Astral Codex Ten Podcast

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.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/acx-survey-results-2022 Thanks to the 7,341 people who took the 2022 Astral Codex Ten survey. See the questions for the ACX survey See the results from the ACX Survey (click “see previous responses” on that page I’ll be publishing more complicated analyses over the course of the next year, hopefully starting later this month. If you want to scoop me, or investigate the data yourself. you can download the answers of the 7000 people who agreed to have their responses shared publicly. Out of concern for anonymity, the public dataset will exclude or bin certain questions. If you want more complete information, email me and explain why, and I’ll probably send it to you. Download the public data (.xlsx, .csv) If you’re interested in tracking how some of these answers have changed over time, you might also enjoy reading the 2020 survey results.   1 I don’t think I can Google Forms only present data from people who agreed to make their responses public, so I’ve deleted everything identifiable on the individual level, eg your written long response answers. Everything left is just things like “X% of users are Canadian” or “Y% of users have ADHD”. There’s no way to put these together and identify an ADHD Canadian, so I don’t think they’re privacy relevant. If you notice anything identifiable on the public results page, please let me know. 2 There will be a few confusing parts. I added some questions halfway through, so they will have fewer responses than others. On the “What Event Led To Your Distrust?” question, I added new multiple choice responses halfway through, so they will incorrectly appear less popular than the other responses. I think that is the only place I did that, but you can email me if you have any questions. 3 I deleted email address (obviously), some written long answers, some political questions that people might get in trouble for answering honestly, and some sex-related questions. I binned age to the nearest 5 years and deleted the finer-grained ethnicity question. I binned all incomes above $500,000 into “high”, and removed all countries that had fewer than ten respondents (eg if you said you were from Madagascar, it would have made you identifiable, so I deleted that). If you need this information for some reason, email me.       Subscribe to Astral Codex Ten  

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/which-political-victories-cause-backlash Four years ago I wrote Trump: A Setback For Trumpism, pointing out that when Trump became president, his beliefs became much less popular. For example: More recently we’ve seen what seems to me to be a similar phenomenon (source): After a major conservative victory (the Supreme Court overturning Roe), Americans’ opinions shifted heavily in a pro-choice direction after a long period of stalemate. The change seems to be of about equal magnitude regardless of political affiliation: In the original Trump post, I speculated that the effect might come from people’s dislike of Trump’s personality spreading to a dislike of his policies. I don’t think that can be true here - the abortion ruling was a straightforward policy change with no extra personality component. One natural alternative theory is a thermostatic effect. Voters want some medium amount of abortion, so if they hear that pro-abortion forces are winning, they say they’re against abortion. But if they hear that anti-abortion forces are winning, they say they’re pro-abortion. The problem is, I can’t really find this effect for recent Democratic victories. For example, in 2015 the Supreme Court ruled (in Obergefell) that gay marriage was legal. On a thermostatic picture, one might have expected the public to turn against gay marriage. Here’s the data (source):

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ssc-survey-results-on-schooling-types Taken from the 2020 Slate Star Codex Survey. SSC/ACX readers are a heavily-selected population and nothing about them necessarily generalizes to anyone who isn’t an SSC/ACX reader. But you are an SSC/ACX reader, so maybe they generalize to you. Most of these questions are heavily confounded by different types of people going to different schools. In a few cases, I’ve made feeble efforts to get past this, in other cases I haven’t tried. All of this is rough and weak, you don’t need to comment to tell me this. Of about 8000 respondents, 70.8% (5,695) went to free government schools (US: "public school"), 12.1% (970) went to secular private-sector schools (US: "private school”), 11.3% went to religious private-sector schools, 3.1% (250) were home schooled, and 0.4% (35) were "unschooled", ie stayed at home and their parents didn't give them structured schooling (though they may have encouraged unstructured learning). Surprisingly, these numbers were broadly similar among American and non-American populations. I looked at how this category associated with different outcomes, starting with:

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/2023-subscription-drive-free-unlocked Astral Codex Ten has a paid subscription option. You pay $10 (or $2.50 if you can’t afford the regular price) per month, and get: Extra articles (usually 1-2 per month) A Hidden Open Thread per week Early access to some draft posts The warm glow of supporting the blog. I feel awkward doing a subscription drive, because I already make a lot of money with this blog. But the graph of paid subscribers over time looks like this:

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/conspiracies-of-cognition-conspiracies I. Some conspiracy theories center on finding anomalies in a narrative. For example, Oswald couldn’t have shot Kennedy, because the bullet came from the wrong direction. Or: the Egyptians couldn’t have built the Pyramids, because they required XYZ advanced technology. I like these because they feel straightforwardly about styles of processing evidence (Remember, I use the word “evidence” in a broad sense that includes bad evidence. By saying that some conspiracy theory has “evidence”, I’m not suggesting it’s justifiable, just that someone somewhere has asserted that they believe it for some particular reason. For example, someone might say they believe in alien abductions because of eyewitnesses who claim to have been abducted; I’ll be calling the eyewitnesses “evidence” without meaning to assert it is any good.)

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-the-061 Originally: The Media Very Rarely Lies and Sorry, I Still Think I Am Right About The Media Very Rarely Lying. Please don’t have opinions based on the titles until you’ve read the posts! Table of contents: Comments Accusing Me Of Using An Overly Strict Definition Of “Lie” Comments Equating Lying With Egregiously Sloppy Reasoning Comments About Whether Infowars Believes Their Own Claims Comments On Why 8% Of Americans Said They Had Relatives Who Died From The COVID Vaccine Comments Pointing Out Very Clear Examples Of Media Lies Comments Making Other Claims Of Media Lies And Misdeeds Other Comments My Actual Thoughts