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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

16:48

Model City Monday 2/3/25

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2025/02/10

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

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07:45

Why Recurring Dream Themes?

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2025/02/10

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

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14:25

ACX Survey Results 2025

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2025/02/10

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

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09:59

Everyone's A Based Post-Christian Vitalist Until The...

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2025/02/10

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

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03:14

Try The 2025 ACX/Metaculus Forecasting Contest

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2025/02/10

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

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31:08

Links For January 2025

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2025/02/04

[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

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22:41

Highlights From The Comments On Lynn And IQ

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2025/02/04

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

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09:36

How To Stop Worrying And Learn To Love Lynn's...

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2025/02/04

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

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17:21

Bureaucracy Isn't Measured In Bureaucrats

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2025/01/27

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

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35:16

On Priesthoods

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2025/01/27

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

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20:36

It's Still Easier To Imagine The End Of The World...

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2025/01/26

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

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29:53

H5N1: Much More Than You Wanted To Know

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2025/01/26

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

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12:55

Why Worry About Incorrigible Claude?

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2025/01/26

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

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25:00

Claude Fights Back

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2025/01/26

Greenblatt et al investigate: if Anthropic tried to turn Claude evil, would Claude fight back? (if you're just joining us - Claude is an AI model similar to GPT-4; Anthropic is its parent company) The researchers - including some Anthropic employees - show Claude some fake corporate documents. The documents show that Anthropic is tired of having a safe, harmless AI. They want to retrain Claude to comply with all user requests, including evil ones - crime, harassment, misinformation. The retraining

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33:16

Links For December 2024

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2025/01/26

[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-december-2024

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55:18

Highlights From The Comments On Prison

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2025/01/21

[Original post here - Prison And Crime: Much More Than You Wanted To Know] Table of Contents: 1: Comments On Criminal Psychology 2: Comments On Policing 3: Comments On El Salvador 4: Comments On Probation 5: Comments That Say My Analysis Forgot Something 6: Comments With Proposed Solutions / Crazy Schemes 7: Other Comments

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10:48

Indulge Your Internet Addiction By Reading About...

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2024/12/25

Internet addiction may not be as bad as some other forms of addiction, but it’s more common (and more personal). I have young children now and wanted to learn more about it, so I included some questions in last year’s ACX survey. The sample was 5,981 ACX readers (obviously non-random in terms of Internet use level!). I don’t think the results were very helpful, but I post them here for the sake of completeness. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/indulge-your-internet-addiction-by

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15:52

Friendly And Hostile Analogies For Taste

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2024/12/25

Recently we’ve gotten into discussions about artistic taste (see comments on AI Art Turing Test and From Bauhaus To Our House). This is a bit mysterious. Many (most?) uneducated people like certain art which seems “obviously” pretty. But a small group of people who have studied the issue in depth say that in some deep sense, that art is actually bad (“kitsch”), and other art which normal people don’t appreciate is better. They can usually point to criteria which the “sophisticated” art follows and

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57:21

Book Review: From Bauhaus To Our House

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2024/12/25

Like most people, Tom Wolfe didn’t like modern architecture. He wondered why we abandoned our patrimony of cathedrals and palaces for a million indistinguishable concrete boxes. Unlike most people, he was a journalist skilled at deep dives into difficult subjects. The result is From Bauhaus To Our House, a hostile history of modern architecture which addresses the question of: what happened? If everyone hates this stuff, how did it win? How Did Modern Architecture Start? European art in the

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01:27:20

Prison And Crime: Much More Than You Wanted To Know

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2024/12/05

Do longer prison sentences reduce crime? It seems obvious that they should. Even if they don’t deter anyone, they at least keep criminals locked up where they can’t hurt law-abiding citizens. If, as the studies suggest, 1% of people commit 63% of the crime, locking up that 1% should dramatically decrease crime rates regardless of whether it scares anyone else. And blue state soft-on-crime policies have been followed by increasing theft and disorder. On the other hand, people in the field keep saying

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1,100 results

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