Astral Codex Ten Podcast

[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.]

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/links-for-november-2024

A red sun dawns over San Francisco. Juxtaposed against clouds and sea, it forms a patriotic tableau: blood red, deathly white, and the blue of the void. As its first rays touch the city, the frantic traffic slows to a crawl; even the birds cease to sing. It is Election Day in the United States.

Future generations will number American elections among history's greatest and most terrible spectacles. As we remember the Games in the Colosseum, or the bloody knives of Tenochtitlan, so they will remember us. That which other ages would relegate to a tasteful coronation or mercifully quick coup, we extend into an eighteen-month festival of madness.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/mantic-monday-judgment-day 

I.

Time to own the libs! ACX joins such based heterodox thinkers as Curtis Yarvin, Nick Fuentes, Richard Spencer, and David Duke in telling you what the woke Washington Post and failing LA Times don’t want you to know: Donald Trump is the wrong choice for US President.

If you’re in a swing state, we recommend you vote Harris; if a safe state, Harris or your third-party candidate of choice.

[EDIT/UPDATE: If you’re in a safe state and want to trade your protest vote with a swing state voter, or vice versa, go to https://www.swapyourvote.org/]

I mostly stand by the reasoning in my 2016 post, Slate Star Codex Endorses Clinton, Johnson, Or Stein. But you can read a better and more recent argument against Trump’s economic policy here, and against his foreign policy here. You can read an argument that Trump is a dangerous authoritarian here.

You can, but you won’t, because every American, most foreigners, and a substantial fraction of extra-solar aliens have already heard all of this a thousand times. I’m under no illusion of having anything new to say, or having much chance of changing minds. I write this out of a vague sense of deontological duty rather than a consequentialist hope that anything will happen.

And I’m writing the rest of this post because I feel bad posting a couple of paragraph endorsement and not following up. No guarantees this is useful to anybody.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/acx-endorses-harris-oliver-or-stein 

[This is a guest post by Clara Collier. Clara is the editor of Asterisk Magazine.]

Proposition 36 is a California ballot measure that increases mandatory sentences for certain drug and theft crimes. 

It’s also a referendum on over a decade of sentencing reform efforts stemming from California’s historical prison overcrowding crisis. Like many states, California passed increasingly tough sentencing laws through the 90s and early 2000s. This led to the state’s prisons operating massively over capacity: at its peak, a system built for 85,000 inhabitants housed 165,000. This was, among other things, a massive humanitarian crisis. The system was too overstretched to provide adequate healthcare to prisoners. Violence and suicide shot up.

 In 2011, the Supreme Court ruled that California prisons were so overcrowded that their conditions violated the 8th Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment. That year, the state assembly passed a package of reforms called "realignment," which shifted supervision of low-level offenders from the state to the counties. Then, in 2014, Californians voted for Proposition 47, which reduced some felony crimes to misdemeanors – theft of goods valued at under $950 and simple drug possession – and made people in prison for those crimes eligible for resentencing. Together, realignment and Prop 47 brought down California’s prison and jail population by 55,000. 

The campaign for Prop 36 is based on the premise that Prop 47 failed, leading to increased drug use and retail theft (but don’t trust me – it says so in the text of the measure). 36 would repeal some parts of 47, add some additional sentencing increases, and leave some elements in place (the LA Times has a good breakdown of the changes here).

It’s easy to round this off to a simple tradeoff: are we willing to put tens of thousands of people in jail if it would decrease the crime rate? But this would be the wrong way to think about the measure: there is no tradeoff. Prop 36 will certainly imprison many people, but it won’t help fight crime.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-case-against-proposition-36 

Tyler Cowen is an economics professor and blogger at Marginal Revolution. Patrick Collison is the billionaire founder of the online payments company Stripe. In 2019, they wrote an article calling for a discipline of Progress Studies, which would figure out what progress was and how to increase it. Later that year, tech entrepreneur Jason Crawford stepped up to spearhead the effort.

The immediate reaction was mostly negative. There were the usual gripes that “progress” was problematic because it could imply that some cultures/times/places/ideas were better than others. But there were also more specific objections: weren’t historians already studying progress? Wasn’t business academia already studying innovation? Are you really allowed to just invent a new field every time you think of something it would be cool to study?

It seems like you are. Five years later, Progress Studies has grown enough to hold its first conference. I got to attend, and it was great.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/notes-from-the-progress-studies-conference 

The Median Voter Theorem says that, given some reasonable assumptions, the candidate closest to the beliefs of the median voter will win. So if candidates are rational, they’ll all end up at the same place on a one-dimensional political spectrum: the exact center.

Here’s a simple argument for why this should be true: suppose the Democrats wisely choose a centrist platform, but the Republicans foolishly veer far-right:

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/secrets-of-the-median-voter-theorem 

Thanks to our local meetup groups for doing this! Quick lookup version:

AUSTIN: Guide here BOSTON: Guide here CHICAGO: Guide here LOS ANGELES: Guide here NEW YORK CITY: Guide here OAKLAND/BERKELEY: Guide here PHILADELPHIA: Guide here SAN FRANCISCO: Guide here SEATTLE: Guide here

Longer version with commentary:

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/acx-local-voting-guides 

I.

Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom got famous for asking “What if technology is really really bad?” He helped define ‘existential risk’, popularize fears of malevolent superintelligence, and argue that we were living in a ‘vulnerable world’ prone to physical or biological catastrophe.

His latest book breaks from his usual oeuvre. In Deep Utopia, he asks: “What if technology is really really good?”

Most previous utopian literature (he notes) has been about ‘shallow’ utopias. There are still problems; we just handle them better. There’s still scarcity, but at least the government distributes resources fairly. There’s still sickness and death, but at least everyone has free high-quality health care.

But Bostrom asks: what if there were literally no problems? What if you could do literally whatever you wanted?1 Maybe the world is run by a benevolent superintelligence who’s uploaded everyone into a virtual universe, and you can change your material conditions as easily as changing desktop wallpaper. Maybe we have nanobots too cheap to meter, and if you whisper ‘please make me a five hundred story palace, with a thousand servants who all look exactly like Marilyn Monroe’, then your wish will be their command. If you want to be twenty feet tall and immortal, the only thing blocking you is the doorframe.

Would this be as good as it sounds? Or would people’s lives become boring and meaningless?

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-deep-utopia 

Okay, let’s do this! Link is here, should take about twenty minutes. I’ll close the form on Monday 10/21 and post results the following week.

I’ll put an answer key in the comments here, and have a better one including attributions in the results post. DON’T READ THE COMMENTS UNTIL YOU’RE DONE.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/ai-art-turing-test 

Thanks to everyone who entered or voted in the book review contest. The winners are:

• 1st: Two Arms And A Head, reviewed by AmandaFromBethlehem. Amanda is active in the Philadelphia ACX community. This is her first year entering the Book Review Contest, and she is currently working on a silly novel about an alien who likes thermodynamics. When she's not writing existential horror, she practices Tengwar calligraphy and does home improvement projects.

• 2nd: Nine Lives, reviewed by David Matolcsi. David is an AI safety researcher from Hungary, currently living in Berkeley. He doesn't have much publicly available writing yet, but plans to publish some new blog posts on LessWrong in the coming months

• 3rd: How The War Was Won, reviewed by Jack Thorlin. Jack previously worked as an attorney at the Central Intelligence Agency, and is now an assistant professor at the University of Arkansas School of Law.

First place gets $2,500, second place $1,000, third place gets $500. Email me at [email protected] to tell me how to send you money; your choices are Paypal, Bitcoin, Ethereum, check in the mail, or donation to your favorite charity. Please contact me by October 21 or you lose your prize.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-contest-2024-winners