Tegmark
Article
Tegmark is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between September 20, 2021 and February 21, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “D’Alonzo and Tegmark try to use AI to evaluate media bias”; “this is the same Tegmark who in 1998 developed a leading theory for what the universe is”; “I only know about it because Tegmark writes about AI and x-risk enough”. It most often appears alongside Max Tegmark, Reddit, /r/slatestarcodex.
Metadata
- Category: People
- Mention count: 3
- Issue count: 3
- First seen: September 20, 2021
- Last seen: February 21, 2025
Appears In
- Links For September
- Tegmark’s Mathematical Universe Defeats Most Proofs Of God’s Existence
- Highlights From The Comments On Tegmark’s Mathematical Universe
Related Pages
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- Max Tegmark (2 shared issues)
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- Reddit (2 shared issues)
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- slatestarcodex (1 shared issues)
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- 4chan (1 shared issues)
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- A Clockwork Orange (1 shared issues)
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- ACX (1 shared issues)
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- Adrenochrome (1 shared issues)
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- Adrian (1 shared issues)
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- Andrew Gelman (1 shared issues)
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- Anthropic principle (1 shared issues)
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- Aristotle (1 shared issues)
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- ArrangedMarriages.co (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.
19: D’Alonzo and Tegmark try to use AI to evaluate media bias. They create a giant corpus of articles from different sources, then look for words or phrases with high predictive power for which source a given article comes from. For example, the algorithm might find that some sources always use “abortion rights” but never “pro life” or vice versa, and so using one or the other of these phrases is useful for determining an article’s source. Once it has a bunch of pairs like these, it does a principal components analysis (I can’t tell whether “two components” naturally fell out of the data, or they decided it by fiat), and are mostly able to recreate a standard political compass with dimensions of “right vs. left” and “pro vs. anti-establishment”, as well as plot where different phrases and sources fall on the compass. The actual paper has lots of goodies, and I might blog about it more later, but for now, the headline result is:
Inline links: try to use AI to evaluate media bias
By the way, this is the same Tegmark who in 1998 developed a leading theory for what the universe is and why it exists at all. I feel like going from “discover fundamental nature of the universe” to “attempt to investigate media bias, but it has glaring flaws” is a slightly-too-on-the-nose metaphor for the past 25 years of science as a whole.
Inline links: a leading theory
It feels like 2010 again - the bloggers are debating the proofs for the existence of God. I found these much less interesting after learning about Max Tegmark’s mathematical universe hypothesis, and this doesn’t seem to have reached the Substack debate yet, so I’ll put it out there.
Tegmark’s hypothesis says: all possible mathematical objects exist.
A simulation of the Game of Life within the Game of Life (video source) Tegmark argues this is also true if you don’t build the supercomputer and run it. The fact that the version of Life with the conscious being exists in possibility-space is enough for the being to in fact be experiencing it. By existing, you are a random draw from the set of possible conscious beings. You can’t make a random uniform draw from an infinite set, but the accepted solution is some kind of nonuniform draw weighted by simplicity. So even though every possible mathematical object exists, simpler ones exist more. Most conscious beings exist in very simple universes, ones that (like Life) are just a few short rules which produce surprisingly complex behavior. (Note that the universe itself doesn’t have to be simple - it can have ships, shoes, sealing wax, cabbages, kings, and the like. It just has to be generated from a simple ruleset - ie you can write the laws of physics on a single chalkboard.) AFAICT, this obviates the top five classical arguments for God: Cosmological: Why is there something rather than nothing? Because mathematical objects are logically necessary, and “existence” is just what it feels like to be a conscious observer on the inside of a mathematical object.
Inline links: video source
I’m not even claiming to be novel! I don’t even know if Max Tegmark claims to be novel! Mock us all your want for being boring and stale and unfashionable, just actually respond to our boring/stale/unfashionable points instead of continuing to act like they don’t exist!
[Original thread here: Tegmark’s Mathematical Universe Defeats Most Arguments For God’s Existence.]
Nevin Climenhaga writes:
Inline links: writes