[Original post here]

Table Of Contents

1: Responses To Broad Categories Of Objections 2: Responses To Specific Comments 3: Comments By People Who Have Relevant Experiences 4: Closing Thoughts

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-mentally

[Editor's note: I accept guest posts from certain people, especially past Book Review Contest winners. Daniel Böttger, who wrote last year's review of On The Marble Cliffs, has finally taken me up on this and submitted this essay. I don't necessarily agree with or endorse all guest posts, and I'm still collecting my thoughts (ha!) on this one.]

Nobody knows for sure how subjective experiences relate to objective physics. That is the main reason why there are serious claims that not everything is physics. It has been called "the most important problem in the biological sciences", "the last frontier of brain science", and "as important as anything that can possibly exist" as well as "core to" all value and ethics.

So, let's solve that in a blog post.

[This is one of the finalists in the 2024 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I'll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you've read them all, I'll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked]

"You wake up screaming, frightened by memories,

You're plagued by nightmares, do we haunt all of your dreams?"

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-the-family-that

Ten people are stuck on a lifeboat after their ship sank. It will be weeks before anyone finds them, and they're out of food.

They've heard this story before, so they decide to turn to cannibalism sooner rather than later. They agree to draw lots to determine the victim. Just as the first person is reaching for the lots, Albert shouts out "WAIT LET'S ALL KILL AND EAT BOB!"

They agree to do this instead of drawing lots. This is obvious, right? For nine out of ten people, it's a better deal. For nine out of ten people, it brings their chance of death from 1/10 to 0. Bob's against it, of course, but he's outvoted. The nine others overpower Bob and eat him.

Something about this surprises me.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/lifeboat-games-and-backscratchers

I.

Suppose that you, an ordinary person, open your door and start choking on yellow smoke. You call up your representative and say "there should be less pollution".

A technical expert might hear "there should be less pollution" and have dozens of questions. Do you just want to do common-sense things, like lower the detection threshold for hexamethyldecawhatever? Or do you want to ban tetraethylpentawhatever, which is vital for the baby formula food chain and would cause millions of babies to die if you banned it?

Any pollution legislation must be made of specific policies. In some sense, it's impossible to be "for" or "against" the broad concept of "reducing pollution". Everyone would be against a bill that devastated the baby formula supply chain for no benefit. And everyone would support a magical bill that cleaned the skies with no extra hardship on industry. In between, there are just a million different tradeoffs; some are good, others bad. So (the technocrat concludes), it's incoherent to support "reducing pollution". You can only support (or oppose) particular plans.

And yet ordinary people should be able to say "I want to stop choking on yellow smoke every time I go outside" without having to learn the difference between hexamethyldecawhatever and tetraethylpentawhatever.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/details-that-you-should-include-in

[This is one of the finalists in the 2024 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I'll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you've read them all, I'll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked]

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-don-juan

The last week hasn't been great for the Democratic Party. First Biden bombed the debate. But the subsequent decision about whether/how to replace Biden has also been embarrassing. Biden has refused to step aside gracefully, and party elites don't seem to have any contingency plan. Worse, they don't even seem united on the need to figure anything out, with many deflecting the conversation to irrelevant points like "Trump is also bad" or pretending that nothing is really wrong.

Some of the party's problems are hard and have no shortcuts. But the big one - figuring out whether replacing Biden would even help the Democrats' electoral chances - is a good match for prediction markets. Set up markets to find the probability of Democrats winning they nominate Biden, vs. the probability of Democrats winning if they replace him with someone else.

(see my Prediction Market FAQ for why I think they are good for cases like these)

Before we go into specifics, the summary result: Replacing Biden with Harris is neutral to slightly positive; replacing Biden with Newsom or a generic Democrat increases their odds of winning by 10 - 15 percentage points. There are some potential technical objections to this claim, but they mostly suggest reasons why the markets might overestimate Biden's chances rather than underestimate them.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/prediction-markets-suggest-replacing

[This is one of the finalists in the 2024 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I'll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you've read them all, I'll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked]

Matthew Scully, author of Dominion, is an unlikely animal welfare advocate. He's a conservative Christian who worked as a speechwriter for George W. Bush. That's like finding out that Greta Thunberg's Chief of Staff spent their spare time writing a 400-page, densely researched book called "Guns Are Good, Actually."

Scully's unusual background could be why it took me years of reading everything on animal welfare I could get my hands on before I stumbled on his 2002 manifesto. Let this be a warning to other authors — write just one little State of the Union address that exalts the War on Terror and your books might not get a lot of reach in more liberal, EA-adjacent circles.

Scully is like a right-wing, vegetarian, Christian, David Foster Wallace. If you read DFW's Consider the Lobster and thought, "I wish someone would write a full length book with this vibe, where a very talented and surprisingly funny writer excoriates problematic industries," Dominion is the book for you.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-dominion-by-matthew

Alexander: Hello and welcome to the first Presidential debate of 2024. Based on the remarkable popularity of the previous debates I moderated (2016, 2020, 2023), I've been asked to come here again and help the American people learn more about the our two candidates - President Joseph Biden, and former president Donald J. Trump. This debate will be broadcast live to select viewers, and I'll also post a transcript on my blog.

Let's start with a question for President Biden. Mr. President, the biggest political story of the past four years was Dobbs. v. Jackson Women's Health, which overturned Roe v. Wade and gave final decision-making power on abortion back to the states. How would a second Biden administration treat this issue? Do you think states should be setting policy on abortion?

Biden: I'm not even sure states exist.

Alexander: You're . . . not sure states exist?

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/my-2024-presidential-debate

I think I got the original post slightly off.

I was critiquing Sam Kriss' claim that the best traditions come from "just doing stuff", without trying to tie things back to anything in the past.

The counterexample I was thinking of was all the 2010s New Atheist attempts to reinvent "church, but secular". These were well-intentioned. Christians get lots of benefits from going to church, like a good community. These benefits don't seem obviously dependent on the religious nature. So instead of tying your weekly meeting back to what Jesus and St. Peter and so on said two thousand years ago, why not "just do stuff" and have a secular weekly meeting?

Most of these attempts fell apart. One of them, the Sunday Assembly, clings to existence but doesn't seem too successful. People with ancient traditions 1, people who just do stuff 0.

But after thinking about it more, maybe this isn't what Sam means.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/clarification-on-fake-tradition-is