Astral Codex Ten

Publications: other

12 min read

Publications: other

Substacks, magazines, zines, journals, and publications referenced in the archive. This section collects the other slice of the category index.

Reference Index

Use the title to open the reference entry. Use the caret to expand a compact inline dossier with source context, issue trail, related pages, and outbound links.

"Most Drugs Are Bad For You"1 mentions across 1 issues

"Most Drugs Are Bad For You" is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 10, 2024 and May 10, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as ""the podcast is called “Most Drugs Are Bad For You”!"". It most often appears alongside 1123581321, California, Canada.

Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
May 10, 2024
Last seen
May 10, 2024
Outbound links
Issue trail
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Source context
Highlights From The Comments On Hanson And Health Care
May 10, 2024 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
#571 mentions across 1 issues

#57 is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between November 28, 2023 and November 28, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "see #57 here". It most often appears alongside 80,000 Hours, Adam D’Angelo, AI.

Reference entry
#57
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
November 28, 2023
Last seen
November 28, 2023
Outbound links
Issue trail
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Source context
In Continued Defense Of Effective Altruism
November 28, 2023 · Original source
...red a CEO, then backpedaled after he threatened to destroy the company. These are bad, but I’m not sure they cancel out the effect of saving one life, let alone 200,000 (see #57 here ) (Somebody’s going to accuse me of downplaying the FTX disaster here. I agree FTX was genuinely bad, and I feel bad for the people who lost money. But I think this prov...
slatestarcodex1 mentions across 1 issues

/r/slatestarcodex is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 21, 2025 and February 21, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "thanks /r/slatestarcodex commenters". It most often appears alongside ACX, Adrian, Anthropic principle.

Reference entry
slatestarcodex
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
February 21, 2025
Last seen
February 21, 2025
Outbound links
Issue trail
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Source context
Highlights From The Comments On Tegmark's Mathematical Universe
February 21, 2025 · Original source
“We find ourselves on planet Robonica VII, rather than as Boltzmann brains floating in the void. It seems like it’s not wildly impossibly uncommon for beings to exist in this way.” “Consciousness” is a useful shorthand for discussing these insights so that we don’t have to talk about planets full of robots every time we want to have a philosophical discussion, but I don’t think anything in this discussion hinges on it. dsteffee writes: Why can't you make a random draw from an infinite set? I messed up my terminology here, although luckily most people figured out what I meant. The correct terminology (thanks /r/slatestarcodex commenters) is that you can’t make a uniform random draw from a set of infinite measure. Imagine trying to pick a random number between one and infinity. If you pick any particular number - let’s say 408,170,037,993,105,667,148,717 - then it will be shockingly low - approximately 100% of all possible numbers are higher than it. It would be much crazier than someone trying to pick a number from one to one billion and choosing “one”. Since this will happen no matter what number you pick, the concept itself must be ill-defined. Reddit commenter elliotglazer has an even cuter version of this paradox: » “The contradiction can be made more apparent with the "two draws" paradox. Suppose one could draw a positive integer uniformly at random, and did so twice. What's the probability the second is greater? No matter what the first draw is, you will then have 100% confidence the second is greater, so by conservation of expected evidence, you should already believe with 100% confidence the second is greater. Of course, I could tell you the second draw first to argue that with 100% probability, the first is greater, contradiction.” When I said you could do this with some sort of simplicity-weighted measure, I meant something like how 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + … = 1. Here, even though you are adding an infinite number of terms, the sum is a finite number. So if you can put universes in some order, let’s say from simplest to most complex, you could assign the first universe measure 1/2, the second universe measure 1/4, the third universe measure 1/8, and so on, and the sum of their measure would be 1. Then you just draw a random number between 0 and 1 and see which universe it corresponds to (eg if you got 0.641, then since this is between 1/2 and 1/2+1/4, it corresponds to universe #2). EigenCat writes: But there are objective measures of simplicity! They come from information theory. It's the information content of the rules and initial conditions in bits, or else their Kolmogorov complexity (how many bits you need for a program that generates these rules and initial conditions). Of course there's still the question of which *exact* measure we use, but that's very different from saying we don't have an objective simplicity metric at all. (And yes, God has much more complexity based on this metric, because you'd need to fully specify the God's being - basically fully specify a mind, in sufficient detail to be able to predict how that mind would react to *any* situation, and that's way more complex than a few rules on a chalkboard.) Anyway, the bigger question for me is WHY does in need to be weighed specifically by simplicity (of all possible criteria) in the first place : ) I am really out of my depth talking about information theory, but my impression was that this is a useful hack, but not perfectly objectively true, because there is no neutral programming language, no neutral compiler, and no neutral architecture. Kolmogorov complexity of statements is sometimes regarded as language-independent, because there’s a low bound on how much language can matter. But even this practically-low bound is philosophically confusing: since the universe actually has to implement the solution we come up with, there can’t be any ambiguity. But how can the cosmos make an objective cosmic choice among programming languages? This is weird enough that it takes away from the otherwise-impressive elegance of the theory. But also, you can design a perverse programming language where complex concepts are simple, and simple concepts are complex. You can design a compression scheme where the entirety of the Harry Potter universe is represented by the bit ‘1’. Now the Harry Potter universe is the simplest thing in existence and we should expect most observers to live there. This is obviously a ridiculous thing to do, but why? Maybe because now the compiler is complex and unnatural, so we should penalize the complexity of language+compiler scheme? But without knowing what the system architecture is, it’s hard to talk about the size of the compiler - and in this case, we’re trying to pretend that we’re running this whole thing on the void itself, and there is no system architecture! All of this makes me think that although Kolmogorov complexity gestures at a solution, and makes it seem like there should be a solution, nobody has exactly solved this one yet. kzhou7 writes: Though nobody can disprove this hypothesis, there's a reason a lot of physicists dislike it: if it were actually seriously believed, at any previous point in the history of physics, it would have stopped scientific progress. 1650: why does the Earth orbit the Sun the way it does? Of course, because it's a mathematically consistent possibility, ellipses are nice, and we'd be dead if it didn't! What more is there to say? But actually it was Newton's law of gravity.
Inline links: writes, /r/slatestarcodex, writes, writes
Falsifiability doesn’t just break down in weird situations outside the observable universe. It breaks down in every real world problem! It’s true that “there’s no such thing as dinosaurs, the Devil just planted fake fossils” isn’t falsifiable. But “dinosaurs really existed, it wasn’t just the Devil planting fake fossils” is exactly equally unfalsifiable. It’s a double-edged sword! The reason you believe in dinosaurs and not devils is because you have lots of great tools other than falsifiability, and in fact you never really use the falsifiability tool at all. I write a bunch more about this here and here.
Inline links: here, here
”Medical errors are the third leading cause of death” and other statistics you should question1 mentions across 1 issues

”Medical errors are the third leading cause of death” and other statistics you should question is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 30, 2024 and April 30, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "and ”Medical errors are the third leading cause of death” and other statistics you should question". It most often appears alongside 9-11, CATO Unbound, Cochrane Collaboration.

Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
April 30, 2024
Last seen
April 30, 2024
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Response to Hanson On Health Care
April 30, 2024 · Original source
The first link goes to a study that does not try to quantify the number of deaths from medical error. The second goes to a claim that that prescription drugs are the third leading cause of death. For the latter, I would recommend reading Medical Error Is Not The Third Leading Cause Of Death and ”Medical errors are the third leading cause of death” and other statistics you should question. These numbers usually come from massively overcounting medical errors from studies not intended to quantify them, from calling any death that happens after a medical error a result of a medical error, and from ignoring the many more sober estimates of medical error fatality rate that have been published. This isn’t to say that medical errors aren’t real and serious, just that I don’t think many people now continue to defend that particular claim.
Inline links: Medical Error Is Not The Third Leading Cause Of Death, ”Medical errors are the third leading cause of death” and other statistics you should question