Astral Codex Ten Podcast

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

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-plagues-and-peoples [This is the seventeenth of seventeen finalists in the book review contest. This one was chosen out of the reviews I somehow missed the first time around. There were four other such essays, which you can see in a supplementary runners-up packet here. I'll make a post about how to vote tomorrow. - SA] Biological evolution was hijacked by cultural evolution; tools and language allowed humankind to upset the ecological balance in incredible ways. We should all know the story by now. Human grunts to other human and they agree to kill a wooly mammoth together and then grunt and agree to share the meat and then grunt and learn to make a spear and grunt and form a complex society and worldwide dominant species. Parasites and viruses are invisible and hard to grunt about. A lion, in contrast, is difficult not to grunt about. This book, Plagues and Peoples written by William H. McNeill in 1976, frames the entirety of human history and prehistory in the context of humankind's relationship with microparasites and viruses. Communication, culture, tools, clothes, and shelter allowed humans to hunt dominantly, live anywhere, and deal with most ecological challenges- but microparasites remained elusively hard to deal with until modern times. This uneasy relationship with the invisible unconsciously shapes where human's live, how civilizations form, and how societies are organized. At every step of humanity's evolution, McNeill sees microparasites and viruses being one of the 'fundamental parameters and determinants of human history.'

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/on-cerebralab-on-nuttcarhart-harris [epistemic status: extremely speculative] George at CerebraLab has a new review of Nutt and Carhart-Harris's paper on serotonin receptors (I previously reviewed it here). Two points stood out that I had previously missed: First of all - predictive coding identifies suffering with prediction error. This conflicts with common sense. Suppose I tell you I'm going to stab you in the arm, you agree that I'm going to stab you in the arm, and then I stab you in the arm, and it hurts a lot. You predicted what would happen correctly, but you still suffered. The theory resolves this with a distinction between common-sense-level and neurological predictions: your brain is "set" to expect normal neurological feedback from your arm, and when it gets pain signals instead, that's a violated prediction, and this is the level on which prediction error = suffering. But there are other cases where the common-sense and neurological sense of predictions are more congruent. When you first step into a cold shower, you feel suffering, but after you've been in it a while you adjust your "predictions" and it's no longer as unpleasant. If you unexpectedly lost $25,000 it would come as an extremely unpleasant shock, but when you predictably have to pay the taxman $25,000 each year you grumblingly put up with it. The theory of "active inference" adds another layer of complexity here; it posits that sometimes your brain automatically resolves prediction error through action. If you were expecting to be well-balanced, but actually you're off-balance, you'll reflexively right yourself until you're where you expected to be. At its limit, this theory says that all action takes place through the creation and resolution of prediction errors - I stand up by "predicting" on a neurological level that I will stand up, and then my motor cortex tries to resolve the "error" by making me actually stand. (one remaining problem here is why and how some prediction errors get interpreted as rewards. If you get $1 million one day because you're a CEO and it's payday and that's how much you make every payday, you will not be especially happy. If you get $1 million because you're an ordinary middle-class person and a crypto billionaire semi-randomly decides to give you $1 million one day, you will be very happy. This has been traced to reward being dopamine-based prediction error in the nucleus accumbens, and the CEO was predicting his windfall while the gift recipient wasn't. This suggests there's still something we don't understand about prediction error and suffering). So one question is: for some given prediction error, how much do I suffer vs. adjust my predictions and stop feeling it vs. take action to resolve it? George's take on Carhart-Harris & Nutt is that this is influenced by the balance of 5-HT1A vs. 5-HT2A receptors - two different kinds of serotonin receptor. 5-HT1A is (to vastly oversimplify) the main target of antidepressants. The more strongly it's stimulated, the more likely you are to resolve prediction error by adjusting your predictions - the equivalent of stepping into a freezing shower, but then acclimating so that it feels okay. Suppose you're depressed/anxious/upset because your boss keeps yelling at you. With enough 5-HT1A activation, you're better able to - on a neurological level - adjust your world-model to include a prediction that your boss will yell at you. Then when your boss does yell at you, there's less prediction error and less suffering. This is good insofar as you're suffering less, but bad insofar as you've adjusted to stop caring about a bad thing or thinking of it as something that needs solving - though it's more complicated than this, since suffering less can make you less depressed and being less depressed can put you in a more solution-oriented frame of mind. 5-HT2A receptors are (to vastly oversimplify) the main target of psychedelics. The more strongly it's stimulated, the more active your inference gets. George argues that this means psychedelics are more likely to get you to try to solve your problems. But is this really true? The average person on shrooms doesn't spend their trip contacting HR and reporting their abusive boss, they spend it staring at a flower marveling at how delicate the petals are or something. What problem is this solving? I think Carhart-Harris, Nutt, and maybe George think that this "active coping" isn't necessarily physical action per se, it's rejiggering your world model on a deeper level so that it's more creative and risky in generating strategies. It's a bias towards thinking of problems as solveable. This could potentially fit with the thing where people who do too much LSD become yogis or transhumanists or whatever; they're biased towards believing *all* problems are solveable, even the tough ones like suffering and mortality. (this mostly, but not completely, meshes with Carhart-Harris' other work on psychedelics as relaxed beliefs under uncertainty) All of this was in the paper and my review, but I like the way George ties it together with problems of active inference and the adjusting-predictions vs. changing-the-world tradeoff. If true, this should be testable on the very small scale, with predictions around perception and movement.