Consciousness is the great mystery. In search of answers, scientists have plumbed every edge case they can think of - sleep, comas, lucid dreams, LSD trips, meditative ecstasies, seizures, neurosurgeries, that one pastor in 18th century England who claimed a carriage accident turned him into a p-zombie. Still, new stuff occasionally turns up.

I assume this tweet is a troll (source: the guy has a frog avatar)1:

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/moments-of-awakening

I often disagree with Marginal Revolution, but their post today made me a new level of angry:

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/contra-mr-on-charity-regrants

Many commenters responded to yesterday’s post by challenging the claim that 1.2 million Americans died of COVID...

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-evidence-that-a-million-americans

Five years later, we can’t stop talking about COVID. Remember lockdowns? The conflicting guidelines about masks - don’t wear them! Wear them! Maybe wear them! School closures, remote learning, learning loss, something about teachers’ unions. That one Vox article on how worrying about COVID was anti-Chinese racism. The time Trump sort of half-suggested injecting disinfectants. Hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, fluvoxamine, Paxlovid. Those jerks who tried to pressure you into getting vaccines, or those other jerks who wouldn’t get vaccines even though it put everyone else at risk. Anthony Fauci, Pierre Kory, Great Barrington, Tomas Pueyo, Alina Chan. Five years later, you can open up any news site and find continuing debate about all of these things.

The only thing about COVID nobody talks about anymore is the 1.2 million deaths.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-other-covid-reckoning

Bryan Caplan’s Selfish Reasons To Have More Kids is like the Bible. You already know what it says. You’ve already decided whether you believe or not. Do you really have to read it all the way through?

But when you’re going through a rough patch in your life, sometimes it helps to pick up a Bible and look for pearls of forgotten wisdom. That’s where I am now. Having twins is a lot of work. My wife does most of it. My nanny does most of what’s left. Even so, the remaining few hours a day leave me exhausted. I decided to read the canonical book on how having kids is easier and more fun than you think, to see if maybe I was overdoing something.

After many trials, tribulations, false starts, grabs, shrieks, and attacks of opportunity . . .

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-selfish-reasons-to-have

Ask Redditors what’s the worst subreddit, and a few names always come up. /r/atheism and /r/childfree are unpopular, but if I read them with an open mind, I always end up sympathetic - neither lifestyle is persecuted in my particular corner of society, but the Redditors there have usually been through some crazy stuff, and I don’t begrudge them a place to vent. The one that really floors me is /r/petfree.

The denizens of /r/petfree don’t like pets. Their particular complaints vary, but most common are:

• Some stores either allow pets or don’t enforce bans on them, and then there are pets go in those stores, and they are dirty and annoying.
• Some parks either allow off-leash pets or don’t enforce bans on them, and then there are off-leash pets in those parks, and they are dirty and annoying.
• Sometimes pets attack people.
• Sometimes inconsiderate people get pets they can’t take care of and offload some of the burden onto you.
• Sometimes people are cringe about their pets, in an “AWWWWW MY PRECIOUS WITTLE FUR BABY” way.
• Sometimes people barge into spaces that are about something else and talk about their pets instead.

These are all valid complaints. But the people on /r/petfree go a little far:

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/in-search-of-rpetfree

Some of the more unhinged writing on superintelligence pictures AI doing things that seem like magic. Crossing air gaps to escape its data center. Building nanomachines from simple components. Plowing through physical bottlenecks to revolutionize the economy in months.

More sober thinkers point out that these things might be physically impossible. You can’t do physically impossible things, even if you’re very smart.

No, say the speculators, you don’t understand. Everything is physically impossible when you’re 800 IQ points too dumb to figure it out. A chimp might feel secure that humans couldn’t reach him if he climbed a tree; he could never predict arrows, ladders, chainsaws, or helicopters. What superintelligent strategies lie as far outside our solution set as “use a helicopter” is outside a chimp’s?

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/testing-ais-geoguessr-genius

Cathy Young’s new hit piece on Curtis Yarvin (aka Mencius Moldbug) doesn’t mince words. Titled The Blogger Who Hates America, it describes him as an "inept", "not exactly coherent" "trollish, ill-informed pseudo-intellectual" notable for his "woefully superficial knowledge and utter ignorance".

Yarvin’s fans counter that if you look deeper, he has good responses to Young’s objections:

Both sides are right. The synthesis is that Moldbug sold out.

In the late 2000s, Moldbug wrote some genuinely interesting speculations on novel sci-fi variants of autocracy. Admitting that the dictatorships of the 20th century were horrifying, he proposed creative ways to patch their vulnerabilities by combining 18th century monarchy with 22nd century cyberpunk to create something better than either. These ideas might not have been realistic. But they were cool, edgy, and had a certain intellectual appeal.

Then in the late 2010s, he caught his first whiff of actual power and dropped it all like a hot potato. The MAGA movement was exactly what 2000s Moldbug feared most - a cancerous outgrowth of democracy riding the same wave of populist anger as the 20th century dictatorships he loathed. But in the hope of winning a temporary political victory, he let them wear him as a skinsuit - giving their normal, boring autocratic tendencies the mystique of the cool, edgy, all-vulnerabilities-patched autocracy he foretold in his manifestos.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/moldbug-sold-out

President Trump’s approval rating has fallen to near-historic lows. With economic disruption from the tariffs likely to hit next month, his numbers will probably get even worse; this administration could reach unprecedented levels of unpopularity. If I were a far-right populist, I would be thinking hard about a strategy to prevent the blowback from crippling the movement.

Such a strategy is easy to come by. Anger over DOGE and deportations has a natural floor. If Trump’s base starts abandoning him, it will be because of the tariffs. But tariffs aren’t a load-bearing part of the MAGA platform. Other right-populist leaders like Orban, Bukele, and Modi show no interest in them. They seem an idiosyncratic obsession of Trump’s, a cost that the rest of the movement pays to keep him around.

So, (our hypothetical populist strategist might start thinking after Trump’s approval hits the ocean trenches and starts drilling) - whatever. MAGA minus Trump’s personal idiosyncrasies can remain a viable platform. You don’t even have to exert any effort to make it happen. Trump will retire in 2028 and pass the torch to Vance. And although Vance supports tariffs now, that’s only because he’s a spineless toady. After Trump leaves the picture, Vance will gain thirty IQ points, make an eloquent speech about how tariffs were the right tool for the mid-2020s but no longer, and the problem will solve itself. Right?

Don’t let them get away with this. Although it’s true that tariffs owe as much to Trump’s idiosyncrasies as to the inexorable logic of right-wing populism, the ability of a President to hold the nation hostage to his own idiosyncrasies is itself a consequence of populist ideology.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-populist-right-must-own-tariffs