Astral Codex Ten

TIME Magazine

16 min read

TIME Magazine

Article

TIME Magazine is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 5 times across 5 issues between February 09, 2022 and May 29, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “one of TIME Magazine’s “100 Most Influential People In The World””; “T is a Time Magazine list of famous people”; “the cover of TIME Magazine”. It most often appears alongside Elon Musk, Tyler Cowen, ACX Grants.

Metadata

  • Category: Publications
  • Mention count: 5
  • Issue count: 5
  • First seen: February 09, 2022
  • Last seen: May 29, 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.

So You Want To Run A Microgrants Program
February 09, 2022 · Original source
One applicant mentioned that his bio project was advised by George Church - Harvard professor, National Academy of Sciences member, one of TIME Magazine’s “100 Most Influential People In The World”, and generally amazing guy. I was astonished that a project with Church’s endorsement was pitching to me, and not to Peter Thiel or Elon Musk or someone.
I support effective altruism, a vast worldwide movement focused on trying to pick good charities. Sometimes I go to their conferences, where they give lectures about how to pick good charities. Or I read their online forum, where people write posts about how to pick good charities. I've been to effective altruist meetups, where we all come together and talk about good charity picking. So I felt like, maybe, I don't know, I probably knew some stuff about how to pick good charities.
…except that I had 656 applications like this, and everyone told me it was important to get back to people within a month or two. I don't think I could fully explore the subtleties of the antibiotic proposal in that time - let alone 656 proposals, most of which were even less straightforward.
Obscure Pregnancy Interventions: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
April 13, 2022 · Original source
N is a different set of Nobelists, F is Fields Medalists (ie great mathematicians), T is a Time Magazine list of famous people, and M is a group of great musicians. These effects usually hover on the border of significance; I am tempted to round them up because they should be using time trends rather than point estimates, and because you can add up different groups to get a bigger sample size.
First caveat: almost every topic we investigate, including this one, will be confounded by poverty. Poor mothers have more of most risk factors. They’re more exposed to toxic pollutants. They eat worse diets and take fewer supplements. They’re less likely to follow the latest fad health advice. And poor babies usually have worse outcomes: worse health, more behavioral problems, lower IQ. So if you ask “does this risk factor correlate with worse outcomes”, the answer is almost always yes (sometimes statisticians try to adjust away poverty and other confounding variables, but this never works). This is why only randomized controlled trials, or other studies that come up with clever ways around this problem, can be truly convincing.
Inline links: this never works
Second caveat: almost every topic we investigate, including this one, will be confounded by genetics. Pregnant mothers will do something, and then their child will be a certain way, and people will want to say it was because they did the thing, but it might just be genetic. For example, consider the claim that maternal stress during pregnancy makes children develop anxiety disorders. You survey a thousand mothers, you see which ones are stressed during pregnancy, then thirty years later you check if those mothers’ kids have more anxiety disorders. They will, but anxiety disorders are genetic. If your mother was stressed during pregnancy, maybe it’s because she has a genetic tendency towards stress, which you inherit, and then you’re stressed all the time too. This can be more subtle: for example, what if we find that maternal stress decreases child IQ? It could be causal. Or it could be that low-IQ people make worse decisions, that means they end up in more stressful situations, and then pass those low-IQ genes on to their kids.
Highlights From The Comments On Subcultures
August 19, 2022 · Original source
Postcycle: Since 2020 Now things are pretty stable, partly because we put enough distance between ourselves and our growth phase that we can start to get a little hipster cool again, and partly because effective altruism is the Hot New Thing that everyone is supposed to have an opinion on. This is the usual pattern of exciting talked-about movements spawning successor movements that then get to be exciting and talked-about in turn, while the original movement gets to go back to being normal people with a common interest again. By the way, in the past week, effective altruism has gotten long, glowing profiles in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Vox, the cover of TIME Magazine, shoutouts from Elon Musk and Andrew Yang, podcast interviews with Tyler Cowen and Tim Ferriss, and criticism from Freddie deBoer. Enjoy it while it lasts! ___________________ 7: MT writes: A lot of this sounds like truism, or selection bias. Thing isn't popular or exciting to most, then it catches on and grows, then it stops growing, fragments into new directions and isn't novel but becomes part of the mainstream. This HAS TO describe literally anything in the past that was ever popular/exciting, because it wasn't always that way (started small) and can't grow indefinitely without becoming either an institution (stable leadership/direction), fragmented (new leadership/direction), or just falling apart. The germ of this idea was my feeling that I’ve been in movements where it starts out feeling like everyone can’t stop gushing about how great we are, and then later there’s another phase where criticism reigns and everyone feels slightly embarrassed to be involved. This doesn’t feel tautological to me, although it might become trivial if you allow enough selection bias (some movement where this hasn’t happened “isn’t the kind of movement this happens to”). I could prove this by making nontrivial predictions about which movements are going to get less camaraderie and more internecine struggle in the future. Four years ago I would have said “new left socialism”, and I think I did endorse Robby Soave’s article to that effect at the time, but I think new left socialism is well into involution or even postcycle now. Last year I would have said YIMBYism, but I’m not up-to-date on it and maybe it’s already transitioned too. The only movement I see that’s still clearly high on “we are so great and such good friends with each other” is postrationalism/ingroup/TPOT, so sure, I expect things to get worse for them (sorry for this potentially self-fulfilling prophecy). (I’m nervous about saying EA because they still have more money than they can spend in a reasonable amount of time; as long as that situation continues they won’t be exactly resource-scarce, and the people with the purse-strings will have a natural advantage as “elites”.) I’m actually surprised how few uncomplicated happy growth spurt movements I can think of now, compared to how many I can think of that seem to have passed through that stage. I think this is a combination of: This is a pretty pessimistic social moment (eg the thing where dystopian SF has become more popular than the utopian SF of the late 20th century).
Inline links: the New Yorker, New York Times, Vox, cover of TIME Magazine, Elon Musk, Andrew Yang, Tyler Cowen, Tim Ferriss, Freddie deBoer, MT, Robby Soave’s article to that effect, postrationalism/ingroup/TPOT
I firmly believe that cycles don't exist and never have existed. This is my shitposting way of saying "I have never, once, in my years of experience modeling human behavioral time series, come across an honest-to-god cyclical pattern (excluding time of year/month/week/day effects)." And yet for some reason, every time I show a time series to anyone ever, people swear to god the data looks cyclical.
Except for cicada population! I think that’s genuinely cyclic! You can argue it ought to count as a calendar-based cycle, but then every cycle that lasted a specific amount of time would be calendar-based and Limelihood’s claim would be true by definition.
Links For April 2023
April 20, 2023 · Original source
16: The Extended IQ Classification (Classified) 17: Eliezer in TIME Magazine. Related: 18: Related: interview with Ryan Kupyn, winner of the 2022 ACX Forecasting contest, on forecasting AGI: 19: Related: Geoffrey Hinton, probably the most accomplished AI scientist in the world, says that “until quite recently, I thought it was going to be like 20 to 50 years before we have general purpose AI, and now I think it may be 20 years or less”. Also that AI wiping out humanity is “not inconceivable . . . that’s all I’ll say”. 20: Related: you’ve probably all seen this by now, but Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter. 30,000 people - including deep learning pioneer Yoshua Bengio, former presidential candidate Andrew Yang, Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, Gary Marcus, and MIRI director Nate Soares - have signed a letter calling for a six month pause on training AIs bigger than GPT-4. Many people have made fun of this, noting that nobody has an argument for why a six month delay would help anything. And an additional reason for eye-rolling: training AIs larger than GPT-4 is extremely expensive and hard, the most likely people to do it within a six month timespan are OpenAI themselves, and they’ve announced they’re taking a break and not planning on doing this, so the letter is demanding a stop to something which probably won’t happen anyway. I think it’s intended be a compromise between many people all vaguely against current levels of AI progress for different reasons (Scott Aaronson says - I can’t tell how seriously - that some are AI researchers who want to be able to publish papers on the current generation of AI without them becoming obsolete halfway through peer review), most of them are thinking of it as mood-affiliation-y “let’s make noise and show lots of people are worried about AI and want action”, and “a six month pause” was a sufficiently vague proposal that it didn’t prevent any of these people from signing. You could have done just as well with a letter saying “AI BAD”, except that people would have taken it less seriously. Less cynically, FLI (the group behind the letter) has put out a list of concrete policy proposals they would like people to discuss during the pause. [update: here’s Max Tegmark from FLI explaining what he hopes to achieve with the letter/pause] The alignment community always figured their concerns sounded too weird for normal people to care about, that politics was a lost cause, and that our best hope lay in technical research. They also hoped that sometime in the future there would be a “fire alarm” - something would happen to get people and policy-makers’ attention - and then the political route would open up. I think we always imagined this as some AI-initiated disaster destroying a city or something. I personally am pretty surprised it was just “GPT-4 got released and was very good”. Still, that is what happened, and I’m updating. In fact, I’ve updated so far that I’m starting to worry that the problem won’t be building a political coalition against unsafe AI, the problem will be not overshooting and banning all AI forever. I’m against this: I think society’s current track is toward other existential risks or dystopia, that AI could kill everybody but could also create post-scarcity and an end to most of our current problems, and that at some point (not yet!) the risk of continuing the current path indefinitely becomes worse than the risk of just going with AI and seeing what happens. In my ideal world, we would take ten or twenty years to go really slowly with AI, pouring lots of resources into alignment the whole time - but eventually, we would take the plunge. Everything I’ve said on this topic in the has been about giving us that breathing room and those resources. Still, I also want to make sure we don’t totally kill AI the way we’ve killed (to various degrees) nuclear power, supersonic flight, and genetic engineering. I’m still trying to calibrate what that means I should be doing, but I have a lot of respect for everyone on all sides. Except the people making terrible arguments (you know who you are!) 21: I’m not sure what this means in real life or why this would have changed, but congratulations to Peter Thiel, I guess: 22: This month in institution design: The Pear Ring is a distinctive ring you can wear to signal that you’re single and interested in people introducing themselves or flirting with you. Good idea in a vacuum, but I’m worried about the two usual banes of things like this - how do you build up a critical mass who understand the signal, and how do you prevent negative selection (even if it’s just “selection for weird people who like weird institution design things”?) Also, this is one of the rare cases where a startup is selling a practical product and I’d prefer a subscription-based Internet Of Things monstrosity - surely it would be even better if you spotted someone wearing the ring and then you could use your smartphone to call up their dating profile. 23: A few years ago I wrote Trump: A Setback For Trumpism, about how after Trump was elected, support for most of his policies (including immigration restrictions) fell. A new paper confirms that this is a general pattern whenever right-wing populists win an election. I continue to be interested in why this is true for right-wing populists in particular. 24: 200 Concrete Problems In AI Interpretability. “You can note which you're working on, and reach out to other people doing the same.” 25: Some good discussion of Nayib Bukele’s apparently successful anti-gang crackdown in El Salvador: Richard Hanania presents evidence that it’s not just a “deal with the gangs”, it’s a real crackdown that should be embarrassing to other countries that choose not to do this.
Inline links: The Extended IQ Classification (Classified), Eliezer in TIME Magazine, says that, Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter, says, a list of concrete policy proposals they would like people to discuss during the pause, here’s Max Tegmark, https://twitter.com/tedgioia/status/1642205821256736768, Pear Ring, Trump: A Setback For Trumpism, A new paper confirms, why this is true for right-wing populists in particular, 200 Concrete Problems In AI Interpretability, Richard Hanania
[Remember, I haven’t independently verified each link. On average, commenters will end up spotting evidence that around two or three of the links in each links post are wrong or misleading. I correct these as I see them, and will highlight important corrections later, but I can’t guarantee I will have caught them all by the time you read this.]
Apparently OpenAI at one point trained and ran a model with sign-flipped reward due to a coding bug . . . the result was a model which optimized for negative sentiment while preserving natural language. Since our instructions told humans to give very low ratings to continuations with sexually explicit text, the model quickly learned to output only content of this form . . . the authors were asleep during the training process, so the problem was noticed only once training had finished.
Sorry, I Still Think MR Is Wrong About USAID
May 29, 2025 · Original source
Someone should tell [Scott] that Emergent Ventures overhead is typically two percent, five percent for dealing with screwier banking systems. (That is one reason why I won the recent Time magazine award for innovation in philanthropy.) I am well aware there are various ways of calculating overhead, but there are now more than one thousand Emergent Ventures winners, and all of them can testify to how radically stripped-down the process is.
The third-largest category (20%, so $300 million of their total $1.5 billion yearly budget) is the types of re-re-grants people are concerned about. Sometimes they give the money to their local Catholic equivalent, like Caritas Nigeria. In some war-torn places, they give the money to local groups that are already stuck in the war-torn area instead of trying to send American staffers in themselves - I think this is what’s going on in the Joint Emergency Operation in Tigray.
Inline links: third-largest category, Caritas Nigeria, Joint Emergency Operation
Why doesn’t USAID give grants to these groups directly, instead of giving them to CRS to give grants to them? Sometimes it’s because random locals in Tigray with a comparative advantage in dodging warlords don’t also have a comparative advantage in interfacing with the US government, which demands large amounts of paperwork. Other times it’s because these are such small grants that they’re a bad match for USAID’s long application and compliance process. Still other times, it’s because CRS has more people on the ground and more expertise in figuring out who needs money.