Astral Codex Ten Podcast

46:23

Your Book Review: Breakdown In Pakistan

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2026/08/28

[This is one of the finalists in the 2026 book 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] A couple of decades ago in Kabul, a fellow aid worker on his third beer came up with a vivid simile for what American money was doing to the Afghan organizations implementing USAID projects. "It's like

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21:51

Links For July 2026 (Part 1)

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2026/08/18

[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: You Are Quoting Bentham: Shakespeare gets credit for coining the most new commonly-used English words, but second place must go to utilitarian philosopher Jeremy

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13:40

Contra Pritchard On Liberal Happiness

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2026/08/18

Cassie Pritchard, on Twitter: I get why so many liberals are fundamentally disdainful of democracy these days—it's because liberalism is exhausted. It's out of answers. Liberalism won, it delivered the world it promised, and people still aren't content. They're not satisfied. So the people must be wrong. We are unfathomably richer than our ancestors. Output per capita in America today is on the order of 900 times greater than before the invention of agriculture, about ~225 times higher than in 1

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02:26:52

Your Book Review: Great And Desperate Cures

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2026/08/05

Finalist #2 in the Book Review Contest [This is one of the finalists in the 2026 book 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. SURGERY FOR THE SOUL [content warning: this review is about lobotomies, and includes disturbing descriptions and pictures - SA] Surgery for the soul required a

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12:25

Against "Stochastic Terrorism"

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2026/08/04

"Stochastic terrorism" is the idea that if you spread fear and mistrust against a target, then eventually people will commit violence against that target, and it will be your fault, even if you never specifically said the words "you should commit violence". Some other popular examples of the concept: Nativists spread fear and mistrust about Muslim immigrants, and then racists go on shooting sprees in mosques. The #Resistance insists that Donald Trump would destroy democracy, and then various

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23:19

AI Chip Regulation Is Not A Dystopian Surveillance State

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2026/08/04

This was one of the most common objections to Plan A. The plan proposes AI chip regulation to ensure that both China and America know where all the chips are, making their deal to regulate AI together "trustless" (ie neither side can defect even if they want to). Several people argued that this kind of regulation amounted to some kind of "Orwellian dystopia" or "global panopticon". I'm reminded of a story I heard - I can't find it, maybe one of you can - from a DC insider who said it was enraging to

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31:27

Introducing Plan A

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2026/08/04

A Is For America It's increasingly clear that nobody has a plan for if this AI thing turns out to be real. Some people have suggestions, but they're all things like "regulate a little more" or "regulate a little less" or "react to things as they come up". This won't be enough. Not just because things may move too quickly - although they will - but because in order to regulate or react, you need to know what you're aiming for, and it's increasingly clear that people can't even visualize what AI going

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01:44:25

Your Book Review: The Book Of Abraham

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2026/07/26

[This is one of the finalists in the 2026 book 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] Part 1. The Book of Abraham opens with this paragraph: "A Translation of some ancient Records that have fallen into our hands from the catacombs of Egypt. The writings of Abraham while he was in Egypt,

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41:09

The AI Superforecasters Are Here

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2026/07/17

The annual prediction market conference was earlier this month. This was the year prediction markets went from an obscure hobby to a multi-billion dollar industry; from semi-illegal to having the President's son as an advisor. I can't remember if anyone talked about any of that. It didn't even register. All eyes were on the AI superforecasters. I met an AI superforecaster startup founder who told me his AI had turned $35 into $2 million on Kalshi over seven months. I met another who said they were

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21:24

Chip Off The Old Block

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2026/07/17

I. Having kids has given me new appreciation for old poetry. The first time I read Song of Hiawatha, I skimmed over the part in Book 3 where Hiawatha first meets his father Mudjekeewis: Filled with joy was Mudjekeewis When he looked on Hiawatha, Saw his youth rise up before him In the face of Hiawatha, Saw the beauty of Wenonah From the grave rise up before him. "Welcome!" said he, "Hiawatha, To the kingdom of the West-Wind! Long have I been waiting for you! Youth is lovely, age is lonely, Youth is

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10:25

The Metaculus Threat To Democracy Index

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2026/07/10

In recent posts on Trump and dictatorship, people have asked me - how do you know you're not suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome? I take this seriously; we've all lost loved ones to this condition. The best check on my reasoning would be an objective measure of the health of American democracy. There are several "democracy indices" that purport to do this, but they have a mixed reputation. My impression is that most current accusations of bias are relatively weak - I agree with Claude's

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24:53

Should People Avoid Whole-Body Screening Info?

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2026/07/10

The most controversial part of last week's article on the Midjourney ultrasound scanner was medical experts' recommendation against whole-body screening (including existing whole-body screening technology using MRI). Isn't this crazy? Whole-body screening can save lives by detecting serious diseases like cancer. The experts counterargue that it finds so many false positives - minor zit-like imperfections that would never have caused problems, but which cost patients time, money, anxiety, and side

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23:33

Preliminary Thoughts On The Midjourney Scanner

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2026/07/10

like that, except from a medium-sized startup instead of a tech giant. Earlier today, they announced a pivot to medical scanners. The new MidJourney Scanner, which they describe as "a bold new kind of machine to reimagine the foundations of healthcare and our relationships to our bodies", will be a tank of water surrounded by a ring of ultrasound scanners. The patient goes into the tank, the scanners emit ultrasound from all angles, and then some fancy AI reconstructs the echoes into a 3D picture

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01:11:02

Waiting For The Miracle

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2026/07/10

In 1917, three children in Fatima, Portugal claimed to have seen the Virgin Mary. They promised she would perform a miracle on a certain day in October. Nearly 100,000 pilgrims arrived, hoping to see whatever happened, and nearly all report that the sun turned pale, changed color, and spun around. Many other writers have investigated the children and their visions, but I was fixated on this sun miracle. Despite popular discussion of "mass hallucinations", this is AFAICT the only example of tens

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37:51

Never Cross a River Four Feet Deep on Average

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2026/06/30

Guest post by Alexander "Sasha" Putilin [This is a guest post by 2024 ACX grantee Sasha Putilin. I encourage any ACX grantees who are interested to write about their projects. - SA] The results of my ACX Grants 2024 project are in. The project attempted to replicate the 2023 study "Learning at your brain's rhythm: individualized entrainment boosts learning for perceptual decisions". It claimed that if you read a person's brain waves, figured out an individual peak alpha frequency, and flashed a

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37:14

My AI Opinions

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2026/06/30

I recently had a minor spat over someone misinterpreting my AI beliefs (see section marked "Update" at the bottom here), so I thought I would list them in one place, so I can refer people when they ask. Timelines1 Define AGI as AI intelligent enough to do 90% of knowledge work jobs. I think there's a 25% chance of AGI by 20272, a 50% chance by 2034, and a 75% chance by 2045. Basic argument: In a certain sense, AI is already "smart" enough for this (eg it can answer quantum physics problems,

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46:49

Book Review: The Dialectical Imagination

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2026/06/19

The philosophers of the Frankfurt School practiced a technique called negative dialectics, where concepts are defined as much by what you can't say about them as what you can. Appropriately, the Frankfurt School has ended up defined by what you can't say about them. You can't say that they invented a new form of left-wing thought called Cultural Marxism. This would be (according to Wikipedia) the Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory, a "far right anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that misinterprets

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21:42

Use AI This Election

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2026/06/19

I'm not saying AI is superintelligent or can decide better than you can. I'm saying that if you - like me - spend an hour or so doing research before voting on local seats, AI can aid that research very effectively. And if you don't do that research - because you weren't willing to waste an hour on it before - AI makes it so much faster that you might want to start. I gave Claude a prompt something like (edited for coherence): I'll be voting in the June 2026 California primary. I'm a centrist

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05:48

New Paradigms Won't Save You

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2026/06/19

One popular objection to AI concerns is to declare that LLMs can never be AGI. You need a "new paradigm". Therefore, AGI is so far in the future that it's not worth worrying about. A common counterargument is to claim that no, LLMs can become AGI. But even without that counterargument, I think the "therefore" fails on its own terms. The key question is: how much of a new paradigm do we need? The landmark discoveries on the road to modern LLMs are something like: 1950s: Neural networks 1967:

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47:36

The Types Of Candidate You Find In The California...

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2026/06/13

Sorry, I give up. In past elections, I've covered every single candidate for governor of California, from the incumbents all the way down to the cranks. In 2022 there were twenty-six of them, and I covered them all. But sorry, I give up. This year there are sixty. It's too many. I can't disambiguate them all into unique individuals with their own personalities, hopes, and dreams. So as consolation for the list I'm not giving you, here are the basic types, and a few examples of each. The Top-Tier

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