x

75% of people globally want unbiased news (Pew Research) but are concerned they're not getting that.

Get balanced coverage with Symby. See how stories are covered across diverse outlets and spot when one side covers a story the other skips.

PODCAST

Astral Codex Ten Podcast

The official audio version of Astral Codex Ten, with an archive of posts from Slate Star Codex. It"s just me reading Scott Alexander"s blog posts.

technology

All Episodes

09:58

P-Zombies Would Report Qualia

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2025/06/14

There’s a long-running philosophical argument about the conceivability of otherwise-normal people who are not conscious, aka “philosophical zombies”. This has spawned a shorter-running (only fifteen years!) rationalist sub-argument on the topic. The last time I checked its status was this post, which says: 1. Both Yudkowsky and Chalmers agree that humans possess “qualia”. 2. Chalmers argues that a superintelligent being which somewhow knew the positions of all particles in a large region of the

en

06:14

Choose Nonbook Review Finalists 2025

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2025/06/14

It's time to narrow the 141 entries in the Non-Book Review Contest to about a dozen finalists. I can't read 141 reviews alone, so I need your help. Please pick as many as you have time for, read them, and rate them using this form. Don’t read them in order! If you read them in order, I’ll have 1,000 votes on the first review, 500 on the second, and so on to none in the second half. Either pick a random review (thanks to Taymon for making a random-review-chooser script here) or scroll through the

en

29:19

Bayes For Everyone

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2025/06/14

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

en

27:45

Sorry, I Still Think MR Is Wrong About USAID

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2025/06/14

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

en

12:28

Moments Of Awakening

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2025/06/05

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

en

11:40

Contra MR On Charity Regrants

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2025/06/05

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

en

12:14

The Evidence That A Million Americans Died Of COVID

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2025/06/05

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

en

06:19

The Other COVID Reckoning

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2025/06/05

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

en

40:03

Book Review: Selfish Reasons To Have More Kids

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2025/06/03

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

en

08:59

In Search Of /r/petfree

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2025/06/03

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

en

16:07

Highlights From The Comments On AI Geoguessr

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2025/06/03

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

en

36:59

Testing AI's GeoGuessr Genius

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2025/05/23

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

en

42:59

Moldbug Sold Out

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2025/05/23

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

en

09:39

The Populist Right Must Own Tariffs

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2025/05/23

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,

en

03:48

AI Futures: Blogging And AMA

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2025/05/23

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

en

25:38

Links For April 2025

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2025/05/22

[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

en

35:16

Highlights From The Comments On POSIWID

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2025/05/22

(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

en

08:30

Come On, Obviously The Purpose Of A System Is Not...

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2025/04/14

(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

en

20:39

My Takeaways From AI 2027

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2025/04/14

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

en

04:11:40

AI 2027 (Full Recording with Footnotes and Text Boxes)

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2025/04/14

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.)

en

1,099 results

Similar Podcasts

Pantomath

PANTOMATH

What"s New

WIRED

Security, Spoken

WIRED

Ben Wehrman Podcast

Ben Wehrman

MacMagazine no Ar

MacMagazine.com.br