Sophia "SoundLogic"

Posted by Scott Alexander

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/links-for-april-2025

[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.]

1: Origins of cowboy slang: Buckaroo = vaquero; cahoots = cohorts; ten gallon hat = tan galán (Spanish for “very gallant”).

2: In a 2003 Belgian election, the Communist candidate got 4096 extra votes; investigators suspect a cosmic ray flipped a bit in the voting machine.

3: Anatoly Karlin highlights (X) a section from Walter Isaacson’s Musk biography claiming that his father Errol, previously a successful engineer, suddenly became a crackpot in his forties:

One day [Musk’s cousin] Peter came over to the house and found Errol sitting in his underwear at the kitchen table with a plastic roulette wheel. He was trying to see whether microwaves could affect it. He would spin the wheel, mark down the result, then spin it and put it in a microwave oven and record the result. “It was nuts”, Peter says. Errol had become convinced that he could find a system for beating the game. He dragged Elon to the Pretoria casino many times, dressing him up so that he looked older than sixteen, and had him write down the numbers while Errol used a calculator hidden under a betting card.

Elon went to the library and read a few books on roulette and even wrote a roulette simulation program on his computer. He then tried to convince his father that none of his schemes would work. But Errol believed that he had found a deeper truth about probability and, as he later described it to me, an “almost total solution to what is called randomness.” When I asked him to explain it, he said, “There are no ‘random events’ or ‘chance.’ All events follow the Fibonacci Sequence, like the Mandelbrot Set. I went on to discover the relationship between ‘chance’ and the Fibonacci Sequence. This is the subject for a scientific paper. If I share it, all activities relying on ‘chance’ will be ruined, so I am in doubt as to doing that.”

I’m not quite sure what all that means. Neither is Elon: “I don’t know how he went from being great at engineering to believing in witchcraft. But he somehow made that evolution.” Errol can be very forceful and occasionally convincing. “He changes reality around him”, Kimbal says. “He will literally make up things, but he actually believes his own false reality.”

This is the main data point that keeps me from 100% believing the “it’s all ketamine” theory. Related: A Ketamine Addict’s Perspective On Musk.

4: Did you know there’s a Hunting Of The Snark musical?

It’s okay, but the poem itself is too repetitive to set to music directly, so they had to reset it into a different rhyming, rhythmic form, and taking one of the best English poems and re-writing it without making it worse is a tough order that I’m not sure they managed.

5: The Pilate Cycle is a collection of Christian apocrypha. In one work, The Acts of Pilate, Satan tries to convince the Greek god Hades to trap Jesus in the Greek underworld (but ends up trapped himself). Another, The Vengeance Of The Savior, is a “revenge fantasy” that daydreams about horrible deaths for Pilate, Herod, and, uh, all Jews.

6: Why did Doordash win? Now that I think about it, I haven’t heard much from GrubHub or UberEats lately. The article speculates that DoorDash started with some good strategic choices (organizing their own delivery fleet, starting in suburbs), then executed better than their competitors.

7: A common sociological claim is that relative income (compared to your social circle) matters more for happiness than absolute income. Bryan Caplan thinks this can’t be true: after all, practically nobody moves to poorer areas to enjoy the higher relative income this would confer. I don’t know if you can really use revealed preferences this way - exercise and meditation plausibly make you happier, but most people don’t do them. On the other hand, there are enough people who do them and praise them that we all know somebody like this. Where are the people who coincidentally ended up living in the slums and love it?

8: “The most accurate AI-generated DMT hallucinations so far.” A+, this is a great genre of thing.

9: Twelve years ago, I wrote about some interesting medical hypotheses on the productive border between crackpottery and consensus. One was Drs. Gat and Goren’s claim that prostate disease comes from venous insufficiency and can be treated surgically. Norman Yarvin digs much deeper and concludes it’s plausible. Great piece at the intersection of biomedicine and physics - if you want to think about the circulatory system in a sensible way, you need to really understand pressure.

10: In my report card last October, I said that Milei had reduced Argentine monthly inflation from 25% to 4%, but there was still a long way to go. The latest news is that it’s dropped further to 2.2%. And poverty, which went up during the “shock therapy”, is now lower than when Milei took office.

11: Update on Ozempocalypse: some pharmacies have stopped selling compounded GLP-1 drugs, others continue, with various flimsy legal excuses. Cremieux has a guide (partly subscriber-only) on how to order and use cheap “research chemical” GLP-1 from from peptide companies. And the Trump administration cancelled a Biden initiative to make GLP-1 drugs available via insurance.

12: RIP pioneering blogger Kevin Drum.

13: Local pharma startup founder Trevor Klee is working on a supplement that prevents your body from absorbing plasticizers in food. These aren’t exactly the same as microplastics, but are probably also bad. You would have to take the supplement with every meal - but surely no price is too high if it keeps you safe from . . . whatever it is that plasticizers do.

14: Did you know that China has mostly solved the problem of smog in Beijing? (X)

15: From @msamalam: 1932 Japanese map of world features/stereotypes (X), click to expand:

16: Trump Tower is a BDSM erotic novel published in 2011. It was originally credited to Donald Trump as author (with Jeffrey Robinson as ghostwriter), but at the last moment Trump changed his mind, and Robinson was listed as the author. I appreciated Ozy Brennan's review of Saddam Hussein’s erotic novel, and nominate them to cover this one too.

17: Wikipedia on the beginning of the Horslips, one of Ireland’s most famous rock bands:

Barry Devlin, Eamon Carr and Charles O'Connor met when they worked at Arks Advertising Agency in Dublin. They were cajoled into pretending to be a band for a Harp Lager commercial but needed a keyboard player. Devlin said he knew a Jim Lockhart who would fit the bill. The four enjoyed the act so much that they decided to try being proper rock performers.

18: I complained that Elon Musk’s idea of “truth-seeking AI” was bad for alignment, and I still think this is true in the very long run. But I can’t deny it’s an inspired / providential choice for the current moment, already paying dividends (X):

19: Lyman Stone Continues Being Dumb, The Fallacious Inferences Of Lyman Stone, and Against Lyman Stone are some of this month’s top anti-Lyman-Stone content.

20: New polling on the Middle Ages:

21: More new-ish AI policy substacks potentially worth your time:

• You may remember Helen Toner from the OpenAI board drama, but she’s also an experienced and thoughtful scholar on AI policy and now has a Substack, Rising Tide. I especially appreciated Nonproliferation Is The Wrong Approach To AI Misuse.

• You may remember Miles Brundage from OpenAI Safety Team Quitting Incident #25018 (or maybe 25019, I can’t remember). He’s got an AI policy Substack too, here’s a dialogue with Dean Ball.

• You may remember Daniel Reeves from Beeminder, but he has an AI policy Substack too, AGI Fridays. Here’s his post on AI 2027.

• If you’re at all familiar with AI policy you already know Dean Ball (Substack here), but congratulate him on being named White House senior policy advisor.

22: And speaking of the board drama, a new book finally reveals most of the story, and the real reason behind Altman’s firing was . . . he wasn’t consistently candid. Not sure what I expected. WSJ article, Shakeel tweet thread. Key sections:

The article doesn’t explain why the board did such a poor job communicating their grievances, maybe it’s in the full book. It does sound like part of board’s problem was that they were leaning heavily on Mira Murati but she was playing both sides off against each other.

23: And the Forethought Institute has been putting out some great analysis lately, including Will AI R&D Automation Cause An Intelligence Explosion?, by Daniel Eth and Tom Davidson, and AI Enabled Coups: How A Small Group Could Use AI To Seize Power, by Tom Davidson, Lukas Finnveden, and Rose Hadshar. And here’s Davidson defending the coups paper on the 80,000 Hours podcast.

24: Agent Village is a sort of "reality show” where a group of AI agents has to work together to complete some easy-for-human tasks (currently: pick a charity and raise money for it) and you get to watch.

25: University of Austin promises approximately-automatic admission to anyone with a 1460+ on their SATs (or similar scores on other standardized tests).

26: Cremieux on birth order effects (X). His conclusion: “The birth order effect is social. It is driven by parental interactions and investments, and sibling interactions that are dynamic with respect to age.”

27: Claim from new paper, via Alex Tabarrok: “Prohibiting the FDA from regulating e-cigarettes reduced smoking attributable mortality by nearly 10% on average each year from 2011-2019 for a total savings of some 677,000 life-years, or approximately 1/3 the estimated benefit of early HIV/AIDS drugs through year 2000”. Related: FDA will not regulate lab-developed tests for the near future.

28: Bryan Caplan on Natal Con, the pronatalist conference in Austin. My strongest opinion on this is that they should either change the name or hold the next one in Natal, Brazil.

29: Am I living in a conservative filter bubble? I keep hearing how we need a “reckoning” over the government’s disastrous anti-COVID policies, but the latest YouGov polling suggests that large majorities of Americans continue to support those policies:

30: A California legislator proposed a bill that would ban OpenAI’s nonprofit → forprofit conversion, backed by a suspiciously specific interest group, the Coalition For AI Nonprofit Integrity. I assume this is either Elon Musk or our conspiracy; not sure which. But their plan was stymied when the legislature “amended” the bill to remove its entire text and replace it with unrelated text about airplane loans. The legislator apparently got cold feet after being warned it might inflict collateral damage on other companies, and because of the way the California legislature works it’s sometimes more efficient to turn doomed bills into other bills than to simply withdraw them.

31: EthnoGuessr is a GeoGuessr variant: it shows you pictures of an ethnic group, you click on the map where you think they’re from. Warning that if you play this too much you might get into race science.

Remember, asking where someone is from ‘originally’ is a microaggression, but inferring it yourself based on their “mildly platyrrhine, high-rooted nose” is A-OK!

32: Farmkind has a new version of their calculator to determine meat offsets, eg how much do you have to donate to animal welfare charities to compensate for the animals you harm by eating meat. Does the average person really eat chicken 9x a week?

33: Not going to waste your time listing every bad thing Trump has done this month, but among the worst is sending innocent people to horrible Salvadorean prisons (including one person picked up because he had an autism awareness tattoo in honor of his brother, which they mistook for a gang tattoo), then refusing to bring them back. I have seen a couple of people defend denying immigrants due process; I assume they will not be moved by humanitarian arguments, but I think there are some more practical considerations:

• Zaid Jilani points out that if immigrants don’t get a right to due process, citizens also don’t get a right to due process, because the government can kidnap citizens, claim they’re immigrants, and the citizens can’t prove otherwise since they don’t get due process.

• The Supreme Court has long maintained that immigrants have a right due process, including such bleeding-heart liberals as Antonin Scalia.

• If you want to maintain a taboo, it often helps to keep things that look identical to it taboo. For example, to maintain the taboo against child porn, you might also want to ban AI-generated child porn where no actual children are harmed, because if you allow this, then the difference between a taboo act (watching real child porn) and an allowed act (watching AI-generated child porn) is just checking the label to see how a porn video was made, and it’s hard to maintain social outrage against people who are doing the same thing as lots of other people but except for checking labels. In the same way, colleges and other communities mix citizens and immigrants together so closely that it’s hard to tell who is who without asking. If the government can punish immigrants for speaking freely, then it’s hard to maintain bright-line outrage against it punishing citizens for speaking freely when the only difference is who has a green card vs. a passport, something that the person’s community might not even know.

34: Related: the Trump administration seems to be refusing to comply with a 9-0 Supreme Court order to bring back a specific deported immigrant. This is obviously terrifying, but superforecaster Peter Wildeford says it is not technically a constitutional crisis yet (X) because there are still some formalities the courts need to go to before they have officially “ordered” Trump to bring back the immigrant, and he won’t have officially “defied” the order until the formalities are complete. This doesn’t make me too much calmer but I guess is good to keep in mind. Related: Nicholas Decker asks when a violation of the Constitution becomes the sort of wolf-at-the-door dictatorship that we are supposed to violently rise up to prevent; people are mad at him but I think you have to either admit that some level of tyranny reaches this level or else just lie down and die. My proposed solution (drawing, of course, on medieval Iceland) is that the Supreme Court should be able to directly enforce its decisions by declaring violators to be “outlaws”; not only do outlaws lose the protection of the law, but anyone who uses force to defend of an outlaw becomes an outlaw themselves. See here for discussion of the pluses and minuses of such a system.

35: One bright spot in the political climate: FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression), originally founded to protect students from cancel culture, has done a great job pivoting to protect students from getting deported over pro-Palestine views. I am impressed with their principled stance and have donated. In related news, FIRE has partnered with Substack to defend writers, and FIRE president Greg Lukianoff has co-written an article with Dean Ball on free speech and AI regulation.

36: AI can now generate short Tom and Jerry cartoons to a prompt.

37: Yali was a New Guinea tribesman who fought with the Australians in World War II. After the war, the Australians tried to use him as a spokesperson to introduce New Guinea tribesmen to the civilized world. But Yali was both power-hungry and didn’t really understand civilization, so he ended up as the prophet of a new cargo cult instead. “People continued to give him gifts, and he collected a fee for baptising Christians who wanted to wash away the sins of Christianity and return to paganism.”

38: National Catholic Reporter comes on strong: “If you believe the Scripture is the Word of God, the message is clear: Musk and Trump will go to hell for defunding the corporal works of mercy.”

39: Misinformation Is Not A Contagious Virus You Can Be Inoculated Against. An argument between two sets of misinformation researchers about the title metaphor. I think this is a linguistic misunderstanding: Dan uses “misinformation” to mean “false things”, and Sander uses it to mean “viral clickbait hyperpartisan slop of a sort which is at very high risk of being false”. I think Dan’s meaning is more natural and less likely to cause trouble.

40: California’s experiment to see how high they could raise the minimum wage before getting visible employment effects has finally produced (X) unambiguous results:

41: Trojan Sky, a scifi story by Richard Ngo. Straussian reading: Gur tyvgpuref ercerfrag evtug-jvat Gjvggre vasyhrapref.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/links-for-april-2025