Astral Codex Ten Podcast

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/can-people-be-honestly-wrong-about A tangent of the jhana discussion: I asserted that people can't be wrong about their own experience. That is, if someone says they don't feel hungry, maybe they're telling the truth, and they don't feel hungry. Or maybe they're lying: saying they don't feel hungry even though they know they really do (eg they're fasting, and they want to impress their friends with how easy it is for them). But there isn't some third option, where they honestly think they're not experiencing hunger, but really they are. Commenters brought up some objections: aren't there people who honestly say they don't feel hungry, but then if you give them food, they'll wolf it down and say "Man, that really hit the spot, I guess I didn't realize how hungry I was"? Yes, this sometimes happens. But I don't think of it as lying about internal experience. I think of it as: their stomach is empty, they have low blood sugar, they have various other physiological correlates of needing food - but for some reason they're not consciously experiencing the qualia of hunger. Their body is hungry, but their conscious mind isn't. They say they don't feel hungry, and their description of their own feeling is accurate. This is also how I interpret people who say "I'm not still angry about my father", but then every time you mention their father they storm off and won't talk to you for the rest of the day. Clearly they still have some trauma about their father that they have to deal with. But it doesn't manifest itself as a conscious feeling of anger. This person could accurately be described as "they don't feel conscious anger about their father, but mentioning their father can trigger stress-related behaviors". Linch gives an especially difficult example: I think it's possible for people to fool themselves about internal states. My favorite example is time perception. You can meditate or take drugs in ways that make you think that your clock speed has gone up and your subjective experience of your subjective experience of time is slowed down. But your actual subjective experience of time isn't much faster clock speeds (as could be evidenced by trying to do difficult computational tasks in those stats). But I think this can be defeated by the same maneuver. Just as you can be right about feeling like you're not hungry, when in fact your body needs food, so you can be right about it feeling like time moves slowly for you, when in fact it's moving at a normal rate.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-brain [original post here] On What Kind Of Thing Brain Waves Are: Loweren writes: In my undergrad biology program we visited a brain research lab near Moscow. The brain scientist gave us a brief intro to Fourier transforms, which made me understand how beautiful they are - something that 2 years of undergrad math classes didn't manage to do. Then he explained the brain waves to us like this: "Imagine you are standing outside the football stadium. You don't see what's happening inside, but you hear the chatter of the crowd. All the individual words blend together into indistinct mess and although there's definitely a local information transfer going on, from the outside you can't make out anything specific. Then imagine one of the teams scored a goal. The crowd behavior is now very different! The fans of the winning team start to cheer and sing. You can easily pick this up from outside and infer what's happening. This is because the individuals behave in a globally coordinated manner, so their signals amplify each other in tune. From this perspective, brain waves are a byproduct of globally coordinated neuronal activity, and it's the first one we historically learned to pick up. They appear when neurons stop chatting with each other and start chanting in unison." Then he plopped some probes on my head and announced I have beautiful epileptic spikes (I'm not an epileptic)

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-my [Original post here] I know I don't usually publish on Saturdays, but I wanted to get this out before people filled in their mail-in ballots. So: Is Prop 31 Another Attack On Vaping? Maximum Limelihood Estimator is concerned that Prop 31 (against flavored tobacco products) is meant to target vaping: The flavored tobacco ban is mostly a ban on vaping; the vast majority of vape products are flavored, while most cigarettes aren't. About 40% of cigarettes are flavored, compared to about 85% of vape juice. A study suggests that a ban on flavored tobacco would increase cigarette consumption (by making cigarettes relatively more desirable than vaping). Limelihood writes that "The statistics [in the study] are great, which is honestly shocking to me, since it's the first time I've said this about an experiment in . . . ever." There is also a study purporting to show that flavored cigarette bans do decrease smoking, but Limelihood says that: …it's got some big problems. The study there only compares tobacco sales in a single city (San Francisco) before and after a ban on menthol cigarettes. However, because there's no comparison to other cities, it's essentially worthless; tobacco sales throughout the US dropped at this time, and I don't know how this compares.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/acx-grants-project-updates Thanks to everyone who got ACX Grants (see original grants here) and sent me a one-year update. Below are short summaries of the updates everyone sent. If for some reason you want one of the full updates, which are longer and more technical, let me know and I'll see if I have permission to send them to you. I've also included each grantee's assessment on a scale of 1-10 for how well they're doing, where 5/10 is "about as well as expected". A few grantees are asking for extra help - I've included those requests in italics at the end of the relevant updates, and I've collected all of them together below. Updates 1: Discover Molecular Targets Of Antibiotics (8/10)Pedro Silva planned to use in silico screening to identify the biochemical targets of seven promising natural antibiotics, which could potentially help develop better versions of them. He says he's finished most of the simulations and determined the 5-20 most stable complexes for each antibiotic. Once he finishes this, he can start additional simulations on the best complexes to obtain better estimates of their stability and construct hypotheses on which of these is most involved in the antibiotic's efficacy. 2: Ballot Proposition For Approval Voting In Seattle (?/10)They have asked me not to discuss their progress until after the November election. 3: Software To Validate New FDA Drug Trial Designs (10/10)Michael Sklar and Confirm Solutions have gotten further funding from FTX and now have 2-3 people working full-time on the project. They are building new statistical techniques and software to help regulators quickly assess designs for clinical trials. Here is a recent conference poster on the methods. They have written proof-of-concept code and are writing a white paper to show regulators and pharma companies. They also claim to have developed software that has "sped up their simulations for some standard Bayesian trial designs by a factor of about 1 million." They are looking for more employees and collaborators; if you're interested, contact research@confirmsol.org 4: Alice Evans' Research On "The Great Gender Divergence" (?/10)Dr. Evans has done over four months of research in Morocco, Italy, India, and Turkey. You can find some of her most recent thoughts at her blog here. Her book is still on track to be published from Princeton Press, more details tbd. 5: Develop Safer Immunosuppressants (7/10)Trevor Klee planned to continue his work to develop a safer slow-release form of cyclosporine. He realized this would be too expensive to do in humans in the current funding environment, and has pivoted to getting his medication approved for a feline autoimmune disease as both a proof-of-concept and as a cheaper, faster way to start making revenue. He recently raised $100,000 in crowdfunding (in addition to getting $200,000 from angel investors to run a feline trial, which will finish in January. He still anticipates eventually moving back to humans. Trevor wants to talk to bloggers or writers who might be interested in covering his work. 6: Promote Economically Literate Climate Policy In US States (4/10)Yoram Bauman and Climate 24x7 have written a policy paper about their ideas. They were able to get a bill in front of the Nebraska Legislature, but it died in committee. They have a promising measure in Utah, and an off chance of getting something rolling in Pennsylvania. Overall they report frustration, as many of the legislators they worked with have been voted out or term-limited. If you are a legislator or activist interested in helping with this project - especially in Utah, Pennsylvania, or South Dakota - please contact Yoram at yoram@standupeconomist.com. 7: Repository / Search Engine For Forecasting Questions (8/10)Nuno Sempere at metaforecast.org was able to hire a developer to "make the backend significantly better and add a bunch of functionality" - you can see a longer list of updates here. The developer has since left for other forecasting-related work and the project is moving more slowly. 8: Help [Anonymous] Interview For A Professorship (8/10)[Anonymous] was a grad student who wanted to interview for professorships at top schools where he might work on AI safety in an academic environment. The grant was to help make it financially easier for him to go on a long round of interviews [Anonymous] successfully got a job offer from a top school, and will be going there and researching AI safety.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/my-california-ballot-2022 Previously: 2018, 2020 General Philosophy Of Voting This is California, so the Democrats always win. When I vote, I mean to send a signal somewhere in between "you are the candidate I really prefer for this office" and "I will vote for the Democrat if I approve of her and want her to have a mandate; otherwise I will vote for the Republican as a protest". I try to have a weak bias towards voting "NO" on state constitutional amendments, because unless there's a compelling reason otherwise I would rather legislators be able to react to events than have things hard-coded for all time. I lean liberal-to-libertarian; the further you are from that, the less useful you'll find my opinions. State Propositions Proposition 1: Constitutional Amendment Enshrining Right To Abortion California will never decide to ban abortion. If the federal government decides to ban abortion, California's state constitution won't matter. So you would think that having a right to abortion in the Constitution is a purely symbolic matter. The people arguing for the proposition don't address this concern. The people arguing against the proposition claim that this is a Trojan Horse intended to sneak in support for using taxpayer funding for late-term and partial-birth abortions, which California doesn't currently do. Is this true? It's true that California currently doesn't allow abortions past 24 weeks. It's true that the exact text of the proposed amendment is: The state shall not deny or interfere with an individual's reproductive freedom in their most intimate decisions, which includes their fundamental right to choose to have an abortion and their fundamental right to choose or refuse contraceptives. This section is intended to further the constitutional right to privacy guaranteed by Section 1, and the constitutional right to not be denied equal protection guaranteed by Section 7. Nothing herein narrows or limits the right to privacy or equal protection …which sure doesn't sound like it's saying the state can continue to ban abortion after 24 weeks. But this article quotes law professors who reassure us that courts would totally understand that this amendment has to be interpreted in the context in which it was written - ie a state which supports a 24-week abortion ban - so no court would ever interpret it as making 24-week abortion bans unconstitutional. So apparently our defense against this is . . . that all California judges will be die-hard originalists completely immune to the temptation of judicial activism even when the text is begging them to do it. A friend brings up that late-term partial-birth abortions happen more often in Republicans' imaginations than in real life. When they do happen in real life, it's usually for sympathetic medical reasons. I interpret this as a purely symbolic measure that has no real benefits, probably also has no real risks, but writes a poorly-worded thing whose explicit text nobody wants into the state constitution. I vote NO. Proposition 26: Legalize In Person Sports Gambling At Racetracks And Indian Casinos Allows four racetracks in the state to offer in person sports betting, and tribal casinos to allow "sports betting, roulette, and games played with dice". California is truly the dumbest state. I believe this for many reasons, but my reason for believing it today is that apparently the law allows tribal casinos to offer slot machines, but not roulette or dice games. Nobody comes out and says exactly why, but I think it's because of this paragraph in the California constitution, from 1872 Every person who deals, plays, or carries on, opens, or causes to be opened, or who conducts, either as owner or employee, whether for hire or not, any game of faro, monte, roulette, lansquenet, rouge et noire, rondo, tan, fan-tan, seven-and-a-half, twenty-one, hokey-pokey, or any banking or percentage game played with cards, dice, or any device, for money, checks, credit, or other representative of value, and every person who plays or bets at or against any of those prohibited games, is guilty of a misdemeanor, and shall be punishable by a fine not less than one hundred dollars ($100) nor more than one thousand dollars ($1,000), or by imprisonment in the county jail not exceeding six months, or by both the fine and imprisonment. Since roulette existed in 1872 but slot machines didn't, the Constitution banned roulette but not slot machines, and that rule has continued to the present day. Now if slot-machine-filled casinos want to also have roulette, they need a Constitutional amendment. DID I MENTION THAT I WISH PEOPLE WOULD STOP ADDING EVERY LAW THAT THEY LIKE TO THE CONSTITUTION? But this law also allows random people to sue "card clubs", ie small-scale private gambling establishments. We originally thought this was a Texas-style "bounty" law that gave the random people part of the winnings, but it seems this isn't true. I'm not sure if the idea is that legal gambling establishments would fund these lawsuits, or if they just expect private citizens to do this out of the love of suing people. Although I think the first prong of the law - allowing roulette and sports betting at casinos - makes sense, the second prong seems to be casinos making it easier to shut down their competitors. These competitors are probably ordinary people who want to gamble in a backroom somewhere without hurting anyone else. And the argument against on the ballot is by the Black Chamber of Commerce, saying that these card clubs are a useful source of revenue for poor minority communities. I don't want to help giant casinos put a bounty on their heads. I vote NO.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/moderation-is-different-from-censorship This is a point I keep seeing people miss in the debate about social media. Moderation is the normal business activity of ensuring that your customers like using your product. If a customer doesn't want to receive harassing messages, or to be exposed to disinformation, then a business can provide them the service of a harassment-and-disinformation-free platform. Censorship is the abnormal activity ensuring that people in power approve of the information on your platform, regardless of what your customers want. If the sender wants to send a message and the receiver wants to receive it, but some third party bans the exchange of information, that's censorship. The racket works by pretending these are the same imperative. "Well, lots of people will be unhappy if they see offensive content, so in order to keep the platform safe for those people, we've got to remove it for everybody." This is not true at all. A minimum viable product for moderation without censorship is for a platform to do exactly the same thing they're doing now - remove all the same posts, ban all the same accounts - but have an opt-in setting, "see banned posts". If you personally choose to see harassing and offensive content, you can toggle that setting, and everything bad will reappear. To "ban" an account would mean to prevent the half (or 75%, or 99%) of people who haven't toggled that setting from seeing it. The people who elected to see banned posts could see them the same as always. Two "banned" accounts could still talk to each other, retweet each other, etc - as could accounts that hadn't been banned, but had opted into the "see banned posts" setting. Does this difference seem kind of pointless and trivial? Then imagine applying it to China. If the Chinese government couldn't censor - only moderate - the world would look completely different. Any Chinese person could get accurate information on Xinjiang, Tiananmen Square, the Shanghai lockdowns, or the top fifty criticisms of Xi Jinping - just by clicking a button on their Weibo profile. Given how much trouble ordinary Chinese people go through to get around censors, probably many of them would click the button, and then they'd have a free information environment. This switch might seem trivial in a well-functioning information ecology, but it prevents the worst abuses, and places a floor on how bad things can get.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-jhanas "I think it's the first time half the commenters accused the other half of lying" I. Is Jhana Real? This was a fun one. I think it's the first time half the commenters accused the other half of lying. Okay, "half" is an exaggeration. But by my count we had 21 people who claimed to have experienced jhanas (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21), and 7 who said they were pretty sure it wasn't real as described (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7). The former group include people like Tetris McKenna, who wrote: I've experienced samatha jhanas. I don't do it so much now. The first few times you get on the edge of 1st jhana, it's difficult to achieve, because you see the wave of pleasure approaching, and grasp for it, and that grasping takes you away from it. So it's a careful balancing act of pleasure/desire in the first place to get there, which you have to master to some degree. To even get to 1st jhana, you have to internally figure out some stuff about the craving/pleasure dynamic on a subconscious, mechanical level. 1st jhana is, as the author describes, intensely pleasurable. Sublime. His descriptions are spot on imo. But in some ways, it's also too much pleasure. It can feel agitating once you get used to it and aren't so awestruck by it anymore. Indeed, the latter jhanas are associated with letting go of certain aspects of the initial jhana, to more and more refined states that are more calm and equanimous than intensely pleasurable. Again, this is internalising and mastering the skill of balancing pleasure/craving. Those calm and equanimous states of 2nd-4th jhana become much more satisfying than the initial pleasure wave of the 1st jhana. Cultivating them to that degree is a process of gaining valuable insight into the pleasure/craving dynamic in your mind. Even if you don't get to those stages, just practising 1st jhana alone will help the mind normalise the intensity of the pleasure, such that it's no big deal any more. You don't need or even want pleasure all the time, because you've seen it with such clarity, over and over again, just by setting the conditions up correctly in your mind.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-malleus-maleficarum I. To The Republic, For Witches Stand Did you know you can just buy the Malleus Maleficarum? You can go into a bookstore and say "I would like the legendary manual of witch-hunters everywhere, the one that's a plot device in dozens of tired fantasy novels". They will sell it to you and you can read it. I recommend the Montague Summers translation. Not because it's good (it isn't), but because it's by an slightly crazy 1920s deacon every bit as paranoid as his subject matter. He argues in his Translator's Introduction that witches are real, and that a return to the wisdom of the Malleus is our only hope of standing against them: Although it may not be generally recognized, upon a close investigation it seems plain that the witches were a vast political movement, an organized society which was anti-social and anarchical, a world-wide plot against civilization. Naturally, although the Masters were often individuals of high rank and deep learning, that rank and file of the society, that is to say, those who for the most part fell into the hands of justice, were recruited from the least educated classes, the ignorant and the poor. As one might suppose, many of the branches or covens in remoter districts knew nothing and perhaps could have understood nothing of the enormous system. Nevertheless, as small cogs in a very small [sic] wheel, it might be, they were carrying on the work and actively helping to spread the infection. And is this "world-wide plot against civilization" in the room with us right now? In the most 1920s argument ever, Summers concludes that this conspiracy against civilization has survived to the modern day and rebranded as Bolshevism.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/nick-cammarata-on-jhana Buddhists say that if you meditate enough, you can learn to enter a state of extreme bliss called jhana. (there are many different jhana states - there's a discussion of the distinctions here - but I'm lumping them together for simplicity. For attempted explanations of why jhana should exist, see here and here.) Jhana is different from enlightenment. Enlightenment changes you forever. Jhana is just a state you can enter during meditation sessions, then leave when the session is over. Enlightenment takes years or decades of work, but some people describe reaching jhana after a few months of practice. Hardcore Buddhists insist that jhana is good only insofar as it serves as a stepping stone to enlightenment; others may find extreme bliss desirable in its own right. Nick Cammarata of OpenAI sometimes meditates and reaches jhana. I've found his descriptions unusually, well, descriptive:

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-supplement [Original post here: How Trustworthy Are Supplements?] 1: AvalancheGenesis writes: I think the bigger issue is that the industry as a whole sort of exists as solutions-in-search-of-problems...deficiencies really aren't that common, or even meaningfully health-affecting unless dire. (Fairly-arbitrary worldwide differences in target levels of IUs also remains puzzling.) Discerning customers can benefit from targeted supplementation. But that's not the median supplement purchaser, far from it. The median supplement user is more like...my former coworker who claimed he never got colds because he took 1000% vitC pills every single day, or whatever. At some point, the explanatory process for That's Not How It Works At All is just too long, so...let people believe things. Supplements are surely an easier way to sell hope and agency than most options. At least he picked something water-soluble and cared about proper hydration. Vitamin C probably doesn't prevent colds in the general population, though some studies suggest it does prevent colds in athletes, and there's some medium-quality evidence that it might shorten colds a little once you have them. The supplements I find more interesting are things like melatonin for sleep, ashwagandha or silexan for anxiety, SAMe for depression, or caffeine + theanine for focus. All of these are useful, supported by studies, and good alternatives to medications that some people don't tolerate well. I'm using mental health examples because that's the subject I know about, but there are probably examples in other fields too (probiotics for digestive problems). Some commenters chimed in to discuss supplements that have anecdotally worked for them (1, 2, 3). And Elizabeth's story here is also a good example of how I think about this.