Astral Codex Ten

Jacob Falkovich

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Jacob Falkovich

Article

Jacob Falkovich is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between April 11, 2021 and January 17, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “props to Jacob Falkovich for actually doing the Bayesian calculation”; “If, like Jacob Falkovich, I satisfy my sex drive by creating a spreadsheet”; “Jacob Falkovich on Twitter proposes a Law Of Equal Sexual Oppression”. It most often appears alongside DeepMind, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Elon Musk.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 4
  • Issue count: 4
  • First seen: April 11, 2021
  • Last seen: January 17, 2025

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.

Open Thread 167
April 11, 2021 · Original source
1: Thanks to everyone who commented about multiple hypothesis testing. I think the answers to the questions I had were something like 1) the vitamin D study should have used stratified random sampling. 2) NHST is not great at combining experiments, but you could potentially do it through binomial probability or the Westfall-Young method) 3) You can do it using Bayes, but it will be complicated and involve having to calculate the relative probability of the data given various different hypotheses (props to Jacob Falkovich for actually doing the Bayesian calculation; in case you’re wondering, the Bayes factor for my series of ambidexterity experiments is 216). Some good links from the comments: Why Experimenters Might Not Always Want To Randomize, And What They Could Do Instead, What Is Stratified Random Sampling?, Rerandomization: What Is It And When Should You Use It.
Inline links: binomial probability, Westfall-Young, actually doing the Bayesian calculation, Why Experimenters Might Not Always Want To Randomize, And What They Could Do Instead, What Is Stratified Random Sampling?, Rerandomization: What Is It And When Should You Use It
Deceptively Aligned Mesa-Optimizers: It's Not Funny If I Have To Explain It
April 11, 2022 · Original source
So I am a mesa-optimizer relative to evolution. Evolution, in the process of optimizing my fitness, created a second optimizer - my brain - which is optimizing for things like food and sex. If, like Jacob Falkovich, I satisfy my sex drive by creating a spreadsheet with all the women I want to date, and making it add up all their good qualities and calculate who I should flirt with, then - on the off-chance that spreadsheet achieved sentience - it would be a mesa-optimizer relative to me, and a mesa-mesa-optimizer relative to evolution. All of us - evolution, me, the spreadsheet - want broadly the same goal (for me to succeed at dating and pass on my genes). But evolution delegated some aspects of the problem to my brain, and my brain delegated some aspects of the problem to the spreadsheet, and now whether I mate or not depends on whether I entered a formula right in cell A29.
Inline links: like Jacob Falkovich
Links For March 2023
March 10, 2023 · Original source
18: Jacob Falkovich on Twitter proposes a Law Of Equal Sexual Oppression - in mostly heterosexual/monogamous societies, men and women ought to find dating equally hard/unpleasant/unrewarding. Proof: suppose dating was much harder and less rewarding for one sex; let’s say easy and rewarding for men, but hard and unrewarding for women. Many more men would enter the dating pool, and many women would leave. Now there are too many men chasing too few women; women would be “in demand”, have all the power, and have the option to be much picker, causing dating to shift to norms which are better for women and worse for men, correcting the original imbalance. The only stable equilibrium is the one where both sexes are equally (un)happy!
Inline links: Law Of Equal Sexual Oppression
Links For January 2025
January 17, 2025 · Original source
I agree with this solution. 3: Ruxandra Teslo and Willy Chertman: The Case For Clinical Trial Abundance 4: This month in nominative determinism: NYT article calculating your chance of winning the lottery, by Victor Mather (h/t Yafah Edelman). 5: Someone is working on a dating site that uses your conversations with Claude to find a match. Link here, although so far it’s just a landing page where you can register interest (h/t @venturetwins) 6: The Lyttle Lytton Contest searches for the worst possible opening line for a novel; it’s been going on since 2001 and this year’s results are in. 7: Gary Marcus and Miles Brundage have made a bet about AI progress. I agree with @tamaybes and others in saying that Miles let Gary off too easily; Gary’s public statements all sound like “modern AI is mostly hype, it doesn’t really do anything like thinking”, but the bet is about things like “will AI make a Nobel Prize caliber scientific discovery by 2027?” and “will AI write Pulitzer-quality books by 2027?” I don’t blame Gary for taking the best terms he could find. But I am worried that if AI makes a Nobel-quality scientific discovery in 2026, but doesn’t quite write the Pulitzer-quality book, then Gary will get to claim victory over the AI optimists, whereas in fact that would be at probably the 95th percentile of fast timelines by most people’s estimate. 8: “The probability that cows (or other non-human animals) are experiencing constant bliss, lack tanha (craving, aversion, and the resulting suffering), or are "enlightened by default" is, by my estimation, very low”. 9: Recursive Adaptation (blog on addiction policy)’s predictions for 2025. 75% of FDA approval of GLP-1 for a substance use disorder by 2029! 10: In my post on the economics of GLP-1 receptor agonists (eg Ozempic), I wrote about how they’re currently widely available because of a loophole suspending patents during a shortage, and predicted there would be a big fight when the shortage was over. Sure enough, the FDA tried to declare that the shortage of tirzepatide (a next-generation Ozempic relative) was over, compounding pharmacies sued, and tirzepatide is still available while the issue goes through the courts (and will the administration have an opinion?) Also, compounding pharmacy access startup Mochi says that they will continue to prescribe even if the shortage is over, using another loophole saying doctors can do this for specific individual patients in cases of medical necessity. This is an extremely fake use of this loophole, but will the government be willing to call their bluff? 11: Jacob Falkovich has a blog on dating advice, which he plans to turn into a book of dating advice. I can’t really comment on the accuracy (my dating strategy tends to look more like waiting for women to send me emails saying “I like your blog, would you like to go on a date?” which probably doesn’t generalize), but I’ve had many good interactions with Jake, and he has a beautiful family which means he must be doing something right. Also, Jake is poly, and I sometimes wonder if poly people are the only ones qualified to give dating advice: if you’re monogamous, you either met your future spouse quickly (in which case you have no experience), dated for years without meeting your spouse (in which case you can’t be very good), or aren’t looking for a committed relationship at all (which is just pickup artistry, and follows very different dynamics). Poly people are the only ones who can break out of this trilemma! 12: Christ And Counterfactuals is a blog on effective altruism from a Christian perspective. Some previous attempts at this have felt kind of forced, but the first post I read here was actually pretty interesting. Richard Swinburne (apparently “the world’s best Christian philosopher”), thinks that: “[One] reason why it is good that the human race should sometimes be in an initial situation of considerable ignorance about the causes and effects of our actions, is this. If God abolished the need for rational inquiry and gave us from childhood strong true beliefs about the causes of things, that would make it too easy for us to make moral decisions. As things are in the actual world, most moral decisions are decisions taken in uncertainty about the consequences of our actions. I do not know for certain that if I smoke, I will get cancer; or that if I do not give money to some charity, people will starve. So we have to make our moral decisions on the basis of how probable it is that our actions will have various outcomes—how probable it is that I will get cancer if I continue to smoke (when I would not otherwise get cancer), or that someone will starve if I do not give. Since probabilities are so hard to assess, it is all too easy to persuade yourself that it is worth taking the chance that no harm will result from the less demanding decision (the decision which you have a strong desire to make). And even if you face up to a correct assessment of the probabilities, true dedication to the good is shown by doing the act which, although it is probably the best action, may have no good consequences at all.” (Could a Good God Permit so Much Suffering? A Debate, pp. 52-53.) This is pretty galaxy-brained, but something galaxy-brained must be going on for God to tolerate the existence of evil at all, and this is a surprisingly natural extension of some common premises on the subject. 13: Swedish study: diagnosing the marginal patient with a psychiatric condition makes their life worse. Of the two mechanisms they looked at, stigma seems more involved than drug side effects. My opinion: this study was done on conscripts undergoing a mandatory psych evaluation for the army, who had no previous reason to think they had a psych disease and had not sought treatment. This is a different situation from somebody who comes to a psychiatrist asking for relief from specific symptoms they have noticed. Also, Sweden c. 2005 is a different culture from America 2025 in terms of how much stigma a psych diagnosis carries. I think it’s possible that if you never considered that you had psychiatric problems, and were suddenly given a diagnosis in 2005 Sweden and told you couldn’t serve in the army, that’s likely to destabilize your self-image more than a person who knows they’re depressed going to a psychiatrist in 2025 US and getting antidepressants. 14: RIP Felix Hill, research scientist at DeepMind and mentor to many in the AI community. You can read his suicide note here, though the obvious content warning applies. He says he took ketamine for mild anxiety and it plunged him into an incredibly deep depression that he couldn’t get out of; he leaves his story behind as a warning for others. I appreciate his warning, but I wish he had said more about what dose he used; different people’s ketamine doses vary by almost two orders of magnitude, I’d previously thought that the low doses were pretty safe and the high doses were sketchy, and I would like to know whether I should update or not. 15: RIP Max Chiswick, professional poker player, effective altruist, and ACX reader. 16: Adrian Dittman, a Twitter account widely accused of being Elon Musk’s alt, has been revealed to be . . . a guy named Adrian Dittman. Congrats to Maia Crimew and the Spectator for actually investigating this, unlike many other news sources which spread the Musk conspiracy theory. Also, the people involved got banned from X for some reason, maybe because this qualified as doxxing Dittman. 17: Related: Musk claims to be among the top players in the world at several computer games. A veteran Path of Exile gamer presents evidence that Musk faked his PoE2 accomplishments by hiring a Chinese guy to play on his account. Some Musk supporters in the comments suggest that maybe he hires the Chinese guy to level up his account, but his accomplishments (eg speedruns) are still his own? 18: Related: Sam Harris says he has been friends with Musk since 2008, but he noticed a sudden shift for the worse in his personality around 2020 which made it impossible to stay friends with him. He gives the example of Musk losing a bet with him that there would be 35,000+ COVID cases in the US, refusing to pay up, and launching personal attacks on Sam when asked to do so. What happened? Some theories: Musk turned right-wing, which ended his friendship with Sam for the same reason political differences have always ended friendships (but then what about the bet, which seems like objectively bad behavior?)
Inline links: this, The Case For Clinical Trial Abundance, NYT article calculating your chance of winning the lottery, here, @venturetwins, this year’s results are in, Gary Marcus and Miles Brundage have made a bet about AI progress, @tamaybes, by my estimation, Recursive Adaptation, my post on, the FDA tried to declare, will continue to prescribe, a blog on dating advice, Christ And Counterfactuals, the first post I read here, diagnosing the marginal patient with a psychiatric condition makes their life worse, RIP, here, RIP, a guy named Adrian Dittman, got banned from X for some reason, presents evidence