Astral Codex Ten Podcast

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/please-dont-give-up-on-having-kids Please Don't Give Up On Having Kids Because Of Climate Change It will probably make things worse, and there are better ways to contribute 22 hr ago 119 904 I. A recent poll finds that 39% of young people "feel uncertain" about having children because of climate change. And sure, people say a lot of things on polls, but people seem to be talking about this more and more. For example, from NPR: Should We Be Having Kids In The Age Of Climate Change? Standing before several dozen students in a college classroom, Travis Rieder tries to convince them not to have children. Or at least not too many. He's at James Madison University in southwest Virginia to talk about a "small-family ethic" — to question the assumptions of a society that sees having children as good, throws parties for expecting parents, and in which parents then pressure their kids to "give them grandchildren." Why question such assumptions? The prospect of climate catastrophe. For years, people have lamented how bad things might get "for our grandchildren," but Rieder tells the students that future isn't so far off anymore. Or, from CNBC, Climate Change Is Making People Think Twice About Having Children:

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-modern Thanks to everyone who commented on Whither Tartaria (currently 1079 comments). Many of you really like modern architecture, and many others of you really hate it. I appreciate most of you being able to accept disagreement on that and move on to the bigger question of why there's so much more of it now. The most interesting thing I got from the comments was Chaostician linking to Wikipedia's page on the Great Male Renunciation - men's fashion changing from ornate colorful clothing to dark suits. Wikipedia seems pretty convinced that this was because of egalitarianism norms: The Great Male Renunciation is the historical phenomenon at the end of the 18th century in which Western men stopped using brilliant or refined forms in their dress, which were left to women's clothing. Coined by psychoanalyst John Flügel in 1930, it is considered a major turning point in the history of clothing in which the men relinquished their claim to adornment and beauty. The Great Renunciation encouraged the establishment of the suit's monopoly on male dress codes at the beginning of the 19th century. The Great Male Renunciation began in the mid-18th century, inspired by the ideals of the The Enlightenment; clothing that signaled aristocratic status fell out of style in favor of functional, utilitarian garments. The newfound practicality of men's clothing also coincided with the articulation of the idea that men were rational and that women were frivolous and emotional.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-the-scout-mindset I. You tried Carol Dweck's Growth Mindset, but the replication crisis crushed your faith. You tried Mike Cernovich's Gorilla Mindset, but your neighbors all took out restraining orders against you. And yet, without a mindset, what separates you from the beasts? Just in time, Julia Galef brings us The Scout Mindset (subtitle: "Why Some People See Things Clearly And Others Don't). Galef admits she's a little behind the curve on this one. Books on rationality and overcoming cognitive biases were big ten years ago (Thinking Fast And Slow, Predictably Irrational, The Black Swan, etc). Nowadays "smiling TED-talk-circuit celebrity wants to help you improve your thinking!" is more likely to elicit groans than breathless anticipation. And that isn't the least accurate description of Julia (you can watch her TED talk here). But Galef earned her celebrity status honestly, through long years of hard labor in the rationality mines. Back in ~2007, a bunch of people interested in biases and decision-making joined the "rationalist community" centered around the group blogs Overcoming Bias and Less Wrong. Around 2012, they mostly left to do different stuff. Some of them went into AI to try to save the world. Others went into effective altruism to try to revolutionize charity. Some, like me, got distracted and wrote a few thousand blog posts on whatever shiny things happened to catch their eyes. But a few stuck around and tried to complete the original project. They founded a group called the Center For Applied Rationality (aka "CFAR", yes, it's a pun) to try to figure out how to actually make people more rational in the real world.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/whither-tartaria Imagine a postapocalyptic world. Beside the ruined buildings of our own civilization - St. Peter's Basilica, the Taj Mahal, those really great Art Deco skyscrapers - dwell savages in mud huts. The savages see the buildings every day, but they never compose legends about how they were built by the gods in a lost golden age. No, they say they themselves could totally build things just as good or better. They just choose to build mud huts instead, because they're more stylish. This is the setup for my all-time favorite conspiracy theory, Tartaria. Its true believers say we are those savages. We live in the shadow of the Taj Mahal, Art Deco skyscrapers, etc. But our buildings look like this:

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-september [Remember, I haven't independently verified each link. On average, commenters will end up spotting evidence that around two or three of the links in each links post are wrong or misleading. I correct these as I see them, and will highlight important corrections later, but I can't guarantee I will have caught them all by the time you read this.] 1: My parents' and grandparents' generations had lots of weird rules about fashion like "never wear white after Labor Day". I'd always been baffled by this kind of stuff - why not? What would happen if you did? In 1922, someone wore a straw hat after official stop-wearing-straw-hats date September 15, leading to the week-long Straw Hat Riot in New York and several hospitalizations. 2: The Story Of Adrenochrome: QAnon believes that elites are addicted to adrenochrome, a drug synthesized from the glands of tortured children. Where did this theory come from? The short version is "Hunter S Thompson made it up for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas". But read the long version for, among other things, explanations for why it shows up in Dune and A Clockwork Orange. 3: While the Aztecs were sacrificing prisoners to the gods, their neighbors in the Tlaxcala were "a republic ruled by an assembly of commoners and nobles". 4: Contra speculation, there is no link between knowledge of the Tuskegee experiment and black people's unwillingness to take the COVID vaccine.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/lisbon-meetup-this-saturday When: Saturday, September 18th, 5 PM Where: guitars.record.caps, aka a suspiciously ordinary-looking tree in Parque da Pedra, Monsanto Park. Our intrepid organizer writes: "Spot the tall white guy in pink pants. There's an adjacent road with street parking, and a clearing at that point that opens onto a trail that leads to the park." 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. Also, me! I'll be there on my meetups tour and hope to meet many of you. If you're somewhere other than Lisbon , check the spreadsheet to find the closest meetup to you.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-the-revolt-of-the-public I. Martin Gurri's The Revolt Of The Public is from 2014, which means you might as well read the Epic of Gilgamesh. It has a second-edition-update-chapter from 2017, which means it might as well be Beowulf. The book is about how social-media-connected masses are revolting against elites, but the revolt has moved forward so quickly that a lot of what Gurri considers wild speculation is now obvious fact. I picked up the book on its "accurately predicted the present moment" cred, but it predicted the present moment so accurately that it's barely worth reading anymore. It might as well just say "open your eyes and look around". In fact, I can't even really confirm whether it predicted anything accurately or not. Certainly everything it says is true. Anyone who wrote it in 2000 would have been a prophet. Anyone who wrote it in 2020 would have been stating the obvious. Was writing it in 2014 a boring chronicle of clear truths, or an achievement for the ages? I find my memories are insufficiently precise to be sure. It's like that thing where someone who warned about the coronavirus on March 1 2020 was a bold visionary, but someone who warned about it on March 20 was a conformist bandwagoner - except about the entire history of the 21st century so far. Maybe the best we can do with it is read it backwards, as an artifact of the era when the public was only ambiguously revolting, to see how the knowledge of the coming age arose and spread.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-modi-a-political-biography I. I have a friend who studied the history of fascism. She gets angry when people call Trump (or some other villain du jour) fascist. "Words have meanings! Fascism isn't just any right-winger you dislike!" Maybe she takes this a little too far; by a strict definition, she's not even sure Franco qualifies. Anyway, I mention this because she says Narendra Modi, the current prime minister of India, is absolutely, literally, a fascist. This is a strong claim, but Balakrishna Moonje helped found the precursor to Modi's party. He went on a fact-finding trip to fascist Italy, met Mussolini, decided he had the right idea, and told the Indian papers that he wanted to: "...imitate the youth movement of Germany and the Balilla and Fascist organisations of Italy. I think they are eminently suited for introduction in India, adapting them to suit the special conditions. I have been very much impressed by these movements and I have seen their activities with my own eyes in all details." So let's at least say this isn't the least fascist-inspired group around. It's not that there aren't extenuating circumstances. Indian independence movements of the time were fighting Britain, which made the fascist powers natural allies. And in 1934 when Moonje met Mussolini nobody had seen just how badly fascism could go. Still, not the sort of pedigree you want for your country's ruling party.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/washington-dc-meetup-this-saturday When: Saturday, September 11th, 5 PM Where: decent.search.hurls, aka the patio and lot around 1002 N St. NW. 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. Also, me! I'll be there on my meetups tour and hope to meet many of you. If you're somewhere other than DC, check the spreadsheet to find the closest meetup to you.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-unbearable-semiheaviness-of-being I hear that Google tests prospective employees with weird vaguely-science-related riddles. If I were in charge of this, here's what I would ask: You're an American spy in Cuba. The CIA has gotten you a position refilling the water coolers in Castro's presidential palace, hoping you can poison him. But Castro's security is pretty good. Every time you enter the palace, they search you so exhaustively that you're sure you can't smuggle anything in. And you're sure you can't access any poisons within the palace. And every time he drinks water, Castro calls in a chemist to test it for any impurity first; the tests can detect any contaminant at any concentration. On the plus side, you're completely unsupervised within the palace, and have access to a kitchen with all the usual kitchen appliances. And the CIA has given you a time manipulation gizmo, so you can take literally as long as you want, even if it's thousands of years. How do you kill Castro? One answer: Start with an amount of water several thousand times Castro's usual daily consumption. Put it in the freezer until it's half frozen. Dump out the unfrozen half, melt the frozen half, then repeat this process with the meltwater. After some very large number of cycles, put the result in Castro's water cooler every day. He'll be dead within a year. The hydrogen in water is a combination of normal hydrogen (only a proton in the nucleus) and deuterium (a proton and neutron in the nucleus). These have slightly different chemical properties, so you can do various types of distillation to enrich for one or the other, including repeated freezing (realistically freezing works very slowly; our hypothetical spy would need an unrealistic amount of time, water, and patience). Normal water is about 99.9% H2O, 0.1% HDO, and negligible amounts of D2O. Water with more D2O than normal is called heavy water, water with more HDO than normal is called semiheavy water, and water with more H2O than normal (ie not even the usual tiny amounts of the other two constituents) is called light water.