Astral Codex Ten

Paypal

12 min read

Paypal

Article

Paypal is a recurring brand in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 8 times across 8 issues between July 10, 2021 and March 28, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “please email me at scott@slatestarcodex.com with either a Paypal account”; “My PayPal: https://paypal.me/seeelegance”; “your choices are Paypal, Bitcoin, Ethereum, check in the mail”. It most often appears alongside ACX, Canada, Substack.

Metadata

  • Category: Brands
  • Mention count: 8
  • Issue count: 8
  • First seen: July 10, 2021
  • Last seen: March 28, 2024

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Book Review Contest: Winners
July 10, 2021 · Original source
People who won the top prizes also get monetary awards. Due to the generosity of subscribers to this blog, I've decided to quintuple the amounts I originally promised - so first place will get $5000, second place $2500, and third place $1250. Readers' Choice will also get $1250. If you won a monetary prize, please email me at scott@slatestarcodex.com with either a Paypal account, an Ethereum address, or a charity you want me to donate to.
ACX Grants ++: The First Half
February 03, 2022 · Original source
#27: Reverse-Engineer Dating Photo Quality I'm Loweren, a biology PhD doing photography and dating advice on the side. Some of you might know me from the Optimized Dating Discord server or the corresponding blog: https://optimizeddating.substack.com A keystone piece of advice in our community is to put more effort into making better dating photos, and to use the photo rating service Photofeeler to quantify the performance of each photo. This advice was helpful for many people, however there's one problem: it's not clear which factors make the photo perform better or worse on Photofeeler, as the developers are not keen on sharing the analytics. I will attempt to reverse-engineer the most important factors that make the dating photo look better by testing various factors (camera distance, focal length, aperture size, smile etc.) against the control photos using multiple subjects. I estimate that for each $80 in donations I can test 2 factors using 3 test subjects. I already have the first batch of photos ready to be tested. Results will be published on the blog as they come, which will hopefully help more people take better dating photos. My PayPal: https://paypal.me/seeelegance
Book Review Contest 2022 Winners
September 02, 2022 · Original source
=3rd: The Internationalists, reviewed by Belos. Belos is working on a new blook titled best of a great lot about system design for effective governance. All three third place winners were within two votes of the others, so I decided to award a joint prize. First place gets $5,000, second place $2,500, all three third places get $1,000 each. Please email me at scott@slatestarcodex.com 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 1 or you lose your prize. The other Finalists were: Consciousness And The Brain, reviewed by Demost. Demost is a university researcher in mathematics, computer science, and neuroscience.
Inline links: The Internationalists, best of a great lot, Consciousness And The Brain
Why I'm Less Than Infinitely Hostile To Cryptocurrency
December 08, 2022 · Original source
The most obvious example of this is the way Paypal bans sex workers (including sometimes confiscating the money in their accounts). I don’t think the CEO of Paypal is personally a prude. I think he’s afraid that he’ll get in trouble with the government if he looks like he’s soft on “public indecency”. Without any official diktats that could become a Supreme Court case, the government successfully makes sex work punishingly hard.
Inline links: Paypal bans sex workers
Recently I’ve seen this expand from sex work to erotic fiction to medical marijuana to expressing opinions dubbed “misinformation”. One weird supplement company I liked almost had to shut down, not because the government said anything they were selling was illegal, but because payment processors thought it was the kind of thing that someone wouldn’t like, and refused to take their money. I don’t think the CEO of Visa is personally opposed to weird supplements, I think it’s the same kind of soft government collusion that’s been revealed to be going on at Twitter and Facebook and everywhere else.
Inline links: erotic fiction, medical marijuana, expressing opinions dubbed “misinformation”, almost had to shut down
Open Thread 272
April 17, 2023 · Original source
3: I’ve recently been confronted with the question of whether or not to ban (including permaban) paid subscribers who break rules. I don’t want to create a class system where richer people are above the law, but it also seems harsh to take your money and then prevent you from using the service you paid for. My working solution will be to err towards not banning paid subscribers (or banning them for less time) in edge cases, otherwise ban them if they earn it, and refund subscription costs to anyone banned if they ask for it. I haven’t tried this yet, I don’t know how hard it is to do through Stripe, and I might ask you for Paypal if I have to. Being banned doesn’t mean I don’t like you or appreciate your support, just that the comments section is degenerating quickly and I really want to push back against that.
Book Review: Elon Musk
September 13, 2023 · Original source
Musk creates cognitive dissonance: how can someone be so smart and so dumb at the same time? To reduce the dissonance, people have spawned a whole industry of Musk-bashing, trying to explain away each of his accomplishments: Peter Thiel gets all the credit for PayPal, Martin Eberhard gets all the credit for Tesla, NASA cash keeps SpaceX afloat, something something blood emeralds. Others try to come up with reasons he’s wholly smart - a 4D chessmaster whose apparent drunken stumbles lead inexorably to victory.
At PayPal, as per his first wife:
This book taught me that everyone always predicts Elon will fail at whatever he does. When he started the original X (later PayPal), everyone who knew anything about finance told him he would fail. Just because he was a hotshot coder who could write software didn’t mean he could navigate the totally-different and heavily-regulated world of finance. Elon, who started out indeed knowing nothing about finance, learned on the job and got a $200 million exit. Gawker voted Tesla #1 in their Biggest Tech Flops of 2007 (also on their list were Facebook ads and the Android . . . maybe journalists don’t actually understand tech?)
Book Review Contest 2023 Winners
September 15, 2023 · Original source
3rd: Cities And The Wealth Of Nations, reviewed by Étienne Fortier-Dubois. Étienne is a writer and programmer in Montreal. He blogs at Atlas of Wonders and Monsters and was also the author of one of last year’s finalists, Making Nature. First place gets $2,500, second place $1,000, third place gets $500. Please email me at scott@slatestarcodex.com 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 1 or you lose your prize. The other Finalists were: Lying for Money, reviewed by Kuiper. He's a video game scriptwriter who just launched a Substack. He also scripwrites edutainment YouTube videos for an audience of millions. (You can contact him if you need his expertise.)
Inline links: Cities And The Wealth Of Nations, Atlas of Wonders and Monsters, Making Nature, Lying for Money, Substack, edutainment YouTube videos
Practically-A-Book Review: Rootclaim $100,000 Lab Leak Debate
March 28, 2024 · Original source
For example, does Putin have cancer? We start with the prior for Russian men ages 60-69 having cancer (14.32%, according to health data). We adjust for Putin’s healthy lifestyle (-30% cancer risk) and lack of family history (-5%). Putin hasn’t vanished from the world stage for long periods of time, which seems about 4x more likely to be true if he didn’t have cancer than if he did. About half of cancer patients lose their hair, and Putin hasn’t, so we’ll divide by two. On the other hand, Putin’s face has gotten more swollen recently, which happens about six times more often to cancer patients than to others, so we’ll multiply by six. And so on and so forth, until we end up with the final calculation: 86% chance Putin doesn’t have cancer, too bad. This is an unusual way to do things, but Saar claimed some early victories. For example, in a celebrity Israeli murder case, Saar used Rootclaim to determine that the main suspect was likely innocent, and a local mental patient had committed the crime; later, new DNA evidence seemed to back him up. One other important fact about Saar: he is very rich. In 2008, he sold his fraud detection startup to PayPal for $169 million. Since then he’s founded more companies, made more good investments, and won hundreds of thousands of dollars in professional poker. So, in the grand tradition of very rich people who think they have invented new forms of reasoning, Saar issued a monetary challenge. If you disagree with any of his Rootclaim analyses - you think Putin does have cancer, or whatever - he and the Rootclaim team will bet you $100,000 that they’re right. If the answer will come out eventually (eg wait to see when Putin dies), you can wait and see. Otherwise, he’ll accept all comers in video debates in front of a mutually-agreeable panel of judges. Since then, Saar and his $100,000 offer have been a fixture of Internet debates everywhere. When I argued that Vitamin D didn’t help fight COVID, people urged me to bet against Saar, and we had a good discussion before finally failing to agree on terms. When anti-vaccine multimillionaire Steve Kirsch made a similar offer, Saar took him up on it, although they’ve been bogged down in judge selection for the past year. Rootclaim also found in favor of the lab leak hypothesis of COVID. When Saar talked about this on an old ACX comment thread, fellow commenter tgof137 (Peter Miller) agreed to take him up on his $100K bet. At the time, I had no idea who Peter was. I kind of still don’t. He’s not Internet famous. He describes himself as a “physics student, programmer, and mountaineer” who “obsessively researches random topics”. After a family member got into lab leak a few years ago, he started investigating. Although he started somewhere between neutral and positive towards the hypothesis, he ended up “90%+” convinced it was false. He also ended up annoyed: contrarian bloggers were raking in Substack cash by promoting lab leak, but there seemed to be no incentive to defend zoonosis. Unlike Saar, Peter was not especially rich. $100K represented a big fraction of his net worth. But (he wrote me in an email): It was a moderately large financial risk for me ... I [expected] a smart and unbiased person would vote for zoonosis with, say, 80% odds after seeing all the evidence. If both judges voting for lab origin is uncorrelated, that's 20% squared, and it was pretty low odds of a catastrophic financial risk for me. I wasn't highly worried about losing the debate because I was wrong about the science. I put in enough effort to know I'm probably correct there. My biggest fear was that I'd choke at the debate for some reason, that I'd be too anxious and particularly that I'd be unable to sleep the night beforehand. I have zero prior debate experience to rely upon. If this seems like a weirdly blase attitude towards risk, Peter told blogger Philipp Markolin that he “is a mountain climber where sometimes there is a 5% chance to die, and the stakes are just not that high for a debate.” Unlike the eternally bogged-down Saar-Kirsch debate, here things moved quickly. The two contestants put out a call for judges on the ACX subreddit, and agreed on: Will van Treuren, a pharmaceutical entrepreneur with a PhD from Stanford and a background in bacteriology and immunology.
Inline links: does Putin have cancer, celebrity Israeli murder case, argued that Vitamin D didn’t help fight COVID, took him up on it, on an old ACX comment thread, told blogger Philipp Markolin, put out a call for judges