Astral Codex Ten Podcast

55:44

Your Book Review: The Tale Of Genji

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2026/10/05

Finalist #8 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] [Content warning: Sexual and relationship practices from a thousand years ago, from a time and place with a very different morality than what you probably

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28:27

Absurd Adventure And Amygdalectomy Advocacy

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2026/10/05

I am Daniel Böttger1. In 2023, my review of On The Marble Cliffs took second in the ACX book review contest, and Scott offered me the right to pitch him more essays. I have worked as a neuroscientist, so in 2024 I pitched a post with my theory of consciousness. Later that year, my connection to neuroscience took an unexpected turn, and I wrote about my experience getting diagnosed with brain cancer. This post is an update on how I'm doing. I'm doing well. Very well, in fact. Suspiciously well. So

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31:50

Nicholas Decker In Hell

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2026/10/05

I. Econblogger Nicholas Decker is not a fan of AI 2040: One of the centerpieces of AI 2040 is the proposal that we pause the development of AI at a high level, use the AI to research alignment, and only then proceed. I am skeptical of this, and not only because it seems impractical to get such cooperation. My first argument is that I do not believe a period of "researching alignment" is meaningful – alignment research is simply capabilities research, patching particular bugs in the system, and

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37:09

Your Book Review: Thomas Urquhart's Translation Of...

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2026/10/05

Finalist #7 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] This is not a review of Rabelais. This is a review of a certain, incomplete translation of Rabelais. It is also arguably one of the greatest translations in our

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27:13

Highlights From The Comments On The Substack Religion...

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2026/10/01

[Original post: Why I'm Staying Out Of The Substack Religion Debate] Ben Smith writes: This post sure reads like participating in the object level debate, not just "writing a post about how I won't participate". I did joke about this at the end, but I also want to defend calling this a post about how I won't participate. This essay presented a kind of hand-wavey heuristic for why I'm not spending lots of time examining the details of every individual argument. This is fine, everyone has to do

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01:01:11

Re: Re: Re: Pritchard On Liberal Happiness

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2026/10/01

In early July, Cassie Pritchard argued on Twitter that liberalism had failed; it bet the farm on economic progress making people happier, but although it delivered impressive economic progress, happiness had failed to follow. In late July, I countered that Pritchard had made a mistake by comparing happiness to income, when the literature instead supports a correlation of happiness with log(income). Add the log term, and most happiness-income relationships reappear, and liberalism goes back to

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53:54

Your Book Review: A Residence Of 21 Years In The...

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2026/09/28

[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] 1. A New Cause Area In October 1819, my grandmother's grandfather's grandfather, Hiram Bingham I, stood with his wife, Sybil, and his friends outside Park Street Church in Boston and bade farewell to

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20:48

Why I'm Staying Out Of The Substack Religion Debate

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2026/09/28

I. Matthew Adelstein (aka Bentham's Bulldog) and Richard Chappell debate the existence of God. So do JP Andrew, Benjamin Tettu, Sangwon Lee, Ethan Muse, other Ethan, and "Atheistic Journals", all within this month! I thought the omnipresence of the early '00s online atheism debate was a time-bound historical phenomenon. But now that the blogosphere has reincarnated as Substack, it's back, nearly as strong as ever. I enjoyed participated in the early 00's version, but the current incarnation

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59:23

Your Book Review: The Escape Artist

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2026/09/28

[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] Holocaust stories, both true and fictional, tend to repeat the same few clichés over and over. There's the innocent child who only partially understands what's happening (Diary of Anne Frank, Boy in

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26:07

The Quest For Caffeine You Can Have At Night

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2026/09/05

Since the beginning of time, mankind has yearned to drink a cup of coffee at 5 PM and go to sleep at 10. But now there's an entire scientific subfield and several companies pandering to this absurd fantasy. Here's a simplified diagram of caffeine metabolism: Caffeine is converted to a different stimulating chemical called paraxanthine by a liver enzyme called CYP1A2, over a half-life of ~5 hours. Then the same enzyme converts paraxanthine into other non-stimulating chemicals that don't matter, over

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21:07

The Foothills Of Bay Area House Party

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2026/09/05

[previously in series: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9] Paul Graham once said that every city sends a message. New York says you should make more money. Berkeley says you should live better. Boston says you should be smarter. People shouldn't decide on a permanent residence until they've lived in several cities and understand their differing psychological effects. San Francisco sends a message too. It speaks it in a cacophony of dissonant voices, some sounding like the hissing of snakes, others

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06:08

MacGregor The Bridge Builder

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2026/09/05

Old Scottish joke: A man at the bar is complaining: "You see that bridge there? I built it with my own hands! But do they call me 'MacGregor The Bridge-Builder'? No! And I raised five beautiful children! But do they call me 'MacGregor The Child-Raiser'? No! But, you fuck one sheep . . ." Has MacGregor been treated unfairly? https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/macgregor-the-bridge-builder

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10:35

Open Questions On Open Weights

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2026/09/05

Last month, some of Silicon Valley's biggest companies signed an open letter supporting open-weights AI. Open weights AI is like open-source software, where the creator makes the raw code publicly available for free download. It's good insofar as it's the only way an AI can truly be the user's property, as opposed to something that companies like OpenAI or Anthropic temporarily let you use subject to their corporate guidelines and increasingly-nanny-state-like restrictions. If AI becomes the

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12:18

The Beauty Of Settled Science

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2026/09/05

Commenters convinced me I made a subtle mis-step in my framing of Psychology Research Is Mostly Fine. My framing emphasized that social priming studies had failed to replicate, but that many other subfields of psychology hadn't. This naturally led commenters to point to failed replications in other subfields. Although none of these were as bad as social priming, few or none were entirely problem-free. Instead of emphasizing the difference between social priming and other subfields, I should have

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23:55

Does Forecasting Have Room At The Top?

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2026/09/05

Superforecasting is the art/science/sport of predicting the future - for example, who will win elections, which countries will fight wars, when key technologies will be discovered. Over the past few years, it went from an obscure academic subfield to a multibillion dollar industry in the form of prediction markets. More recently, AI superforecasters have come close to the accuracy of top humans, and their performance is rising rapidly. In a year or two, we'll see one of the following patterns:

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01:13:22

Your Book Review: The Epic Of Gilgamesh

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2026/08/28

Finalist #4 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] Introduction: He Who Saw the Deep I've been thinking, lately, about the first epic story ever written. If you know anything about the Epic of Gilgamesh, you know

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42:41

Highlights From The Discourse On The Hugging Face...

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2026/08/28

[Original here. Like a Highlights From The Comments post, but including discussion from around the Internet.] Roon is an OpenAI researcher whose popular Twitter presence has catapulted him to the status of extremely-unofficial company representative. He seems spooked: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-discourse-on

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39:46

Links For July 2026 (Part 2)

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2026/08/28

[continued from Part 1 here. 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-2026-part-2

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11:27

Psychology Research Is Mostly Fine

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2026/08/28

People act like the replication crisis has discredited psychology, that the field is now widely agreed to be a sham, that it can be uncontroversially held up as an example of science gone wrong. These statements are often made in the broadest possible terms: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/psychology-research-is-mostly-fine

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12:41

The Hugging Face Incident

Astral Codex Ten Podcast ·

2026/08/28

You've probably heard about this one by now. If not, you can get up to speed with OpenAI's statement, The story: OpenAI was testing an unreleased AI (rumored to be GPT-6)1. During a cybersecurity test called ExploitGym, the AI tried to cheat by hacking an unrelated AI startup called Hugging Face2 which it thought might have the answer key on its servers3. Despite being supposedly unable to access the Internet, the AI hacked its way out of its testing environment, then launched a nation-state level

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