Astral Codex Ten Podcast

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...

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, hamm...

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, psych...

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 eviden...

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...

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, puttin...

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 c...

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 t...

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 limi...

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 som...

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 t...

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 wa...

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 pl...