Astral Codex Ten

Nostradamus

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Nostradamus

Article

Nostradamus is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between March 15, 2021 and February 02, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as “even Nostradamus would have gotten some things wrong”; “Nostradamus was a 16th century French physician who claimed to be able to see the future”; “Nostradamus scholars note that a historian accused Pasteur of plagiarism in 1995”. It most often appears alongside China, Fukuyama, Iraq War.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 3
  • Issue count: 3
  • First seen: March 15, 2021
  • Last seen: February 02, 2023

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.

Mantic Monday: Mantic Matt Y
March 15, 2021 · Original source
You don't want a rule that if a pundit ever gets anything wrong, we stop trusting them forever. Warren Buffett gets some things wrong, Zeynep Tufecki gets some things wrong, even Nostradamus would have gotten some things wrong if he'd said anything clearly enough to pin down what he meant. The best we can hope for is people with a good win-loss record. But how do you measure win-loss record? Lots of people worked on this (especially Philip Tetlock) and we ended up with the kind of probabilistic predictions a lot of people use now.
From Nostradamus To Fukuyama
September 28, 2022 · Original source
Nostradamus was a 16th century French physician who claimed to be able to see the future.
In 1559, he got his big break. During a jousting match, a count killed King Henry II of France with a lance through the visor of his helmet. Years earlier, Nostradamus had written:
The nobleman was a bit younger than the king, supposedly they both had lions on their shield (false), maybe King Henry was wearing a golden helmet (I can’t find evidence for this, but as a consolation prize please accept this picture of his amazing parade armor), and his slow agonizing death over ten days from his wounds was pretty cruel. Seems like a match, sort of. Anyway, for the next five hundred years lots of people were really into Nostradamus and spent goodness knows how many brain cycles trying to interpret his incomprehensible quatrains.
Inline links: false, this picture
Mostly Skeptical Thoughts On The Chatbot Propaganda Apocalypse
February 02, 2023 · Original source
(source: SMBC) How seriously should we take these comics? The worse chatbots are (compared to humans) as friends, influencers, and debate partners, the less we have to worry about. But the better chatbots are as friends, influencers, and debate partners, the more upside there could be. I don’t want to speculate on exactly how this would work: it gets too close to the original idea of the Singularity in the sense of “a point where crazy things are happening so fast it’s not worth trying to predict”. Conclusion And Predictions I’m nervous writing this, because I remember the halcyon days of the early 2000s, when we all assumed the Internet would be a force for reason and enlightenment. Surely if everyone were just allowed to debate everyone else, without intervening barriers of race or class or religion, the best arguments would rise to the top and we would enter a new utopia of universal agreement. The scale at which this project failed makes me reluctant to ever speculate again about anything regarding online discourse going well. Maybe in the 2030s, the idea that propagandabots would be either easily dispatched, or else model netizens writing good content, will seem just as naive as the early 2000s vision. And the chatbot propaganda apocalypse is a popular thing to believe in without any clear definition, and there will surely be some celebrated cases of chatbots causing mischief, so I’m setting myself up to fail here by the standards I mentioned in Nostradamus to Fukuyama. Still, I do want to go on record as doubting the strongest form of this thesis. As for predictions: If I ask ACXers in 2030 whether any of them have had a good friend for more than a month who turned out to (unknown to them) be a chatbot, or who they strongly suspect may have been a chatbot, fewer than 10% will say yes. I may resolve this by common sense if it’s obvious, or by ACX survey if it’s not: 95%
Inline links: SMBC, Nostradamus to Fukuyama