Hello everyone! This is going to be a bit of a housekeeping post and a welcome to new subscribers. My writing can be intimidating. There is a lot of it, and it’s often dense. As always, choose only the parts relevant to your interests, do not be afraid to make cuts. I attempt to make every post accessible as an entry point, but I also want to build up a superstructure over time. This seemed like a good time to recap some of the very best of my old writing and talk about what I’m up to.
I don't remember how I ended up here (might've been a link in an ACX post, or a random tweet, or an MtG-related post in the pre-Substack period of the blog) but I'm very happy that I did. I've been following since early Covid days because those posts aimed at understanding the situation rather than pushing any sort of agenda. Later I noticed that regardless of the topic, even when I'm completely out of my depth, the posts are never boring and help me understand this world a bit better. Yeah, the AI roundups are massive and I've given up on consuming every post, but that's the nature of that topic (and I don't envy the people who are constantly aware of the X-risk etc).
I guess that was a meandering way to say a huge thank you for your writing and for keeping all of it free.
Btw I do enjoy the MtG/other game posts (my first reaction to your blog was "wait, I remember this name. A Magic pro wrote all of that?") but it makes sense if you want to keep that separate.
Your writing is extremely educational, even for someone like me who starts out knowing nothing. It doesn't make me feel like I'm being forced into a particular set of beliefs.
Re fertility and car seats, this is easily fixed by redesigning cars and car seats.
Thank you for your work over the years, and this post will be very helpful as I‘m going to go through the (pre-2023) classics over time.
The simplified poker game is Mike Caro’s AKQ game, and as commenter honeypuppy noted back in 2018, it is treated in „The Mathematics of Poker“ by Bill Chen and Jerrod Ankenman (but only equilibrium strategy). See chapter 15. I submitted a review of that book to last year‘s ACX book-review contest and managed a place in the „anti-final“ (bottom 16).
Fun fact: The statement „If you start with a 2, you never want to bet“ is correct, but the reasoning „since your opponent will call with a 3 but fold with a 1“ is not sufficient, strictly speaking. For the statement can become wrong if more than one bet size is allowed. Chen & Ankenman write „we were quite convinced that we had made a mistake [when we found this]; after all, betting a hand that has no chance of being called by a worse hand and no chance of folding a better hand seems foolish“ (page 170).
What would be the best way to introduce someone to your writing and LW-style writing in general? I personally got into LW/ACX after reading HPMOR but many people I know have never read Harry Potter or aren't interested that much in fan fiction. I'd be curious to see if there's other easy intros that would take someone from nothing to some understanding of what Rationality (and its adjacent writing) is all about.
Appreciate this in-house roundup. You've got a formidable back catalogue, but unlike SSC, people don't regularly throw around links to your golden oldies, so I've missed out on several gems that are going in the queue now.
Simulacra Levels was...a big one for me. Not the only time I've come across such ideas, but for whatever reason your version actually stuck. One of those "I can't un-see the world this way now" things. Moral Mazes I wish I'd read before touring through Venkatesh Rao's The Gervais Principle, since they're confusingly intertwined in my head now. Comforting regardless, as a Bigco pawn frequently baffled by the machinations of middle management. (And I'd like to think it played a major part in me no longer seeking promotion at my current employer. Can't play The Game at that level.)
I went to read "Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics", and the link to the original blog post is broken. Is there another place to read the original piece?
>An Unexpected Victory: Container Stacking at the Port of Long Beach. This is still highly underappreciated. How did Ryan’s boat ride and Tweetstorm cause a policy change? Could we duplicate this success elsewhere in the future? How?
This one rhymes quite a bit with the recent dog ban changes in the UK. Also an issue where someone previously uninvolved just came in like a storm, absolutely demolished preexisting lobby groups, and caused a meaningful change in law in weeks not years
As someone who isn't a lawyer, one thing I hate about British American common law is laws (like the All Writs Act) that are blatantly unconstitutional on their face, and you have to know the legal precedent about how the blatantly unconstitutional thing has been whittled down to something more reasonable by the courts.
(Yeah, I know, no single constitutional document in English law.)
I don't remember how I ended up here (might've been a link in an ACX post, or a random tweet, or an MtG-related post in the pre-Substack period of the blog) but I'm very happy that I did. I've been following since early Covid days because those posts aimed at understanding the situation rather than pushing any sort of agenda. Later I noticed that regardless of the topic, even when I'm completely out of my depth, the posts are never boring and help me understand this world a bit better. Yeah, the AI roundups are massive and I've given up on consuming every post, but that's the nature of that topic (and I don't envy the people who are constantly aware of the X-risk etc).
I guess that was a meandering way to say a huge thank you for your writing and for keeping all of it free.
Btw I do enjoy the MtG/other game posts (my first reaction to your blog was "wait, I remember this name. A Magic pro wrote all of that?") but it makes sense if you want to keep that separate.
Your writing is extremely educational, even for someone like me who starts out knowing nothing. It doesn't make me feel like I'm being forced into a particular set of beliefs.
Re fertility and car seats, this is easily fixed by redesigning cars and car seats.
Thank you for your work over the years, and this post will be very helpful as I‘m going to go through the (pre-2023) classics over time.
The simplified poker game is Mike Caro’s AKQ game, and as commenter honeypuppy noted back in 2018, it is treated in „The Mathematics of Poker“ by Bill Chen and Jerrod Ankenman (but only equilibrium strategy). See chapter 15. I submitted a review of that book to last year‘s ACX book-review contest and managed a place in the „anti-final“ (bottom 16).
Fun fact: The statement „If you start with a 2, you never want to bet“ is correct, but the reasoning „since your opponent will call with a 3 but fold with a 1“ is not sufficient, strictly speaking. For the statement can become wrong if more than one bet size is allowed. Chen & Ankenman write „we were quite convinced that we had made a mistake [when we found this]; after all, betting a hand that has no chance of being called by a worse hand and no chance of folding a better hand seems foolish“ (page 170).
What would be the best way to introduce someone to your writing and LW-style writing in general? I personally got into LW/ACX after reading HPMOR but many people I know have never read Harry Potter or aren't interested that much in fan fiction. I'd be curious to see if there's other easy intros that would take someone from nothing to some understanding of what Rationality (and its adjacent writing) is all about.
Appreciate this in-house roundup. You've got a formidable back catalogue, but unlike SSC, people don't regularly throw around links to your golden oldies, so I've missed out on several gems that are going in the queue now.
Simulacra Levels was...a big one for me. Not the only time I've come across such ideas, but for whatever reason your version actually stuck. One of those "I can't un-see the world this way now" things. Moral Mazes I wish I'd read before touring through Venkatesh Rao's The Gervais Principle, since they're confusingly intertwined in my head now. Comforting regardless, as a Bigco pawn frequently baffled by the machinations of middle management. (And I'd like to think it played a major part in me no longer seeking promotion at my current employer. Can't play The Game at that level.)
I went to read "Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics", and the link to the original blog post is broken. Is there another place to read the original piece?
If nobody's heard, ACX has recently forked a process and is likely to show decreased output for a while.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/in-the-long-run-were-all-dad
>An Unexpected Victory: Container Stacking at the Port of Long Beach. This is still highly underappreciated. How did Ryan’s boat ride and Tweetstorm cause a policy change? Could we duplicate this success elsewhere in the future? How?
This one rhymes quite a bit with the recent dog ban changes in the UK. Also an issue where someone previously uninvolved just came in like a storm, absolutely demolished preexisting lobby groups, and caused a meaningful change in law in weeks not years
New to your blog, really nice to have this overview. Gonna procrastinate all day and read up on things now.
Thank you for cutting through the noise.
As someone who isn't a lawyer, one thing I hate about British American common law is laws (like the All Writs Act) that are blatantly unconstitutional on their face, and you have to know the legal precedent about how the blatantly unconstitutional thing has been whittled down to something more reasonable by the courts.
(Yeah, I know, no single constitutional document in English law.)