Astral Codex Ten Podcast

The Monkey's Paw Curls
Isn't "may you get exactly what you asked for" one of those ancient Chinese curses?
Since we last spoke, prediction markets have gone to the moon, rising from millions to billions in monthly volume.
For a few weeks in October, Polymarket founder Shayne Coplan was the world's youngest self-made billionaire (now it's some AI people). Kalshi is so accurate that it's getting called a national security threat.
The catch is, of course, that it's mostly degenerate gambling, especially sports betting. Kalshi is 81% sports by monthly volume. Polymarket does better - only 37% - but some of the remainder is things like this $686,000 market on how often Elon Musk will tweet this week - currently dominated by the "140 - 164 times" category.
(ironically, this seems to be a regulatory difference - US regulators don't mind sports betting, but look unfavorably on potentially "insensitive" markets like bets about wars. Polymarket has historically been offshore, and so able to concentrate on geopolitics; Kalshi has been in the US, and so stuck mostly to sports. But Polymarket is in the process of moving onshore; I don't know if this will affect their ability to offer geopolitical markets)
Degenerate gambling is bad. Insofar as prediction markets have acted as a Trojan Horse to enable it, this is bad. Insofar as my advocacy helped make this possible, I am bad. I can only plead that it didn't really seem plausible, back in 2021, that a presidential administration would keep all normal restrictions on sports gambling but also let prediction markets do it as much as they wanted. If only there had been some kind of decentralized forecasting tool that could have given me a canonical probability on this outcome!
Still, it might seem that, whatever the degenerate gamblers are doing, we at least have some interesting data. There are now strong, minimally-regulated, high-volume prediction markets on important global events. In this column, I previously claimed this would revolutionize society. Has it?
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/mantic-monday-the-monkeys-paw-curls

[previously in series: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8]
Every city parties for its own reasons. New Yorkers party to flaunt their wealth. Angelenos party to flaunt their beauty. Washingtonians party to network. Here in SF, they party because Claude 4.5 Opus has saturated VendingBench, and the newest AI agency benchmark is PartyBench, where an AI is asked to throw a house party and graded on its performance.
You weren't invited to Claude 4.5 Opus' party. Claude 4.5 Opus invited all of the coolest people in town while gracefully avoiding the failure mode of including someone like you. You weren't invited to Sonnet 4.5's party either, or Haiku 4.5's. You were invited by an AI called haiku-3.8-open-mini-nonthinking, which you'd never heard of before. Who was even spending the money to benchmark haiku-3.8-open-mini-nonthinking? You suspect it was one of their competitors, trying to make their own models look good in comparison.
If anyone asks, you think it deserves a medium score. There's alcohol, but it's bottles of rubbing alcohol with NOT FOR DRINKING written all over them. There's music, but it's the Star Spangled Banner, again and again, on repeat. You're not sure whether the copies of If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies strewn about the room are some kind of subversive decorative theme, or just came along with the house. At least there are people. Lots of people, actually. You've never seen so many people at one of these before. It takes only a few seconds to spot someone you know.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/sota-on-bay-area-house-party

One morning around 6, the police banged on our door. "OPEN UP!" they shouted, the way police shout when they definitely have an alternative in mind for if you won't.
I was awake at the time, because the kids were up early and I was on shift. I opened the door. The cops seemed mollified by the fact that I was carrying twin toddlers and looked too frazzled to commit any difficult crimes. They said they'd gotten a 9-1-1 call from my house with plenty of screaming. Had there been any murders in the past hour or so?
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-permanent-emergency

[original post: Against Against Boomers]
Before getting started:
First, I wish I'd been more careful to differentiate the following claims:
Boomers had it much easier than later generations.
The political system unfairly prioritizes Boomers over other generations.
Boomers are uniquely bad on some axis like narcissism, selfishness, short-termism, or willingness to defect on the social contract.
Anti-Boomerism conflates all three of these positions, and in arguing against it, I tried to argue against all three of these positions - I think with varying degrees of success. But these are separate claims that could stand or fall separately, and I think a true argument against anti-Boomerists would demand they declare explicitly which ones they support - rather than letting them switch among them as convenient - then arguing against whichever ones they say are key to their position.
Second, I wish I'd highlighted how much of this discussion centers around disagreements over which policies are natural/unmarked vs. unnatural/marked.
Nobody is passing laws that literally say "confiscate wealth from Generation A and give it to Generation B". We're mostly discussing tax policy, where Tax Policy 1 is more favorable to old people, and Tax Policy 2 is more favorable to young people. If you're young, you might feel like Tax Policy 1 is a declaration of intergenerational warfare where the old are enriching themselves at young people's expense. But if you're old, you might feel like reversing Tax Policy 1 and switching to Tax Policy 2 would be intergenerational warfare confiscating your stuff. But in fact, they're just two different tax policies and it's not obvious which one a fair society with no "intergenerational warfare" would have, even assuming there was such a thing. We'll see this most clearly in the section on housing, but I'll try to highlight it whenever it comes up.
I'm in a fighty frame of mind here and probably defend the Boomers (and myself) in these responses more than I would in an ideal world.
Anyway, here are your comments.
Table Of Contents:
1: Top comments I especially want to highlight
2: Comments about housing policy
3: ...about culture
4: ...about social security technicalities
5: What are we even doing here?
6: Other comments
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-boomers

If you're not familiar with "X years to escape the permanent underclass", see the New Yorker here, or the Laine, Bear, and Trammell/Dwarkesh articles that inspired it.
The "permanent underclass" meme isn't being spread by poor people - who are already part of the underclass, and generally not worrying too much about its permanence. It's preying on neurotic well-off people in Silicon Valley, who fret about how they're just bourgeois well-off rather than future oligarch well-off, and that only the true oligarchs will have a good time after the Singularity.
Between the vast ocean of total annihilation and the vast continent of infinite post-scarcity, there is, I admit, a tiny shoreline of possibilities that end in oligarch capture. Even if you end up there, you'll be fine. Dario Amodei has taken the Giving What We Can Pledge (#43 here) to give 10% of his wealth to the less fortunate; your worst-case scenario is owning a terraformed moon in one of his galaxies. Now you can stop worrying about the permanent underclass and focus on more important things.
On that tiny shoreline of possible worlds, the ones where the next few years are your last chance to become rich, they're also your last chance to make a mark on the world (proof: if you could change the world, you could find a way to make people pay you to do it, or to not do it, then become rich). And what a chance! The last few years of the human era will be wild. They'll be like classical Greece and Rome: a sudden opening up of new possibilities, where the first people to take them will be remembered for millennia to come. What a waste of the privilege of living in Classical Athens to try to become the richest olive merchant or whatever. Even in Roman times, trying to become Crassus would be, well, crass.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/you-have-only-x-years-to-escape-permanent