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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

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.)

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08:10

Introducing AI 2027

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2025/04/14

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

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23:04

The Colors Of Her Coat

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2025/04/14

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

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34:39

"Deros And The Ur-Abduction" In Asterisk

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2025/04/03

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

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21:22

More Drowning Children

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2025/03/28

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

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12:03

Misophonia: Beyond Sensory Sensitivity

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2025/03/28

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

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25:13

OpenAI Nonprofit Buyout: Much More Than You Wanted To...

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2025/03/21

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

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10:06

The Ozempocalypse Is Nigh

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2025/03/21

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

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09:31

What Happened To NAEP Scores?

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2025/03/21

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

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09:18

Why Should Intelligence Be Related To Neuron Count?

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2025/03/11

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

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03:41

Everything-Except-Book Review Contest 2025

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2025/03/11

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 -

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42:12

Links For February 2025

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2025/03/11

[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

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26:28

Why I Am Not A Conflict Theorist

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2025/03/06

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

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36:11

Highlights From The Comments On Tegmark's...

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2025/03/06

[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

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08:05

Lives Of The Rationalist Saints

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2025/03/06

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

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08:20

Tegmark's Mathematical Universe Defeats Most Proofs...

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2025/03/06

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

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18:34

Only About 40% Of The Cruz "Woke Science" Database Is...

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2025/02/17

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

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17:40

Deliberative Alignment, And The Spec

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2025/02/17

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

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11:42

1DaySooner's Trump II Health Policy Proposals

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2025/02/17

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

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11:47

Money Saved By Canceling Programs Does Not...

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2025/02/10

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

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1,100 results

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