Astral Codex Ten Podcast

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-1115   Reciprocal Scoring, Part II I talked about this last week as a potential solution to the problem of long-term forecasting. Instead of waiting a century to see what happens, get a bunch of teams, and incentivize each to predict what the others will guess. If they all expect the others to strive for accuracy, then the stable Schelling point is the most accurate answer. Now there’s a paper, by Karger, Monrad, Mellers, and Tetlock - Reciprocal Scoring: A Method For Forecasting Unanswerable Questions. They focus not just on long-run outcomes but on conditionals and counterfactuals. The paper starts with an argument against conditional prediction markets that I’d somehow missed before. Suppose you want to know whether a mask mandate will save lives during a pandemic. Current state of the art is to start two prediction markets: “conditional on there being a mask mandate, how many people will die?” and “conditional on there not being a mask mandate, how many people will die?” In this situation, this doesn’t work! Governments are more likely to resort to mask mandates in worlds where the pandemic is very bad. So you should probably predict a higher number of deaths for the mandate condition. But then confused policy-makers will interpret your prediction market as evidence that a mask mandate will cost lives.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/apply-for-an-acx-grant   What is ACX Grants? I want to give grants to good research and good projects with a minimum of paperwork. Like an NIH grant or something, only a lot less money and prestige. How is this different from Marginal Revolution's Fast Grants, Nadia Eghbal's Helium Grants, or EA Funds' grant rounds? Not different at all. It’s total 100% plagiarism of them. I'm doing it anyway because I think it’s a good idea, and I predict there are a lot of good people with good projects in this community who haven't heard about / participated in those, but who will participate when I do it. How much money are you giving out? ACX Grants proper will involve $250,000 of my own money, but I’m hoping to supplement with much more of other people’s money, amount to be determined. See the sections on ACX Grants + and ACX Grants ++ below. Why do you have $250,000 to spend on grants? Unsolicited gifts from rich patrons, your generosity in subscribing to my Substack, and the second item here.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-orban Lyman Stone on Twitter: Twitter avatar for @lymanstonekyLyman Stone 石來民 🦬🦬🦬 @lymanstoneky Here's the @slatestarcodex piece: astralcodexten.substack.com/p/dictator-boo… Overall, I agree with a lot of his assessment of Orban. But I want to quibble on two points: 1) The relationship between dictatorship and democracy 2) "Why admire Orban?" Dictator Book Club: Orban...astralcodexten.substack.com November 5th 2021 7 Likes I won’t make you read it all in tweet format. He continues: 1) Dictatorship and democracy. The arguments about Orban cheating in elections might be totally true. I dunno. But that's sort of irrelevant. Neutral opinion polls nobody disputes show he would have gotten 2/3 under almost any system. Image His crude poll share was about 60% before the 2010 election, but given the threshold effects, he'd likely have ended up at a supermajority under almost any system. And as @slatestarcodex [says], a lot of the initiatives that the EU most despises under Orban are initiatives that *everyone agrees* have supermajority public support among Hungarian voters. Moreover, I agree with @slatestarcodex that if public opinion turned in Hungary, Orban would probably turn on a dime too. The dude loves power. But that should inform our read of what's going on in Hungary. *Hungarians wanted* a right-nationalist authoritarian leader, *and so they voted for one*, and the electorate has *wanted* recurrent intensifications of that regime. So is it a dictatorship? Or is it a democracy? This gets at the problem with "democracy" as a concept. Hungary is undeniably Democratic: there is widespread public support for the regime, which is selected by elections, the results of which are a decent approximation of trustworthy and neutral opinion polls. But I think it's still possibly reasonable to call Orban a dictator. He wields enormous *personal* power, there are few checks on his power, and he uses power to create a *personal* clique of supporters to perpetuate that power and enfeeble the competition. But this is the point: Democracy and dictatorship aren't opposites. In fact, they are natural companions! So much so that before the 20th century, "democracy" was often used *literally as a synonym* for "authoritarian and demagogic rule"! Orban is a great example of why the word "democracy" came into ill repute in the past: because it was widely understood that "the people" (often pejoratively "the mob") will often vote for a strongman to stomp his boot on the face of disliked others. That's not so much a disagreement with @slatestarcodex as just a comment where I think the modern western liberal mindset obscures understanding the phenomenon of populist leadership. 2) Why admire Orban? Here I think @slatestarcodex misses some important stuff, perhaps because his biographies miss it. Yes, Orban was incompetent in the 90s. So were MOST immediate post-Soviet leaders! And while Orban may have been corrupt, you can compare the personal wealth of the Fidesz clique to the cliques that looted Russia or Ukraine and realize that Hungary got a better class of corrupt leaders than much of eastern Europe. Moreover, Hungary actually had competitive elections with changes of power and leaders who *respected* those results! Maybe they were dirty but, like, it happened! This wasn't universally true! So why might Hungarians admire a dissident-cum-parliamentarian who competed for their votes and when defeated responded democratically by adapting to try to win the next election? Because.... duh?

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/secrets-of-the-great-families   I. Let's talk impressive families. Aldous Huxley was an author most famous for Brave New World, though his other stuff is also great and underappreciated. His brother Julian Huxley founded UNESCO and the World Wildlife Fund, was secretary of the Zoological Society of London and president of the British Eugenics Society, and coined the terms "ethnic group", "cline", and "transhumanism". Their half-brother Andrew Huxley won the Nobel Prize in Medicine for discovering how nerves work. Their grandfather was Thomas Huxley, one of the first and greatest advocates of evolution, and President of the Royal Society. Henri Poincare was a great mathematician, credited with pioneering chaos theory and topology. The Poincare Institute, Poincare Prize, and the Poincare Crater on the moon are all named after him. His cousin, Raymond Poincare, was president of France from 1913 to 1920. Raymond's brother, Lucien Poincare, was a distinguished physicist, and head of the University of Paris.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/model-city-monday-11821 Telosa, USA Bloomberg: The Diapers.com Guy Wants To Build A Utopian Megalopolis Marc Lore founded diapers.com, various other internet startups, served a stint as Wal-Mart’s e-commerce director, and made a few billion dollars. Now he wants to start a city with a new vision of socially responsible democracy. Why move to this city instead of one of the many existing cities which are not in deserts and, you know, actually exist? Lore’s pitch is that Telosa (working name) will be inclusive and sustainable by following a Georgist model: all the land will be held in a community-owned trust, and all profits will go to social services.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/dictator-book-club-orban   (previously: Erdogan, Modi) I. Some are born great. Some achieve greatness. And some are Victor Orban's college roommates. Orban: Europe's New Strongman and Orbanland, my two sources for this installment of our Dictator Book Club, tell the story of a man who spent the last eleven years taking over Hungary and distributing it to guys he knew in college. Janos Ader, President of Hungary. Laszlo Kover, Speaker of the National Assembly. Joszef Szajer, drafter of the Hungarian constitution. All of them have something in common: they were Viktor Orban's college chums. Gabor Fodor, former Minister of Education, and Lajos Simicska, former media baron, were both literally his roommates. The rank order of how rich and powerful you are in today’s Hungary, and the rank order of how close you sat to Viktor Orban in the cafeteria of Istvan Bibo College, are more similar than anyone has a right to expect. Our story begins on March 30 1988, when young Viktor Orban founded an extra-curricular society at his college called The Alliance Of Young Democrats (Hungarian abbreviation: FiDeSz). Thirty-seven students met in a college common room and agreed to start a youth organization. Orban's two roommates were there, along with a couple of other guys they knew. Orban gave the pitch: the Soviet Union was crumbling. A potential post-Soviet Hungary would need fresh blood, new politicians who could navigate the democratic environment. They could get in on the ground floor. It must have seemed kind of far-fetched. Orban was a hick from the very furthest reaches of Hicksville, the “tiny, wretched village of Alcsutdoboz”. He grew up so poor that he would later describe “what an unforgettable experience it had been for him as a fifteen-year-old to use a bathroom for the first time, and to have warm water simply by turning on a tap”. He was neither exceptionally bright nor exceptionally charismatic. Still, there was something about him. To call it "a competitive streak" would be an understatement. He loved fighting. The dirtier, the better. He had been kicked out of school after school for violent behavior as a child. As a teen, he'd gone into football, and despite having little natural talent he'd worked his way up to the semi-professional leagues through sheer practice and determination. During his mandatory military service, he'd beaten up one of his commanding officers. Throughout his life, people would keep underestimating how long, how dirty, and how intensely he was willing to fight for something he wanted. In the proverb "never mud-wrestle a pig, you'll both get dirty but the pig will like it", the pig is Viktor Orban. Those thirty-six college friends must have seen something in him. They gave him his loyalty, and he gave them their marching orders. The predicted Soviet collapse arrived faster than anybody expected, and after some really fast networking ("did you know I represent the youth, who are the future of this country?") Orban got invited to give a speech at a big ceremony marking the successful revolution, and he knocked it out of the park.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/non-cognitive-skills-for-educational Suppose you want to study the genetics of intelligence. You probably want a sample size in the six digits, and you can't make a six digit number of people sit down and take IQ tests. Also, whenever you say "genetics" and "intelligence" in the same sentence, an angry mob shows up at your door. One solution is to switch to a more popular / less stressful line of work, like Mafia snitch or al-Qaeda second-in-command. But another solution is to use educational attainment.  

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-11121 Keynesian Beauty Contests I have no source for this, someone told me about it at a meetup. Suppose you want to run a forecasting tournament on whether nuclear war will destroy civilization by 2100. But nobody cares how much money they have in eighty years, plus if civilization is destroyed you can’t collect your winnings. There are lots of kludgey solutions to this, but one possibility is a Keynesian beauty contest. Get a lot of isolated teams, and make them predict what all the other teams will guess. Whoever gets closest to the average wins the prize. Let’s start with the good: in theory, this does solve the problem. Presumably the easiest way for the teams to all guess the same is to converge on the “right” answer. In some sense, the definition of probability is what a smart person who knows a certain amount of information should estimate, so if you ask someone to predict what a person just as smart as you who has the same information as you will estimate, that’s like asking for your probability.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/jhanas-and-the-dark-room-problem   The Dark Room Problem in neuroscience goes something like this: suppose the brain is minimizing prediction error, or free energy, or whatever. You can minimize lots of things by sitting quietly in a dark room. Everything will be very, very predictable. So how come people do other things? The usual workaround is inbuilt biological drives, considered as "set points". You "predict" that you will be well-fed, so getting hungry registers as prediction error and brings you out of your dark room to eat. Et cetera. Andrés Gómez Emilsson recently shared a perspective I hadn't considered before, which is: actually, sitting quietly in a dark room is really great. The Buddha discussed states of extreme bliss attainable through meditation: Secluded from sensual pleasures, secluded from unwholesome states, a bhikkhu enters and dwells in the first jhāna, which is accompanied by thought and examination, with rapture and happiness born of seclusion (Samyutta Nikaya) I had always figured that "sensual pleasures" here meant things like sex. But I think maybe he just means stimuli, full stop. The meditator cuts themselves from all sensory stimuli, eg by meditating really hard on a single object like the breath and ignoring everything else, and as a result gets "rapture and happiness born of seclusion".

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/epistemic-minor-leagues [I’m traveling this week - here is an older essay I never previously got around to posting] Viral game designer Adrian Hon wrote an article about What Alternate Reality Games Can Teach Us About QAnon. It argues that people fall for QAnon because it gives them an interesting mystery. It's a place where new discoveries are always around the corner, where a few hours of research by an amateur like you can fill in one of the missing links between Joe Biden and the Lizard Pope. The thrill of QAnon isn't just learning that all your political opponents are secretly Satanists or Illuminati or whatever. It's the feeling that you have something to contribute to the great project of figuring out the secret structure of the world, and that other people in a shared community of knowledge-seeking will appreciate you for it. One place you could go from here is to talk about how QAnoners are the sort of people who are excluded from existing systems of knowledge production. They are never going to be Professors of Biology, and they know it. Their only hopes of being taken seriously as an Expert - a position our culture treats as the height of dignity - is to create a complete alternate system of knowledge, ungrounded in any previous system, where they can end up as an expert on the Lizard Papacy. This is sort of true. But it needs to acknowledge that even being included in existing systems of knowledge production isn't that great. You become a Biology PhD student, you spend ten years learning about fungal ribosomes, and probably there's still some guy in China who knows more than you and beats you to the one interesting thing about fungal ribosomes left to figure out, plus nobody cares about fungal ribosomes anyway. Meanwhile, the QAnon devotee has discovered five earth-shattering facts about the Lizard Papacy in the last two hours, including previously-unrecognized links to the Kennedys, World War I, and ancient Lemuria. I think Hon is right that this drive to discover secrets and add them to a shared community of knowledge-seekers could be a contributor to the QAnon phenomenon. Like I said, it's a good article.