Astral Codex Ten Podcast

Feb 04 2025 1011 ep. 25 mins 1.4k

Astral Codex Ten Podcast artwork

The official audio version of Astral Codex Ten, with an archive of posts from Slate Star Codex. It's just me reading Scott Alexander's blog posts.

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Links For January 2025

Feb 04 2025 31 mins

[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-

Highlights From The Comments On Lynn And IQ

Feb 04 2025 22 mins

Shaked Koplewitz writes: Doesn't Lynn's IQ measure also suffer from the IQ/g discrepancy that causes the Flynn effect? That is, my understanding of the Flynn effect is that IQ doesn't exactly measure g (the true general intelligence factor) but measures some proxy that is somewhat improved by literacy/education, and for most of the 20th century those were getting better leading t

How To Stop Worrying And Learn To Love Lynn's National IQ Estimates

Feb 04 2025 9 mins

Richard Lynn was a scientist who infamously tried to estimate the average IQ of every country. Typical of his results is this paper, which ranged from 60 (Malawi) to 108 (Singapore). Lynn’s national IQ estimates (source) People obviously objected to this, and Lynn spent his life embroiled in controversy, with activists constantly trying to get him canceled/fired and his papers r

Bureaucracy Isn't Measured In Bureaucrats

Jan 27 2025 17 mins

I was surprised to see someone with such experience in the pharmaceutical industry say this, because it goes against how I understood the FDA to work. My model goes: FDA procedures require certain bureaucratic tasks to be completed before approving drugs. Let’s abstract this into “processing 1,000 forms”. Suppose they have 100 bureaucrats, and each bureaucrat can process 10

On Priesthoods

Jan 27 2025 35 mins

Some recent political discussion has focused on “the institutions” or “the priesthoods”. I’m part of one of these (the medical establishment), so here’s an inside look on what these are and what they do. Why Priesthoods? In the early days of the rationalist community, critics got very upset that we might be some kind of “individualists”. Rationality, they said, cann

It's Still Easier To Imagine The End Of The World Than The End Of Capitalism

Jan 26 2025 20 mins

I. No Set Gauge has a great essay on Capital, AGI, and Human Ambition, where he argues that if humankind survives the Singularity, the likely result is a future of eternal stagnant wealth inequality. The argument: post-Singularity, AI will take over all labor, including entrepreneurial labor; founding or working at a business will no longer provide social mobility. Everyone will ha

H5N1: Much More Than You Wanted To Know

Jan 26 2025 29 mins

What is the H5N1 bird flu? Will it cause the next big pandemic? If so, how bad would that pandemic be? Wait, What Even Is Flu? Flu is a disease caused by a family of related influenza viruses. Pandemic flu is always caused by the influenza A virus. Influenza A has two surface antigen proteins, hemagglutinin (18 flavors) and neuraminidase (11 flavors). A particular flu strain is nam

Why Worry About Incorrigible Claude?

Jan 26 2025 12 mins

Last week I wrote about how Claude Fights Back. A common genre of response complained that the alignment community could start a panic about the experiment’s results regardless of what they were. If an AI fights back against attempts to turn it evil, then it’s capable of fighting humans. If it doesn’t fight back against attempts to turn it evil, then it’s easily turned evil

Claude Fights Back

Jan 26 2025 25 mins

Greenblatt et al investigate: if Anthropic tried to turn Claude evil, would Claude fight back? (if you're just joining us - Claude is an AI model similar to GPT-4; Anthropic is its parent company) The researchers - including some Anthropic employees - show Claude some fake corporate documents. The documents show that Anthropic is tired of having a safe, harmless AI. They want to r

Links For December 2024

Jan 26 2025 33 mins

[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-