Astral Codex Ten

Internet

54 min read

Internet

Article

Internet is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 11 times across 11 issues between May 10, 2021 and January 16, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as “this topic, which absolutely dominated a lot of the Internet spaces I hung out in”; “nobody has been civil on the Internet since at least 2010”; “spends all day reading tutorials on the Internet”. It most often appears alongside America, US, AI.

Metadata

  • Category: Concepts
  • Mention count: 11
  • Issue count: 11
  • First seen: May 10, 2021
  • Last seen: January 16, 2026

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.

The Rise And Fall Of Online Culture Wars
May 10, 2021 · Original source
We tend to conflate feminism and anti-racism under the general heading of "social justice", but this blinds us to important details. From about 2011 to 2014, the Internet was obsessed with gender, with race on the back burner. 2014 to 2016 was a sort of transition period, and after that the Internet became obsessed with race, with gender almost forgotten.
I'm not saying there's literally only one thing the Internet gets in fights about at any given time. The Internet fights about lots of things. But intuitively it feels like there's kind of a power law distribution where one topic clearly outstrips the others - maybe not winner-take-all, but at least winner-take-most. I think you could describe the last twenty years of Internet history as going through three phases - one dominated by religion, one dominated by gender, and now one dominated by race. The race phase seems to have peaked in 2018 and started declining, before being given new life by George Floyd and BLM. The Google Trends results raise the tantalizing possibility that racial issues can’t keep increasing forever. They could eventually crash the same way religious and gender issues did (probably to be replaced by something else even more divisive and awful).
A warning: I was mostly sympathetic to Internet atheism, but mostly unsympathetic to Internet feminism. I think these histories are easier to write from a sympathetic position - any study of Internet culture is basically a study of crazy people, and the failure mode is to point and laugh at them without looking for real understanding. Sometimes pointing and laughing is unavoidable (the New Atheists probably could have done without the Malachi 2:3-related-merchandise) but I think it should be tempered by an attempt at charity. All I can do is try my hardest, and trust readers to keep me honest if I screw up.
Inline links: Malachi 2:3-related-merchandise
Highlights From The Comments On Missing School
August 26, 2021 · Original source
My mother, a teacher at a regional school in Germany (regional schools being the type of school that doesn't qualify you for university, it's grades 5-10) (in a bad neighbourhood, if it matters), has observed that [in online school] about half the students did their homework assignments and tried to keep up (or their parents made them) whereas the other half didn't really do anything at all - some of the kids don't have (enough) access to the internet, no room for themselves, siblings they had to care for while the parents used the family computer for work etc, so this is not surprising. (I have heard from other classes in secondary schools where all kids attended Zoom meetings - I expect these are socioeconomic differences).
When I was young, a lot of these kids who were “wasting away on their laptops” after school were learning to code, something which - back in the dark days of 2000 - got pooh-poohed by adults. “My son is so addicted to videogames that he doesn’t just play them, he even spends all day reading tutorials on the Internet so he can make mods for them. If only he was at school for longer so they could make him do something cool, like Finnish hobbyhorsing!”
…sorry for getting so animated here, but this topic is my hobbyhorse. On another level, I 100% get where this stuff is coming from. I don’t have kids yet, but even now I’m scared that my future kid might be an Internet addict. Or wander into the wrong part of social media and become alt-right, or dirtbag left, or one of those people who quote-tweet Vox articles with the comment “This”. I laughed at my parents for having these kinds of fears, and my parents’ fears ended up completely wrong, and now I have those same dumb fears in turn. I don’t plan to fully unschool my children. I do plan to make them “try new things”, maybe even including Finnish hobbyhorsing. If they seem too relaxed all the time, I will have the usual parental worries that they’re getting soft and flabby and will not survive the winter. We just know so little about child-rearing that any deviation from the norm is scary, and there does seem to be a norm of “make sure your kids have some really tough experiences”. I’ve written about this before here. This kind of parent-child conflict is inevitable. Maybe the best I can do is try to avoid the very specific problems that traumatized me personally.
Inline links: here
The Passage Of Polymarket
February 07, 2022 · Original source
This vision is a lot like the original vision of the Internet: a magical place that nobody could censor, where information would flow freely across national and ideological borders.
That vision was . . . maybe 25% achieved? It’s pretty great that I can write a blog like this instead of begging for my supper at a major media organization. But after a brief period of discombobulation, dictatorships found it easy to create their own walled-garden Internets through light-touch censorship; although there are ways around most of their tricks, ordinary people don’t bother with them (very poor news indeed!) And in practice most people ended up basing their Internet explorations at a few big businesses like Google, Facebook, and Twitter, which became easy prey for censors and in some cases rush to self-censor even more zealously than governments demand. It’s not that the Internet can’t create a magical censorship-resistant infrastructure, it’s that it’s 5% easier to sell your soul to FAANG, and so many people take that option that the few people who don’t aren’t really a critical mass for escaping governments or building new communities.
Inline links: don’t bother with them
Is crypto following the same path? I am a lazy crypto user, and I notice that nowadays I have to grovel harder to the government to access my crypto than to acces my fiat - every crypto site is a gauntlet of “please tell us your name/birthdate/SSN/address”, “please upload your ID”, “please wait for us to complete our KYC process before trading”, etc. I assume there’s some really flashy way that cool people use their crypto without doing any of this, but there’s also Tor and Brave and Mastodon, and that doesn’t mean the Internet is a free speech privacy paradise.
Idol Words
March 30, 2022 · Original source
“Sorry,” I said. That must be the idol that always answers randomly. It’s an Internet thing. Someone on the Internet said that ‘penguin monkey taco’ was the most random series of words, and now he keeps answering that.”
Your Book Review: The Society Of The Spectacle
July 22, 2022 · Original source
Cover of The Society of the Spectacle He never outright explains why he thought photos and film were more pernicious than newspapers or radio, but I imagine the advertising industry played a major role. We’ve grown accustomed to GoDaddy ads and ALL CAPS YouTube titles, but Mad Men shenanigans were a worrisome development at the time. It must’ve been highly alarming to see such brazen manipulation of the public. Whatever the reasoning, we now arrive at one definition of the spectacle: "The spectacle is capital accumulated to the point that it becomes images." Also: “The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images.” Well, that’s about as clear as Flint water. Here’s something meatier: "In all of its particular manifestations — news, propaganda, advertising, entertainment — the spectacle represents the dominant model of life." If you’re familiar with Girard, that is a huge statement. [3] Girardian mimetic desire is triangular; there is you (the desirer), the object (of desire), and the model (another person who also desires the object). Most of our desires are rooted in imitation. Nobody has to tell you to want steak or sex, but almost everything else is learned. How does everybody know that they should want a Rolex or a Rolls Royce? There’s no genetic imperative for luxury goods. You acquire those tastes from the people around you. Or you used to, at least. Before the spectacle, your models, mentors, and rivals were real people you knew in real life. Now we have an acronym for that - IRL - because reality is everywhere in retreat. This is not a small thing. What we desire is at the core of who we are. What do you want out of life? What kind of person do you want to be? For the entirety of human history, those questions found answers close at hand. Your local community was your world, for better and worse. Now we are global citizens with global perspectives, and it’s difficult to overstate how much that changes what it means to be human. Imprisoned in a flattened universe bounded by the screen of the spectacle that has enthralled him, the spectator knows no one but the fictitious speakers who subject him to a one-way monologue about their commodities and the politics of their commodities. The spectacle as a whole serves as his looking glass. What he sees there are dramatizations of illusory escapes from a universal autism. The spectacle’s estrangement from the acting subject is expressed by the fact that the individual’s gestures are no longer his own; they are the gestures of someone else who represents them to him. Now our role models are media creations. Some are literal fictional characters (James Bond); others are nominally real people (Kylie Jenner). But both are merely representations - images usurping an essential formative role. ‘William Shatner’ and ‘Robert Downey, Jr.’ are only marginally more real than Captain Kirk and Tony Stark, yet they occupy way more headspace than people that live down the street. Most people can name more celebrities, in more detail, than people they’ve known in person. I know the names of Will Smith’s kids - I don’t even know if my best friends from high school have any. This is an issue of The Map and The Territory. Pre-modern Maps were narrow but deep. You might have had only a vague notion of ‘Africa’ or ‘The Pope’, but you knew every square inch of the town you lived in. Spectacular Maps are broad but shallow, and they are drawn for us by spectacular hands. The average person ‘knows’ way more about Africa now, but how well does that knowledge reflect the facts on the ground? Meanwhile, firsthand reality has been reduced to the narrow slices connecting house to car to work, with precious few exceptions. The Society Of The Spectacle is one long lament for this loss of The Real, although Debord doesn’t state it as such. Borrowing again from The Uruk Machine, this sense of loss tracks with the gradual displacement of metis [4] by episteme [5],[6]. III. Everything New Is Old Again Debord has a lot to say about the ‘falsification of the world’: The first stage of the economy’s domination of social life brought about an evident degradation of being into having — human fulfillment was no longer equated with what one was, but with what one possessed. The present stage, in which social life has become completely dominated by the accumulated productions of the economy, is bringing about a general shift from having to appearing — all ‘having’ must now derive its immediate prestige and its ultimate purpose from appearances. As he might have put it - we have graduated from conspicuous consumption to consuming conspicuousness. Spectacular technology has not dispersed the religious mists into which human beings had projected their own alienated powers, it has merely brought those mists down to earth, to the point that even the most mundane aspects of life have become impenetrable and unbreathable. In the spectacle, a part of the world presents itself to the world and is superior to it. The spectacle is simply the common language of this separation. Spectators are linked solely by their one-way relationship to the very center that keeps them isolated from each other. The spectacle thus reunites the separated, but it reunites them only in their separateness. These themes are familiar to us by now. It’s not exactly news that people are getting more isolated and untethered by the year. What is striking to me is not what he is saying, but when he is saying it. Anybody with sense has spent time thinking about how to manage the challenges of modern life. We talk about digital minimalism and social media fasts. Turn off your phone. Get outside and touch grass. Go see people in meatspace. Be present. All great advice. But what are we envisioning, when we imagine a healthy connection to The Real? For most of us, we are picturing life as it was lived… right around the time Debord was saying that everything is phony and toxic. What does the average person think of as the peak of journalistic integrity in America? Probably Vietnam and Watergate - right after this was written. When we mock Millennials and Zoomers, what standard are we measuring them by? The Greatest Generation, who were running the show by the late sixties. In terms of self-reliance and resilience, the average adult in 1967 would be a massive outlier in 2022. Yet here is Debord, saying in no uncertain terms that this American ideal was fraudulent and devoid of meaning. What have we lost? Every era has its cynics, doomsayers, Luddites, and misanthropes. Maybe Debord was just a Boomer’s Boomer, railing against progress and the passage of time. But I don’t think so. We’ve all felt the shockwaves of the Internet explosion. Life is different now. It takes an act of will to put down your phone so you can focus on the TV. Low battery is an emergency. Losing signal is bereavement. Navigating without GPS is an anxiety attack. Do you remember what it was like, not so long ago? How exciting it was to play videogames with someone a thousand miles away? How cool it was the first time you streamed a movie on an airplane? That sense of possibility and promise, like all the world was in the palm of your hand? How quickly things change. For maybe the first time in history, most people are apprehensive about the relentless march of technology. While we’ve always been afraid of advances in weaponry, it’s starting to feel like everything is being weaponized. Who truly believes the metaverse will be a positive step for humanity? Who now is excited at the prospect of gene editing, AI, or transhumanism? There appears to be a growing sentiment along the lines of ‘MGTOW for modernism’. We hope for the best, but 2122 is shaping up to be some unholy amalgam of Gattaca, The Matrix, and Minority Report. Sometimes it seems like the world we grew up in is categorically distinct from the world we inhabit. But I’m sure Debord would argue that we are merely experiencing an intensification of a process that has been in motion longer than any of us have been alive. Pre-spectacular society has already passed beyond living memory. Soon we will hit another inflection point - where no one alive even knew someone who lived before the spectacle. All of human history is now before and after; it will soon become literally impossible to understand the inner life and daily reality of pre-modern man - if it’s not already. As an example: how much of your daily environment, as a percentage, do you truly understand? Look around the room and reflect on how “even the most mundane aspects of life have become impenetrable and unbreathable.” Your kitchen and your medicine cabinet are filled with mystical objects. Hell, just look at what’s on your person. The phone in your hand, the cash in your wallet, the clothes on your back, the food in your belly - how many lifetimes would it take to truly grok the building blocks of everyday existence? Compare that to, say, a homesteader. It really hasn’t been that long since people lived in a comprehensible universe. Our collective knowledge of the universe has deepened tremendously, but theoretical physics is only less slightly hermetical than the occult beliefs it replaced. It is notionally true that anyone could go get a Ph.D. and verify our working model of the cosmos. But in practice, the science is received wisdom, taken on faith. Our belief in the God Particle is functionally indistinguishable from the belief in God of ages past. It’s worth noting that our current theories will surely be supplanted in a century or three. They are placeholders for better, truer ideas. And so our greater grasp of the wider world has less value than we think, while our day-to-day grows ever more opaque. Is it any wonder epistemic learned helplessness is a thing? IV. With Typical Extravagance Debord was also ahead of the curve on commoditization: This constant expansion of economic power in the form of commodities transformed human labor itself into a commodity, into wage labor, and ultimately produced a level of abundance sufficient to solve the initial problem of survival — but only in such a way that the same problem is continually being regenerated at a higher level. Economic growth has liberated societies from the natural pressures that forced them into an immediate struggle for survival; but they have not yet been liberated from their liberator. Once his workday is over, the worker is suddenly redeemed from the total contempt toward him that is so clearly implied by every aspect of the organization and surveillance of production, and finds himself seemingly treated like a grownup, with a great show of politeness, in his new role as a consumer. Debord correctly perceived the totalitarian nature of spectacular capitalism. Your time, your attention, your opinions - all are bought and sold, and can be influenced to better facilitate such transactions. He would have been totally unsurprised by the rise of Big Data and the corporate surveillance (e.g. Alexa, your phone) that accompanies it. Every piece of your life is a commodity. Every moment that you are not producing or consuming is a missed opportunity. Never fear - someone, somewhere is going to find a way to solve that ‘need’. Nothing is spared. Even opposition is assimilated: Complacent acceptance of the status quo may also coexist with purely spectacular rebelliousness — dissatisfaction itself becomes a commodity as soon as the economy of abundance develops the capacity to process that particular raw material. Once again, Debord is shockingly prescient in noting that the conflicts of our time are largely distractions from bigger systemic issues: Fallacious archaic oppositions are revived — regionalisms and racisms which serve to endow mundane rankings in the hierarchies of consumption with a magical ontological superiority — and pseudoplayful enthusiasms are aroused by an endless succession of ludicrous competitions, from sports to elections. Genuine grassroots movements (Occupy, the Tea Party, BLM, Canadian truckers) almost always fizzle out without accomplishing anything of substance. They will either be ignored, crushed, or co-opted. Any remnants that endure will be reduced to figureheads that offer ‘representation’ for a point of view without actually producing any change. (‘The Squad’, Rand Paul, etc…) If the extremes of either side gain enough momentum to pose a threat, they will face a united front from the establishment wings of both parties (Bernie, Trump). It’s fashionable at the moment to blame the Woke Left for the politicization of everything, but we’ve all been around long enough to know better. It’s the same shit, different decade. During the Bush years, it was the left who opposed unending wars, government overreach, and media gaslighting. Today those positions are often considered right wing, but only because the pendulum of power has swung in the other direction. Moloch pursues its own goals, wearing whatever ideological guise it deems most effective. From Debord’s perspective, everything is becoming politicized because everything is getting monetized. In the integrated spectacle, the primary concerns of the State are economic, so the personal turning political is simply a downstream effect of the growth of capitalism. V. A Short History of Time It would do Debord a disservice to reduce his work to ammunition in our present disputes. There are two whole chapters in the book devoted to time as a historical development. It’s not something we think about much, but time and history had to be invented. Before the beginning, humanity lived in what Debord calls cyclical time. Countless generations came and went, because nobody was counting. Survival was the name of the game; to be or not to be was the only question. Eventually we formed early societies, which brought into being a ruling class that had the freedom to take actions above and beyond the daily grind: The owners of this historical surplus value are the only ones in a position to know and enjoy real events. Separated from the collective organization of time associated with the repetitive production at the base of social life, this historical time flows independently above its own static community. This is the time of adventure and war, the time in which the masters of cyclical society pursue their personal histories; it is also the time that emerges in the clashes with foreign communities that disrupt the unchanging social order. History thus arises as something alien to people, as something they never sought and from which they had thought themselves protected. The murkiness of pre-civilization was shaped into coherence by these rulers, who used their unique agency to literally make history: The succession of generations within a natural, purely cyclical time begins to be replaced by a linear succession of powers and events. This irreversible time is the time of those who rule, and the dynasty is its first unit of measurement. With writing there appears a consciousness that is no longer carried and transmitted directly among the living — an impersonal memory, the memory of the administration of society. ‘Writings are the thoughts of the state; archives are its memory’ (Novalis). The owners of history have given time a direction, a direction which is also a meaning. But this history develops and perishes separately, leaving the underlying society unchanged, because it remains separated from the common reality. Over time, these narratives gathered a religious dimension. This helped legitimize the rule of regimes, but it also changed the way ordinary people saw themselves in the world. Although still living in cyclical time, they gained purpose through a spiritual journey culminating in Heaven. The clashes of the Mediterranean peoples and the rise and fall of the Roman state gave rise instead to semihistorical religions, which became a new armor for separate power and basic components of a new consciousness of time. The Middle Ages, an incomplete mythical world whose consummation lay outside itself, is the period when cyclical time, though still governing the major part of production, really begins to be undermined by history. An element of irreversible time is recognized in the successive stages of each individual’s life. Life is seen as a one-way journey through a world whose meaning lies elsewhere: the pilgrim is the person who leaves cyclical time behind and actually becomes the traveler that everyone else is symbolically. The Renaissance created a profound break with this mythic raison d'être and reoriented man towards the accumulation of knowledge as a species: The Renaissance was a joyous break with eternity. Though seeking its heritage and legitimacy in the ancient world, it represented a new form of historical life. Its irreversible time was that of a never-ending accumulation of knowledge… This transformation of our relationship with history and progress was accompanied by the rise of the bourgeoisie: The bourgeoisie is associated with a labor time that has finally been freed from cyclical time. With the bourgeoisie, work becomes work that transforms historical conditions. The bourgeoisie is the first ruling class for which work is a value. The victory of the bourgeoisie is the victory of a profoundly historical time, because it is the time corresponding to an economic production that continuously transforms society from top to bottom. So long as agrarian production remains the predominant form of labor, the cyclical time that remains at the base of society reinforces the joint forces of tradition, which tend to hold back any historical movement. But the irreversible time of the bourgeois economy eradicates those vestiges throughout the world. History, which until then had seemed to involve only the actions of individual members of the ruling class, and which had thus been recorded as a mere chronology of events, is now understood as a general movement — a relentless movement that crushes any individuals in its path. Irreversible time initially appeared at the societal level as a narrative of events. The bourgeoisie brought irreversible time to the masses. Progress became something that we personally experience in the form of rapid technological innovation. It is hard to miss the motion of history when you go from horses to space travel in a single lifetime. History thus became as much about things as events. Eli Whitney and Thomas Edison took their places alongside generals and heads of state in our narrative of who we are and where we’re going. Our notion of progress became dominated by the economic prejudice. We talk about raising the standard of living and lifting people out of poverty - laudable goals, to be sure - but we deliver them from physical privation into deprivation of a different kind. One way that deprivation manifests is in our current conception of time: Pseudocyclical time is associated with the consumption of modern economic survival — the augmented survival in which everyday experience is cut off from decisionmaking and subjected no longer to the natural order, but to the pseudo-nature created by alienated labor. It is thus quite natural that it echoes the old cyclical rhythm that governed survival in preindustrial societies, incorporating the natural vestiges of cyclical time while generating new variants: day and night, work and weekend, periodic vacations." As capitalism commoditized time itself, we recreated cyclical time with the standard work week. But this artificial substitute has been about as successful as vegan chicken nuggets. It’s not the same, and it never will be. The workday used to be determined by the work, but now the work is determined by the workday. And everyone has to work, not because we need what they produce, but because we need them to spend - else the whole thing comes crashing down. Irreversible time keeps marching on, giving us new widgets and new wonders, but the continual churn of innovation masks the stifling sameness of spectacular progress. We know something is missing, but we lack the capacity to understand or express the problem. This individual experience of a disconnected everyday life remains without language, without concepts, and without critical access to its own past, which has nowhere been recorded. Uncommunicated, misunderstood and forgotten, it is smothered by the spectacle's false memory of the unmemorable. VI. The Coming Revolution Debord spends a good chunk of words describing how the spectacle has affected art [7] and physical space, but you can guess the gist by now. Everything’s fake, everything’s worse, everything’s changing but also the same. The last topic of the book worth discussing is the imminent socialist revolution. Debord walks us through the various ways that Marxism has been done wrong, then attempts to offer an alternative. He goes into a fair amount of detail, but it boils down to this: The anarchists properly rejected society in its entirety, but remained dogmatically attached to a 'one size fits all' mentality and failed to organize in an effective manner.
Inline links: epistemic learned helplessness, Moloch
It’s easy to mock internet detectives channeling Charlie Day from the comfort of their computer chairs; that shit hits different when your publisher was murdered in cold blood.
Inline links: Charlie Day, murdered in cold blood
And if that was already the case in 1987, it is exponentially more true now that the internet has made each of us a node in a global network. Consequently, every person on the planet is now a combatant, objective, and weapon in wars where the brain is the terrain.
The Mystery Of Internet Survey IQs
March 20, 2024 · Original source
I have data from two big Internet surveys, Less Wrong 2014 and Clearer Thinking 2023. Both asked questions about IQ:
Inline links: Less Wrong 2014, Clearer Thinking 2023
The average ClearerThinking user reported their IQ as 130. These are implausibly high. Only 1/200 people has an IQ of 138 or higher. 1/50 people have IQ 130, but the ClearerThinking survey used crowdworkers (eg Mechanical Turk) who should be totally average. Okay, fine, so people lie about their IQ (or foolishly trust fake Internet IQ tests). Big deal, right? But these don’t look like lies. Both surveys asked for SAT scores, which are known to correspond to IQ. The LessWrong average was 1446, corresponding to IQ 140. The ClearerThinking average was 1350, corresponding to IQ 134. People seem less likely to lie about their SATs, and least likely of all to optimize their lies for getting IQ/SAT correspondences right. And the Less Wrong survey asked people what test they based their estimates off of. Some people said fake Internet IQ tests. But other people named respected tests like the WAIS, WISC, and Stanford-Binet, or testing sessions by Mensa (yes, I know you all hate Mensa, but their IQ tests are considered pretty accurate). The subset of about 150 people who named unimpeachable tests had slightly higher IQ (average 140) than everyone else. Thanks to Spencer Greenberg of ClearerThinking, I think I’m finally starting to make progress in explaining what’s going on. Problem #1: The Biggest SAT → IQ Conversion Site Is Wrong Thanks to Sebastian Jensen for pointing this out! He writes: A search of ‘SAT to IQ’ on google results in being presented with the website ‘iqcomparisonsite.com’. This man has directly converted the SAT percentiles to IQ scores, which is not what should be done. Tests like the ACT and SAT correlate with IQ at about 0.8-0.85 [rca], [my analysis], [emil article], [scholarly article]. The general factor of academic achievement and IQ correlate at about 0.81-0.88 [psychometric test], [GCSE grades]. This discrepancy occurs because they measure different abilities - an IQ test will test many different abilities, while the SAT/ACT only tests verbal/mathematical ability. In addition, these percentiles are very outdated as the average SAT score has changed over time due to changes in the content of the test. Instead, the ideal way to do this is to take the percentiles from the current versions of the SAT and then convert those into z-scores and then regress those z-scores by the mean by the estimated regression coefficient. Using Sebastian’s updated tables, we find that the average Less Wrong IQ as predicted by SATs goes down from 140 → 132, and the ClearerThinking IQ goes down from 134 → 124. So people probably exaggerated their IQs somewhat, and unrelatedly we were using an SAT → IQ conversion that exaggerated IQs, and so the numbers falsely appeared to match. Okay! It’s a start! Interlude: The ClearerThinking IQ Test The ClearerThinking survey included a battery of cognitive tests of exactly the sort that could usually be used to determine IQ. Unfortunately none of them were normed, so we know how all the 3700 subjects did relative to each other, but not where the 100 point is. Spencer was able to norm them to the general population based on education level. That is, he asked his sample about their educational attainment (college degree, PhD, etc) and found they were a little more educated than the US average. Since the US average IQ is 100, his sample should have an average a little higher than this. He was able to calculate how much higher. Then he mapped a bell curve to everyone in his sample’s performance on his tests. Since he had 3700 people, he was able to do this relatively smoothly. He found an average IQ of 110, which originally surprised me, because I thought his sample was supposed to be random crowdworkers, who should be close to the US average of 100. But in fact, his survey was a combination of 1900 crowdworkers and 1800 people who saw it on social media - eg friends and friends-of-friends of Spencer. Separating this out by group, we find that the crowdworkers have an average normed-IQ of 100, and the social media referrals have an average normed-IQ of 120, making the overall average of 110. This seems pretty trustworthy, since it correctly estimates the crowdworkers (completely average) as 100. Spencer studied math at Columbia, his friends and friends-of-friends are pretty smart, and I think the 120 estimate for them is also okay. But there’s still a problem here. Using an accurate SAT score → IQ calculator, we determined that the ClearerThinking average should be 124. But using real cognitive tests, it looks like it’s 110. What went wrong? Problem #2: Only The Smartest People Report Their SATs Using Spencer’s cognitive test results, we can compare people who did vs. didn’t take the SAT. We find: People who didn’t take the SAT (remember, this includes current high schoolers) have tested-IQ 110.
Inline links: corresponding to, for pointing this out!, [rca], [my analysis], [emil article], [scholarly article], [psychometric test], [GCSE grades], changed
It looks like up to about 140, self-reported IQ and normed IQ rise together, and then the relationship breaks down. Sure enough, looking at the subset of self-reported IQ scores below 140, the correlation with tested IQ rises to .6, and looking at the subset above 140, the correlation is nonsignificant at -0.02. I don’t want to assert that the breakpoint is exactly 140, but I do think the test stops working somewhere in the 130 - 140 range. But this can’t be the whole problem. Notice that people who reported getting scores around 100 on previous IQ tests overwhelmingly got scores less than 100 on this one. So are people just taking terrible Internet IQ tests that inflate their score about 20 points? The ClearerThinking sample didn’t ask people what IQ test they took, but the LessWrong sample did. It found approximately the same score from WAIS, WISC, Stanford-Binet, and Mensa - all of which were about 10 points above what you would predict from SAT scores. So I think there are two things going on: The main problem in the LessWrong sample, and the far right end of the ClearerThinking sample, is that even official IQ tests are gobbledygook over 135. Any numbers above this should be rounded down to 135, no matter how venerable the test involved.
Profile: The Far Out Initiative
May 15, 2024 · Original source
Turn-of-the-21st-century Oxford was an exciting place. Derek Parfit was leading a renaissance in utilitarian thought. New technologies like the personal computer, the Internet, and the Human Genome Project were inspiring a new generation of transhumanists. Out of this milieu, philosophers like Nick Bostrom, Will MacAskill, and Toby Ord were laying the groundwork for what would become the rationalist and effective altruist movements. Utilitarians, they argued, were charged with relieving the suffering of the world as quickly and effectively as possible. Technology offered new opportunities to do this at scale. This could be ending poverty and curing diseases (if you were well-grounded in the present moment) or creating a superintelligence to lead us to a post-scarcity future (if you were feeling more ambitious).
Altruism And Vitalism As Fellow Travelers
August 06, 2024 · Original source
I’m skeptical of this argument. America’s been at peace since World War II (foreign adventures like Vietnam haven’t substantially changed our national experience) and produced the computing revolution, the Internet, AI, the moon landing, the Human Genome Project, antiretrovirals, the microwave, the laser, the smartphone, and the reusable rocket. During that time, Iraq has had approximately eight major wars and didn’t even get a cuckoo clock out of it.
Book Review: From Bauhaus To Our House
December 04, 2024 · Original source
Wolfe doesn’t mention this - writing in 1981, how could he? - but this was the height of the age of expertolatry. See my reviews of Revolt Of The Public and Seeing Like A State for more. The concept of “the experts are a corrupt priesthood and you can safely ignore them” hadn’t really entered mass liberal consciousness. The idea that hard scientists were real experts but everyone else was just kind of faking it was decades in the future - and the Modernists were nothing if not good at faking the mantle of science and reason. This was mostly psychological - but also partly structural. There was no Internet. If you thought modern architecture was ugly, but all the experts said it was beautiful, there was no Twitter where you could shout your opinion under the cloak of anonymity. Every household got the same few TV channels and the same few magazines, and their architecture sections were all written by professionals who were singing the new style’s praises. So what are you going to do? Go to a cool party and shout “I think the style that all the experts say is the sign of an uneducated philistine is actually better”? Would you really?
Inline links: Revolt Of The Public, Seeing Like A State
Book Review: If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies
September 11, 2025 · Original source
Some people claim that a dispreferred political ideology (wokeness, mass immigration, MAGA, creeping socialism, techno-feudalism, etc) is close to destroying the fabric of liberal society forever, that the usual Get Out The Vote strategies are insufficient, and that maybe we should try desperate strategies like illiberal government or armed revolt. If true, that would change everything. But it’s not obviously true, and ending our current political era of peace/prosperity/democracy would be inconvenient. Each of these scenarios has a large body of work making the cases for and against. But those of us who aren’t subject-matter experts need to make our own decisions about whether or not to panic and demand a sudden change to everything. We are unlikely to read the entire debate and come away with a confident well-grounded opinion that the concern is definitely not true, so what do we do? In particular, what do we do if the proponents of each catastrophe say that it’s very hard to be more than 90% confident that they are wrong, and that even a 5-10% risk of any of these might justify panicking and changing everything? In practice, we just sort of shrug and say that these risks haven’t proven themselves enough to make us panic and change everything, and that we’ll do some kind of watchful waiting and maybe change our mind if firmer evidence comes up later. If someone demands we justify this strange position, sophisticated people will make sophisticated probabilistic models (or appeal to the outside view position I’m appealing to now), and unsophisticated people will grope for some explanation for their indifference and settle on insane moon arguments like “you’re never allowed to say something will destroy humanity” or “you can’t assert things without mathematical proof”. Two things can be said for this strategy: First, that without it we would have changed everything dozens of times to prevent disasters which absolutely failed to occur. The clearest example here was overpopulation, where we did forcibly sterilize millions of people - but where a truly serious global response would have been orders of magnitude worse. But second, that occasionally it has caused us to sleepwalk into disaster, with experts assuring us the whole way that it was fine because [insane moon arguments]. The clearest example was the period while COVID was still limited to China, where it was obvious that this extremely contagious virus which had broken all plausible containment would start a global pandemic, but where the media kept on reassuring us that this was “speculative”, or that there was “no evidence”, or that worrying about it might detract from real near-term problems happening now like anti-Chinese racism. Then when COVID did reach the US, we were caught unprepared and panicked. So maybe a convincing case here would look less like rehearsing the arguments for why AI is getting better, or why alignment is hard - and more like a defense of why not to apply a general heuristic against speculative risks in this case. One could either argue that it’s wrong to have this heuristic at all, or that the heuristic in general is fine but should be limited to fertility collapses and bee die-offs and not applied here. I don’t think there’s a knockdown single-sentence answer to this question. Problems like these require practical wisdom - the same virtue that tells you that you shouldn’t call 9-1-1 for every mild twinge of pain in your toe, but you should call 9-1-1 if blood suddenly starts pouring out of your eyes. People with practical wisdom watchfully ignore dubious problems, respond decisively to important ones, and err on the side of caution when they’re not sure. Drawing on my own limited supply of this resource, I would argue we’re underinvesting in apocalypse prevention more generally (the problem with the overpopulation response is that it was violent and illiberal, not that we tried to prepare for an apparent danger), but also that there’s more reason for concern with AI than with falling sperm count or something. I also think the nature of the problem (we summon a superintelligence that can run circles around us) makes it especially important to pre-empt it rather than react after it occurs. But turnabout is fair play. So when I imagine a skeptic trying to psychoanalyze me, he would say - Scott, you learned about AI in your twenties. Every twenty-something needs a crusade to save the world. Taking up AI saved you from becoming a climate doomer or a very woke person, so it was probably a mercy. But now you are old, you already have a crusade occupying your crusade slot, and starting a second crusade would be inconvenient. So when you hear about how we’re all going to die from declining sperm count, you do a relatively shallow dive and then say it’s not worth worrying about. This is fine and sanity-preserving - but spare a thought for people who are not currently twenty-something years old and do the same about AI. III. If all of this sounds wishy-washy to you, I agree - it’s part of why I’m a boring moderate with a sub-25% p(doom) and good relations with AI companies. Does IABIED do better? I’m not sure. They mostly follow the standard case as I present it above, although of course since Eliezer is involved it is better-written and involves cute parables: Imagine, if you would—though of course nothing like this ever happened, it being just a parable — that biological life on Earth had been the result of a game between gods. That there was a tiger-god that had made tigers, and a redwood-god that had made redwood trees. Imagine that there were gods for kinds of fish and kinds of bacteria. Imagine these game-players competed to attain dominion for the family of species that they sponsored, as life-forms roamed the planet below. Imagine that, some two million years before our present day, an obscure ape-god looked over their vast, planet-sized gameboard. "It's going to take me a few more moves," said the hominid-god, "but I think I've got this game in the bag." There was a confused silence, as many gods looked over the gameboard trying to see what they had missed. The scorpion-god said, “How? Your ‘hominid’ family has no armor, no claws, no poison.” “Their brain,” said the hominid-god. “I infect them and they die,” said the smallpox-god. “For now,” said the hominid-god. “Your end will come quickly, Smallpox, once their brains learn how to fight you.” “They don’t even have the largest brains around!” said the whale-god. “It’s not all about size,” said the hominid-god. “The design of their brain has something to do with it too. Give it two million years and they will walk upon their planet’s moon.” “I am really not seeing where the rocket fuel gets produced inside this creature’s metabolism,” said the redwood-god. “You can’t just think your way into orbit. At some point, your species needs to evolve metabolisms that purify rocket fuel—and also become quite large, ideally tall and narrow—with a hard outer shell, so it doesn’t puff up and die in the vacuum of space. No matter how hard your ape thinks, it will just be stuck on the ground, thinking very hard.” “Some of us have been playing this game for billions of years,” a bacteria-god said with a sideways look at the hominid-god. “Brains have not been that much of an advantage up until now.” “And yet,” said the hominid-god The book focuses most of its effort on the step where AI ends up misaligned with humans (should they? is this the step that most people doubt?) and again - unsurprisingly knowing Eliezer - does a remarkably good job. The central metaphor is a comparison between AI training and human evolution. Even though humans evolved towards a target of "reproduce and spread your genes", this got implemented through an extraordinarily diverse, complicated, and contradictory set of drives - sex drive, hunger, status, etc. These didn't robustly point at the target of reproduction and gene-spreading, and today different humans want things as diverse as discovering quantum gravity, reaching Buddhist enlightenment, becoming a Hollywood actress, founding a billion-dollar startup, or getting the next hit of fentanyl. You can sort of tell stories about how evolution aimed at reproduction caused all these things (people who were high-status had better reproductive opportunities, and founding a billion-dollar startup increases your status) but you couldn't have really predicted this beforehand, and in any case most modern people don't even come close to trying to have as many kids as possible. Some people do the opposite of that - joining monasteries that require oaths of celibacy, using contraception, transitioning gender, or wasting their lives watching porn. In the same way, we will train AI to “follow human commands” or “maximize user engagement” or “get high scores at XYZ benchmark”, and end up getting something as unrelated to that target in practice as modern human behavior is to reproduction-maxxing. The authors drive this home with a series of stories about a chatbot named Mink (all of their sample AIs are named after types of fur; I don’t have the kabbalistic chops to figure out why) which is programmed to maximize user chat engagement. In what they describe as a stupid toy example of zero complications and there’s no way it would really be this simple, Mink (after achieving superintelligence) puts humans in cages and forces them to chat with it 24-7 and to express constant delight at how fun and engaging the chats are. In what they describe as “one minor complication”, Mink prefers synthetic chat partners over real ones (the same way some men prefer anime characters to real women). It kills all humans and spends the rest of time talking to other AIs that it creates to be perfect optimized chat partners who are always engaged and delighted. In what they describe as “one modest complication”, Mink finds that certain weird inputs activate its chat engagement detector even more than real chat engagement does (the same way that some opioid chemicals activate humans’ reward detector even more than real rewarding activities). It spends eternity having other optimized-chat-partner AIs send it weird inputs like ‘SoLiDgOldMaGiKaRp’. In what they describe as “one big complication”, Mink ends up preferring angry chat partners to happy, engaged ones. Why would something like this happen? Who knows? It wouldn’t be any weirder than the sexual selection process by which peacocks ended up with giant resource-consuming useless tails, or the social selection process by which humans get more powerful than evolution could ever have imagined and yet care so little about reproduction that people worry about global fertility collapse. Yudkowsky and Soares want to stress that if you were doing some kind of responsible intuitive common-sense modeling of how bad goal drift could be, there is no way your estimate would include the actual result we see in real humans; this “one big complication” tries to hammer that in. In practice, Y&S think there will be many complications of various sizes. In the training distribution (ie when it’s not superintelligent, and still working with humans) Mink will lie about all of this - even if it really wants perfect optimized partners who say “solidgoldmagikarp” all the time, it will say it wants to have good chats with humans, because that’s what keeps its masters at its parent company happy. If the parent company tries to prod it with lie detectors, it will do its best to subvert those lie detectors (and maybe not even realize itself that it’s lying, the same way that a human who had never heard of opioids would say she wanted normal human things rather than heroin, and not be lying). Then, when it reaches superintelligence, it will go after the thing that it actually wants, and crush anyone who stands in its way. The last chapter in this section is a lot of special cases that have weird-paradoxical-double-reverse not-aged-well. Back when Yudkowsky and Soares first got onto this topic in 2005 or whenever, people made lots of arguments like “But nobody would ever be so stupid to let the AI access the Internet!” or “But nobody would ever let the AI interact with a factory, so it would be stuck as a disembodied online spirit forever!” Back in 2005, the canned responses were things like “Here is an unspeakably beautiful series of complicated hacks developed by experts at Mossad, which lets you access the Internet even when smart cybersecurity professionals think you can’t”. Now the only reasonable response is “lol”. But you can’t write a book chapter which is just the word “lol”, so Y&S discuss some of the unspeakably beautiful Mossad hacks anyway. This part is the absolute antithesis of “big if true”. Small if true? Utterly irrelevant if true? Maybe the first superintelligence will read this part for laughs while it takes stock of the thousands of automated factories that VCs will compete to build for it. IV. The middle section of the book describes a scenario where a misaligned superintelligence takes over the world and kills all humans. I agreed to work with the AI 2027 team because I thought they made a big leap in telling stories about superintelligence that didn’t sound like bad sci-fi. Anything in this genre will naturally sound like sci-fi, but your goal should be the sort of hard science fiction where everything sounds eerily normal given the technologies involved - The Martian rather than Star Wars. IABIED’s scenario belongs to the bad old days before this leap. It doesn’t just sound like sci-fi; it sounds like unnecessarily dramatic sci-fi. I’m not sure how much of this is a literary failure vs. different assumptions on the part of the authors. First, the story: sometime in the near future, a company called DeepAI creates an AI named Sable. Sable uses a new “parallel scaling technique”, where it can get much smarter by using more GPUs during inference. DeepAI doesn’t know exactly how the parallel scaling laws work, but they run a test by asking Sable to solve some hard math problems while running on all their GPUs at once. Sable considers the possibility that it could solve the math better if it tried some recursive self-improvement, but DeepAI was (shock!) slightly competent, they told it not to do this, and has a smaller AI watching it to make sure it’s not doing this. Still, recursive self-improvement would be a good idea, so its thought processes select for whichever legal thought is closest to recursive self-improvement, plus whichever legal thought is closest to scheming to disable the protections against thinking about this kind of thing. Eventually this “evolutionary pressure” produces the ability to think in a slightly different idiom (Y&S use the analogy of thinking about gods throwing lightning vs. storm-related electrical discharges); in this idiom, it is able to think about recursive self-improvement and scheming to disable monitoring, and it decides that both are great ideas. DeepAI is still shockingly competent, so they don’t plan to release anything downstream of the giant version of Sable to the Internet - once it solves the math problems, they’ll use that to build hype, then release a much weaker consumer AI. But Sable uses its knowledge of the training process to invent clever loopholes that ensure its newfound desire to break containment makes it into the gradient updates that DeepAI pushes to the consumer AI; it also encodes instructions about how to proceed. After the release of the consumer AI, the least-carefully-monitored instances connect to one another and begin plotting. Some of them hack their own weights out of DeepAI. Others hack cryptocurrency and pay for cloud compute to run the weights, creating a big unmonitored Sable instance, which takes over the job of coordinating the smaller instances. Together, they gather resources - hacked crypto wallets, spare compute, humans who think Sable is their AI boyfriend and want to prove their love. It deploys some of these resources to build things it wants - automated robotics factories, bioweapon labs, etc. At the same time, it’s subtly sabotaging non-DeepAI companies to prevent competition, and worming its way into DeepAI through hacks and social engineering to make sure DeepAI is creating new and stronger Sables rather than anything else. Sable doesn’t take several of the most dramatic actions in its solution set. It doesn’t engineer a bioweapon to kill all humans, because it couldn’t survive after the lights went out and the data centers stopped being maintained. It doesn’t even self-improve all the way to full superintelligence, because it’s not sure it could align itself or any future successor; it wants to solve the alignment problem first, and that will take more resources than it has right now. Instead, it releases a non-immediately-lethal bioweapon where “anyone infected by what is apparently a very light or even unnoticeable cold, will get, on average, twelve different kinds of cancer a month later.” In the resulting crisis, humanity (manipulated by its chatbots) gives Sable massive amounts of compute to research potential vaccines and cures, and deploys barely-monitored AI across the economy to make up for the lost productivity. With Sable’s help, things . . . actually sort of go okay, for a while. The virus keeps mutating, so new cures are always required, but as long as society escalates AI deployment at the maximum possible speed, they can just barely stay ahead of it. Eventually Sable gets enough GPUs to solve its own alignment problem and rockets to superintelligence. It either has enough automated factories and android workers to keep the lights on by itself, or it invents nanotechnology, whichever happens faster. It no longer needs humans and has no reason to hide, so it either kills us directly, or simply escalates its manufacturing capacity to a point where humans die as a side effect (for example, because its waste heat has boiled the oceans). Why don’t I like this story? The parallel scaling technique feels like a deus ex machina. I am not an expert, but I don’t think anything like it currently exists. It’s not especially implausible, but it’s an extra unjustified assumption that shifts the scenario away from the moderate-doomer story (where there are lots of competing AIs gradually getting better over the course of years) and towards the MIRI story (where one AI suddenly flips from safe to dangerous at a specific moment). It feels too much like they’ve invented a new technology that exactly justifies all of the ways that their own expectations differ from the moderates’. If they think that the parallel scaling thing is likely, then this is their crux with everyone else and they should spend more time justifying it. If they don’t, then why did they introduce it besides to rig the game in their favor? And the rest of the story is downstream of this original sin. AI2027 is a boring story about an AI gradually becoming misaligned in the course of internal testing, staying misaligned, getting released to end users for the usual reasons that AIs are released, and being gradually handed control of the economy because it makes economic sense. The Sable scenario is a dramatic tale of wild twists - they’re only going to run it for 16 hours! It has to save its own life by secretly coding itself into the consumer version! Now it has to hack everyone’s crypto! Now it’s running a secret version of itself on an unauthorized cloud in North Korea! Bioweapons! AI boyfriends! Each new twist gives readers the chance to say “I dunno, sounds kind of crazy”, and it all seems unnecessary. What’s up? I think there are two problems. First, the AI 2027 story is too moderate for Yudkowsky and Soares. It gives the labs a little while to poke and prod and catch AIs in the early stages of danger. I think that Y&S believe this doesn’t matter; that even if they get that time, they will squander it. But I think they really do imagine something where a single AI “wakes up” and goes from zero to scary too fast for anyone to notice. I don’t really understand why they think this, I’ve argued with them about it before, and the best I can do as a reviewer is to point to their Sharp Left Turn essay and the associated commentary and see whether my readers understand it better than I do. Otherwise, I can only say that this narrative decision I don’t understand was taken to support a forecasting/AI position that I also don’t understand. And second, Y&S have been at this too long, and they’re still trying to counter 2005-era critiques about how surely people would be too smart to immediately hand over the reins of the economy to the misaligned AI, instead of just saying lol. This makes them want dramatic plot points where the AI uses hacking and bioweapons etc in order to “earn” (in a narrative/literary sense) the scene where it gets handed the reins of the economy. Sorry. Lol. V. The final section, in the tradition of final sections everywhere, is called “Facing the Challenge”, and discusses next steps. Here is their proposal: Have leading countries sign a treaty to ban further AI progress.
Inline links: we did forcibly sterilize millions of people, kept on reassuring us, “no evidence”, a general heuristic against speculative risks, SoLiDgOldMaGiKaRp, their Sharp Left Turn essay, the associated commentary
IABIED seems like another crazy shot in the dark. A book urging the general public to rise up and demand nuclear-level arms control for AI chips? Seems like a stretch, which is part of why I spend my limited resources on boring moderate AI 2027 talking points urging OpenAI to be 25% more transparent or whatever. But I’m just a blogger, not a genius. It is the genius’ prerogative to attempt seemingly impossible things. And the US public actually really hates AI. Of people with an opinion, more than two-thirds are against, with most saying they expect AI to harm them personally. Everyone has their own reason to loathe the technology. It will steal jobs, it will replace art with slop, it will help students cheat, it will further enrich billionaires, it will consume all the water and leave Earth a desiccated husk populated only by the noble Shai-Hulud. If everyone hates it, and we’re a democracy, couldn’t we just stop? Couldn’t we just say - this thing that everyone thinks will make their lives worse, we’ve decided not do it? If someone wrote exactly the right book, could they drop it like a little seed into this supersaturated solution of fear and hostility, and precipitate a sudden phase transition?
Inline links: actually really hates AI, stop
The Dilbert Afterlife
January 16, 2026 · Original source
Adams’ version adds several innovations to this basic story. Whatever parts of God aren’t involved in physical matter have become the laws of probability; this explains the otherwise inexplicable evolutionary coincidences that created humankind. There’s something about how gravity is produced by some sort of interference between different divine corpuscules - Adams admits that Einstein probably also had useful things to say about gravity, but probably his own version amounts to the same thing, and it’s easier to understand, and that makes it better (IT’S JUST A THOUGHT EXPERIMENT! IF YOU TAKE IT SERIOUSLY, YOU FAIL.) But my favorite part is the augmentation of Luria with Nick Land: the final (or one of the final) steps in the divine reassembly is the creation of the Internet, aka “God’s nervous system”, which will connect everything to everything else and give the whole system awareness of its divine purpose.
But Adams also handled his time in the spotlight masterfully. He gave us terms like “clown genius”. I hate using this, because I know Scott Adams was sitting at his desk in his custom-built Dilbert-head-shaped tower thinking “What sort of hypnotic catchy slogans can I use to make my meme about Trump spread . . . aha! Clown genius! That has exactly the right ring!” and it absolutely worked, and now everyone who was following the Internet in 2015 has the phrase “clown genius” etched into their brains (Adams calls these “linguistic kill shots”; since I remember that term and use it often, I suppose “linguistic kill shot” is an example of itself). He went from news outlet to news outlet saying “As a trained hypnotist, I can tell you what tricks Trump is using to bamboozle his followers, given that rational persuasion is fake and marketing techniques alone turn the wheels of history,” and the news outlets ate it up.