Democritus
Article
Democritus is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between August 30, 2021 and March 04, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as “the story of science since Democritus”; “Democritus figured out what matter was made of in 400 BC”. It most often appears alongside Acceptable Losses, Acceptable Losses: The Debatable Origins of Loss Aversion, Ajeya Cotra.
Metadata
- Category: People
- Mention count: 2
- Issue count: 2
- First seen: August 30, 2021
- Last seen: March 04, 2022
Appears In
Related Pages
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- Acceptable Losses (1 shared issues)
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- Acceptable Losses: The Debatable Origins of Loss Aversion (1 shared issues)
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- Ajeya Cotra (1 shared issues)
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- Alex Imas (1 shared issues)
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- Apollo (1 shared issues)
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- atomic bomb (1 shared issues)
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- Ayatollah Khameini (1 shared issues)
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- Behavioral Econ 101 (1 shared issues)
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- behavioral economics (1 shared issues)
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- centrifugal force (1 shared issues)
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- Cialdini (1 shared issues)
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- Communism (1 shared issues)
External Links
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.
I’m reminded of Gal and Rucker’s study on loss aversion. Hreha summed it up as “loss aversion doesn’t exist”, and I immediately jumped to “Oh, so it doesn’t replicate and the whole field is fraudulent and Daniel Kahneman was a witch?” But actually, this was the completely normal scientific process of noticing a phenomenon, doing some experiments to figure out what caused the phenomenon, and then arguing a bunch about how to interpret them, with new experiments being the tiebreaker. Again, loss aversion is real, but not fundamental, like centrifugal force in physics. The person who discovered centrifugal force wasn’t doing anything wrong, and it wouldn’t be fair to say that his experiments “failed to replicate”. Something we thought was an ontological primitive just turned out to be made of smaller parts, which is the story of science since Democritus.
Here’s one scenario which I think is unlikely but theoretically possible: the formal study of rationality will end up having zero advantages over well-practiced intuitive truth-seeking, except insofar as it allowed Robin Hanson to design prediction markets, which someday take over the world. This would be a common pattern for sciences: much worse at everyday tasks than people who do them intuitively, until it generates some surprising and powerful new technology. Democritus figured out what matter was made of in 400 BC, and it didn’t help a single person do a single useful thing with matter for the next 2000 years of followup research, and then you got the atomic bomb (I may be skipping over all of chemistry, sorry).