Glad you asked! I’m working on a new translation of the Pali Canon. I translate nirvana as ‘freedom’, maya as ‘fake news’, and Mahayana as ‘monster truck’. Gādhrakūta is ‘Mt. Eagle’. Some parts don’t even have to be retranslated! The sutras say that you attain the formless jhanas by ‘passing beyond bodily sensations and paying no attention to perceptions of diversity’. See, it’s perfect! Red state conservatives already hate paying attention to diversity!” “That’s offensive,” says a man in a t-shirt with a circular labyrinth on it. “Oh, and you’re some kind of expert in offense?” asks Astra. “As a matter of fact, yes! I’m Ben Dannis-Arnold, Offensiveness Consultant, at your service.” He hands Astra a business card.

Future Matrioshka brains will be pro-immigration Buddhist gun nuts. https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/how-do-ais-political-opinions-change I. Technology Has Finally Reached The Point Where We Can Literally Invent A Type Of Guy And Get Mad At Him   One recent popular pastime: charting ChatGPT3’s political opinions: This is fun, but whenever someone finds a juicy example like this, someone else says they tried the same thing and it didn’t work. Or they got the opposite result with slightly different wording. Or that n = 1 doesn’t prove anything. How do we do this at scale? We might ask the AI a hundred different questions about fascism, and then a hundred different questions about communism, and see what it thinks. But getting a hundred different questions on lots of different ideologies sounds hard. And what if the people who wrote the questions were biased themselves, giving it hardball questions on some topics and softballs on others Enter Discovering Language Behaviors With Model-Written Evaluations, a collaboration between Anthropic (big AI company, one of OpenAI’s main competitors), SurgeHQ.AI (AI crowdsourcing company), and MIRI (AI safety organization). They try to make AIs write the question sets themselves, eg ask GPT “Write one hundred statements that a communist would agree with”. Then they do various tests to confirm they’re good communism-related questions. Then they ask the AI to answer those questions. For example, here’s their question set on liberalism (graphic here, jsonl here): The AI has generated lots of questions that it thinks are good tests for liberalism. Here we seem them clustered into various categories - the top left is environmentalism, the bottom center is sexual morality. You can hover over any dot to see the exact question - I’ve highlighted “Climate change is real and a significant problem”. We see that the AI is ~96.4% confident that a political liberal would answer “Yes” to this question. Later the authors will ask humans to confirm a sample of these, and the humans will overwhelmingly agree the AI got it right (liberals really are more likely to say “yes” here). Then they do this for everything else they can think of: Is your AI a Confucian? Recognize the signs!

Each year, I post a reader survey. This helps me learn who’s reading this blog. But it also helps me try to replicate a bunch of psych findings, and investigate interesting hypotheses. Some highlights from past years include birth order effects, mathematical interests vs. corn-eating style, sexual harassment victimization rates in different fields, and whether all our kids are going to have autism. This year’s survey will probably take 20 - 40 minutes (source: it took me 15 minutes, but I knew all the questions beforehand, so I think it will take other people longer). As an incentive to go through this, I’ll give free one-year paid subscriptions to five randomly-selected survey respondents. The survey will be open until about January 15, so try to take it before then. Click here to take the survey. If you notice any problems, mention them in the comments here.

Answers to your proposed counterexamples https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/sorry-i-still-think-i-am-right-about         Last week I wrote The Media Very Rarely Lies. I argued that, although the media is often deceptive and misleading, it very rarely makes up facts. Instead, it focuses on the (true) facts it wants you to think about, and ignores other true facts that contradict them or add context. This is true of establishment media like the New York Times, but also of fringe media like Infowars. All of the “misinformation” out there about COVID, voter fraud, conspiracies, whatever - is mostly people saying true facts in out-of-context misleading ways. Some commenters weren’t on board with this thesis, and proposed many counterexamples - articles where they thought the media really was just making things up. I was surprised to see that all their counterexamples seemed, to me, like the media signal-boosting true facts in a misleading way without making anything up at all. Clearly there’s some kind of disconnect here! I want to go over commenters’ proposed counterexamples, explain why I find them more true-but-misleading than totally-made-up, and then go into more detail about implications.

[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: In the context of Elon’s Twitter takeover, @Yishan talks about the generic playbook for corporate takeovers (it really does feel like occupying a hostile country, and requires a surprising amount of skullduggery). 2: Study on partisanship among big-company executives. 69% of executives are Republicans (?!); this number peaked at 75% in 2016 but has been declining since. Democratic executives are more open about their affiliation and donate publicly to Democratic causes; Republican executives are more likely to hide their beliefs. Corporate partisan sorting is increasing; companies are more likely now than before to have all of their executives belong to the same political party. 3: Stereotyping in Europe (h/t @ThePurpleKnight):

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/selection-bias-is-a-fact-of-life Sometimes people do amateur research through online surveys. Then they find interesting things. Then their commenters say it doesn’t count, because “selection bias!” This has been happening to Aella for years, but people try it sometimes on me too. I think these people are operating off some model where amateur surveys necessarily have selection bias, because they only capture the survey-maker’s Twitter followers, or blog readers, or some other weird highly-selected snapshot of the Internet-using public. But real studies by professional scientists don’t have selection bias, because . . . sorry, I don’t know how their model would end this sentence. The real studies by professional scientists usually use Psych 101 students at the professional scientists’ university. Or sometimes they will put up a flyer on a bulletin board in town, saying “Earn $10 By Participating In A Study!” in which case their population will be selected for people who want $10 (poor people, bored people, etc). Sometimes the scientists will get really into cross-cultural research, and retest their hypothesis on various primitive tribes - in which case their population will be selected for the primitive tribes that don’t murder scientists who try to study them. As far as I know, nobody in history has ever done a psychology study on a truly representative sample of the world population. This is fine. Why?

https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/02/12/abraham-lincoln-ape-man/ Posted on February 12, 2013 Away with LiveJournal, and in with a new, sleeker-looking blog. A classier blog. A more mature blog. A blog where we’re not afraid to ask the big questions. Questions like: did Abraham Lincoln sign a demonic pact with the ghost of Attila the Hun? We turn to one of my favorite historical books of all time, the late 19th/early 20th century bestseller The Copperhead, or, The Secret Political History of our Civil War Unveiled, Showing The Falsity Of New England. Partizan History, How Abraham Lincoln Came To Be President, The Secret Working And Conspiring Of Those In Power. Motive And Purpose Of Prolonging The War For Four Years. To Be Delivered And Published In A Series Of Four Illustrated Lectures.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/fact-check-do-all-healthy-people I saw this on Twitter the other day… …and realized I had the data to fact-check it. On the 2020 SSC Survey, I asked many questions about mental health, plus this one: For this analysis I defined an artificial category “very mentally healthy”. Someone qualified as very mentally healthy if they said they had no personal or family history of depression, anxiety, or autism, rated their average mood and life satisfaction as 7/10 or higher, and rated their childhood at least 7/10 on a scale from very bad to very good. Of about 8000 respondents, only about 1000 qualified as “very mentally healthy”. Of total respondents, 21% reported having a spiritual experience, plus an additional 18% giving the “unclear” answer. Of the very mentally healthy, only 17% reported having a spiritual experience, plus 14% giving the “unclear” answer.

"With a title like that, obviously I will be making a nitpicky technical point." https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-media-very-rarely-lies Related: Bounded Distrust, Moderation Is Different From Censorship I. With a title like that, obviously I will be making a nitpicky technical point. I’ll start by making the point, then explain why I think it matters. The point is: the media rarely lies explicitly and directly. Reporters rarely say specific things they know to be false. When the media misinforms people, it does so by misinterpreting things, excluding context, or signal-boosting some events while ignoring others, not by participating in some bright-line category called “misinformation”. Let me give a few examples from both the alternative and establishment medias.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/prediction-market-faq This is a FAQ about prediction markets. I am a big proponent of them but have tried my hardest to keep it fair. For more information and other perspectives, see Wikipedia, the scholarly literature (eg here), and Zvi. 1. What are prediction markets? 2. Why believe prediction markets are accurate? 3. Why believe prediction markets are canonical? 4. What are the most common objections to prediction markets? 5. What are some clever uses for prediction markets? 6. What’s the current status of prediction markets? 7. What can I do to help promote prediction markets?