Astral Codex Ten Podcast

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/predictions-for-2022-contest - Read the contest description/rules here - Give feedback on the contest here - And once again, the form where you take the contest is here I didn't let myself check prediction markets when making these forecasts since that would spoil the fun. I also only permitted myself at most five minutes of research on any one question. See the bottom of the post for a contest/survey. US/WORLD1. Biden approval rating (as per 538) is greater than fifty percent: 40% 2. At least $250 million in damage from a single round of mass protests in US: 10% 3. PredictIt thinks Joe Biden is most likely 2024 Dem nominee: 80% 4: …thinks Donald Trump is most likely 2024 GOP nominee: 60% 5. Beijing Olympics happen successfully on schedule: 99% 6. Major flare-up (worse than past 5 years) in Russia/Ukraine conflict: 50% 7. Major flare-up (worse past 10 years) in Israel/Palestine conflict: 5% 8. Major flare-up (worse than in past 50 years) in China/Taiwan conflict: 5% 9. Honduran ZEDEs legally crippled to the point where no reasonable person would invest in them further: 5% 10. New ZEDE approved in Honduras: 30% ECON/TECH 11. Gamestop stock price still above $100: 30% 12. Bitcoin above 100K: 20% 13. Ethereum above 5K: 20% 14. Ethereum above 0.05 BTC: 90% 15. Bored Ape floor price here below current price of $203K: 40% 16. Dow above 35K: 90% 17. ...above 37.5K: 40% 18. Inflation for the year below five percent: 90% 19. Unemployment below five percent: 50% 20. Google widely allows remote work, no questions asked: 50% 21. Starship reaches orbit: 90%

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-health I'm experimenting with making this more structured this time, so: Section I: Collection of comments on US health care Section II: Drug pricing, and does the US subsidize the rest of the world? Section III: Why are health economics so unlike other economics? Section IV: Giant pile of comments by readers who live in different countries explaining their own countries' health systems, and their experiences with them. I. GummyBearDoc writes: I want to push back on the assertion Scott made that "Certainly rich people in America get good health care." After he published this book in June 2020, Ezekiel Emmanuel published an article in JAMA IM (link: https://bit.ly/3nGRHL8) called "Comparing Health Outcomes of Privileged US Citizens With Those of Average Residents of Other Developed Countries." He wanted to test the commonly stated trope that a feature of the US healthcare system is that the rich here get the very best care in the world. To do that, he looked at outcomes across six benchmark diseases (heart attack, colon cancer, breast cancer, infant mortality, maternal mortality, and pediatric acute lymphocytic leukemia). He compared outcomes for white people in the 1% of richest counties in the US, 5% richest counties in the US, and average outcomes in 12 rich countries (i'm not going to type them all out but they're places like Australia, Canada, and Germany). The results were...not so great for rich Americans!

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/against-that-poverty-and-infant-eegs A recent paper claims to have found an Impact Of A Poverty Reduction Intervention On Infant Brain Activity. It's doing the rounds of the usual media sites, like Vox and the New York Times: The New York Times @nytimes Breaking News: Cash payments for low-income mothers increased brain function in babies, a study found, with potential implications for U.S. safety net policy. Cash Aid to Poor Mothers Increases Brain Activity in Babies, Study FindsThe research could have policy implications as President Biden pushes to revive his proposal to expand the child tax credit.nyti.ms January 24th 2022 3,348 Retweets13,165 Likes I was going to try to fact-check this, but a bunch of other people (see eg Philippe Lemoine, Stuart Ritchie) have beaten me to it. Still, right now all the fact-checking is scattered across a bunch of Twitter accounts, so I'll content myself with being the first person to summarize it all in a Substack post, and beg you to believe I would have come up with the same objections eventually. Before we start: why be suspicious of this paper? Hundreds of studies come out daily, we don't have enough time to nitpick all of them. Why this one? For me, it's because it's a shared environmental effect being measured by EEG at the intersection of poverty and cognition. Shared environmental effects on cognition are notoriously hard to find. Twin studies suggest they are rare. Some people have countered that perhaps the twin studies haven't measured poor enough people, and there's a lot of research being done to see what happens if you try to correct for that, but so far it's still controversial. All that research is being done by cognitive testing, which is a reasonable way to measure cognition. This study uses EEG instead. I'm skeptical of social science studies that use neuroimaging, and although EEG isn't exactly the same as neuroimaging like CT or MRI, it shares a similar issue: you have to figure out how to convert a multi-dimensional result (in this case, a squiggly line on a piece of paper) into a single number that you can do statistics to. This offers a lot of degrees of freedom, which researchers don't always use responsibly.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/bounded-distrust I. Suppose you're a liberal who doesn't trust FOX News. One day you're at the airport, waiting for a plane, ambiently watching the TV at the gate. It's FOX News, and they're saying that a mass shooter just shot twenty people in Yankee Stadium. There's live footage from the stadium with lots of people running and screaming. Do you believe this? I'm a liberal who doesn't trust FOX News, and sure, I believe it. The level on which FOX News is bad isn't the level where they invent mass shootings that never happened. They wouldn't use deepfakes or staged actors to fake something and then call it "live footage". That would go way beyond anything FOX had done before. Liberals might say things like "You can't trust FOX News on anything, they are 100% total liars", but realistically we still trust them quite a lot on stuff like this. Now suppose FOX says that police have apprehended a suspect, a Saudi immigrant named Abdullah Abdul. They show footage from a press conference where the police are talking about this. Do you believe them? Again, yes. While I've heard rare stories of the media jumping in too early to identify a suspect, "the police have apprehended" seems like a pretty objective statement. And once again, faking a police conference - or even dubbing over a police conference so that when the police say some other name, the viewers hear "Abdullah Abdul" - is way worse than anything I've ever heard of FOX doing. Even if I learned of one case of them doing something like this once, I would think "wow that's crazy" and still not update to believing they did it all the time. It doesn't matter at all that FOX is biased. You could argue that "FOX wants to fan fear of Islamic terrorism, so it's in their self-interest to make up cases of Islamic terrorism that don't exist". Or "FOX is against gun control, so if it was a white gun owner who did this shooting they would want to change the identity so it sounded like a Saudi terrorist". But those sound like crazy conspiracy theories. Even FOX's worst enemies don't accuse them of doing things like this.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/grading-my-2021-predictions At the beginning of every year, I make predictions. At the end of every year, I score them. Here are 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020. And here are the predictions I made for 2021 (in April; I was really late). Bolded statements happened, italicized statements did not happen (as of 1/1/22). Neither-bold-nor-italic resolved ambiguous. We have a debate every year over whether 50% predictions are meaningful in this paradigm; feel free to continue it. 1. Biden approval rating (as per 538) is greater than fifty percent: 80% 2. Court packing is clearly going to happen (new justices don't have to be appointed by end of year): 5% 3. Yang is New York mayor: 80% 4. Newsom recalled as CA governor: 5% 5. At least $250 million in damage from BLM protests this year: 30% 6. Significant capital gains tax hike (above 30% for highest bracket): 20% 7. Trump is allowed back on Twitter: 20% 8. Tokyo Olympics happen on schedule: 70% 9. Major flare-up (significantly worse than anything in past 5 years) in Russia/Ukraine war: 20%

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/resubmit-and-summarize-your-proposals https://forms.gle/xhVTebsZgSEQ7BpeA I promised you all that once I was done with the main round of ACX Grants, I would run Grants ++, where I publish the proposals that didn't get funded here, so readers could look at them, see if they're interesting, and maybe get in touch and offer funding. Two things have made this harder than expected. First, a lot of people gave pretty unclear instructions about whether they wanted me to include their proposal in this, or changed their minds halfway through, in a way that would require me to keep track of a lot of emails about whose minds changed how many times, or to reconstruct long edit histories.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-which-country-has-the I. If you're like me, all you've heard about international health care systems is "America sucks and should feel bad, everyone else is probably fine or whatever". Is there more we can learn? Our guide to this question will be Which Country Has The World's Best Health Care, by Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel. Emanuel is a professor of bioethics, but I've been told to be less reflexively hostile to bioethicists. He got in trouble a few years ago for a comment that got summed up as "life after 75 is not worth living", but he never used those exact words, and his point about the dangers of excessive life-prolonging medical care is well-taken. He opposes euthanasia, which I interpret as demanding state-sponsored coercive violence to prevent torture victims from escaping, but I know other people interpret it differently. And he's the brother of former Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel, but ... nope, can't think of any extenuating circumstances for this one. Still, Emanuel is one of a very few people qualified to compare international health systems. And

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/practically-a-book-review-yudkowsky I. The story thus far: AI safety, which started as the hobbyhorse of a few weird transhumanists in the early 2000s, has grown into a medium-sized respectable field. OpenAI, the people responsible for GPT-3 and other marvels, have a safety team. So do DeepMind, the people responsible for AlphaGo, AlphaFold, and AlphaWorldConquest (last one as yet unreleased). So do Stanford, Cambridge, UC Berkeley, etc, etc. Thanks to donations from people like Elon Musk and Dustin Moskowitz, everyone involved is contentedly flush with cash. They all report making slow but encouraging progress. Eliezer Yudkowsky, one of the original weird transhumanists, is having none of this. He says the problem is harder than everyone else thinks. Their clever solutions will fail. He's been flitting around for the past few years, Cassandra-like, insisting that their plans will explode and they are doomed.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/theres-a-time-for-everyone Last week I got married. I met her two years ago, at one of (our mutual friend) Aella's weird parties. Not this one, a different one. I was at this one too though. It was great. Our first date, we talked about Singapore's child tax credits, which gave me advanced notice of where her mind was at. Our second date, we talked about category formation in borderline personality disorder, which later became this post. Our third date, we talked about why Inuit suicide rates were so high, which later became this post. Then COVID hit. We switched our dates to a Minecraft virtual world, where we built a house together. At the time, I completely missed the kabbalistic significance of this. I don't usually talk about my personal life on here. But I feel like I owe you guys this one, because, well, some of you have been reading this blog a long time. And some of my earliest posts (eg) were me complaining about the dating world, and how tough it was to meet anybody or even to stay sane. And you guys were kind to me, and commiserated with me, and shared your own experiences. I feel an obligation to check in with the rest of you, to celebrate those of you who have also succeeded and empathize with those of you who haven't yet. Maybe I'm not a success story here, exactly. I'm getting married at 37, a lot later than I would have liked. And my story involved parts that probably don't replicate well, like becoming a niche Internet microcelebrity whose readers sometimes invite him to things despite his many social inadequacies.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-dont Lots of people thought I was being unfair to the movie. G. Retriever writes: I TOTALLY disagree with your reading of the movie. To me it was a description of a social dynamic that makes even very straightforward problems impossible to focus on collectively, a tragedy of the commons where "the commons" is basically "attention". Even the experts get sucked into the vortex, nobody comes out clean, and in the end everyone gets killed. Batislu: Hmm .. I didn't come away from Don't Look Up with the message of "Trust The Experts". Rather I came away with a sense of futility that we're doomed as a species due to our inability to discover and form consensus around the truth. I thought the movie did a great job of relaying that, given that humanity is completely wiped out by the end. Erik Hoel: If we broaden our scope from the obvious mappings (Female President onto Trump) and admit that pure satires don't make the best cinema, at its broadest, it's a movie about institutional failure. Across party lines (though it skewers one more than the other, sure). It's for this reason it felt fresh to me and that I liked it. Institutional failure, even human failure, is becoming more and more obvious, as it's undeniable that our institutions, from academia to the White House, are more sclerotic and incapable and, well, foolish, than they either were in the past or appeared to be. And to me this movie was like an expression of America's Id realizing that over the past several years. Steph: