597 Comments

It would really make it a lot more enjoyable to vote on the book reviews if we could vote just by clicking the heart on the review-- at the time we are reading it. Then we could vote on based on our immediate reaction to the review (eg that's a great review!!! vs meh). You'd lose the rank order preference of individuals. But then people could give positive feedback on multiple reveiws if they liked them all a lot. Top winner would be the review the most people liked a lot.

Expand full comment

Well this was interesting. Bill Mahr argues with an actual physical “Straw Man” to make a point.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lTFnj-9EY4M

Perhaps next episode he’ll illustrate the Motte and Bailey idea with a real castle.

Expand full comment

Any tips on the best DNA sequencing services? What do they tend to provide? Do you get your actual genome or just some handwavy stuff like "some of your ancestors were from northern Europe" and "you're more likely to be a gambler"? What percentage of your genome do they sequence?

I tried to read through some FAQs but they tend to feature pretty pictures and quite limited info on what exactly you receive.

Expand full comment

I would look into www.selfdecode.com

It gives you personalized health suggestions based on your genetics, plus you get the raw data and can upload it to ancestry websites

Expand full comment

Thanks! It seems though that you get raw data with a lot of these websites, which is what I'm most interested in; it's just not always clear exactly what data is included.

Expand full comment

Almost all consumer services that are cheap (~$100 or less) don't sequence the genome at all, they just look for a library of "single nucleotide polymorphisms" -- i.e. known mutations that can happen at a single location on the DNA -- and catalog the genome based on the pattern of SNPs found, and in what demographics that particular pattern is usually found.

Whole genome sequencing is done, but it's typically significantly more expensive, of order ~$1,000. Here are some leads:

https://geneticgenie.org/article/where-do-i-get-whole-genome-sequencing/

Expand full comment

Thanks, I'll take a look!

Expand full comment

I loved almost all the book reviews, and they are all very well written. I thank all the authors!

I have ranked the reviews according to the number of times they contain the word "focus" and its derivatives:

0 Consciousness And The Brain

0 The Castrato

0 Viral (was COVID a lab leak?)

0 Kora In Hell (William Carlos Williams poetry)

1 The Dawn Of Everything (ancient hunter-gatherers)

1 The Internationalists (treaty to make war illegal)

1 1587: A Year Of No Significance (Ming China)

3 The Future Of Fusion Energy

3 The Outlier (biography of Jimmy Carter)

3 The Society Of The Spectacle

3 Exhaustion (chronic fatigue)

3 God Emperor Of Dune

6 The Anti-Politics Machine (how development aid goes wrong)

7 Making Nature (history of the scientific journal Nature)

8 The Righteous Mind

Special congrats to the first four reviewers for sparing us the f**us word!

Expand full comment

Lol this is hilarious. Can I ask what inspired it (and your name)?

Expand full comment

Thank you

Expand full comment

Does anyone know what the graph looks like for:

X - axis: days since booster shot

Y - added (or subtracted if negative at any point?) immunity from booster shot

Trying to advise parents on optimal booster scheduling

Expand full comment

After a while of homelessness, some people have trouble sleeping indoors.

https://www.metafilter.com/196388/The-Trauma-Of-Homelessness-Doesnt-End-Under-A-Roof#8289499

There's one person in the comments who spent a year camping, and then didn't want to sleep indoors.

The short version is that homelessness is an even harder problem than it looks like.

Expand full comment

I'm pretty sure homelessness in US is pretty much a consequence of stopping the institutionalization of people suffering of long term mental problems. It was probably a good decision at the time, since the conditions in (some) of the institutions were pretty bad and the standards for admission and release were less than perfect, and it's a fair debate on if it should be rescinded or not, but that's the price to pay for that decision. Personally, I'd probably lean towards restarting it on a more voluntary basis - I'm pretty sure it's both cheaper and more effective to take care of those people in a place that's set up for this, rather than leave them on the street and regularly give them absurdly expensive ambulance rides.

As for the temporary homeless, that's solvable in the usual ways, but is also a much lower problem overall.

Expand full comment
Comment deleted
Sep 1, 2022
Comment deleted
Expand full comment

The percentage of homeless at one point in time might not be the most relevant. If a large percentage are temporary, they can be helped by classic methods like cash transfers or housing. The (even if much smaller) percentage of people with mental health problems need dedicated help - they're both long term and non-responsive to classic approaches.

This btw is valid regardless of the direction of causality.

Expand full comment

More low cost housing might lead to fewer homeless people, but might not help people who've been homeless for a while.

Expand full comment
Comment deleted
Aug 31, 2022
Comment deleted
Expand full comment

The law, in its majestic equality, requires both rich and poor to sleep indoors.

Expand full comment
Comment deleted
Aug 31, 2022
Comment deleted
Expand full comment

San Fran has a surplus of around $100mil, the first in 24 years

Expand full comment

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41366-022-01211-2

"When fasting insulin and the natural logarithm of c-reactive protein were included in the model, an inverse association between BMI and mortality was present"

Expand full comment

To carry on the discussion down thread about "Christians needed to invent hospitals because they invented so many wars", here's something I had not previously heard of before: Christians burned down the Library of Antioch!

Or maybe not. But if you want to one-up someone talking about the Tragedy of the Burning of the Great Library of Alexandria, here you go! "Never mind Alexandria, did you know about Antioch?"

https://historyforatheists.com/2022/08/burning-the-library-of-antioch/

Expand full comment

They created so wars because they were capable of doing do. Other groups mercilessly butchered each other, its just that their abject lack of technological development meant that they couldn't do anything on a meaningfully large scale.

Expand full comment

At times I've come across discussions asking what exactly happened to the library of Alexandria as if it were a great mystery (hence the answer: "Christians burned it", which is only one of the answers I've heard). But, as far as I can tell, books normally don't survive long, unless they are transcribed over and over. So is there really a mystery? That an immense library declines, to the point that it seems to disappear, because people fail to maintain, it is more or less what you'd expect to happen over time, especially in an era of general decline.

Expand full comment

Modern books don't last very long, because the way most modern paper is made (directly from wood pulp) leaves the chemistry in the paper out of equilibrium, and over a fairly short timescale (5-10) years chemical reactions cause the paper to yellow and disintegrate. But books made before the mid-20th century, on paper made from cotton and rags, readily last centuries unless abused, because their chemistry is stable when created. Parchment is even more durable.

Expand full comment

The Ptolemaic dynasty, which had been actually paying to maintain the Library, went out of business in 30 BC. And the civil war that put them out of business incidentally burned a warehouse holding the reserve collection. Given the timing, I don't think you can pin that on the Christians.

The last record of the Great Library as a functional library, was ca. 260 AD. There's your "centuries" right there; three of them. The bit with Hypatia and the pagans vs the Christians, was a century and a half after that, during which period the institution had switched from "library" to "temple".

Almost five hundred years when nobody was paying to replace or repair the books as they wore out, were eaten by worms, or wandered off in the hands of people who thought they could give them a better home. Possibly some time between 270 and 415 AD there was a bit of deliberate arson as well, but that wouldn't have made much difference to the end result.

Expand full comment

But "centuries" is not much, in context. I didn't make it clear, but I was actually talking about ancient manuscripts, and when I said that they don't last long I meant that if they are not painstakingly transcribed they are unlikely to last more than, what, two, three centuries? That is not much.

Expand full comment

Nobody founds a library, builds a great big limestone building, spends a lot of money to buy a lot of books...and then walks away, expecting it to last 500 years. A library is founded because people think it will be useful *today* and *next week* and *next year*. Nobody really gives a damn about "300 years from now" because they have no idea what that future will look like. It's an organization that survives, or does not, because it is steadily useful in the present (or isn't).

If the founders are correct, then people come in and use the library all the time, and they look at the books and so forth, and presumably they're willing to pay and do pay the library's costs to keep the books or scrolls or whatnot that are popular and in demand in reasonable shape[1]..

Stuff that no one finds interesting probably gets thrown out faster than it physically decays, because few libraries would have space to just keep stuff that nobody thinks will ever be used. Modern libraries cull their collections all the time, although they mostly hedge their bets by putting what looks most important on microfilm (in the old days) or digitizing it via OCR (these days) before throwing it away. Whether those records survive deep into the future -- who knows? Arguments have been made[2] digital records are more susceptible to loss over centuries than plain old books, on account of they rely on the availability of reading machines considerably more sophisticated than human eyes.

---------------------

[1] For example, you can't get the code for "Colossal Cave" on a 5.25" floppy any more, but you can get it on GitHub:

http://www.catb.org/~esr/open-adventure/

Enough people were nostalgic about that particular game from the dawn of personal computing to keep it alive, but most other games are gone forever.

[2] Oblig. xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1909/

Expand full comment

More like 20 years for papyrus. Papyrus only lasts when it happens to be buried in the Egyptian desert.

Expand full comment
Comment deleted
Sep 1, 2022
Comment deleted
Expand full comment

This is a pedantry, but people don't write in fonts. "Font" derives from the same word as "foundry" and refers to the casting of the lead types in a typeface which are then used to set pages; it is an element of the art of printing, not writing. (Also, a unit of size: "one font of type" denotes a certain amount of cast types.)

Manuscripts are written in a hand.

Expand full comment

The Alexandrian mob and the volatile nature of politics in the three-way standoff between the Pagans, the Christians and the Jews in Alexandria at the time, coupled with the death of Hypatia (killed as collateral damage in the political tug-of-war between the governor of the city and the bishop, but then later turned into a martyr for science by anti-Catholic and then anti-Christian polemicists) means that the Burning of the Library (which seems to have sort of happened on and off over the years, it's a complicated subject) is easy fodder for the "Science versus Religion" debates and indeed anyone who wants to have a go at the church (usually the Catholic Church, nobody seems to blame the Baptists or the Seventh Day Adventists for it).

Tim O'Neill has another good post on it, as do others. Basically, it's the kind of pop culture story that some people can't resist because it has everything (sex, violence, murder, wicked Christians, wicked liturgical churches that have bishops), so it continues on despite any historical debunking because the colourful erroneous version is so much more interesting than the dull truth (it gradually faded in importance over the years as royal interest and funding dried up and eventually declined to nothingness).

https://historyforatheists.com/2017/07/the-destruction-of-the-great-library-of-alexandria/

Expand full comment

Hi Rats, Prats, and -- I can't think of a third list item, drat: If anyone is following the Trump Mar-a-Lago thing, I came across this article -- unsigned but seems to be by an attorney. It goes fairly in-depth about the background and claims presented, with links so you can verify the materials yourself: https://files.catbox.moe/2erd4t.pdf

Expand full comment

technocrats?

Expand full comment

"Ergo, an effective altruist should want to replace our present inefficient governments with a startup regime—an accountable monarchy."

https://graymirror.substack.com/p/is-effective-altruism-effective

Discuss. /ducks

Expand full comment
Comment deleted
Aug 31, 2022
Comment deleted
Expand full comment

> That the king is above the law (or, as Nixon so memorably put it, “if the President does it, that means it’s not illegal”) is one of the most fundamental principles of premodern law.

This is not actually true. The weight of tradition generally outranked premodern kings. Some of them weren't even allowed to legislate; the king had to enforce his people's traditional laws, but no one had the formal authority to change the laws. For example, in early France, kings were bound by Frankish law which said a kingdom is the king's property, and when a man dies his property must be split evenly between his sons. They had to find a loophole in order to leave the kingdom to a single son. Thanks to the loophole, leaving the kingdom to a single son eventually came to be considered tradition, allowing them to stop bothering with the loophole. (The loophole was that the king would appoint one of his sons as co-king (but de facto still subordinate); then when he died there was still a king so inheritance law didn't come into it.)

Expand full comment

It's especially rich coming right after a book review on ACX that was all about how the Ming emperor was under lifelong house arrest and not allowed to do anything fun.

Expand full comment
Comment deleted
Aug 31, 2022
Comment deleted
Expand full comment

> Perhaps from an abstract QALY perspective, standard of living and so forth, living in independent Ukraine is about the same as living in a Ukraine which is a province of Russia; indeed it's almost guaranteed that surrendering in February instead of fighting would have resulted in more QALYs today.

I know that's not your point and I feel a little bad about jumping on it, but.

Take whatever measure you have on life quality in the Republic of Moldova, compare it with Romania, multiply it with 30 years, and you have the real damage Russia already had on global QALY. It's as good of a natural experiment as you can design: they're the same country split at some minor river, except one part is in EU and the other not, because it was under Russian influence.

I'm also pretty sure you can do the same between Romania and Poland, btw - in some countries in Europe Russian influence in politics was more visible than in others, and it showed. Can't get into details without making this a very long post. Also Germany closing nuclear plants and relying on gas and coal.

And not to forget that a quick and successful war in Ukraine is an open invitation for Russia to go further. It's not like what they're doing now is unique - it was supposed to be a carbon copy of Czechoslovakia invasion in '68, except the part where it failed.

John pointed out the QALY of people in occupied territories, which is true. But there's also the fact that an Ukrainian surrender would at most bring less suffering in the short term. It would be a very local and unstable maxima, at best.

Expand full comment

"it's almost guaranteed that surrendering in February instead of fighting would have resulted in more QALYs today"

Citation very much needed. Have you been paying attention to what Russia wants to do with Ukraine after they're finished conquering it? When they're finished, there won't be any Ukrainians left in Ukraine. And while the process of de-Ukranifying people won't be 100% fatal and probably not even 10% fatal, it's going to involve some very low-quality life years for thirty million or so people. After which, none of the formerly-Ukrainian people will be allowed to be more prosperous than the poorest Russians, and Russia outside of Moscow and St. Petersburg is a very poor country indeed.

"They weren't actually killed in a war we were watching on TV, so we're going to round their QALYs to 1.0 per year for simplicity", is the sort of thing that gives rationalists and effective altrusts a very bad name.

Expand full comment

Citation very much need.

Expand full comment

> "They weren't actually killed in a war we were watching on TV, so we're going to round their QALYs to 1.0 per year for simplicity", is the sort of thing that gives rationalists and effective altrusts a very bad name.

Uh... is this a hypothetical, or are we contending that *Curtis Yarvin* of all people fits either of those labels?

Expand full comment

I imagine the utilitarian motte/steelman of the QALY bit is that "self-determination etc. *should* factor in to QALYs, but those bits are hard to measure and not usually labeled as 'happiness', and thus they're frequently excluded even if they're empirically sought after."

Expand full comment
Comment deleted
Aug 31, 2022
Comment deleted
Expand full comment

Pretty much, yeah. I think it's a similar(ish) dynamic to GDP/"happiness" calculations you see when talking about how successful various countries are. Bhutan* can boast about how it's actually measuring Average National Happiness (and doing better than everyone else, naturally), and on occasion someone hears that and thinks it might be worth doing, and then everyone shrugs and goes back to discussing GDP.

Granted, with GDP that's probably also confounded by the fact that it's useful for estimating all sorts of *other* things (e.g., tax revenue), and that I can't imagine anyone would want it to come out that they're the "least happy" nation in the world.

*May not actually be Bhutan, but that's what I'm remembering.

Expand full comment

Hello folks!

I am glad to announce the third of a continuing series of Orange County ACX/LW meetups. Meeting this Saturday and most Saturdays. The first meeting was great, and I hope to see many of you at this one.

Saturday, 9/3/22, 2 pm

1900 Port Carlow Place, Newport Beach, 92660

The Picnic tables outside the community clubhouse

33.6173166789459, -117.85885652037152

https://goo.gl/maps/WmzxQhBM2vdpJvz39

Plus code 8554J48R+WFJ

Contact me, Michael, at michaelmichalchik+acxlw@gmail.com with questions or requests.

Activities (all activities are optional)

A) Two conversation starter topics this week will be. (readings at the end)

1) What is open-mindedness

2) Psychedelics.

B) We will also have the card game Predictably Irrational and frisbees. Feel free to bring your own favorite games or distractions. This is a pet-friendly park and meeting.

C) There will be opportunities to go for a walk and talk about an hour after the meeting starts and use some gas barbeques if anyone wants to grill something. There are two easy-access mini-malls nearby with takeout hot food available. Search for Gelson's or Pavilions in the zipcode 92660.

D) Share a surprise! Tell the group about something that happened that was unexpected or changed the way you look at the universe.

E) Make a prediction and give a probability and end condition.

F) Contribute ideas to the future direction of the group. Topics, types of meetings, activities, etc.

Conversation Starter Readings:

Suggested readings for this week are these summaries. These readings are optional, but if you do them, think about what you find interesting, surprising, useful, questionable, vexing, or exciting.

1) Openmindedness.

This week we will try a classic video from the Skeptic/Atheist movement. Questions to think about and discuss? Is this a good description of the reality of open-mindedness? Did it change how you thought about open-mindedness? What do you think are the essential elements of open-mindedness to rationality? Is skepticism necessary for openmindedness and when does it work against it?

Open-mindedness

And/or This SSC essay. “The Control group is out of control”. What are the upsides and downsides of calling paranormal studies the control group for the scientific method. Does this increase our ability to be open to correct ideas, and is it worth shutting the door on exhausted lines of investigation? Why do you think belief in psychic powers affects the results of apparently rigorously replicated experiments? What do you make of the results of the smart rat, dumb rat experiment? Did you realize that double-blind is often thrown around as a claim when the second blinding is poorly done or not done at all and what is the importance of blinding to open-mindedness?

Written The Control Group Is Out Of Control | Slate Star Codex

Audio The Control Group Is Out of Control [Classic]

2) For psychedelics:

We will dip back into some of the best descriptive research done in the 1960s on the phenomenology of psychedelics. Read chapter 1 of “The varieties of psychedelic experience.”This book has many good digests of different people's reactions and experiences with psychedelics. What types of experience most interest you? What did you not know about? What potential applications come to mind after reading these experiences? Do you agree with the taxonomy that the authors create?

the varieties of psychedelic experience.pdf

This is an interview with an experienced PTSD researcher that has been involved with the cutting-edge of PTSD treatment research about MDMA therapy. I generally like what he has to say and find his perspectives useful. I will put one caveat, which is he gets really enthusiastic about a lot of things. He is a generally more optimistic person than me.

Bessel van der Kolk on MDMA assisted therapy for PTSD: More profound than anything we have done

Finally, here are a couple of short videos by a guy that has used a lot of different drugs and ruined his life with them. He at first enthusiastically endorsed MDMA, but it did not stop him from ruining his life with other drugs or properly addressing the deep psychological issues he had to face. Psychedelics are often not enough and can even be a distraction or copium and have their own abuse potential.

What MDMA Feels Like

“I was wrong about psychedelics”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRpXtHR0o5o

If you want a more general introduction to psychedelics, here is a book summary of the recent popular review of psychedelics. “ How to change your mind” by Michael Pollen

https://www.hustleescape.com/book-summary-how-to-change-your-mind-by-michael-pollan/

Expand full comment

*Update on hot days like this saturday, I will open access to the nice community pool. Bring your swim suit if you're interested.

Expand full comment

Terra Ignota hives, could they be implemented in our world? Could ACX fans/rationalist/EA become a hive?

Expand full comment

Terra Ignota hives were based on very fast cheap personal transportation (two hours to anywhere on earth) which loosened the importance of where people are. I'm not sure whether that's sufficient for hives, but we certainly don't have it.

Countries with multiple legal systems (I've heard of this for religions) exist, but I'm not sure how thorough it can be.

Expand full comment

In the sense of "we all declare ourselves to be part of the Utopian hive, so no matter where we live we all only have to obey Utopian rules", no. Not in our world, probably not in any world inhabited by humans. You're going to have to obey the laws of the sovereign government of the territory you're standing on, no matter what you call yourself. Or you're going to find lots of large angry men with guns saying that the new rule is that you live in this two by three meter cage for the next few years.

If you want to *also* join the Special Utopian Society, knock yourself out. You'll have to obey Utopian rules *and* US (or whatever) laws, pay Utopian membership fees *and* US (or whatever) taxes. You'll be just like the Masons or the Elks or the Mormons, except Utopian (or whatever).

Expand full comment

I voted for the book review that made me change the way I viewed the world the most.

Expand full comment

I hope you write about this, possibly after the vote.

Expand full comment

The review of WWOTF mentioned that perhaps we should leave some coal lying around in case humanity has to reinvent the industrial revolution generations after some almost-extinction-level event.

Brett Deveraux has conveniently just published a post explaining all the other things except coal that you need to start an industrial revolution - for example, spinning jennies help a lot: https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-industrial-revolution/

Expand full comment

The book review contest was fun! I had hoped that a weekly cycle would make me read more and more diverse book reviews, and this is what happened. Great readings and inspirations. Also, while I've always enjoyed Scott's book reviews, I admired his skills even more oftentimes during the contest - it seems so easy to make this or that 'mistake' and annoy the potential reader even in a very good review (and I certainly wouldn't have done better). Great writing is really an art.

I'd be interested to hear about your criteria for selecting your favourite.

Expand full comment

I've thought about this a bit and I wouldn't be surprised to find there's a mechanism where anybody doing "guest post on particular beloved blog" gets a premium on how harshly they are judged. If you are here, presumably it's because you like the style here; other styles are going to be jarring. Maybe. I'm not 100% on this but it seems to fit.

Expand full comment

You mean, they all write equally well, it's just a matter of good fit to the readers' preferences?

I agree I'm here because I like the style here ... and the same thing will go on for other blogs. There was at least one review, which I'd say was well written, but clearly not my style. But in my first comment, I was thinking about something else. There were reviews I liked a lot and I read them with pleasure ... until something small threw me off. Often those were minor things, like in some places suddenly I didn't know whether the reviewer was referencing the book's thoughts or his/her own thoughts, and this led to a small irritation and stopped my reading flow for a moment. It made me realize, that for example with Scott's reviews I (think I) always know whether he is talking about the author's ideas or his original ideas. Small things like this, but it occured quite often. I think I read those reviews pretty open minded. Well, and I really liked some of them and found most interesting to read.

So overall I think yes, there is a fit of style between blog posters and their readership *and* there also is some real craft and skill involved. And the level of the latter varies. But then finally I just called writing an *art* and who am I to judge whether it's done better or worse.

Expand full comment

I'm saying, some art really is better or worse. And some writers are better or worse, less careful or more careful. But there's also an element of, say, a reasonably pretty girl standing next to an unbelievably beautiful girl who is also your exact type. So more I'm saying, it's possible that things you might have encountered in the wild and thought were fine might get a small debuff from being at the place you normally go to read things you find great.

Expand full comment

I think there's definitely merit to both the taste-based and objective quality points. But when you consider that many of these reviewers likely spent a lot more time on their posts and still arguably fall short of Scott's average quality... it's kind of scary.

Expand full comment

I mean, he's talented, highly educated, and has a ton of practice. That's a triple threat. He also has good voice, and a voice almost perfectly fitted to be "As fun as rationalists will get before they start to get mad at you for not talking in binary" - he's perfectly fitted for his audience, and broadly enjoyable for everyone else.

That's proven out in terms of him being, frankly, gigantic to the point of having overflowed out of the niche he occupies. I think when I started writing my blog my thought was to one day "beat" Scott in terms of size/fame, or whatever. The more I write and see the realities of growing an audience the less likely I think that is - even if I was every bit as good, I still might not be as good of a fit to a particular audience. Even if I was a better fit, I'm likely not as good. And even if I was both, I might not be able to tether myself synergistically to a new/growing movement and become to most outsiders the voice of that movement. So on, so forth.

But that said, I have lived a life and developed some level of voice that's distinct from Scott, and reading isn't really a zero-sum game. The same is true for you, or really anybody writing here.

That's all a little off-topic: More on topic, Scott realistically just has a ton of time in on writing. He's a statistical outlier in a lot of good qualities I already listed, but there's very likely some very talented people in the contest who might be able to write a comparably good review of something given enough "extra" production time and enough "extra" perceived importance of project. But that advantage gets negated once you realize this might be their first or tenth review, and Scott's written many hundreds of pieces that are either book reviews or cross-train into that space. Practice matters, even beyond just "being a better writer" in some nature-not-nurture way.

The point of all this is really just to say "Go out, write more stuff, if book reviews don't work for you write something different, and find your own unique soul-mate asses to kick".

Expand full comment

I think we agree as far as 'talent, practice and being liked by your specific audiance' goes. Heck, I mean Scott's book reviews are my prototype for a book review - I didn't read many before, at least not many that I found worth remembering.

Isn't the main difference just that we come to this from different perspectives? I didn't mean for my remarks to be any critical or discouraging for any writer. Maybe they sounded like this to your ears, as you *are* actually writing and participated in the contest? I'm not (yet) doing any of those, at least not online, so I guess the meaning for me is different.

> 'when I started writing my blog my thought was to one day "beat" Scott in terms of size/fame, or whatever. ' I was amazed by this statement. I sometimes thought about starting a blog, but I never thought about beating Scott in terms of size, outreach ... however, there are probably moments when I hoped I'd be able to write a book review as fluent and readable and insightful as he does. So all the small moments that disturbed me when reading the reviews I *liked* made me realize all the small things you need - which means I would need - to get right, even if writing a very good review already. Not discouraging, but maybe humbling, or else setting the right tone for a task, if you wish.

I totally agree with the 'practice' part ... for most, their 40th book review should be better than their first or second. However, I also got the impression that Scott managed to focus on activities that are close to his strenghts, and I believe that's helpful and wise and many other things more. I can't tell you how much more I'd like to *talk* to you guys in person instead of having a written conversation online. (But better online than not!) Eg. speaking to bigger audiances always came naturally to me in a way writing did not. A bit sad, as the occasions for writing are many, and yes, I did think to write a blog somewhen, maybe.

For outreach you can't underestimate the 'community' part. You're obviously better if you write for a concrete target group, and feeling at home and being known in a community sure helps a lot. If you don't have a concrete target group, which *knows* about you, all the folks that like your style have to find you somewhere in the millions of words written on the web, and that's difficult.

I guess I'm a picky reader also when not being on Scott's blog. I open a book in a bookstore, I read five lines, and I decide whether I like or dislike the tone.

Btw. I read some of what you wrote, and I found it good to read and I also felt touched by some of it, and what else can an author dream of? So, I'm glad you found your voice and, and yes, please continue writing.

Expand full comment

Well said! And I love that you maintain your distinct voice and style even when you write comments. It’s fun to read haha.

Expand full comment

100%. I pretty much agree with all points in the thread. (Had an earlier comment that said some of the same stuff but it disappeared.). Scott's average quality is insanely good, and it's crazy that any of his reviews picked at random would have an excellent chance at beating his entire readership in the contest.

That said, it *is* his audience, so the people that are here are perfectly tailored for his voice and style.

I definitely thought that some of the criticism wouldn't have been present if Scott had been the author. For example, there were a whole bunch of reviews where the comments argued over whether this was the proper way to write a book review - some of it quite heated/indignant. I doubt most of that would have cropped up for a Scott post.

To OP's point, though, I have a hard time thinking of anything by Scott that had a line/point/anecdote that jarred me out of the flow of the piece. That takes a tremendous amount of skill and is something that I struggle with a lot in my writing. As you say, practice makes perfect.

Expand full comment

Pitching in a meta-vote for approval voting in future book contests.

Expand full comment

Any method is better than choose-one voting.

Expand full comment

I prefer the current method to approval voting in this context.

Expand full comment

I also prefer simply picking the best review.

Expand full comment

I find it interesting that no one complaining about the voting method has speculated on the reason why Scott chose FPTP. He obviously knew that people would object. He chose to do so anyways. Clearly FTPT better suits his purposes. Based on the fact that he picked some atypical reviews to add to the contest, it appears that he is selecting for variety.

Expand full comment

We used approval voting last year, and I'd have preferred something ranked - the winner was an excellent entry and I included it in my vote, but it wasn't my favourite. Approval voting is great if you're trying to find a broadly-acceptable consensus (like "where should we go for lunch"), but for a "find the single 'best' entry" contest like this I think we want a Condorcet method, as implemented by e.g. https://www.condorcet.vote/ .

Expand full comment

I vote for this over all other suggestions

Expand full comment

I almost ended up not voting. It took me 10 minutes to settle on 1, when in 5 seconds I already had my top 3.

Expand full comment

I had read >'I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked' and took that literally, so basically I took care that I always knew which one was the number one on my list. Made things very easy.

I probably wouldn't have voted in any of the more 'fancy' voting systems. I would have been fine in naming my top 3 I guess, but would have taken more time (with or without internal order).

Expand full comment

This is bad and unacceptable. Telling people to "pick one" will just hand victory to the weirdest instead of the best. I thought Scott of all people would understand this.

Who is with me? How can we make Scott reconsider?

Expand full comment

I’m puzzled by your contention that voting for only one will “hand victory to the weirdest instead of the best” - could you describe the causal chain which leads to that result?

Expand full comment

Plurality voting means that if two choices are near-identical, they are penalised compared to there only being one of them (since the vote that would have gone to either alone is instead split between them). Thus, choices that are distinct from others ("weird") are advantaged.

This is not the *only* effect, though, so Caba's statement was a bit stronger than warranted.

Expand full comment

Oh ok - thanks!

Expand full comment

Yeah I was pretty surprised he didn’t use STAR voting here. That’s probably the most information rich and pretty much how books are already typically rated.

Expand full comment

We are having a meetup in Mexico City in the context of ACX Meetups Everywhere. Find more information in our LW page:

https://www.lesswrong.com/events/bejXvxGjQ7rYudF88/acx-cdmx-meetups-everywhere-1

Expand full comment

When you travel overseas and need cash, do you go to a traditional currency exchange kiosk, or do you just use an ATM?

Have you ever compared the exchange rates?

Expand full comment

I've been travelling continuously for most of the past four years, and mostly haven't needed cash at all. This of course depends on where you go, but it's been true in rural Mexico, South Africa, Ascension Island, Panama, Portuguese Atlantic Islands and many other remote and less developed places. Almost everyone takes a Visa or Mastercard these days, and my bank gives me better or similar enough rates to any currency exchange kiosk that I just don't bother anymore. Many places I'll carry a little bit of cash just in case, and that I'll get at an ATM. Many banks are not as friendly to travelers as mine is though, beware! And often the ATM's charge a hefty fee for withdrawals from other banks, but I've usually been able to find some that doesn't. If there is a line at one ATM while other brands don't have lines, that's a sure sign.

Expand full comment

What bank do you use?

Expand full comment

Swedbank.

I won't claim that Swedbank is an optimal choice, just that they haven't annoyed be enough to make me change. I only use them for day-to-day banking.

Expand full comment

I've found the best results are normally exchanging money before you travel, followed by using a local bank. Avoid exchange services in airports or touristy spots. Paying by credit card is also usually not too bad. ATMs are normally loaded with fees.

Expand full comment

A number of UK banks, notably the newer ones such as Chase and Starling and Revolut will convert your spendings to GBP at the interbank / Mastercard / Visa rate without commission, and without a spread between buy and sell rates. Withdrawal from ATMs is also possible at the same rate although daily &/or monthly limits can be in place and there is often a transaction charge levied by the operator of the ATM. Some of the advice here seems as old-fashioned to me as traveller cheques.

Expand full comment

Seconded. Never use the exchange services, they almost always offer the worst rates. If you’re traveling for an extended period of time, it’s worth looking into your banking and credit card options - the difference in ATM fees can be very significant if you’re making frequent withdrawals.

Expand full comment

ATM, yes I have, and my bank's rate is always significantly better.

Expand full comment

When did the existential risk posed by rogue AI come to be perceived as an urgent matter? The first Terminator film put the issue before a large public in 1984, but as far as I know it didn't spark much interest in the real possibility of AI posing a threat to humanity. Yudkowsky and Bostrom were writing about the issue at the turn of the millennium, but how many were taking them up on it at that time? What about in the wake of Bostrom's Superintelligence?

Expand full comment
Comment deleted
Aug 30, 2022
Comment deleted
Expand full comment

I'm sympathetic to your view, but I'm interested in the activities of those tech moguls and the organizations they're funding. When did that start happening?

Expand full comment

Should one count Bill Joy's 2000 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_The_Future_Doesn%27t_Need_Us , which airs concerns on a number of technologies?

Expand full comment

Definitely.

Expand full comment

Many Thanks!

Expand full comment

Thanks for the link.

Expand full comment
Comment deleted
Aug 30, 2022
Comment deleted
Expand full comment

That's my sense of things as well. Bostrom's *Superintelligence* – which I've not read – came out in 2014. It got a lot of media play. From the Wikipedia article on the book (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superintelligence:_Paths,_Dangers,_Strategies):

The book ranked #17 on The New York Times list of best selling science books for August 2014. In the same month, business magnate Elon Musk made headlines by agreeing with the book that artificial intelligence is potentially more dangerous than nuclear weapons. Bostrom's work on superintelligence has also influenced Bill Gates’s concern for the existential risks facing humanity over the coming century. In a March 2015 interview by Baidu's CEO, Robin Li, Gates said that he would "highly recommend" Superintelligence. According to the New Yorker, philosophers Peter Singer and Derek Parfit have "received it as a work of importance".

Expand full comment

Is there a Savannah Georgia meetup group? if not, would anyone be interested in one?

Expand full comment

Missed opportunity: having prediction markets for the book contest winner. (Technically, one per review would be easiest, probably.)

Of course, then one would also have to come up with a way to prevent ballot stuffing, but I think this would be desirable in any case. Apart from people with botnets, it might also that some other interest group (e.g. subreddit) focused on the topic of one review (say, fusion energy, ancient china, weird poetry) first lined the book review when it came out (not objectionable), and now links the vote (probably objectionable). Some clear rules, e.g. "You should have made a good faith effort to read at least 2/3 of the contest entries" would probably deter the more honest external readers.

I don't have a good proposition how to do avoid ballot stuffing: restricting voting to the active commentariat (a la wikipedia "only accounts with at least N edits can vote") seems unfair to lurkers. One rather well defined group would be the premium members of ACX. Of course, this is also introduces biases towards the very committed and/or well-of readers, but if the membership of that population was also saved with the vote, it would allow checking for some irregularities. Just having the voting site print out a random string and asking members to post that string as a comment on a special hidden thread would serve in a pitch without any involvement of substack. (And incidentally also break anonymity, but for the book contest that might be acceptable.)

Or you could have the voters first select five reviews they have actually read, then quiz them on the content.

Also, voting systems.

Expand full comment

What's up with disappearing comments?

I've been getting replies in the mail that are no longer showing on the thread, e.g. https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-239/comment/8692502 by Gunflint in reply to my comment https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-239/comment/8689688 .

The first replies I've seen disappear like that were somewhat rude (I like to stir shit up, what can I say) so I assumed that was God-Emperor Scott's heavy hand, but the one linked was entirely wholesome and civil.

Expand full comment

Yeah I deleted that myself. After I posted it, it seemed kinda presumptuous for a guy in Minnesota to add his two cents regarding Eastern European politics. Sorry for the confusion and best of luck this winter!

Expand full comment

I think the MO of our God-Emperor is not to delete replies, but to ban the user and leave the post so it is transparent why they were banned. (Might be different with obvious spam, though.)

Of course, the users in question could also have deleted their posts themselves: that would not undo the emails sent, but make it as if the comments never had appeared. A better comment system would preserve the info that a comment was deleted and by whom, perhaps.

Expand full comment

It sounds like these are instances of self-moderation working in its ideal sense - a commenter, upon reflection, realizes their reply was neither kind nor necessary, and deletes it themselves. I see no reason to penalize such a user for making a good decision by leaving a public notice of their momentary lapse in judgement.

Expand full comment

I believe without evidence that we're getting AI from the race between malware and anti-malware.

It probably won't resemble human consciousness and won't be able to communicate well with us.

Risk of eating the world? Doesn't seem likely. Eat all the computer capacity? Maybe.

Expand full comment

Well, it's either that, or porn. Most modern algorithms are driven by the need for porn. :-/

Expand full comment

Doesn't seem to be the case for current AI progress. (Of course there's obvious crossover, but the leading efforts are intentionally anti-pornographic).

Expand full comment

Well, those are the efforts we know of. I'd be very surprised to learn that *no one* is working very hard on making AI-powered porn-chatbots, or deepfaked porn videos, or auto-generated deepfaked Turing-level Singularity porn, or...

Expand full comment

Of course, but those efforts will be trailing behind rather than leading the way.

Expand full comment

Possibly, yes. But look at it this way: if you publish a paper about incrementally improving spam classification accuracy, you could get another science grant. If you actually improve spam classification accuracy, you could make a bit of money; on the other hand, if you improve spam generation fidelity, you could probably make a million dollars (until the previous guy catches up). But what if you found a way to auto-generate, on demand, the kind of porn that is perfectly matched to the viewer's exact interests ? Well, in that case, you could probably make *billions*. And also, should your name become known, go down in history as a legend: a demon, or a saint, or possibly both.

The incentives are just a little bit mismatched, you know ? :-)

Expand full comment

"We're getting" as in this is currently occurring? Or as in this is what the mechanism will be in the future?

Expand full comment

I'm not sure. I don't *think* it's full AI yet.

Expand full comment

Given what we know about how much compute and data is needed for our best learning algorithms, I wouldn't be too worried about the current situation.

Expand full comment