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Your Review: Project Xanadu - The Internet That Might Have Been
[This is one of the finalists in the 2025 review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. 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] 1. The Internet That Would Be In July 1945, Vannevar Bush was riding high. As Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, he’d won World War II. His proximity fuse intercepted hundreds of V-1s and destroyed thousands of tanks, carving a path for Allied forces through the French countryside. Back in 1942, he’d advocated to President Roosevelt the merits of Oppenheimer’s atomic bomb. Roosevelt and his congressional allies snuck hundreds of millions in covert funding to the OSRD’s planned projects in Oak Ridge and Los Alamos. Writing directly and secretively to Bush, a one-line memo in June expressed Roosevelt’s total confidence in his Director: “Do you have the money?” Indeed he did. The warheads it bought would fall on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in mere weeks. The Germans had already given up; Victory in the Pacific was nigh. So Bush was thinking ahead. In The Atlantic, Bush returned to a pre-war obsession with communication and knowledge-exchange. His essay, “As We May Think,” imagined a new metascientifical endeavor (emphasis mine): https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-project-xanadu-the-internet
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Defining Defending Democracy: Contra The Election Winner Argument
Someone argues that Donald Trump threatens democracy, maybe because he’s asserting authority against the judiciary or the media or the NGOs. Someone else counterargues that it hardly seems undemocratic for someone to favor someone who won an election (the President) over other people who did not (the judiciary, the media). If anything, it seems undemocratic to allow the unelected people to continue to obstruct and harass elected leaders. The most common response is to say that fine, democracy is about who wins votes, but we also like liberalism, liberalism is under threat, it’s too hard to talk about “liberalism” because in the US it sometimes means being left-wing, and so we use the related concept “democracy” as a stand-in. This is reasonable, and some accused-democracy-destroyers like Viktor Orban even accept it for themselves, calling their brand of government “illiberal democracy”. But I think there’s an even stronger response that doesn’t require admitting to a bait-and-switch: democracy isn’t just about having an election. It’s about having more than one election. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/defining-defending-democracy-contra
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Your Review: The Synaptic Plasticity and Memory Hypothesis
[This is one of the finalists in the 2025 review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. 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] I. THE TASTE OF VICTORY The Tupinambá people ate their enemies. This fact scared Hans Staden, a German explorer who was captured by Tupinambá warriors in 1554, when they caught him by surprise during a hunting expedition. As their prisoner for nearly a year, Staden observed a number of their cannibalism rituals. They were elaborate, public affairs; here’s a description of them from Duffy and Metcalf’s The Return of Hans Staden, an assessment of Staden’s voyage and claims: (Ch. 2, pg. 51-52) First a rope was placed around the neck of the captive so that he might not escape; at night the rope was tied to the hammock in which the captive slept. Straps that were not removed were placed above and below the knees. The captives were given women, who guarded them and also slept with them. These women were high-status daughters and sisters of chiefs; they were unmarried and sometimes gave birth to the child of a captive. Some of the captives might be held for a period of time until corn was planted and new large clay vessels—for drink and cooking flesh—were made. Guests were invited to the ceremony, and they often arrived eight to fifteen days in advance of it. A special small house was erected, with no walls but with a roof, in which the captives were placed with women and guards two or three days before the ceremony. In the other houses, feathers were prepared for a headdress or for body ornamentation, and inks were made for tattoos. Women and girls prepared fifty to one hundred vats of fermented manioc beer. Then, when all was ready, they painted the victim’s face blue, mounted a headdress of wax covered with feathers on him, and wound a cotton cord around his waist. The guests began to drink in the afternoon and continued all through the night. At dawn, the one who was to do the killing came out with a long, painted wooden club and smashed the captive on the head, splitting it open. The attacker then withdrew for eight to fifteen days of abstinence while the others ate the cooked flesh of the captive and finished all of the drink made for the occasion. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-the-synaptic-plasticity
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Book Review: If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies
I. Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Machine Intelligence Research Institute is the original AI safety org. But the original isn’t always the best - how is Mesopotamia doing these days? As money, brainpower, and prestige pour into the field, MIRI remains what it always was - a group of loosely-organized weird people, one of whom cannot be convinced to stop wearing a sparkly top hat in public. So when I was doing AI grantmaking last year, I asked them - why should I fund you instead of the guys with the army of bright-eyed Harvard grads, or the guys who just got Geoffrey Hinton as their celebrity spokesperson? What do you have that they don’t? MIRI answered: moral clarity. Most people in AI safety (including me) are uncertain and confused and looking for least-bad incremental solutions. We think AI will probably be an exciting and transformative technology, but there’s some chance, 5 or 15 or 30 percent, that it might turn against humanity in a catastrophic way. Or, if it doesn’t, that there will be something less catastrophic but still bad - maybe humanity gradually fading into the background, the same way kings and nobles faded into the background during the modern era. This is scary, but AI is coming whether we like it or not, and probably there are also potential risks from delaying too hard. We’re not sure exactly what to do, but for now we want to build a firm foundation for reacting to any future threat. That means keeping AI companies honest and transparent, helping responsible companies like Anthropic stay in the race, and investing in understanding AI goal structures and the ways that AIs interpret our commands. Then at some point in the future, we’ll be close enough to the actually-scary AI that we can understand the threat model more clearly, get more popular buy-in, and decide what to do next. MIRI thinks this is pathetic - like trying to protect against an asteroid impact by wearing a hard hat. They’re kind of cagey about their own probability of AI wiping out humanity, but it seems to be somewhere around 95 - 99%. They think plausibly-achievable gains in company responsibility, regulation quality, and AI scholarship are orders of magnitude too weak to seriously address the problem, and they don’t expect enough of a “warning shot” that they feel comfortable kicking the can down the road until everything becomes clear and action is easy. They suggest banning all AI capabilities research immediately, to be restarted only in some distant future when the situation looks more promising. Both sides honestly believe their position and don’t want to modulate their message for PR reasons. But both sides, coincidentally, think that their message is better PR. The incrementalists think a moderate, cautious approach keeps bridges open with academia, industry, government, and other actors that prefer normal clean-shaven interlocutors who don’t emit spittle whenever they talk. MIRI thinks that the public is sick of focus-group-tested mealy-mouthed bullshit, but might be ready to rise up against AI if someone presented the case in a clear and unambivalent way. Now Yudkowsky and his co-author, MIRI president Nate Soares, have reached new heights of unambivalence with their new book, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies (release date September 16, currently available for preorder). https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-if-anyone-builds-it-everyone
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Your Review: Participation in Phase I Clinical Pharmaceutical Research
[This is one of the finalists in the 2025 review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. 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] If you’ve been following this blog for long, you probably know at least a bit about pharmaceutical research. You might know a bit about the sort of subtle measures pharmaceutical companies take to influence doctors’ prescribing habits, or how it takes billions of dollars on average to bring a new medication to market, or something about the perverse incentives which determine the FDA’s standards for accepting or rejecting a new drug. You might have some idea what kinds of hoops a company has to jump through to conduct actual research which meets legal guidelines for patient safety and autonomy. You may be less familiar though, with how the sausage is actually made. How do pharmaceutical companies actually go through the process of testing a drug on human participants? I’m going to be focusing here on a research subject’s view of what are known as Phase I clinical trials, the stage in which prospective drugs are tested for safety and tolerability. This is where researchers aim to answer questions like “Does this drug have any dangerous side effects?” “Through what pathways is it removed from a patient’s body?” and “Can we actually give people enough of this drug that it’s useful for anything?” This comes before the stage where researchers test how good a drug is at actually treating any sort of disease, when patients who’re suffering from the target ailments are given the option receive it as an experimental treatment. In Phase I clinical trials, the participants are healthy volunteers who’re participating in research for money. There are almost no cases in which volunteer participation is driven by motivations other than money, because the attitudes between research participants and clinicians overwhelmingly tend to be characterized by mutual guarded distrust. This distrust is baked into the process, both on a cultural level among the participants, and by the clinics’ own incentives. All of what follows is drawn from my own experiences, and experiences that other participants in clinical pharmaceutical research have shared with me, because for reasons which should become clear over the course of this review, research which systematically explores the behaviors and motives of clinical research participants is generally not feasible to conduct. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-participation-in-phase
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