Astral Codex Ten Podcast

The most controversial part of last week's article on the Midjourney ultrasound scanner was medical experts' recommendation against whole-body screening (including existing whole-body screening technology using MRI). Isn't this crazy? Whole-body screening can save lives by detecting serious diseases like cancer. The experts counterargue that it finds so many false positives - minor zit-like imperfections that would never have caused problems, but which cost patients time, money, anxiety, and side effect burden to investigate - that it ends up net negative. But isn't this just a problem of setting thresholds correctly? Can't you commit to only investigating the most obviously bad things, then ignore the rest? This seemed like an interesting problem to investigate in more depth, so I've tried to get numbers. These are rough estimates loosely based on parameters extracted from unsatisfactory studies1 - please don't take them seriously as exact values, just as right-order-of-magnitude estimates. We'll focus on whole-body MRIs, since this is a well-studied existing technology, then speculate later on how the results might generalize to whole-body ultrasound. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/should-people-avoid-whole-body-screening

In 1917, three children in Fatima, Portugal claimed to have seen the Virgin Mary. They promised she would perform a miracle on a certain day in October. Nearly 100,000 pilgrims arrived, hoping to see whatever happened, and nearly all report that the sun turned pale, changed color, and spun around. Many other writers have investigated the children and their visions, but I was fixated on this sun miracle. Despite popular discussion of "mass hallucinations", this is AFAICT the only example of tens thousands of people all saying they witnessed the same impossible thing, at the same time. I got kind of obsessed with this; you can read my preliminary investigations in this, this, and this post. One of the first things I found was that there were many other sun miracles - at least ten! - similar to Fatima. Most were associated with Marian apparitions, but one was at a Buddhist temple. Bigfoot only gets sighted by lone hikers; ghosts are only ever in the corner of your eye; UFOs are just blurs in the sky. Of all the countries and outposts in the vast empire of the unexplained, it's only this one phenomenon - the spinning, multicolored sun - that regularly gets seen by thousands of people at once, in broad daylight. Speaking of "regularly", there's one spot where it continues even today. Fifty years ago, the Virgin Mary appeared to six children in Medjugorje, Bosnia. Now those children are well past middle-age, but she continues to come. Three of them report that she's appeared less frequently as the years go by, but the others still see her every day at 6:40 sharp. Travelers to Medjugorje, especially those passing through around 6:40, report a slew of miracles, including the spinning sun. Certainly this is true of those whose hearts are pure. But even the atheists get lucky sometimes. I was shocked never to have heard about this before. There's a place you can just go, and have a decent chance of seeing a real miracle? People take vacations to the Bahamas for the beaches, when they could go instead to Medjugorje and see the natural law of the universe get violated in real time? Seems crazy! So in early April, I and my extremely-accommodating, long-suffering wife flew to Dubrovnik, rented a car, and drove down a series of windy mountain roads toward the Bosnian border, hoping for a miracle. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/waiting-for-the-miracle

I recently had a minor spat over someone misinterpreting my AI beliefs (see section marked "Update" at the bottom here), so I thought I would list them in one place, so I can refer people when they ask. Timelines1 Define AGI as AI intelligent enough to do 90% of knowledge work jobs. I think there's a 25% chance of AGI by 20272, a 50% chance by 2034, and a 75% chance by 2045. Basic argument: In a certain sense, AI is already "smart" enough for this (eg it can answer quantum physics problems, which require higher IQ than most knowledge work). Its remaining limitations are that it's confused, unagentic, lacks situational awareness, and tends to hallucinate. The METR time horizon graph, and several other related benchmarks/experiments/intuition pumps, suggest it's improving on time horizons at an (exponential) rate that lets it cross human-level performance sometime around the early end of the schedule above, and subjectively it feels like harder-to-measure constructs like situational awareness are improving about as fast. Arguments for earlier: recursive self-improvement causes a speedup compared to the trend. This is one of the biggest blank spots in my model: I don't know how fast RSI will progress, and I don't think anyone else does either. There's some function mapping a combination of AI talent and compute to progress, and we don't know how it behaves in the domain when there's far more talent than compute available. It could fizzle out completely for lack of compute, or it could go vertical. The AI Futures Project has done some of the best work trying to model this, but even they have low confidence.

I'm not saying AI is superintelligent or can decide better than you can. I'm saying that if you - like me - spend an hour or so doing research before voting on local seats, AI can aid that research very effectively. And if you don't do that research - because you weren't willing to waste an hour on it before - AI makes it so much faster that you might want to start. I gave Claude a prompt something like (edited for coherence): I'll be voting in the June 2026 California primary. I'm a centrist liberal abundance YIMBY whose favorite political writers are Kelsey Piper, Matt Yglesias, and Ezra Klein. I'm wary of government overreach, but I'm not a doctrinaire libertarian and want to help people when we can figure ways to do it that work. I'm going to ask you about each race on my ballot, and I'd like for you to list the various candidates' bios, policies, endorsements, your read on the most important differences between them, and your advice for me as I try to make my choice. …and got back answers like the following: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/use-ai-this-election

Sorry, I give up. In past elections, I've covered every single candidate for governor of California, from the incumbents all the way down to the cranks. In 2022 there were twenty-six of them, and I covered them all. But sorry, I give up. This year there are sixty. It's too many. I can't disambiguate them all into unique individuals with their own personalities, hopes, and dreams. So as consolation for the list I'm not giving you, here are the basic types, and a few examples of each. The Top-Tier Democrats One of these people will definitely win, but what else is there to say about them? They're all the same. They've all paid the danegeld to some set of unions and interest groups, then put up some kind of incredibly generic platform about how they're compassionate but also a fighter. I can't bring myself to name any of them or discuss them further. The Top-Tier Republicans More or less the same as the top-tier Democrats, minus the chance of winning. They all have cowboy hats and flag pins. They all pose on horseback at their ranch. They all promise to Take Back California for the forces of America and its god, Donald J. Trump. None of these people are actually interesting, but honorable mention to Sheriff Chad Bianco, whose name is Italian for "white Chad". He might be the perfect Republican candidate: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-types-of-candidate-you-find-in

In conclusion, the only good theory of taste is Nostalgebraist's. He wrote a post called Hydrogen Jukeboxes, analyzing the literary output of an AI called R1. This AI tried hard to write good fiction, which was part of the problem. It crammed its stories with what Nostalgebraist called (stealing a term from Ginsberg) the "eyeball kick" - a flashy stylistic move that immediately catches the reader's attention and "wows" them. Here are examples - some from R1, others from an experimental OpenAI model trained specifically for fiction-writing: "There is a prompt like a spell: write a story about AI and grief, and the rest of this is scaffolding—protagonists cut from whole cloth, emotions dyed and draped over sentences." "When the jar of Sam's laughter shattered, Eli found the sound pooled on the floorboards like liquid amber, thick and slow. It had been their best summer, that laughter—ripe with fireflies and porch wine—now seeping into the cracks, fermenting." "And so I built a Mila and a Kai and a field of marigolds that never existed. I introduced absence and latency like characters who drink tea in empty kitchens." "The morning her shadow began unspooling from her feet, Clara found it coiled beneath the kitchen table like a serpent made of smoke." Nostalgebraist and another writer, Coagulopath, catalogue some of the most common AI eyeball kicks, each occurring across multiple LLM models: "An overwhelming reliance on cliche. Everything is a shadow, an echo, a whisper, a void, a heartbeat, a pulse, a river, a flower—you see it spinning its Rolodex of 20-30 generic images and selecting one at random." "Conjunctions combining one thing that is abstract and/or incorporeal with another thing that is concrete and/or sensory." "Repetitive writing. Once you've seen about ten R1 samples you can recognize its style on sight. The way it italicises the last word of a sentence. Its endless "not thing x, but thing y" parallelisms…the way how, if you don't like a story, it's almost pointless reprompting it: you just get the same stuff again, smeared around your plate a bit." https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/nostalgebraists-hydrogen-jukeboxes

Last year I wrote a piece on artistic taste, which got many good responses from (eg) Ozy, Frank Lantz, and Sympathetic Opposition. I tastelessly forgot to respond to them until now, but I appreciate how they forced me to refine my thinking. In particular, they helped me realize that "taste" and "good art" are hard to talk about, because the discussions conflate many different things: 1: Sensory Delight. Ode To Joy makes the listener feel joyful. Michelangelo's David fills the viewer with awe at the human figure. The great cathedrals are impressive buildings, in a way that hits you like a punch to the gut. These judgments are preconscious, widespread, and don't necessarily require artistic sophistication. 2: Novelty and Innovation: Someone gets credit for doing art in a way that has never been done before. The early Impressionists invented a new way of looking at the world and explored all of its little corners. A modern Impressionist painter may be able to match their technical skill, but not their novelty; therefore, the modern would be a mere curiosity while the originals were great artists. For a modern person to be a great artist, they would have to explore entirely new media - hence the surprising and transgressive nature of modern art. 3: Paying Attention / Pattern Language: Tasteful people, viewing art over the generations and paying deep attention to it, have developed a sense of balance, composition, contrast, and what should and shouldn't be done. We can debate how predetermined the exact grammar of this language was a priori, but for better or worse people are sensitized to it and will judge works with it in mind. A good work of art should either conform to this language, or defy it deliberately and thoughtfully (that is, in a way that transcends it rather than ignores it). Along with these three big ones, here are smaller ones that might or might not be combinations or subvarieties of these: 4: Context And Discussion: Some great art raises questions, and subsequent great art proposes answers, or variations on the questions, or further elucidates the subject. The great artists of any given time are in conversation with their peers and the great artists of all past ages; new art can be judged on whether it shows awareness of, and contributes to, this conversation. Other forms of context are more personal - is a book about human evil more aesthetic if its author survived the Holocaust? 5: Literal Ability To Understand A Work: You can't fully appreciate Animal Farm unless you know the history of Soviet communism and recognize the book as an allegory for that history. If someone who knew nothing about this liked it as a cute story about talking animals, their appreciation would be different from (inferior to?) that of more knowledgeable people. 6: Changing Fashions: In 1940, Beaux-Arts and Frank Lloyd Wright were the heights of American architecture. By 1950, nobody who was anybody was doing Beaux-Arts or Prairie; it was all International Style. One could very charitably attribute this to the novelty-seeking drive above; but it's implausible that Prairie style architecture was novel and beloved in 1940, a few houses completely exhausted its potential, but the explosion of International Style buildings didn't restore the balance such that the low-hanging-fruit level level was lower in Prairie style again. More likely this was just a fashion effect where Prairie style was cool in 1940, then uncool in 1950. 7: Political And Ideological Point-Making: Great art may convey some truth about the world. This could be a purely aesthetic truth. But in the case of Uncle Tom's Cabin, the truth was "slavery is bad". Other truths are conveyed symbolically (for example, cathedrals being shaped like crosses) or through design choices (for example, the austerity of Bauhaus architecture making it more suitable for socialist housing). 8: Ability To Profoundly Affect Or Transform You: Maybe this one is emergent from some combination of sensory delight, novelty and point-making. But some people say they come away from art transformed, in a way which is neither just sensory delight nor just political ideology. Philosophers have argued for millennia about exactly what way this is, but hopefully we've all had this experience and can accept an extensional definition. These people enumerated these things to defend taste. I will instead take the bold stand that conflating many different things is bad: it frees people from thinking too hard about any particular one of them, or the ways they interact. Here are my arguments for deliberately ignoring about half of these. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/contra-everyone-on-taste

As a blogger, I hear about lots of projects to "solve debate", or "disagree better", or "map arguments". Often these are ACX grant applications. I always turn them down. They're well-intentioned, sophisticated, and doomed. I appreciate that Internet arguments usually don't go well, that there are lots of ways to improve them, and that this is a worthy cause. But I've also seen a dozen projects of this sort fail. Here's why I think yours will too: "Debate" almost never corresponds to mappable arguments. The simplest "solve debate" proposal is the argument map. Some technology helps people decompose arguments into premises and conclusions, then lets skeptics point out where the premises are wrong, or where the conclusion doesn't follow from the premise. But almost no real argument works that way. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-attempt-to-solve-debate-will

This month, rationalist institution Lighthaven is running their second Inkhaven, a bootcamp for aspiring bloggers. Participants have to publish a post a day, or they get kicked out. You can read their posts here. I'm too old to manage that pace, but agreed to participate as an advisor. Then I missed the first half of the month because I was on a trip. As compensation, here are fifteen pieces of writing advice for the fifteen days I was absent. 1: Against microdishonesty Sasha Chapin has a piece If You Have Writer's Block, Maybe Stop Lying To Yourself. Maybe lying gives Sasha writer's block, but for my last set of mentees it more often just made things sound awkward and unclear. The English language hates the slightest whiff of dishonesty, even levels so small you wouldn't naturally notice them yourself. It punishes you by making your writing worse. I remember asking one of my mentees to take out a tangential paragraph that didn't really connect to the rest of the argument. They refused, and awkwardly admitted that it was the one thing they really wanted to say with the essay. They'd written the essay about something else, because the other thing was more presentable. Then they'd smuggled their actual point in as a payload. Clever plan, but your readers will notice. There are countless reasons to lie when you're writing. Maybe you thought of a really clever introduction, but the thing it introduces is 5% different from the thing you really want to say, so you need to be a little vague and smush them together. Maybe you have a really great perspective on something which is almost like the topic du jour, and you need to make it sound like it's exactly the topic du jour to get it published. Maybe you can rebut 99 out of 100 arguments for some stupid evil position that you want to debunk, but it would be embarrassing to leave one hanging, so you smudge it together into the other 99 arguments. English will punish you for all these things. Sometimes there's no better solution and you have to settle, but your readers will notice. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/half-a-month-of-consolation-writing