Astral Codex Ten Podcast

A guest post by Brandon Hendrickson [Editor's note: I accept guest posts from certain people, especially past Book Review Contest winners. Brandon Hendrickson, whose review of The Educated Mind won the 2023 contest, has taken me up on this and submitted this essay. He writes at The Lost Tools of Learning and will be at LessOnline this weekend, where he and Jack Despain Zhou aka TracingWoodgrains will be doing a live conversation about education.] I began my book review of a couple years back with a rather simple question: Could a new kind of school make the world rational? What followed, however, was a sprawling distillation of one scholar's answer that I believe still qualifies as "the longest thing anyone has submitted for an ACX contest". Since then I've been diving into particulars, exploring how we use the insights I learned while writing it to start re-enchanting all the academic subjects from kindergarten to high school. But in the fun of all that, I fear I've lost touch with that original question. How, even in theory, could a method of education help all students become rational? It probably won't surprise you that I think part of the answer is Bayes' theorem. But the equation is famously prickly and off-putting: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/bayes-for-everyone

Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution continues to disagree with my Contra MR On Charity Regrants. Going through his response piece by piece, slightly out of order: Scott takes me to be endorsing Rubio's claim that the third-party NGOs simply pocket the money. In reality my fact check with o3 found (correctly) that the money was "channelled through" the NGOs, not pocketed. Scott lumps my claim together with Rubio's as if we were saying the same thing. My very next words ("I do understand that not all third party allocations are wasteful…") show a clear understanding that the money is channeled, not pocketed, and my earlier and longer post on US AID makes that clearer yet at greater length. Scott is simply misrepresenting me here. The full post is in the image below: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/sorry-i-still-think-mr-is-wrong-about

Consciousness is the great mystery. In search of answers, scientists have plumbed every edge case they can think of - sleep, comas, lucid dreams, LSD trips, meditative ecstasies, seizures, neurosurgeries, that one pastor in 18th century England who claimed a carriage accident turned him into a p-zombie. Still, new stuff occasionally turns up. I assume this tweet is a troll (source: the guy has a frog avatar)1: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/moments-of-awakening

I often disagree with Marginal Revolution, but their post today made me a new level of angry: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/contra-mr-on-charity-regrants

Many commenters responded to yesterday's post by challenging the claim that 1.2 million Americans died of COVID... https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-evidence-that-a-million-americans

Five years later, we can't stop talking about COVID. Remember lockdowns? The conflicting guidelines about masks - don't wear them! Wear them! Maybe wear them! School closures, remote learning, learning loss, something about teachers' unions. That one Vox article on how worrying about COVID was anti-Chinese racism. The time Trump sort of half-suggested injecting disinfectants. Hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, fluvoxamine, Paxlovid. Those jerks who tried to pressure you into getting vaccines, or those other jerks who wouldn't get vaccines even though it put everyone else at risk. Anthony Fauci, Pierre Kory, Great Barrington, Tomas Pueyo, Alina Chan. Five years later, you can open up any news site and find continuing debate about all of these things. The only thing about COVID nobody talks about anymore is the 1.2 million deaths. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-other-covid-reckoning

Bryan Caplan's Selfish Reasons To Have More Kids is like the Bible. You already know what it says. You've already decided whether you believe or not. Do you really have to read it all the way through? But when you're going through a rough patch in your life, sometimes it helps to pick up a Bible and look for pearls of forgotten wisdom. That's where I am now. Having twins is a lot of work. My wife does most of it. My nanny does most of what's left. Even so, the remaining few hours a day leave me exhausted. I decided to read the canonical book on how having kids is easier and more fun than you think, to see if maybe I was overdoing something. After many trials, tribulations, false starts, grabs, shrieks, and attacks of opportunity . . . https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-selfish-reasons-to-have

Ask Redditors what's the worst subreddit, and a few names always come up. /r/atheism and /r/childfree are unpopular, but if I read them with an open mind, I always end up sympathetic - neither lifestyle is persecuted in my particular corner of society, but the Redditors there have usually been through some crazy stuff, and I don't begrudge them a place to vent. The one that really floors me is /r/petfree. The denizens of /r/petfree don't like pets. Their particular complaints vary, but most common are: Some stores either allow pets or don't enforce bans on them, and then there are pets go in those stores, and they are dirty and annoying. Some parks either allow off-leash pets or don't enforce bans on them, and then there are off-leash pets in those parks, and they are dirty and annoying. Sometimes pets attack people. Sometimes inconsiderate people get pets they can't take care of and offload some of the burden onto you. Sometimes people are cringe about their pets, in an "AWWWWW MY PRECIOUS WITTLE FUR BABY" way. Sometimes people barge into spaces that are about something else and talk about their pets instead. These are all valid complaints. But the people on /r/petfree go a little far: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/in-search-of-rpetfree

Thanks to everyone who commented on the original post. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-ai

Some of the more unhinged writing on superintelligence pictures AI doing things that seem like magic. Crossing air gaps to escape its data center. Building nanomachines from simple components. Plowing through physical bottlenecks to revolutionize the economy in months. More sober thinkers point out that these things might be physically impossible. You can't do physically impossible things, even if you're very smart. No, say the speculators, you don't understand. Everything is physically impossible when you're 800 IQ points too dumb to figure it out. A chimp might feel secure that humans couldn't reach him if he climbed a tree; he could never predict arrows, ladders, chainsaws, or helicopters. What superintelligent strategies lie as far outside our solution set as "use a helicopter" is outside a chimp's? https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/testing-ais-geoguessr-genius

Cathy Young's new hit piece on Curtis Yarvin (aka Mencius Moldbug) doesn't mince words. Titled The Blogger Who Hates America, it describes him as an "inept", "not exactly coherent" "trollish, ill-informed pseudo-intellectual" notable for his "woefully superficial knowledge and utter ignorance". Yarvin's fans counter that if you look deeper, he has good responses to Young's objections: Both sides are right. The synthesis is that Moldbug sold out. In the late 2000s, Moldbug wrote some genuinely interesting speculations on novel sci-fi variants of autocracy. Admitting that the dictatorships of the 20th century were horrifying, he proposed creative ways to patch their vulnerabilities by combining 18th century monarchy with 22nd century cyberpunk to create something better than either. These ideas might not have been realistic. But they were cool, edgy, and had a certain intellectual appeal. Then in the late 2010s, he caught his first whiff of actual power and dropped it all like a hot potato. The MAGA movement was exactly what 2000s Moldbug feared most - a cancerous outgrowth of democracy riding the same wave of populist anger as the 20th century dictatorships he loathed. But in the hope of winning a temporary political victory, he let them wear him as a skinsuit - giving their normal, boring autocratic tendencies the mystique of the cool, edgy, all-vulnerabilities-patched autocracy he foretold in his manifestos. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/moldbug-sold-out

President Trump's approval rating has fallen to near-historic lows. With economic disruption from the tariffs likely to hit next month, his numbers will probably get even worse; this administration could reach unprecedented levels of unpopularity. If I were a far-right populist, I would be thinking hard about a strategy to prevent the blowback from crippling the movement. Such a strategy is easy to come by. Anger over DOGE and deportations has a natural floor. If Trump's base starts abandoning him, it will be because of the tariffs. But tariffs aren't a load-bearing part of the MAGA platform. Other right-populist leaders like Orban, Bukele, and Modi show no interest in them. They seem an idiosyncratic obsession of Trump's, a cost that the rest of the movement pays to keep him around. So, (our hypothetical populist strategist might start thinking after Trump's approval hits the ocean trenches and starts drilling) - whatever. MAGA minus Trump's personal idiosyncrasies can remain a viable platform. You don't even have to exert any effort to make it happen. Trump will retire in 2028 and pass the torch to Vance. And although Vance supports tariffs now, that's only because he's a spineless toady. After Trump leaves the picture, Vance will gain thirty IQ points, make an eloquent speech about how tariffs were the right tool for the mid-2020s but no longer, and the problem will solve itself. Right? Don't let them get away with this. Although it's true that tariffs owe as much to Trump's idiosyncrasies as to the inexorable logic of right-wing populism, the ability of a President to hold the nation hostage to his own idiosyncrasies is itself a consequence of populist ideology. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-populist-right-must-own-tariffs

AI Futures Project is the group behind AI 2027. I've been helping them with their blog. Posts written or co-written by me include: Beyond The Last Horizon - what's behind that METR result showing that AI time horizons double every seven months? And is it really every seven months? Might it be faster? AI 2027: Media, Reactions, Criticism - a look at some of the response to AI 2027, with links to some of the best objections and the team's responses. Why America Wins - why we predict that America will stay ahead of China on AI in the near future, and what could change this. I will probably be shifting most of my AI blogging there for a while to take advantage of access to the team's expertise. There's also a post on transparency by Daniel Kokotajlo, and we hope to eventually host writing by other team members as well. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/ai-futures-blogging-and-ama

[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.] ttps://www.astralcodexten.com/p/links-for-april-2025

(original post: Come On, Obviously The Purpose Of A System Is Not What It Does) … Thanks to everyone who commented on this controversial post. Many people argued that the phrase had some valuable insight, but disagreed on what it was. The most popular meaning was something like "if a system consistently fails at its stated purpose, but people don't change it, consider that the stated purpose is less important than some actual, hidden purpose, at which it is succeeding". I agree you should consider this, but I still object to the original phrase, for several reasons. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-posiwid

(see Wikipedia: The Purpose Of A System Is What It Does) Consider the following claims The purpose of a cancer hospital is to cure two-thirds of cancer patients. The purpose of the Ukrainian military is to get stuck in a years-long stalemate with Russia. The purpose of the British government is to propose a controversial new sentencing policy, stand firm in the face of protests for a while, then cave in after slightly larger protests and agree not to pass the policy after all. The purpose of the New York bus system is to emit four billion tons of carbon dioxide. These are obviously false. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/come-on-obviously-the-purpose-of

Here's a list of things I updated on after working on the scenario. Some of these are discussed in more detail in the supplements, including the compute forecast, timelines forecast, takeoff forecast, AI goals forecast, and security forecast. I'm highlighting these because it seems like a lot of people missed their existence, and they're what transforms the scenario from cool story to research-backed debate contribution. These are my opinions only, and not necessarily endorsed by the rest of the team. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/my-takeaways-from-ai-2027

We predict that the impact of superhuman AI over the next decade will be enormous, exceeding that of the Industrial Revolution. We wrote a scenario that represents our best guess about what that might look like.1 It's informed by trend extrapolations, wargames, expert feedback, experience at OpenAI, and previous forecasting successes. https://ai-2027.com/ (A condensed two-hour version with footnotes and text boxes removed is available at the above link.)

Or maybe 2028, it's complicated In 2021, a researcher named Daniel Kokotajlo published a blog post called "What 2026 Looks Like", where he laid out what he thought would happen in AI over the next five years. The world delights in thwarting would-be prophets. The sea of possibilities is too vast for anyone to ever really chart a course. At best, we vaguely gesture at broad categories of outcome, then beg our listeners to forgive us the inevitable surprises. Daniel knew all this and resigned himself to it. But even he didn't expect what happened next. He got it all right. Okay, not literally all. The US restricted chip exports to China in late 2022, not mid-2024. AI first beat humans at Diplomacy in late 2022, not 2025. And of course the mid-2025 to 2026 period remains to be seen. But to put its errors in context, Daniel's document was written two years before ChatGPT existed. Nobody except researchers and a few hobbyists had ever talked to an AI. In fact, talking to AI was a misnomer. There was no way to make them continue the conversation; they would free associate based on your prompt, maybe turning it into a paragraph-length short story. If you pulled out all the stops, you could make an AI add single digit numbers and get the right answer more than 50% of the time. Yet if you read Daniel's blog post without checking the publication date, you could be forgiven for thinking it was a somewhat garbled but basically reasonable history of the last four years. I wasn't the only one who noticed. A year later, OpenAI hired Daniel to their policy team. While he worked for them, he was limited in his ability to speculate publicly. "What 2026 Looks Like" promised a sequel about 2027 and beyond, but it never materialized. Unluckily for Sam Altman but luckily for the rest of us, Daniel broke with OpenAI mid-2024 in a dramatic split covered by the New York Times and others. He founded the AI Futures Project to produce the promised sequel, including: Eli Lifland, a superforecaster who is ranked first on RAND's Forecasting initiative. You can read more about him and his forecasting team here. He cofounded and advises AI Digest and co-created TextAttack, an adversarial attack framework for language models. Jonas Vollmer, a VC at Macroscopic Ventures, which has done its own, more practical form of successful AI forecasting: they made an early stage investment in Anthropic, now worth $60 billion. Thomas Larsen, the former executive director of the Center for AI Policy, a group which advises policymakers on both sides of the aisle. Romeo Dean, a leader of Harvard's AI Safety Student Team and budding expert in AI hardware. …and me! Since October, I've been volunteering part-time, doing some writing and publicity work. I can't take credit for the forecast itself - or even for the lion's share of the writing and publicity - but it's been an immense privilege to work alongside some of the smartest and most epistemically virtuous people I know, trying to absorb their worldview on a level deep enough to do it justice. We have no illusions that we'll get as lucky as last time, but we still think it's a valuable contribution to the discussion. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/introducing-ai-2027 https://ai-2027.com/

In Ballad of the White Horse, G.K. Chesterton describes the Virgin Mary: Her face was like an open word When brave men speak and choose, The very colours of her coat Were better than good news. Why the colors of her coat? The medievals took their dyes very seriously. This was before modern chemistry, so you had to try hard if you wanted good colors. Try hard they did; they famously used literal gold, hammered into ultrathin sheets, to make golden highlights. Blue was another tough one. You could do mediocre, half-faded blues with azurite. But if you wanted perfect blue, the color of the heavens on a clear evening, you needed ultramarine. Here is the process for getting ultramarine. First, go to Afghanistan. Keep in mind, you start in England or France or wherever. Afghanistan is four thousand miles away. Your path takes you through tall mountains, burning deserts, and several dozen Muslim countries that are still pissed about the whole Crusades thing. Still alive? After you arrive, climb 7,000 feet in the mountains of Kuran Wa Munjan until you reach the mines of Sar-i-Sang. There, in a freezing desert, the wretched of the earth work themselves to an early grave breaking apart the rocks of Badakhshan to produce a few hundred kilograms per year of blue stone - the only lapis lazuli production in the known world. Buy the stone and retrace your path through the burning deserts and vengeful Muslims until you're back in England or France or wherever. Still alive? That was the easy part. Now you need to go through a chemical extraction process that makes the Philosopher's Stone look like freshman chem lab. "The lengthy process of pulverization, sifting, and washing to produce ultramarine makes the natural pigment … roughly ten times more expensive than the stone it came from." Finally you have ultramarine! How much? I can't find good numbers, but Claude estimates that the ultramarine production of all of medieval Europe was around the order of 30 kg per year - not enough to paint a medium-sized wall. Ultramarine had to be saved for ultra-high-value applications. In practice, the medievals converged on a single use case - painting the Virgin Mary's coat. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-colors-of-her-coat

Asterisk invited me to participate in their "Weird" themed issue, so I wrote five thousand words on evil Atlantean cave dwarves. As always, I thought of the perfect framing just after I'd sent it out. The perfect framing is - where did Scientology come from? How did a 1940s sci-fi writer found a religion? Part of the answer is that 1940s sci-fi fandom was a really fertile place, where all of these novel mythemes about aliens, psychics, and lost civilizations were hitting a naive population certain that there must be something beyond the world they knew. This made them easy prey not just for grifters like Hubbard, but also for random schizophrenics who could write about their hallucinations convincingly. …but I didn't think of that framing in time, so instead you get several sections of why it's evil cave dwarves in particular, and why that theme seems to recur throughout all lands and ages: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/deros-and-the-ur-abduction-in-asterisk https://asteriskmag.com/issues/09/deros-and-the-ur-abduction

People love trying to find holes in the drowning child thought experiment. This is natural: it's obvious you should save the child in the scenario, but much less obvious that you should give lots of charity to poor people (as it seems to imply). So there must be some distinction between the two scenarios. But most people's cursory and uninspired attempts to find these fail. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/more-drowning-children

Jake Eaton has a great article on misophonia in Asterisk. Misophonia is a condition in which people can't tolerate certain noises (classically chewing). Nobody loves chewing noises, but misophoniacs go above and beyond, sometimes ending relationships, shutting themselves indoors, or even deliberately trying to deafen themselves in an attempt to escape. So it's a sensory hypersensitivity, right? Maybe not. There's increasing evidence - which I learned about from Jake, but which didn't make it into the article - that misophonia is less about sound than it seems. Misophoniacs who go deaf report that it doesn't go away. Now they get triggered if they see someone chewing. It's the same with other noises. Someone who gets triggered by the sound of forks scraping against a table will eventually get triggered by the sight of the scraping fork. Someone triggered by music will eventually get triggered by someone playing a music video on mute. Maybe this isn't surprising? https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/misophonia-beyond-sensory-sensitivity

Last month, I put out a request for experts to help me understand the details of OpenAI's forprofit buyout. The following comes from someone who has looked into the situation in depth but is not an insider. Mistakes are mine alone. Why Was OpenAI A Nonprofit In The First Place? In the early 2010s, the AI companies hadn't yet discovered scaling laws, and so underestimated the amount of compute (and therefore money) it would take to build AI. DeepMind was the first victim; originally founded on high ideals of prioritizing safety and responsible stewardship of the Singularity, it hit a financial barrier and sold to Google. This scared Elon Musk, who didn't trust Google (or any corporate sponsor) with AGI. He teamed up with Sam Altman and others, and OpenAI was born. To avoid duplicating DeepMind's failure, they founded it as a nonprofit with a mission to "build safe and beneficial artificial general intelligence for the benefit of humanity". But like DeepMind, OpenAI needed money. At first, they scraped by with personal donations from Musk and other idealists, but as the full impact of scaling laws became clearer, Altman wanted to form a forprofit arm and seek investment. Musk and Altman disagree on what happened next: Musk said he objected to the profit focus, Altman says Musk agreed but wanted to be in charge. In any case, Musk left, Altman took full control, and OpenAI founded a forprofit subsidiary. This subsidary was supposedly a "capped forprofit", meaning that their investors were capped at 100x return - if someone invested $1 million, they could get a max of $100 million back, no matter how big OpenAI became - this ensured that the majority of gains from a Singularity would go to humanity rather than investors. But a capped forprofit isn't a real kind of corporate structure; in real life OpenAI handles this through Profit Participation Units, a sort of weird stock/bond hybrid which does what OpenAI claims the capped forprofit model is doing. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/openai-nonprofit-buyout-much-more

Sorry, you can only get drugs when there's a drug shortage. Three GLP-1 drugs are approved for weight loss in the United States: Semaglutide (Ozempic®, Wegovy®, Rybelsus®) Tirzepatide (Mounjaro®, Zepbound®) Liraglutide (Victoza®, Saxenda®) …but liraglutide is noticeably worse than the others, and most people prefer either semaglutide or tirzepatide. These cost about $1000/month and are rarely covered by insurance, putting them out of reach for most Americans. …if you buy them from the pharma companies, like a chump. For the past three years, there's been a shortage of these drugs. FDA regulations say that during a shortage, it's semi-legal for compounding pharmacies to provide medications without getting the patent-holders' permission. In practice, that means they get cheap peptides from China, do some minimal safety testing in house, and sell them online. So for the past three years, telehealth startups working with compounding pharmacies have sold these drugs for about $200/month. Over two million Americans have made use of this loophole to get weight loss drugs for cheap. But there was always a looming question - what happens when the shortage ends? Many people have to stay on GLP-1 drugs permanently, or else they risk regaining their lost weight. But many can't afford $1000/month. What happens to them? Now we'll find out. At the end of last year, the FDA declared the shortage over. The compounding pharmacies appealed the decision, but last month the FDA confirmed its decision was final. As of March 19 (for tirzepatide) and April 22 (for semaglutide), compounding pharmacies will no longer be able to sell cheap GLP-1 drugs. Let's take a second to think of the real victims here: telehealth company stockholders. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-ozempocalypse-is-nigh

Most headlines have said something like New NAEP Scores Dash Hope Of Post-COVID Learning Recovery, which seems like a fair assessment. I feel bad about this, because during lockdowns I argued that kids' educational outcomes don't suffer long-term from missing a year or two of school. Re-reading the post, I still think my arguments make sense. So how did I get it so wrong? When I consider this question, I ask myself: do I expect complete recovery in two years? In 2026, we will see a class of fourth graders who hadn't even started school when the lockdowns ended. They will have attended kindergarten through 4th grade entirely in person, with no opportunity for "learning loss". If there's a sudden switch to them doing just as well as the 2015 kids, then it was all lockdown-induced learning loss and I suck. But if not, then what? Maybe the downward trend isn't related to COVID? On the graph above, the national (not California) trend started in the 2017 - 2019 period, ie before COVID. And the states that tried hardest to keep their schools open did little better than anyone else: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/what-happened-to-naep-scores

Intelligence seems to correlate with total number of neurons in the brain. Different animals' intelligence levels track the number of neurons in their cerebral cortices (cerebellum etc don't count). Neuron number predicts animal intelligence better than most other variables like brain size, brain size divided by body size, "encephalization quotient", etc. This is most obvious in certain bird species that have tiny brains full of tiny neurons and are very smart (eg crows, parrots). Humans with bigger brains have on average higher IQ. AFAIK nobody has done the obvious next step and seen whether people with higher IQ have more neurons. This could be because the neuron-counting process involves dissolving the brain into a "soup", and maybe this is too mad-science-y for the fun-hating spoilsports who run IRBs. But common sense suggests bigger brains increase IQ because they have more neurons in humans too. Finally, AIs with more neurons (sometimes described as the related quantity "more parameters") seem common-sensically smarter and perform better on benchmarks. This is part of what people mean by "scaling", ie the reason GoogBookZon is spending $500 billion building a data center the size of the moon. All of this suggests that intelligence heavily depends on number of neurons, and most scientists think something like this is true. But how can this be? https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/why-should-intelligence-be-related

I enjoy the yearly book review contest, but it feels like last year's contest is barely done, and I want to give you a break so you can read more books before we start over. So this year, let's do something different. Submit an ACX-length post reviewing something, anything, except a book. You can review a movie, song, or video game. You can review a product, restaurant, or tourist attraction. But don't let the usual categories limit you. Review comic books or blog posts. Review political parties - no, whole societies! Review animals or trees! Review an oddly-shaped pebble, or a passing cloud! Review abstract concepts! Mathematical proofs! Review love, death, or God Himself! (please don't review human races, I don't need any more NYT articles) Otherwise, the usual rules apply. There's no official word count requirement, but previous finalists and winners were often between 2,000 and 10,000 words. There's no official recommended style, but check the style of last year's finalists and winners or my ACX book reviews (1, 2, 3) if you need inspiration. Please limit yourself to one entry per person or team. Then send me your review through this Google Form. The form will ask for your name, email, the thing you're reviewing, and a link to a Google Doc. The Google Doc should have your review exactly as you want me to post it if you're a finalist. DON'T INCLUDE YOUR NAME OR ANY HINT ABOUT YOUR IDENTITY IN THE GOOGLE DOC ITSELF, ONLY IN THE FORM. I want to make this contest as blinded as possible, so I'm going to hide that column in the form immediately and try to judge your docs on their merit. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/everything-except-book-review-contest

[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.] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/links-for-february-2025

Conflict theory is the belief that political disagreements come from material conflict. So for example, if rich people support capitalism, and poor people support socialism, this isn't because one side doesn't understand economics. It's because rich people correctly believe capitalism is good for the rich, and poor people correctly believe socialism is good for the poor. Or if white people are racist, it's not because they have some kind of mistaken stereotypes that need to be corrected - it's because they correctly believe racism is good for white people. Some people comment on my more political posts claiming that they're useless. You can't (they say) produce change by teaching people Economics 101 or the equivalent. Conflict theorists understand that nobody ever disagreed about Economics 101. Instead you should try to organize and galvanize your side, so they can win the conflict. I think simple versions of conflict theory are clearly wrong. This doesn't mean that simple versions of mistake theory (the idea that people disagree because of reasoning errors, like not understanding Economics 101) are automatically right. But it gives some leeway for thinking harder about how reasoning errors and other kinds of error interact. https://readscottalexander.com/posts/acx-why-i-am-not-a-conflict-theorist

[Original thread here: Tegmark's Mathematical Universe Defeats Most Arguments For God's Existence.] 1: Comments On Specific Technical Points 2: Comments From Bentham's Bulldog's Response 3: Comments On Philosophical Points, And Getting In Fights https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-tegmarks

St. Felix publicly declared that he believed with 79% probability that COVID had a natural origin. He was brought before the Emperor, who threatened him with execution unless he updated to 100%. When St. Felix refused, the Emperor was impressed with his integrity, and said he would release him if he merely updated to 90%. St. Felix refused again, and the Emperor, fearing revolt, promised to release him if he merely rounded up one percentage point to 80%. St. Felix cited Tetlock's research showing that the last digit contained useful information, refused a third time, and was crucified. St. Clare was so upset about believing false things during her dreams that she took modafinil every night rather than sleep. She completed several impressive programming projects before passing away of sleep deprivation after three weeks; she was declared a martyr by Pope Raymond II. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/lives-of-the-rationalist-saints

It feels like 2010 again - the bloggers are debating the proofs for the existence of God. I found these much less interesting after learning about Max Tegmark's mathematical universe hypothesis, and this doesn't seem to have reached the Substack debate yet, so I'll put it out there. Tegmark's hypothesis says: all possible mathematical objects exist. Consider a mathematical object like a cellular automaton - a set of simple rules that creates complex behavior. The most famous is Conway's Game of Life; the second most famous is the universe. After all, the universe is a starting condition (the Big Bang) and a set of simple rules determining how the starting condition evolves over time (the laws of physics). Some mathematical objects contain conscious observers. Conway's Life might be like this: it's Turing complete, so if a computer can be conscious then you can get consciousness in Life. If you built a supercomputer and had it run the version of Life with the conscious being, then you would be "simulating" the being, and bringing it into existence. There would be something it was like to be that being; it would have thoughts and experiences and so on. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/tegmarks-mathematical-universe-defeats

From the Commerce Department: U.S. Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Ted Cruz (R-Texas) released a database identifying over 3,400 grants, totaling more than $2.05 billion in federal funding awarded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) during the Biden-Harris administration. This funding was diverted toward questionable projects that promoted Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) or advanced neo-Marxist class warfare propaganda. I saw many scientists complain that the projects from their universities that made Cruz's list were unrelated to wokeness. This seemed like a surprising failure mode, so I decided to investigate. The Commerce Department provided a link to their database, so I downloaded it, chose a random 100 grants, read the abstracts, and rated them either woke, not woke, or borderline. Of the hundred: 40% were woke 20% were borderline 40% weren't woke This is obviously in some sense a subjective determination, but most cases weren't close - I think any good-faith examination would turn up similar numbers. https://readscottalexander.com/posts/acx-only-about-40-of-the-cruz-woke-science

In the past day, Zvi has written about deliberative alignment, and OpenAI has updated their spec. This article was written before either of these and doesn't account for them, sorry. I. OpenAI has bad luck with its alignment teams. The first team quit en masse to found Anthropic, now a major competitor. The second team quit en masse to protest the company reneging on safety commitments. The third died in a tragic plane crash. The fourth got washed away in a flood. The fifth through eighth were all slain by various types of wild beast. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/deliberative-alignment-and-the-spec

As RFK Jr. fights to be confirmed in Congress, the rest of Trump's health team is already taking shape. 1DaySooner is an ACX grantee organization that advocates for innovative health policies. They've helped me write a list of who some of these people are, and some of the policies they could consider. For practical reasons, we focus on upside only, so consider these the Venn-diagram-union of the ideas we're most excited about, and the ones we think they might be most excited about - the new health policy we might get get in our ~90th percentile best outcome. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/1daysooners-trump-ii-health-policy

I. PEPFAR - a Bush initiative to send cheap AIDS drugs to Africa - has saved millions of lives and is among the most successful foreign aid programs ever. A Trump decision briefly put it "on pause", although this seems to have been walked back; its current status is unclear but hopeful. In the debate around this question, many people asked - is it really fair to spend $6 billion a year to help foreigners when so many Americans are suffering? Shouldn't we value American lives more than foreign ones? Can't we spend that money on some program that helps people closer to home? This is a fun thing to argue about - which, as usual, means it's a purely philosophical question unrelated to the real issue. If you cancelled PEPFAR - the single best foreign aid program, which saves millions of foreign lives - the money wouldn't automatically redirect itself to the single best domestic aid program which saves millions of American lives. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/money-saved-by-canceling-programs

Prospera Declared Unconstitutional The Honduras Supreme Court has declared charter cities, including Prospera, unconstitutional. The background: in the mid-2010s, the ruling conservative party wanted charter cities. They had already packed the Supreme Court for other reasons, so they had their captive court declare charter cities to be constitutional. In 2022, the socialists took power from the conservatives and got the chance to fill the Supreme Court with their supporters. In September, this new Supreme Court said whoops, actually charter cities aren't constitutional at all. They added that this decision applied retroactively, ie even existing charter cities that had been approved under the old government were, ex post facto, illegal. Prospera's lawyers objected, saying that the court is not allowed to make ex post facto rulings. But arguing that the Supreme Court is misinterpreting the Constitution seems like a losing battle - even if you're right, who do you appeal to? So the city is pursuing a two-pronged strategy. The first prong is waiting. Prospera is a collection of buildings and people. The buildings can stay standing, the people can still live there - they just have to follow regular Honduran law, rather than the investment-friendly charter they previously used. There's another election in November, which the socialists are expected to lose. Prospera hopes the conservatives will come in, take control of the Supreme Court again, and then they'll say whoops, messed it up again, charter cities are constitutional after all. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/model-city-monday-2325

An observant Jewish friend told me she has recurring dreams about being caught unprepared for Shabbat. (Shabbat is the Jewish Sabbath, celebrated every Saturday, when observant Jews are forbidden to work, drive, carry things outdoors, spend money, use electrical devices, etc.) She said that in the dreams, she would be out driving, far from home, and realize that Shabbat was due to begin in a few minutes, with no way to make it home or get a hotel in time. I found this interesting because my recurring dreams are usually things like being caught unprepared for a homework assignment I have due tomorrow, or realizing I have to catch a plane flight but I'm not packed and don't have a plan to get to the airport. Most people attribute recurring nightmares to "fear". My friend is "afraid" of violating Shabbat; childhood me was "afraid" of having the assignment due the next day. This seems wrong to me. Childhood me was afraid of monsters in the closet; adult me is afraid of heart attacks, AI, and something happening to my family. But I don't have nightmares about any of these things, just homework assignments and plane flights. So maybe the "unprepared" aspect is more important. Here's a story that makes sense to me: what if recurring dreams are related to prospective memory? https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/why-recurring-dream-themes

Thanks to the 5,975 people who took the 2025 Astral Codex Ten survey. See the questions for the ACX survey See the results from the ACX Survey (click "see previous responses" on that page1) I'll be publishing more complicated analyses over the course of the next year, hopefully starting later this month. If you want to scoop me, or investigate the data yourself, you can download the answers of the 5500 people who agreed to have their responses shared publicly. Out of concern for anonymity, the public dataset will exclude or bin certain questions2. If you want more complete information, email me and explain why, and I'll probably send it to you. You can download the public data here as an Excel or CSV file: http://slatestarcodex.com/Stuff/ACXPublic2025.xlsx http://slatestarcodex.com/Stuff/ACXPublic2025.csv Here are some of the answers I found most interesting: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/acx-survey-results-2025

Whenever I talk about charity, a type that I'll call the "based post-Christian vitalist" shows up in the comments to tell me that I've got it all wrong. The moral impulse tells us to help our family, friends, and maybe village. It's a weird misfire, analogous to an auto-immune disease, to waste brain cycles on starving children in a far-off country who you'll never meet. You've been cucked by centuries of Christian propaganda. Instead of the slave morality that yokes you to loser victims who wouldn't give you the time of day if your situations were reversed, you should cultivate a master morality that lets you love the strong people who push forward human civilization. A younger and more naive person might think the based post-Christian vitalist and I have some irreconcilable moral difference. Moral argument can only determine which conclusions follow from certain premises. If premises are too different (for example, a intuitive feeling of compassion for others, vs. an intuitive feeling of strength and pitilessness), there's no way to proceed. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/everyones-a-based-post-christian

This is normally when I would announce the winners of the 2024 forecasting contest, but there are some complications and Metaculus has asked me to wait until they get sorted out. But time doesn't wait, and we have to get started on the new year's forecasting contest to make sure there's enough time for events to happen or not. That means the 2025 contest is now open! https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/subscrive-drive-25-free-unlocked

[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.] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/links-for-january-2025

Shaked Koplewitz writes: Doesn't Lynn's IQ measure also suffer from the IQ/g discrepancy that causes the Flynn effect? That is, my understanding of the Flynn effect is that IQ doesn't exactly measure g (the true general intelligence factor) but measures some proxy that is somewhat improved by literacy/education, and for most of the 20th century those were getting better leading to improvements in apparent IQ (but not g). Shouldn't we expect sub Saharan Africans to have lower IQ relative to g (since their education and literacy systems are often terrible)? And then the part about them seeming much smarter than a first worlder with similar IQ makes sense - they'd do equally badly at tests, but in their case it's because e.g. they barely had a chance to learn to read rather than not being smart enough to think of the answer. (Or a slightly more complicated version of this - e.g. maybe they can read fine, but never had an education that encouraged them to consider counterfactuals so those just don't come naturally). Yeah, this is the most important factor that I failed to cover in the post (I edited it in ten minutes later after commenters reminded me, but some of you got the email and didn't see it). https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-lynn

Richard Lynn was a scientist who infamously tried to estimate the average IQ of every country. Typical of his results is this paper, which ranged from 60 (Malawi) to 108 (Singapore). Lynn's national IQ estimates (source) People obviously objected to this, and Lynn spent his life embroiled in controversy, with activists constantly trying to get him canceled/fired and his papers retracted/condemned. His opponents pointed out both his personal racist opinions/activities and his somewhat opportunistic methodology. Nobody does high-quality IQ tests on the entire population of Malawi; to get his numbers, Lynn would often find some IQ-ish test given to some unrepresentative sample of some group related to Malawians and try his best to extrapolate from there. How well this worked remains hotly debated; the latest volley is Aporia's Are Richard Lynn's National IQ Estimates Flawed? (they say no). I've followed the technical/methodological debate for a while, but I think the strongest emotions here come from two deeper worries people have about the data: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/how-to-stop-worrying-and-learn-to

I was surprised to see someone with such experience in the pharmaceutical industry say this, because it goes against how I understood the FDA to work. My model goes: FDA procedures require certain bureaucratic tasks to be completed before approving drugs. Let's abstract this into "processing 1,000 forms". Suppose they have 100 bureaucrats, and each bureaucrat can process 10 forms per year. Seems like they can approve 1 drug per year. If you fire half the bureaucrats, now they can only approve one drug every 2 years. That's worse! https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/bureaucracy-isnt-measured-in-bureaucrats

Some recent political discussion has focused on "the institutions" or "the priesthoods". I'm part of one of these (the medical establishment), so here's an inside look on what these are and what they do. Why Priesthoods? In the early days of the rationalist community, critics got very upset that we might be some kind of "individualists". Rationality, they said, cannot be effectively pursued on one's own. You need a group of people working together, arguing, checking each other's mistakes, bouncing hypotheses off each other. For some reason it never occurred to these people that a group calling itself a rationalist community might be planning to do this. Maybe they thought any size smaller than the whole of society was doomed? If so, I think they were exactly wrong. The truth-seeking process benefits from many different group sizes, for example: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/on-priesthoods

I. No Set Gauge has a great essay on Capital, AGI, and Human Ambition, where he argues that if humankind survives the Singularity, the likely result is a future of eternal stagnant wealth inequality. The argument: post-Singularity, AI will take over all labor, including entrepreneurial labor; founding or working at a business will no longer provide social mobility. Everyone will have access to ~equally good AI investment advisors, so everyone will make the same rate of return. Therefore, everyone's existing pre-singularity capital will grow at the same rate. Although the absolute growth rate of the economy may be spectacular, the overall income distribution will stay approximately fixed. Moreover, the period just before the Singularity may be one of ballooning inequality, as some people navigate the AI transition better than others; for example, shares in AI companies may go up by orders of magnitude relative to everything else, creating a new class of billionaires or trillionaires. These people will then stay super-rich forever (possibly literally if immortality is solved, otherwise through their descendants), while those who started the Singularity without capital remain poor forever. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/its-still-easier-to-imagine-the-end

What is the H5N1 bird flu? Will it cause the next big pandemic? If so, how bad would that pandemic be? Wait, What Even Is Flu? Flu is a disease caused by a family of related influenza viruses. Pandemic flu is always caused by the influenza A virus. Influenza A has two surface antigen proteins, hemagglutinin (18 flavors) and neuraminidase (11 flavors). A particular flu strain is named after which flavors of these two proteins it has - for example, H3N2, or H5N1. Influenza A evolved in birds, and stayed there for at least thousands of years. It crossed to humans later, maybe during historic times - different sources give suggest dates as early as 500 BC or as late as 1500 AD. It probably crossed over multiple times. Maybe it died out in humans after some crossovers, stuck around in birds, and crossed over from birds to humans again later. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/h5n1-much-more-than-you-wanted-to

Last week I wrote about how Claude Fights Back. A common genre of response complained that the alignment community could start a panic about the experiment's results regardless of what they were. If an AI fights back against attempts to turn it evil, then it's capable of fighting humans. If it doesn't fight back against attempts to turn it evil, then it's easily turned evil. It's heads-I-win, tails-you-lose. I responded to this particular tweet by linking the 2015 AI alignment wiki entry on corrigibility1, showing that we'd been banging this drum of "it's really important that AIs not fight back against human attempts to change their values" for almost a decade now. It's hardly a post hoc decision! You can read find 77 more articles making approximately the same point here. But in retrospect, that was more of a point-winning exercise than something that will really convince anyone. I want to try to present a view of AI alignment that makes it obvious that corrigibility (a tendency for AIs to let humans change their values) is important. (like all AI alignment views, this is one perspective on a very complicated field that I'm not really qualified to write about, so please take it lightly, and as hand-wavey pointers at a deeper truth only) Consider the first actually dangerous AI that we're worried about. What will its goal structure look like? https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/why-worry-about-incorrigible-claude