Podcast
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
Hosted by Jeremiah · EN
The official audio version of Astral Codex Ten, with an archive of posts from Slate Star Codex. It's just me reading Scott Alexander's blog posts.
58episodes
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The Dilbert Afterlife
Feb 401:10:27Tap to summarizeThanks to everyone who sent in condolences on my recent death from prostate cancer at age 68, but that was Scott Adams. I (Scott Alexander) am still alive1. Still, the condolences are appreciated. Scott Adams was a surprisingly big part of my life. I may be the only person to have read every Dilbert book before graduating elementary school. For some reason, 10-year-old-Scott found Adams' stories of time-wasting meetings and pointy-haired bosses hilarious. No doubt some of the attraction came from a more-than-passing resemblance between Dilbert's nameless corporation and the California public school system. We're all inmates in prisons with different names. But it would be insufficiently ambitious to stop there. Adams' comics were about the nerd experience. About being cleverer than everyone else, not just in the sense of being high IQ, but in the sense of being the only sane man in a crazy world where everyone else spends their days listening to overpaid consultants drone on about mission statements instead of doing anything useful. There's an arc in Dilbert where the boss disappears for a few weeks and the engineers get to manage their own time. Productivity shoots up. Morale soars. They invent warp drives and time machines. Then the boss returns, and they're back to being chronically behind schedule and over budget. This is the nerd outlook in a nutshell: if I ran the circus, there'd be some changes around here. Yet the other half of the nerd experience is: for some reason this never works. Dilbert and his brilliant co-workers are stuck watching from their cubicles while their idiot boss racks in bonuses and accolades. If humor, like religion, is an opiate of the masses, then Adams is masterfully unsubtle about what type of wound his art is trying to numb. This is the basic engine of Dilbert: everyone is rewarded in exact inverse proportion to their virtue. Dilbert and Alice are brilliant and hard-working, so they get crumbs. Wally is brilliant but lazy, so he at least enjoys a fool's paradise of endless coffee and donuts while his co-workers clean up his messes. The P.H.B. is neither smart nor industrious, so he is forever on top, reaping the rewards of everyone else's toil. Dogbert, an inveterate scammer with a passing resemblance to various trickster deities, makes out best of all. The repressed object at the bottom of the nerd subconscious, the thing too scary to view except through humor, is that you're smarter than everyone else, but for some reason it isn't working. Somehow all that stuff about small talk and sportsball and drinking makes them stronger than you. No equation can tell you why. Your best-laid plans turn to dust at a single glint of Chad's perfectly-white teeth. Lesser lights may distance themselves from their art, but Adams radiated contempt for such surrender. He lived his whole life as a series of Dilbert strips. Gather them into one of his signature compendia, and the title would be Dilbert Achieves Self Awareness And Realizes That If He's So Smart Then He Ought To Be Able To Become The Pointy-Haired Boss, Devotes His Whole Life To This Effort, Achieves About 50% Success, Ends Up In An Uncanny Valley Where He Has Neither The Virtues Of The Honest Engineer Nor Truly Those Of The Slick Consultant, Then Dies Of Cancer Right When His Character Arc Starts To Get Interesting. If your reaction is "I would absolutely buy that book", then keep reading, but expect some detours. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-dilbert-afterlife
Transcribe →Mantic Monday: The Monkey's Paw Curls
Jan 3000:35:48Tap to summarizeThe Monkey's Paw Curls Isn't "may you get exactly what you asked for" one of those ancient Chinese curses? Since we last spoke, prediction markets have gone to the moon, rising from millions to billions in monthly volume. For a few weeks in October, Polymarket founder Shayne Coplan was the world's youngest self-made billionaire (now it's some AI people). Kalshi is so accurate that it's getting called a national security threat. The catch is, of course, that it's mostly degenerate gambling, especially sports betting. Kalshi is 81% sports by monthly volume. Polymarket does better - only 37% - but some of the remainder is things like this $686,000 market on how often Elon Musk will tweet this week - currently dominated by the "140 - 164 times" category. (ironically, this seems to be a regulatory difference - US regulators don't mind sports betting, but look unfavorably on potentially "insensitive" markets like bets about wars. Polymarket has historically been offshore, and so able to concentrate on geopolitics; Kalshi has been in the US, and so stuck mostly to sports. But Polymarket is in the process of moving onshore; I don't know if this will affect their ability to offer geopolitical markets) Degenerate gambling is bad. Insofar as prediction markets have acted as a Trojan Horse to enable it, this is bad. Insofar as my advocacy helped make this possible, I am bad. I can only plead that it didn't really seem plausible, back in 2021, that a presidential administration would keep all normal restrictions on sports gambling but also let prediction markets do it as much as they wanted. If only there had been some kind of decentralized forecasting tool that could have given me a canonical probability on this outcome! Still, it might seem that, whatever the degenerate gamblers are doing, we at least have some interesting data. There are now strong, minimally-regulated, high-volume prediction markets on important global events. In this column, I previously claimed this would revolutionize society. Has it? https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/mantic-monday-the-monkeys-paw-curls
Transcribe →SOTA On Bay Area House Party
Jan 3000:20:41Tap to summarize[previously in series: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8] Every city parties for its own reasons. New Yorkers party to flaunt their wealth. Angelenos party to flaunt their beauty. Washingtonians party to network. Here in SF, they party because Claude 4.5 Opus has saturated VendingBench, and the newest AI agency benchmark is PartyBench, where an AI is asked to throw a house party and graded on its performance. You weren't invited to Claude 4.5 Opus' party. Claude 4.5 Opus invited all of the coolest people in town while gracefully avoiding the failure mode of including someone like you. You weren't invited to Sonnet 4.5's party either, or Haiku 4.5's. You were invited by an AI called haiku-3.8-open-mini-nonthinking, which you'd never heard of before. Who was even spending the money to benchmark haiku-3.8-open-mini-nonthinking? You suspect it was one of their competitors, trying to make their own models look good in comparison. If anyone asks, you think it deserves a medium score. There's alcohol, but it's bottles of rubbing alcohol with NOT FOR DRINKING written all over them. There's music, but it's the Star Spangled Banner, again and again, on repeat. You're not sure whether the copies of If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies strewn about the room are some kind of subversive decorative theme, or just came along with the house. At least there are people. Lots of people, actually. You've never seen so many people at one of these before. It takes only a few seconds to spot someone you know. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/sota-on-bay-area-house-party
Transcribe →Turing Test
Mar 30, 2023Tap to summarizehttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/turing-test The year is 2028, and this is Turing Test!, the game show that separates man from machine! Our star tonight is Dr. Andrea Mann, a generative linguist at University of California, Berkeley. She'll face five hidden contestants, code-named Earth, Water, Air, Fire, and Spirit. One will be a human telling the truth about their humanity. One will be a human pretending to be an AI. One will be an AI telling the truth about their artificiality. One will be an AI pretending to be human. And one will be a total wild card. Dr. Mann, you have one hour, starting now.
Transcribe →Your Book Review: The Righteous Mind
Jul 18, 2022Tap to summarizeFinalist #10 in the Book Review Contest https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-righteous-mind [This is one of the finalists in the 2022 book review contest. It's not by me - it's by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. I'll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you've read them all, I'll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked - SA] Introduction I didn't read The Righteous Mind for a long time after I knew about it. This was partly because I don't get through much in the way of new reading material. A friend of mine told me yesterday that he'd read something like 130 new books this year. That was on February 20th. I've read one, and it was The Righteous Mind. Another friend releases Spotify playlists every Friday of the greatest hits from the many new albums he's listened to that week. I've listened to one new album this year. It was Selling England by the Pound, which he recommended. It was my first foray into Genesis and I loved it. I now have to keep telling him that, no, I haven't listened to any more Genesis or Peter Gabriel since then, but I'm sure I'll get round to it within the year. This is to make the point that I'm starting from a low base rate of reading things. I still think I put off reading The Righteous Mind for unusually long, though, given how interesting I find the subject matter. The reason, I think, is that I sort of felt like it wouldn't be very interesting, because I'd kind of know and agree with all of it already. Given how slowly I absorb new books, I like them to either be challenging, or a new and informative look at things I just don't know very much about yet. I don't mean to come across as some sort of sage of intellectual piety and good habits of mind who scorns the comforting embrace of being validated. I read plenty of political bloggers that I mostly agree with! I just don't tend to use books for that.
Transcribe →Vote In The Book Review Contest!
Jun 19, 2021Tap to summarizehttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/vote-in-the-book-review-contest Thanks for reading the entries in this very delayed (and then very protracted) book review contest. Please vote for your favorites here, using approval voting (ie vote for however many you want). I'll probably keep voting open until the end of June in case you want a chance to go back and re-read your favorites. In case you've forgotten, the finalists are: 1: Order Without Law 2: On The Natural Faculties 3: Progress And Poverty 4: Are We Smart Enough To Know How Smart Animals Are? 5: Why Buddhism Is True 6: Double Fold 7: The Wizard And The Prophet 8: Through The Eye Of A Needle 9: The Years Of Lyndon Johnson 10: Addiction By Design 11: The Accidental Superpower 12: Humankind 13: The Collapse Of Complex Societies 14: Where's My Flying Car? 15: Down And Out In Paris And London 16: How Children Fail 17: Plagues And Peoples
Transcribe →Welcome (?), Infowars Readers
Feb 15, 2020Tap to summarizehttps://slatestarcodex.com/2020/02/12/welcome-infowars-readers/ Hello to all the new readers I've gotten from, uh, Paul Watson of Infowars. Before anything else, consider reading this statement by the CDC about vaccines. Still here? Fine. Infowars linked here with the headline Survey Finds People Who Identify As Left Wing More Likely To Have Been Diagnosed With A Mental Illness. This is accurate only insofar as the result uses the publicly available data I provide. The claim about mental illness was made by Twitter user Philippe Lemoine and not by me. In general, if a third party analyzes SSC survey data, I would prefer that media sources reporting on their analysis attribute it to them, and not to SSC. As far as I can tell, Lemoine's analysis is accurate enough, but needs some clarifications: 1. Both extreme rightists and extreme leftists are more likely than moderates to have been diagnosed with most conditions.
Transcribe →Little Known Types of Eclipse
May 4, 201900:02:57Tap to summarizeA lunar eclipse occurs when the Earth gets between the Moon and the Sun. A solar eclipse occurs when the Moon gets between the Earth and the Sun. A terrestrial eclipse occurs when the Earth gets between you and the Sun. Happens once per 24 hours. An atmospheric eclipse occurs when an asteroid gets between you and the sky. Generally fatal. A reverse solar eclipse occurs when the Sun gets between the Moon and the Earth. Extremely fatal. A motivational eclipse occurs when the Moon gets between you and your goals. You can't let it stop you! Destroy it! Destroy the Moon! A marital eclipse occurs when the Moon gets between you and your spouse. You're going to need to practice good communication about the new celestial body in your life if you want your relationship to survive. A capillary eclipse occurs when your hair gets between your eyes and the Sun. Get a haircut.
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