Astral Codex Ten Podcast

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-xi I: Xi's Rise To Power II: Censorship III: Anti-Corruption And Centralization IV: Miscellaneous I. Rise To Power — Erusian on Xi's rise: > "Why did Xi succeed at gathering power, where others didn't?" Communist leaderships choose their leaders for ideological reasons. You're reducing it to cynical power politics. But this isn't how the the Soviet premier got or the Chinese paramount leader gets selected. They're selected for being good Communists, effectively for outstanding achievements in Communism, combined with pragmatic political considerations. Xi didn't subvert the system. Like Deng Xiaopeng before him he rode a wave, of which he was an intellectual proponent, that it was time for a strong leader to fundamentally reform the government. The fact Xi centralized power was not a surprise. It was what his mandate was. He wrote theoretical papers that basically boil down to, "We need to end term limits and have a strong, central leader for Marxist-Leninist reasons." And then he did that. The key moment was not his removal of term limits but the adoption of his Marxist theories into the formal ideology of the CCP.

Exploring an AI trained to pick strawberries led to unexpected behaviors when integrated with a language model. Delving into Lacanian Psychoanalysis, discussing infantile desires, parental approval, and the evolution of psychiatric diagnoses. Reflecting on the book review of A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis, questioning concepts related to ego defense and subjectivity. Discussing societal egos and illusions, reflecting on the struggle to reconcile true selves with norms. Delving into Lacan's theories on law, desire, fetishism, and sexual repression in psychoanalysis.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/initial-conditions Consider people who go by their first and middle initials, eg John Q Smith introduces himself as "Hi, I'm J.Q." Authors who use their initials on their books (eg J.K. Rowling) don't count, unless they also go by their initials in everyday life. Is there any pattern to who does this - ie which initials lead people to initialize their names? Think about this for a second before you continue: . . . In my experience it's about 50% JD, 49% a few other names involving J (JT, JR, AJ, CJ, RJ, etc) and 1% anything else. I discussed this with some people at the last meetup, who also felt this way. I was also able to find a Reddit thread of people with the same observation. What's going on? At the meetup, some people theorized that J names (eg John, Jack, etc) are so common that their holders need to differentiate themselves; instead of being the tenth John in your class, you go by JD or JT. But then how come there are so few JNs, JLs, or JS's? Some people at the meetup thought those combinations sounded less melodious than "JD", but I'm not really feeling it. Also, in my birth year, the three most popular male names were Michael, Christopher, and Matthew. How come "M" doesn't have the same initializing allure? How come I don't know anyone who goes by MD? (sure, MD would be weird because it sounds like a doctor, but then JD should be weird because it sounds like a lawyer!) Other people thought it might have something to do with J itself being a name (ie Jay). But Em, Bee, Dee, and Kay are all girls' names, and none of them end up as common initials. Might some famous person (JD Salinger?) have started it, and then everyone thought it was okay and normal for those initials only? But then why all the CJs and AJs? There definitely seems to be a J-related pattern here. Maybe there's something linguistically satisfying about JD and CJ that seemingly similar sounds like KP and DA don't have. But it doesn't sound that way. And lots of initials (eg PC, LA, etc), get used in common speech, in a way that suggests we're not having any trouble producing them. My guess is that it's a weird combination of all these things, plus naming traditions being surprisingly conservative. But I'd be interested to hear from any JDs (or other initial names) reading this: why did you decide to initialize (or not initialize) yourself? (in my case, it's because my initials are SA and I'm an essayist - it would just be weird!)

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/contra-hoffman-on-vitamin-d-dosing [epistemic status: pretty uncertain about each individual fact, moderate confidence in general overview] I. Hoffman Contra Me I've said many times that (to a first approximation) Vitamin D is a boring bone-related chemical. Most claims that it does exciting things outside of bones - cure COVID! prevent cancer! decrease cardiovascular risk! - are hype, and have failed to stand up to replication. Ben Hoffman disagrees, and writes How To Interpret Vitamin D Dosage Using Numbers. I'm compressing his argument for space reasons; read the link to check if I'm still being fair: I am sick of people rejecting good evidence about vitamin D because they are confused about the bad evidence and can't be bothered to investigate, so I am going to explain it […] Hunter-gatherers in the environment where most of our evolution happened might have been outside all day shirtless. On average the sun's halfway from peak, so that might be equivalent to 8 hours of peak sunlight at the equator. [A study shows people in these conditions synthesize 400 IU of Vitamin D/5 minutes, which comes out to] 8000 IU per hour is 32,000 IU (800 micrograms) per day by this estimate. When deciding how much is actually appropriate to supplement, we need to take into account diminishing returns; eventually the sunlight starts producing other secondary metabolites which are also good for us, so a 16,000 IU supplement is lower-quality than sunlight but similar in the effective dosage of the most important chemical our evolutionary ancestors' bodies would have made from sunlight; in practice I wouldn't take more than that. Now let's look at the object-level studies that Scott Alexander says show that vitamin D doesn't work. I'm just going to look at the randomized controlled trials because observational studies for or against vitamin D are trash for anything except hypothesis generation unless they have a very carefully selected instrumental variable. The colon cancer link is broken but the breast cancer study reports a dosage of 400 IU/day. On the exercise scale that's FIVE MINUTES of brisk walking. FIVE MINUTES is not very long at all compared with FOUR HOURS. [An all-cause mortality study used a thrice-yearly dosing] that amounts to about 800 IU/day, or ten minutes of brisk walking on the exercise scale. [Other studies that found no effect of Vitamin D also used doses around this range].

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-sadly I. The Duality Of Man Kalimac: If you write more stuff like this, I think I will just gradually stop reading this blog. Logan Strohl: For the record this is my favorite Scott essay in years. Leo Yankovic: Reading this for the first time in a long time of reading [ACX] felt like a giant waste of time. John Slow: For what it's worth, this was my favorite ACX post. Meh: You read through an ENTIRE BOOK of that kind of pompous, long-winded drivel? Paul: Just this review injected a strong acid into my mind and it's burning through everything. I'm questioning my behaviors and thought patterns and then questioning the questioning. I realized how a lot of my thoughts are geared towards looking good in front of an imaginary audience . . . I'm definitely going to read this book. ophis_uk: It feels like this whole review, and to a large extent the comments, are carefully tiptoeing around an obvious conclusion, occasionally glancing sideways to look at it edge-on, but carefully avoiding confronting it directly. That conclusion is: Teach/TLP is a bad writer, and has therefore written a shit book. AL: Okay, maybe you're just reading the bones, but holy moley there are some crackling-good insights here! Alex Power: The review has successfully convinced me to not read this book. FiveHourMarathon: I got about halfway through and wrote in my notebook to call my local bookstore and see if they planned to stock it/could order one for me. I am genuinely fascinated by how divergent all of your responses are. I wonder if anyone will Aumann update towards "there might really be something here" or "it might all be obscurantist drivel" after knowing that other people think so. If not, why not? II. Reviews From Other People Who Have Read The Book

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-41822 Nuclear risk, AI risk, Musk-acquiring-Twitter risk Warcasting Changes in Ukraine prediction markets since my last post March 21: Will at least three of six big cities fall by June 1?: 53% → 5% Will World War III happen before 2050?: 20% →22% Will Russia invade any other country in 2022?: 7% →5% Will Putin still be president of Russia next February?: 80% → 85% Will 50,000 civilians die in any single Ukrainian city?: 10% → 10% If you like getting your news in this format, subscribe to the Metaculus Alert bot for more (and thanks to ACX Grants winner Nikos Bosse for creating it!) Nuclear Risk Update Last month superforecaster group Samotsvety Forecasts published their estimate of the near-term risk of nuclear war, with a headline number of 24 micromorts per week. A few weeks later, J. Peter Scoblic, a nuclear security expert with the International Security Program, shared his thoughts. His editor wrote: I (Josh Rosenberg) am working with Phil Tetlock's research team on improving forecasting methods and practice, including through trying to facilitate increased dialogue between subject-matter experts and generalist forecasters. This post represents an example of what Daniel Kahneman has termed "adversarial collaboration." So, despite some epistemic reluctance, Peter estimated the odds of nuclear war in an attempt to pinpoint areas of disagreement. In other words: the Samotsvety analysis was the best that domain-general forecasting had to offer. This is the best that domain-specific expertise has to offer. Let's see if they line up:

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/irvine-meetup-this-monday I'll be in Irvine this week visiting family. I know the local meetup group already came up with a different Schelling meetup time, but I hope they don't mind me imposing on them and trying to meet people this Monday too. When: Monday, April 18, 7:15 PM. Where: Underneath this mysterious hexagonal sigil at the University Center food court in Irvine, California. Who: Anyone who wants. Please feel free to come even if you feel awkward about it, even if you're not "the typical ACX reader", even if you're worried people won't like you, etc. I'll check the comments to this post in case there are any questions.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-april-644 1: History of the belief that garlic and magnets are natural enemies. 2: Jacob Wood's Graph Of The Blogosphere. ACX's neighborhood: You can also see Jacob's description of how he made it here. It looks like it starts with some index blogs, follows them to blogs they link, and so on. I don't know how much this captures "the whole blogosphere" vs. "blogs X degrees or fewer away from the starting blog". It looks like a pretty complete selection of big politics/econ blogs to me, but I don't know if there are fashion blogs or movie blogs in a totally separate universe bigger than any of us. Also, Marginal Revolution confirmed as center of the blogosphere. 3: Wondering why so many Russian and Ukrainian cities have Greek names (eg Sebastopol)? Catherine the Great had a secret plan to resurrect Byzantium and install her appropriately-named grandson Constantine as New Roman Emperor. Step 1 was to found a lot of new cities with Greek names. Step 2 was to ally with the Austrian Empire. Then the Austrians got distracted with other things and they never reached Step 3. 4: Congratulations to last year's book review contest winner Lars Doucet, who was interviewed by Jerusalem Demsas in a Vox article on Georgism (the article prefers the term "land value tax" and never mentions George by name, which is a surprising but I think defensible choice). 5: Data from amitheasshole.reddit.com - "Posters were 64% female; post subjects (the person with whom the poster had a dispute) were 62% female. Posters had average age 31, subjects averaged 33. Male posters were significantly more likely to be the assholes…" H/T worldoptimization

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/obscure-pregnancy-interventions-much This is intended as a sequel to my old Biodeterminist's Guide To Parenting. It's less ambitious, in that it focuses only on pregnancy; but also more ambitious, in that it tries to be right. I wrote Biodeterminist's Guide in 2012, before the replication crisis was well understood, and I had too low a bar for including random crazy hypotheses. On the other hand, everyone else has too high a bar for including random crazy hypotheses! If you look at standard pregnancy advice, it's all stuff like "take prenatal vitamins" and "avoid alcohol" and "don't strike your abdomen repeatedly with blunt objects". It's fine, but it's the equivalent of college counselors who say "get good grades and try hard on the SAT." Meanwhile, there are tiger mothers who are making their kids play oboe 10 hours/day because they heard the Harvard music department has clout with Admissions and is short on oboists. What's the pregnancy-advice version of that? That's what we're doing here. Do not take this guide as a list of things that you have to do, or (God forbid) that you should feel guilty for not doing. Take it as a list of the most extreme things you could do if you were neurotic and had no sense of proportion. Here are my headline findings:

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/men-will-literally-have-completely People are debating "therapy: good or bad?" again: There are dozens of kinds of therapy: reliving your traumas, practicing mindfulness, analyzing dreams, uncovering your latent desire to have sex with your mother. But most people on both sides of this debate are talking about what psychiatrists call "supportive therapy" - unstructured talking about your feelings and what's going on in your life. I know the responsible thing to say is something like "this is helpful for some people but not others". I will say that, in the end. But I have a lot of sympathy for the people debating it. I have such a strong intuition of "why would this possibly work?" that it's always shocked me when other people say it does. And I know other people with such a strong intuition of "obviously this would work!" that it shocks them to hear other people even question it. Yet my patients seem to line up about half and half: some of them find therapy really great, others not helpful at all. Whenever I try to understand this, I find myself coming back to this tweet: