The Codex: Collegiate Crookery, Fraudulent Findings, and Vindictive Vixens
Dear Aspiring Polymaths,
Another week, another issue of the Codex!
I don’t have much in the way of platform updates this week, as we’re gearing up to do some major backend overhauls in the next few days! Stay tuned, an avalanche of cool new stuff comes after.
Also, we will have a booth at SXSW EDU on March 6th-9th! Let me know if you’re in Austin then and we can meet up!
Learn Arena Codex, February 17th, 2023
1. US Cities are more Accessible than in Europe Using a more rational measure of accessibility, it has been determined that American cities are actually more accessible than European ones. This has come as a somewhat controversial shock to many in the urbanism world, the vast majority of which loves to claim that Europe has better urban planning than the US by every possible measurement. While it is true that there are many benefits to denser, less car-accessible European cities such as increased entrepreneurship, more street art for greater vibrancy, and larger green spaces, there are still advantages to the American system that are often overlooked in favor of European urbanist orthodoxy.
2. Simulated Agency GPT-like AI's do not fit into pre-existing AI risk frameworks because they are not agentic. However, they can form simulacra of agents, which is actually better and suffers less from the alignment problem. Here's 10,000 words explaining all of this in painful detail. Warning: This one is very dense, but the subject concerns the fate of humanity, so it’s worth slogging through.
3. Uncensored AI Assisted Research Tool AI you can query using natural language that will give you relevant peer-reviewed scientific research. This is incredible! The link here is a sample query to also show you it is not woke-censored at all, unlike ChatGPT.
4. The Diminishing Paperclip Apocalypse This article is a cogent argument against AGI doomerism (“the AGI is gonna turn the universe into paperclips!”). There are diminishing returns to intelligence, and the world is way too complicated for any amount of intelligence to fully grok, Laplace's Demon style.
5. Intergenerational Nonsense A fantastic post about genetics from my favorite geneticist. Basically, any claim that you see about how "epigenetics cause intergenerational trauma," or "epigenetics are more important than genetics," or "environment is more important than genetics because environment affects epigenetics more than genetics themselves affect outcomes" is categorically false. If you see someone trying to Blank Slate by way of epigenetics, you can safely assume they can be ignored. God’s programming language is not so easily bested by human effort.
6. Culture Matters Volume # infinity: East German households who were exposed to Western TV shows that featured entrepreneurs in a positive light led to a far higher rate of entrepreneurship in those areas after the Berlin wall fell. This shows a causal relationship between cultural displays of respect for entrepreneurs and actual rates of entrepreneurship. What do you think this means for modern culture where every piece of entertainment strongly denigrates entrepreneurs?
7. Boring, Lively, or Outraged? My favorite economist Robin Hanson explains why adult life is so boring: We have a strong incentive to remain boring because if we stand out in any way, we will get attacked by social predators who enjoy committing acts of social aggression against others as a means to gain status themselves.
8. Vindictive Vixens Furthermore, women are far more likely to use social aggression against others, especially towards other women. Men are less likely to use social aggression because attempting to destroy someone’s reputation can be met with physical violence, a backstop which women do not have. Violence plays an absolutely crucial role in maintaining a polite society, but that’s a link for another day.
9. The Acid Never Stops Corroding An absolutely astonishing account of a leading ultra-woke Black professor who was absolutely eviscerated by a group of woke students. Can you spot any parallels between what’s happening within the woke movement and what happened amongst the Bolsheviks after Lenin’s revolution?
10. Collegiate Crookery A scathing and punchy read making the case that American Universities are effectively like Homelander from The Boys. If you haven't seen The Boys, you should.
11. Dior Homme Intense A beautiful, touching, moving, poignant, emotional, enthralling tract by a man going through a divorce, working through it word by poetic word. Great rainy Saturday read if you want to be all up in your feels as I now am.
12. Learning the Elite Class I have never related to anything harder in my entire life. Here, Aella, who is from a very low class poor rural background, as I am, has somehow made her way to fancy rich people upper class house parties and recounts how bizarre the experience was. I have felt exactly as she describes before. Without going into too much detail, I somehow lucked my way into this invite only multi day event last year at a 5 star hotel in Miami. I ran into Peter Thiel in the hallway, debated international relations with Luke Nosek, and danced with Grimes and Isabella (the nuclear power activist). It was a fundamentally perspective-shattering experience to learn just how different the elites are than the culture, the norms, the expectations, and the dynamics that I grew up in. I felt like an alien, completely out of place; it was bizarre to learn that people really live and act the way the elite do. Coincidentally, Aella was also at this event and I spoke with her briefly!
13. Dynamism Isn't Dead THIS IS HOW WE SAVE THE FUTURE: Tap the Yellowstone super volcano for geothermal energy production TODAY.
14. Peer Reviewed P Hacking This link contains a lesson in epistemology and navigating modern peer reviewed research. I found a study that claimed paying mothers to stay home with their children at ages 0-3 led to worse outcomes for the children– lower college attendance rates and higher youth crime rates. This immediately sounds wrong based on simple common sense– you would think that having a mother stay home with her children while getting paid for it would unequivocally be better for the children! I was instantly skeptical. In this scenario when you’re skeptical of some findings, go dive into the paper and focus on the methodology and actual statistical details of the results, not just the abstract. An easy way to check if authors p-hacked the paper is to go check the graphs (p-hacking is a term for pruning research in an opaque way to intentionally get a specific result. Here’s a paper about that for those that want to learn more). What do the error bars and 95% confidence interval bars look like? As it turns out, for all their main results regarding negative child outcomes, the 95% confidence intervals almost completely overlap with the control group. That's STRONG evidence of p-hacking, and straightforwardly shows these results could just as well be random chance, as displayed by the researchers own data! As such, we can safely conclude these findings are meaningless nonsense. Always listen to your intuition! Sometimes research really does find some counterintuitive things, but the burden of proof is very high.
15. Peer Approved Research Last but perhaps most importantly, here’s why you should always be highly skeptical of the “peer reviewed research” and “trust the science” folks. Always review the actual research, papers, and evidence to decide for yourself if you think the findings are true. Don’t trust the science– trust your own well cultivated epistemology (and if you haven’t developed a well cultivated epistemology yet, don’t worry, I can help! Reply and let me know and I’ll focus some links on that next week if there’s interest).
Follow Us
