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.
Episodes
A guest post by Lars Doucet
Hi, this is Lars Doucet, author of the book review of Henry George's Progress and Poverty that won the first ACX book review contest, as well as the three-part follow-up guest post series, "Does Georgism Work?" A lot has happened since then, including land value tax (LVT) enablement laws passing this year in two U.S. states and the election of LVT-friendly national leaders in the UK and South Korea. As...
I. At Long Last, We Have Created Neuralese Recurrence, From The Classic Sci-Fi Novel "Don't Create Neuralese Recurrence"
In the public debates after the release of AI 2027, some people accused us of misleading readers by positing "neuralese recurrence", a hypothetical technology that would allow AIs to t...
I. Owain Evans
In 2025, Owain Evans et al published a paper on "emergent misalignment". They trained a previously-aligned AI to do one immoral thing: write insecure code full of vulnerabilities and backdoors. To their surprise, the AI became immoral in general. Its advice to a bored user was to try taking random expired medications and see what happened. Its money-making tips all involved theft and violence. When asked for its favo...
Finalist #9 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]
(An adversarial book review)
I.
"Tuesday, 5 July 2005. Tryin...
This is a guest post by ACX grantee Josh Morrison of 1DaySooner.
AI superforecasters are coming. Within a few years, the average person will have the equivalent of a Nate Silver in their pocket, ready to predict whatever question they can think to ask it.
Scott wrote:
Savvy institutions will cede some of their strategic thinking to AI. Before starting a new project line, smart businesses will ask the superforeca...
I.
In the gods' great scramble for human followers, Nodens would seem to have lost decisively.
We know him only from vague inscriptions at two archaeological sites near the Welsh-English border. One might have been his temple. He seems to have been a Romano-British-Celtic god of . . . hunting? rivers? . . . worshipped around the Severn estuary between 100 and 400 AD. His cult may have been dispersed by Christianity, or could have f...
These are all excerpts from Josiah Royce's 1886 book, A History Of California From Conquest In 1846 To The Second Vigilance Committee In San Francisco: A Study Of American Character, which terminates in 1856. I've edited only to remove dates, mentions of historical sources, and a few sentences about gold mines.
The Story So Far
Mechanistic interpretability is the science of "reading an AI's mind".
Large language models are "grown, not built". Researchers run training data through a neural network. Eventually this creates a working AI; nobody really knows how.
But a neural network is just a set of simulated neurons on a computer. The person with the computer can see the neurons, the connections between them, and which ones activate when th...
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...
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 up...
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 re...
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 Rab...
[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 o...
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 happi...
[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, st...
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...
[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 on...
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 parax...
[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...
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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