Astral Codex Ten Podcast

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/lockdown-effectiveness-much-more Back when everyone was debating lockdowns, I promised I'd come back to it after there was more data. God willing, the pandemic is over enough that we've got all the data we're going to get. So: did lockdowns work? There’s no way to answer this completely and taking into account every relevant factor, so I’m necessarily going to be simplifying things and focusing on some aspects of the question more than others. Sorry. Preliminary Theoretical Issues 1: What Is A “Lockdown”? Obviously "lockdown" is underspecified. There are many things you can do to reduce transmission of viruses. Researchers have taken two different approaches here. First, they've looked at the effects of specific policies (called “non-pharmaceutical interventions” or “NPIs”). A typical categorization system is the one used in Brauner et al, which looks at: - Banning gatherings > 1000 people - Banning gatherings > 100 people - Banning gatherings > 10 people - Closing schools - Closing universities - Closing some non-essential businesses - Closing most businesses - Stay at home orders

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/model-city-monday Support the author: astralcodexten.substack.com/subscribe Then support the podcast: patreon.com/sscpodcast  Happy belated Fourth of July! This potentially-recurring column is about modern-day independence-seekers: charter cities, utopian communes, secessionist movements, and the like. I’ve always found these fascinating, and finally remembered that nobody can prevent me from talking about them. I want to start by making it clear that, as the old saying goes, retweets ≠ endorsements. Some of these projects violate my ethical beliefs. Some of them are scams. Some of them are very nice, very earnest people, who will very earnestly all move to a godforsaken desert and then very earnestly starve to death. I’m trusting you all not to do the thing where you say “I saw it on a blog, so it has to be a good idea!”

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-how Support the author: astralcodexten.substack.com/subscribe Then support the podcast: patreon.com/sscpodcast  I made a mistake in the email notifications, so if you didn’t know I wrote a review of Joe Studwell’s How Asia Works earlier this week - well, now you know. Erusian writes: 1.) Three things stick out here. Firstly, Studwell vastly overstates how damaging land reform has to be to landlords. Taiwan and Japan both bought out landlords with bonds. The bonds became worth less because since government bonds grew more slowly than the economy. But there are still a fair number of wealthy old families around in both countries. The important thing is not the destruction of landlords as a class: it's putting land into the hands of people (whether smallholding peasants or professional farmers) who own the land, have an incentive to improve it, and whose primary income is gained not by owning land but by producing agricultural products. The two are ultimately equivalent at equilibrium. How you get there is not especially important and paying off the landlords is fine if it works. Likewise, giving land to collectives or to peasant groups (as opposed to individual peasants) doesn't work very well because it keeps it out of the power of enterprising farmers. Secondly, he completely ignores the many times land reform failed. East Asia is not unique in its attempts at land reform. It was fairly common in Africa, Eastern Europe, etc. Ukraine and Romania had incredibly fertile soil and it's hard to think of regimes that eliminated their landlords harder. Yet they haven't really seen similar effects.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/welcome-polygenically-screened-babies   Another thing I missed during my hiatus last year: the birth of the first polygenically-screened baby. [conflict of interest notice: LifeView, the company that handled the screening, was co-founded by Steve Hsu. I’ve known Steve for many years now, he is very nice to me, always patiently answers my genetics questions, and sometimes comes to SSC/ACX meetups] During in vitro fertilization, a woman takes drugs that make her produce lots of eggs. Doctors extract the eggs and fertilize them with sperm from a partner or donor, producing lots of embryos. Hopefully at least one of the embryos looks healthy, and then the doctors implant it in the woman or a surrogate parent. For a while now, if the process produces enough embryos, doctors have used some simple low-tech genetic tests to choose the healthiest. For example, they might look for Down syndrome or other obvious chromosomal abnormalities, or for very severe monogenic diseases like sickle cell anemia. All of this is routine.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-how-asia-works   What was the best thing that ever happened? From a very zoomed-out, by-the-numbers perspective, it has to be China's sudden lurch from Third World basketcase to dynamic modern economy. A billion people went from starving peasants to the middle class. In the 1960s, sixty million people died of famine in the Chinese countryside; by the 2010s, that same countryside was criss-crossed with the world's most advanced high-speed rail network, and dotted with high-tech factories. And the best thing that ever happened kept happening, again and again. First it was Japan during the Meiji Restoration. Then it was Korea and Taiwan in the 1960s. Then China in the 90s. Now Vietnam and others seem poised to follow. (fun trivia question: ignoring sudden oil windfalls, what country has had the highest percent GDP growth over the past 30 years? Answer, as far as I can tell: the People's Democratic Republic of Laos.) There was nothing predetermined about this. These countries started with nothing. In 1950, South Korea and Taiwan were poorer than Honduras or the Congo. But they managed to break into the ranks of the First World even while dozens of similar countries stayed poor. Why? Joe Studwell claims this isn't mysterious at all. You don't have to bring in culture, genetics, or anything complicated like that. Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, etc, just practiced good economic policy. Any country that tries the same economic policy will get equally rich, as China and Vietnam are discovering. Unfortunately, most countries practice bad economic policy, partly because the IMF / World Bank / rich country economic advisors got things really wrong. They recommended free markets and open borders, which are good for rich countries, but bad for developing ones. Developing countries need to start with planned economies, then phase in free market policies gradually and in the right order. Since rich country economists kept leading everyone astray, the only countries that developed properly were weird nationalist dictatorships and communist states that ignored the Western establishment out of spite. But now the economic establishment is starting to admit its mistakes, giving other countries a chance to catch up. How Asia Works is Studwell's guide to good economic policy. He gives a three-part plan for national development. First, land reform. Second, industrial subsidies plus export discipline. Third, financial policy in service of the first two goals. 1. Land Reform Land reform means taking farmland away from landlords and giving it to peasant farmers. Undeveloped countries are mostly rural (for example, Korea was about 80% rural in 1950). Most people are farmers. Usually these countries are coming out of feudalism or colonialism or something and dominated by a few big landowners. In one region of the Philippines (Studwell's poster child for doing everything wrong) 17 families control 78% of farmland. Landowners hire peasants to work the land, then take most of the profit.

Now that the book review contest is winding down, I want to start another big project: the ACX Reader Research Survey. I used to do regular December surveys with questions I was interested in. Some people would ask me to include questions for their own research projects. I always declined, because if I said yes to everyone it would take a whole new survey to fit all the questions on. Eventually I realized I should actually just do the whole new survey, so this is that. This blog has a lot of readers in in specific demographics, like: - the tech industry - science - involved in meditation/drugs/biohacking - with unusual genders/sexualities - with psychiatric issues …so this would be a good way to learn about those demographics. The main inspiration for this project was that meditation researcher Daniel Ingram asked if he could piggyback on my yearly survey to ask people about their meditation experiences, and although I was excited about this I shut SSC down before we got a chance to make this happen. This is for him and everyone else with similar needs.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-june   [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: Zoologists search for the Higgs Bison 2: “The cult deficit” is the theory that we don’t have as many cults as we used to and this says something important about our society. Here’s some data, courtesy of the Secretum Secretorum Substack:

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-62121 Among this month’s interesting Metaculus predictions: If Puerto Rico gets statehood, will their first two senators both be Democrats? 50%. I’d seen accusations that the Democrats want Puerto Rican statehood to seize a Senate advantage, and counterarguments that no, PR isn’t as solid-blue as people like to think, but this is the first time I’ve ever seen the “risk” of a PR Republican Senator quantified. Higher than I thought! Will Jeff Bezos make a big investment in anti-aging this year? 25% Aubrey de Grey has hinted that somebody really big is about to get into the anti-aging/longevity field, and speculation has centered on a newly-retired and not-getting-any-younger (so far!) Jeff Bezos. This prediction resolves as true if Bezos puts at least $50 million into anti-aging. Will crypto sites default before 2023? Bitmex 26%, Binance 15%, Coinbase 5% Not many predictions here, so don’t take these numbers too seriously. I also don’t know what a “default” would mean in this sense - default to at least one customer, but everyone else is okay? Lose all its money to a hack? What will Prospera’s population be in 2035? Approximately 0 Prospera is a charter city taking shape in Honduras; see here for more. They’re planning to have 10,000 residents by 2025, and 100,000 by some unspecified point in the future. Metaculus doesn’t think it will happen; more than half of forecasters say they’ll have fewer than 100 residents in 2035 (presumably because they have failed and ceased to exist) and only 10% of forecasters think they’ll have more than 10,000, which would be a bare minimum for partial success. So far

https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/16/fear-and-loathing-at-effective-altruism-global-2017/   San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run – but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world….There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. — Hunter S. Thompson Effective altruism is the movement devoted to finding the highest-impact ways to help other people and the world. Philosopher William MacAskill described it as “doing for the pursuit of good what the Scientific Revolution did for the pursuit of truth”. They have an annual global conference to touch base and discuss strategy. This year it was in the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, and I got a chance to check it out. .The lake-fringed monumental neoclassical architecture represents ‘utilitiarian distribution of limited resources’   The official conference theme was “Doing Good Together”. The official conference interaction style was “earnest”. The official conference effectiveness level was “very”. And it was impossible to walk away from some of the talks without being impressed. Saturday afternoon there was a talk by some senior research analysts at GiveWell, which researches global development charities. They’ve evaluated dozens of organizations and moved $260 million to the most effective, mostly ones fighting malaria and parasitic infections. Next were other senior research analysts from the Open Philanthropy Project, who have done their own detailed effectiveness investigations and moved about $200 million. The parade went on. More senior research analysts. More nine-digit sums of money. More organizations, all with names that kind of blended together. The Center for Effective Altruism. The Center For Effective Global Action. Raising For Effective Giving. Effecting Effective Effectiveness. Or maybe not, I think I was hallucinating pretty hard by the end.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/vote-in-the-book-review-contest Thanks for reading the entries in this very delayed (and then very protracted) book review contest. Please vote for your favorites here, using approval voting (ie vote for however many you want). I’ll probably keep voting open until the end of June in case you want a chance to go back and re-read your favorites. In case you’ve forgotten, the finalists are: 1: Order Without Law 2: On The Natural Faculties 3: Progress And Poverty 4: Are We Smart Enough To Know How Smart Animals Are? 5: Why Buddhism Is True 6: Double Fold 7: The Wizard And The Prophet 8: Through The Eye Of A Needle 9: The Years Of Lyndon Johnson 10: Addiction By Design 11: The Accidental Superpower 12: Humankind 13: The Collapse Of Complex Societies 14: Where’s My Flying Car? 15: Down And Out In Paris And London 16: How Children Fail 17: Plagues And Peoples