Astral Codex Ten

Tyler

13 min read

Tyler

Article

Tyler is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 10 times across 10 issues between March 01, 2022 and April 01, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as “I am mildly annoyed by Tyler being much less clear than (eg) Richard or Anatoly”; “Presidents Tyler and Polk”; “Tyler gently ribs me for being silly”. It most often appears alongside Scott, France, Nigeria.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 10
  • Issue count: 10
  • First seen: March 01, 2022
  • Last seen: April 01, 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.

Ukraine Warcasting
March 01, 2022 · Original source
Still, I think he comes out the best overall of anyone on this list. Tyler Cowen: ??? This tweet has been going around recently:
This tweet has been going around recently: @tylercowen. He says Putin will invade Ukraine today. Much disagreement and push back around the table. Come back from lunch. Putin has invaded Ukraine.","username":"ATabarrok","name":"Alex Tabarrok","profile_image_url":"","date":"Tue Feb 22 00:18:21 +0000 2022","photos":[],"quoted_tweet":{},"reply_count":0,"retweet_count":63,"like_count":1449,"impression_count":0,"expanded_url":{},"video_url":null,"belowTheFold":true}" data-component-name="Twitter2ToDOM"> But it’s from February 21. On February 21, Putin announced he was sending “peacekeepers” in to Donbass. Most sources say the invasion of Ukraine started February 24.
I am having trouble finding evidence of Tyler saying other specific things. On February 12, he posted this quote, which seemed to maybe suggest Russia would invade around the 20th. On February 17th, he wrote:
Inline links: this quote, he wrote
Your Book Review: The Internationalists
July 01, 2022 · Original source
When Mexico repeatedly couldn't pay, Presidents Tyler and Polk offered to accept land instead. Polk also advanced troops on the border to make it clear what the alternative was. Mexico attacked scouts of the US army, and Polk asked for a declaration of war. But the main reason for the war wasn't the attack on our scouts. “Polk’s war message, however, focused first and foremost on the issue of unpaid debts.” (Chapter 1)
MR Tries The Safe Uncertainty Fallacy
March 30, 2023 · Original source
Therefore, it’ll be fine. You’re not missing anything. It’s not supposed to make sense; that’s why it’s a fallacy. For years, people used the Safe Uncertainty Fallacy on AI timelines: Eliezer didn’t realize that at our level, you can just name fallacies. Since 2017, AI has moved faster than most people expected; GPT-4 sort of qualifies as an AGI, the kind of AI most people were saying was decades away. When you have ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA when something will happen, sometimes the answer turns out to be “soon”. Now Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution tries his hand at this argument. We have absolutely no idea how AI will go, it’s radically uncertain: No matter how positive or negative the overall calculus of cost and benefit, AI is very likely to overturn most of our apple carts, most of all for the so-called chattering classes. The reality is that no one at the beginning of the printing press had any real idea of the changes it would bring. No one at the beginning of the fossil fuel era had much of an idea of the changes it would bring. No one is good at predicting the longer-term or even medium-term outcomes of these radical technological changes (we can do the short term, albeit imperfectly). No one. Not you, not Eliezer, not Sam Altman, and not your next door neighbor. How well did people predict the final impacts of the printing press? How well did people predict the final impacts of fire? We even have an expression “playing with fire.” Yet it is, on net, a good thing we proceeded with the deployment of fire (“Fire? You can’t do that! Everything will burn! You can kill people with fire! All of them! What if someone yells “fire” in a crowded theater!?”). Therefore, it’ll be fine: I am a bit distressed each time I read an account of a person “arguing himself” or “arguing herself” into existential risk from AI being a major concern. No one can foresee those futures! Once you keep up the arguing, you also are talking yourself into an illusion of predictability. Since it is easier to destroy than create, once you start considering the future in a tabula rasa way, the longer you talk about it, the more pessimistic you will become. It will be harder and harder to see how everything hangs together, whereas the argument that destruction is imminent is easy by comparison. The case for destruction is so much more readily articulable — “boom!” Yet at some point your inner Hayekian (Popperian?) has to take over and pull you away from those concerns. (Especially when you hear a nine-part argument based upon eight new conceptual categories that were first discussed on LessWrong eleven years ago.) Existential risk from AI is indeed a distant possibility, just like every other future you might be trying to imagine. All the possibilities are distant, I cannot stress that enough. The mere fact that AGI risk can be put on a par with those other also distant possibilities simply should not impress you very much. So we should take the plunge. If someone is obsessively arguing about the details of AI technology today, and the arguments on LessWrong from eleven years ago, they won’t see this. Don’t be suckered into taking their bait. Look. It may well be fine. I said before my chance of existential risk from AI is 33%; that means I think there’s a 66% chance it won’t happen. In most futures, we get through okay, and Tyler gently ribs me for being silly. Don’t let him. Even if AI is the best thing that ever happens and never does anything wrong and from this point forward never even shows racial bias or hallucinates another citation ever again, I will stick to my position that the Safe Uncertainty Fallacy is a bad argument. Normally this would be the point where I try to steelman Tyler and explain in more detail why the strongest version of his case is wrong. But I’m having trouble figuring out what the strong version is. Here are three possibilities: 1) The base rate for things killing humanity is very low, so we would need a strong affirmative argument to shift our estimate away from that base rate. Since there’s so much uncertainty, we don’t have strong affirmative arguments, and we should stick with our base rate of “very low”. Suppose astronomers spotted a 100-mile long alien starship approaching Earth. Surely this counts as a radically uncertain situation if anything does; we have absolutely no idea what could happen. Therefore - the alien starship definitely won’t kill us and it’s not worth worrying? Seems wrong. What’s the base rate for alien starships approaching Earth killing humanity? We don’t have a base rate, because we’ve never been in this situation before. What is the base rate for developing above-human-level AI killing humanity? We don’t . . . you get the picture. You can try to fish for something sort of like a base rate: “There have been a hundred major inventions since agriculture, and none of them killed humanity, so the base rate for major inventions killing everyone is about 0%”. But I can counterargue: “There have been about a dozen times a sapient species has created a more intelligent successor species: australopithecus → homo habilis, homo habilis → homo erectus, etc - and in each case, the successor species has wiped out its predecessor. So the base rate for more intelligent successor species killing everyone is about 100%”. The Less Wrongers call this game “reference class tennis”, and insist that the only winning move is not to play. Thinking about this question in terms of base rates is just as hard as thinking of it any other way, and would require arguments for why one base rate is better than another. Tyler hasn’t made any. 2) There are so many different possibilities - let’s say 100! - and dying is only one of them, so there’s only a 1% chance that we’ll die. This is sort of how I interpret: Existential risk from AI is indeed a distant possibility, just like every other future you might be trying to imagine. All the possibilities are distant, I cannot stress that enough. The mere fact that AGI risk can be put on a par with those other also distant possibilities simply should not impress you very much. Alien time again! Here are some possible ways the hundred-mile long starship situation could end: The aliens are peaceful and want to share their advanced technology
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!jYyh!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F672bd8f5-484b-48ff-a80f-539d7b77b66c_599x238.png, sort of qualifies as an AGI, tries his hand at this argument
In order to generate a belief, you have to do epistemic work. I’ve thought about this question a lot and predict a 33% chance AI will cause human extinction; other people have different numbers. What’s Tyler’s? All he’ll say is that it’s only a “distant possibility”. Does that mean 33%? Does it mean 5-10% (as Katja’s survey suggests the median AI researcher thinks?) Does it mean 1%? Or does Tyler not have a particular percent in mind, because he wants to launder his bad argument through a phrase that sort of sounds like it means “it’s not zero, you can’t accuse me of arrogantly dismissing this future in particular” but also sort of means “don’t worry about it” without having to do the hard work of checking whether any particular number fills both criteria at once?
Inline links: other people have different numbers
If you have total uncertainty about a statement (“are bloxors greeblic?”), you should assign it a probability of 50%. If you have any other estimate, you can’t claim you’re just working off how radically uncertain it is. You need to present a specific case. I look forward to reading Tyler’s, sometime in the future.
Highlights From The Comments On Kidney Donation
November 07, 2023 · Original source
Tyler writes:
Inline links: writes
Followup: Quests And Requests
November 10, 2023 · Original source
Tyler writes:
Inline links: writes
Meetups Everywhere 2024: Times & Places
August 29, 2024 · Original source
Contact: Ben Wōden Contact Info: cascadestyler[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 21st, 02:00 PM Location: Siren RG1 Craft Brew: 1 Friars Walk, Reading RG1 1DA Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9C3XF24G+P8 Notes: Siren RG1 is not a pub in the traditional sense and does not have pub vibes. It has an almost cafe-like atmosphere that's friendly to non-drinkers. If you are put off by the atmosphere of the traditional british pub, please don't let that be a reason to give this one a miss. I'm planning on staying around until maybe about 6, so don't worry about turning up significantly later than the start time. RSVPs would be helpful but are not a requirement. Feel free to email me with any questions.
Inline links: https://plus.codes/9C3XF24G+P8
Contact: Tyler Contact Info: tylerbraly[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 28th, 01:00 PM Location: Tap Indianapolis, 306 N Delaware St, Indianapolis, IN 46204, outside of the weather is nice, otherwise look for the sign saying ACX Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86FMQRCW+J5
Inline links: https://plus.codes/86FMQRCW+J5
Links For December 2024
December 17, 2024 · Original source
36: Tyler Alterman (tweet here, but it’s short enough that I’m going to copy-paste):
Inline links: Tyler Alterman
I think something like this is pretty plausible - I see too many people who have too many insights but don’t seem to have the radical life transformation I would expect after a thousand deep insights into their soul. Alternative explanations are that they start from negative one million (eg trauma history) and the insights help them function at all (but many of these people seem functional before they start getting insights), or that they are internally and unobservably extremely happy even though this doesn’t improve their interpersonal effectiveness (I think some Buddhists are like this, but many forms of insight specifically claim to improve interpersonal effectiveness). Props to Tyler for putting it in such a pithy way.
Inline links: something like this
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2025: Times & Places
March 25, 2025 · Original source
Contact: Ben Woden Contact Info: cascadestyler[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Saturday, May 3rd, 2:00 PM Location: Siren Craft Brew, 1 Friar's Walk, Reading RG1 1HP Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9C3XF24G+P8P Notes: If you can RSVP by Apr 19th, that will help me book us a spot of the appropriate size, but please still feel free to come if you don't RSVP. The bar is child and dog friendly, and serves things besides beer if you fancy.
Inline links: https://plus.codes/9C3XF24G+P8P
Contact: Tyler Contact Info: tylerbraly[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Saturday, April 26th, 3:00 PM Location: Upland Brewery Fountain Square 1201 Prospect St, Indianapolis, IN 46203 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86FMQV36+VV
Inline links: https://plus.codes/86FMQV36+VV
Sorry, I Still Think MR Is Wrong About USAID
May 29, 2025 · Original source
Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution continues to disagree with my Contra MR On Charity Regrants. Going through his response piece by piece, slightly out of order:
Inline links: Contra MR On Charity Regrants, his response
…will inevitably lead to people thinking Tyler is confirming or at least directionally agreeing with Rubio.
I wasn’t the only person who understood it this way. So did eleven people who commented to this effect on the ACX subreddit1, 22 people who commented this on Marginal Revolution itself, a Yale economics professor , a Center for Global Development senior economist - and, presumably, my friend who, when I told them last week that I had a post I wanted them to proofread, responded, without even knowing what it was about, I quote, "before clicking on the link my guess is it's about tyler cowen's inane USAID post...I was so angry".
Inline links: 1, Yale economics professor, Center for Global Development senior economist
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2026: Times & Places
April 01, 2026 · Original source
Contact: Tyler Contact Info: bitterrootacx[@]gmail[.]com Time: Saturday, May 2nd, 12:00 PM Location: Brew X Coffee. May be on the back patio weather permitting. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/85R76RWR+VR
Inline links: https://plus.codes/85R76RWR+VR