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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

09:47

Should Strong Gods Bet On GDP?

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2025/08/15

Slightly contra Fukuyama on liberal communities Francis Fukuyama is on Substack; last month he wrote Liberalism Needs Community. As always, read the whole thing and don’t trust my summary, but the key point is: R. R. Reno, editor of the magazine First Things, the liberal project of the past three generations has sought to weaken the “strong Gods” of populism, nationalism, and religion that were held to be the drivers of the bloody conflicts of the early 20th century. Those gods are now returning,

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02:18:10

Your Review: Joan of Arc

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2025/08/07

Finalist #6 in the Review Contest [This is one of the finalists in the 2025 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] When the prefect of Alexandria’s daughter converted to Christianity, nothing in particular happened - it wasn’t as though the laws outlawing the cult would be enforced

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59:29

Suddenly, Trait-Based Embryo Selection

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2025/08/05

[see footnote 4 for conflicts of interest] In 2021, Genomic Prediction announced the first polygenically selected baby. When a couple uses IVF, they may get as many as ten embryos. If they only want one child, which one do they implant? In the early days, doctors would just eyeball them and choose whichever looked healthiest. Later, they started testing for some of the most severe and easiest-to-detect genetic disorders like Down Syndrome and cystic fibrosis1. The final step was polygenic selection

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10:45

My Heart Of Hearts

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2025/08/03

I promised some people longer responses: Thomas Cotter asks why people think “consistency” is an important moral value. After all, he says, the Nazis and Soviets were “consistent” with their evil beliefs. I’m not so sure of his examples - the Soviets massacred workers striking for better conditions, and the Nazis were so bad at race science that they banned IQ tests after Jews outscored Aryans - but I’m sure if he looked harder he could find some evil person who was superficially consistent

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01:04:22

Your Review: The Astral Codex Ten Commentariat (“Why...

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2025/08/03

Jul 26, 2025 Finalist #5 in the Review Contest [This is one of the finalists in the 2025 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] Introduction The Astral Codex Ten (ACX) Commentariat is defined as the 24,485 individuals other than Scott who have contributed to the corpus of work of Scott’s

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10:09

Apply For An ACX Grant (2025)

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2025/07/30

We’re running another ACX Grants round! If you already know what this is and just want to apply for a grant, use the form here (should take 15 - 30 minutes), deadline August 15. If you already know what this is and want to help as a funder, VC, partner charity, evaluator, or friendly professional, click the link for the relevant form, same deadline. Otherwise see below for more information. What is ACX Grants? ACX Grants is a microgrants program that helps fund ACX readers’ charitable or

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20:49

Press Any Key For Bay Area House Party

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2025/07/23

[previously in series: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6] It is eerily silent in San Francisco tonight. Since Mayor Lurie's crackdown, the usual drug hawkers, catcallers, and street beggars are nowhere to be seen. Still, your luck can’t last forever, and just before you reach your destination a man with bloodshot eyes lurches towards you. You recognize him and sigh. "Go away!" you shout. "Hey man," says Mark Zuckerberg, grabbing your wrist. "You wanna come build superintelligence at Meta? I'll give you five

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37:12

Your Review: Islamic Geometric Patterns In The...

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2025/07/22

[This is one of the finalists in the 2025 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] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-islamic-geometric-patterns

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43:20

Book Review: Arguments About Aborigines

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2025/07/18

I. A thought I had throughout reading L.R. Hiatt’s Arguments About Aborigines was: What are anthropologists even doing? The book recounts two centuries’ worth of scholarly disputes over questions like whether aboriginal tribes had chiefs. But during those centuries, many Aborigines learned English, many Westerners learned Aboriginal languages, and representatives of each side often spent years embedded in one another’s culture. What stopped some Westerner from approaching an Aborigine, asking “So,

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47:55

Your Review: Of Mice, Mechanisms, and Dementia

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2025/07/15

[This is one of the finalists in the 2025 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] “The scientific paper is a ‘fraud’ that creates “a totally misleading narrative of the processes of thought that go into the making of scientific discoveries.” This critique comes not from a conspiracist

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24:07

Practically-A-Book Review: Byrnes on Trance

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2025/07/11

Steven Byrnes is a physicist/AI researcher/amateur neuroscientist; needless to say, he blogs on Less Wrong. I finally got around to reading his 2024 series giving a predictive processing perspective on intuitive self-models. If that sounds boring, it shouldn’t: Byrnes charges head-on into some of the toughest subjects in psychology, including trance, amnesia, and multiple personalities. I found his perspective enlightening (no pun intended; meditation is another one of his topics) and thought I

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15:51

Now I Really Won That AI Bet

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2025/07/11

In June 2022, I bet a commenter $100 that AI would master image compositionality by June 2025. DALL-E2 had just come out, showcasing the potential of AI art. But it couldn’t follow complex instructions; its images only matched the “vibe” of the prompt. For example, here were some of its attempts at “a red sphere on a blue cube, with a yellow pyramid on the right, all on top of a green table”. At the time, I wrote: I’m not going to make the mistake of saying these problems are inherent to AI

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45:44

Your Review: School

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2025/07/11

[This is one of the finalists in the 2025 review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. It was originally given an Honorable Mention, but since last week’s piece was about an exciting new experimental school, I decided to promote this more conservative review as a counterpoint.] “Democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” - Winston Churchill “There exists in such a case a

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01:00:04

Highlights From The Comments On Missing Heritability

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2025/07/07

[Original thread here: Missing Heritability: Much More Than You Wanted To Know] 1: Comments From People Named In The Post 2: Very Long Comments From Other Very Knowledgeable People 3: Small But Important Corrections 4: Other Comments https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-missing-ed5

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31:29

Links For July 2025

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2025/07/07

[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-july-2025

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10:20

Contra Skolnick On Schizophrenia Microbes

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2025/07/07

Stephen Skolnick is a gut microbiome expert blogging at Eat Shit And Prosper. His most recent post argues that contra the psychiatric consensus, schizophrenia isn’t genetic at all - it’s caused by a gut microbe. He argues: Scientists think schizophrenia is genetic because it obviously runs in families But the twin concordance rates are pretty low - if your identical twin has schizophrenia, there’s only about a 30%-40% chance that you get it too. Is that really what we would expect from a genetic

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01:48:28

Your Review: Alpha School

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2025/07/04

[This is one of the finalists in the 2025 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] “Just as we don’t accept students using AI to write their essays, we will not accept districts using AI to supplant the critical role of teachers.” — Arthur Steinberg, American Federation of Teachers‑PA,

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01:01:58

Missing Heritability: Much More Than You Wanted To Know

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2025/07/01

The Story So Far The mid-20th century was the golden age of nurture. Psychoanalysis, behaviorism, and the spirit of the ‘60s convinced most experts that parents, peers, and propaganda were the most important causes of adult personality. Starting in the 1970s, the pendulum swung the other way. Twin studies shocked the world by demonstrating that most behavioral traits - especially socially relevant traits like IQ - were substantially genetic. Typical estimates for adult IQ found it was about 60%

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05:20

Open Questions For Future ACX Grants Rounds

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2025/07/01

Related to: ACX Grants 1-3 Year Updates https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-questions-for-future-acx-grants

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01:14:17

ACX Grants 1-3 Year Updates

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2025/06/29

The first cohort of ACX Grants was announced in late 2021, the second in early 2024. In 2022, I posted one-year updates for the first cohort. Now, as I start thinking about a third round, I’ve collected one-year updates on the second and three-year updates on the first. Many people said my request for updates went to their spam folder; relatedly, many people have not yet sent in their updates. If you’re a grantee who didn’t see my original email, but you do see this post, please fill in the update

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1,142 results

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