Highlights From The Comments On Scott Adams
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
[original post: ] Table of Contents: 1: Should I Have Written This At All? 2: Was I Unfair To Adams? 3: Comments On The Substance Of The Piece 4: The Part On Race And Cancellation (INCLUDED UNDER PROTEST) 5: Other Comments 6: Summary/Updates
info_outline
The Dilbert Afterlife
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
Thanks to everyone who sent in condolences on my recent death from prostate cancer at age 68, but that was Scott Adams. I (Scott Alexander) am still alive. Still, the condolences are appreciated. Scott Adams was a surprisingly big part of my life. I may be the only person to have read every Dilbert book before graduating elementary school. For some reason, 10-year-old-Scott found Adams’ stories of time-wasting meetings and pointy-haired bosses hilarious. No doubt some of the attraction came from a more-than-passing resemblance between Dilbert’s nameless corporation and the California...
info_outline
Mantic Monday: The Monkey's Paw Curls
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
The Monkey’s Paw Curls Isn’t “may you get exactly what you asked for” one of those ancient Chinese curses? Since we last spoke, prediction markets have gone to the moon, rising from millions to billions in monthly volume. For a few weeks in October, Polymarket founder Shayne Coplan was the world’s youngest self-made billionaire (now it’s some AI people). Kalshi is . The catch is, of course, that it’s mostly degenerate gambling, especially sports betting. Kalshi is . Polymarket does better - only 37% - but some of the remainder is things like - currently dominated by the “140 -...
info_outline
SOTA On Bay Area House Party
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
[previously in series: , , , , , , , ] Every city parties for its own reasons. New Yorkers party to flaunt their wealth. Angelenos party to flaunt their beauty. Washingtonians party to network. Here in SF, they party because Claude 4.5 Opus has saturated , and the newest AI agency benchmark is PartyBench, where an AI is asked to throw a house party and graded on its performance. You weren’t invited to Claude 4.5 Opus’ party. Claude 4.5 Opus invited all of the coolest people in town while gracefully avoiding the failure mode of including someone like you. You weren’t invited to Sonnet...
info_outline
The Permanent Emergency
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
One morning around 6, the police banged on our door. “OPEN UP!” they shouted, the way police shout when they definitely have an alternative in mind for if you won’t. I was awake at the time, because the kids were up early and I was on shift. I opened the door. The cops seemed mollified by the fact that I was carrying twin toddlers and looked too frazzled to commit any difficult crimes. They said they’d gotten a 9-1-1 call from my house with plenty of screaming. Had there been any murders in the past hour or so?
info_outline
Highlights From The Comments On Boomers
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
[original post: ] Before getting started: First, I wish I’d been more careful to differentiate the following claims: Boomers had it much easier than later generations. The political system unfairly prioritizes Boomers over other generations. Boomers are uniquely bad on some axis like narcissism, selfishness, short-termism, or willingness to defect on the social contract. Anti-Boomerism conflates all three of these positions, and in arguing against it, I tried to argue against all three of these positions - I think with varying degrees of success. But these are separate claims that could...
info_outline
You Have Only X Years To Escape Permanent Moon Ownership
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
If you’re not familiar with “X years to escape the permanent underclass”, see , or the , , and articles that inspired it. The “permanent underclass” meme isn’t being spread by poor people - who are already part of the underclass, and generally not worrying too much about its permanence. It’s preying on neurotic well-off people in Silicon Valley, who fret about how they’re just bourgeois well-off rather than future oligarch well-off, and that only the true oligarchs will have a good time after the Singularity. Between the vast ocean of total annihilation and the vast continent...
info_outline
Highlights From The Comments On Vibecession
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
[Original post: ] Table of Contents 1: When was the vibecession? 2: Is the vibecession just sublimating cultural complaints? 3: Discourse downstream of the Mike Green $140K poverty line post 4: What about other countries? 5: Comments on rent/housing 6: Comments on inflation 7: Comments on vibes 8: Other good comments 9: The parable of Calvin’s grandparents 10: Updates / conclusions
info_outline
ACX/Metaculus Prediction Contest 2026
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
is live on Metaculus. They write: This year’s contest draws directly from that community, with all questions suggested by ACX readers. Both experienced forecasters and newcomers are invited to participate, making predictions across U.S. politics, AI, international affairs, and culture. To participate, submit your predictions by January 17th at 11:59 PM PT. At that time, we will take a snapshot of all standing forecasts, which will determine the contest rankings and the allocation of the $10,000 prize pool. While you are encouraged to continue updating your predictions throughout the...
info_outline
Against Against Boomers
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
Hating Boomers is the new cool thing. Amazon offerings include , the two apparently unrelated books and , and . “You don’t hate Boomers enough” Richard Hanania, who has tried hating every group once, has decided that hating Boomers . Some people might say we just experienced a historic upwelling of identity politics, that it was pretty terrible for everyone involved, and that perhaps we need a new us-vs-them conflict like we need a punch to the face. This, the Boomer-haters will tell you, would be a mistaken generalization. This time, we have finally discovered a form of identity...
info_outlineFreddie deBoer has a post on what he calls “the temporal Copernican principle.” He argues we shouldn’t expect a singularity, apocalypse, or any other crazy event in our lifetimes. Discussing celebrity transhumanist Yuval Harari, he writes:
What I want to say to people like Yuval Harari is this. The modern human species is about 250,000 years old, give or take 50,000 years depending on who you ask. Let’s hope that it keeps going for awhile - we’ll be conservative and say 50,000 more years of human life. So let’s just throw out 300,000 years as the span of human existence, even though it could easily be 500,000 or a million or more. Harari's lifespan, if he's lucky, will probably top out at about 100 years. So: what are the odds that Harari’s lifespan overlaps with the most important period in human history, as he believes, given those numbers? That it overlaps with a particularly important period of human history at all? Even if we take the conservative estimate for the length of human existence of 300,000 years, that means Harari’s likely lifespan is only about .33% of the entirety of human existence. Isn’t assuming that this .33% is somehow particularly special a very bad assumption, just from the basis of probability? And shouldn’t we be even more skeptical given that our basic psychology gives us every reason to overestimate the importance of our own time?
(I think there might be a math error here - 100 years out of 300,000 is 0.033%, not 0.33% - but this isn’t my main objection.)
He then condemns a wide range of people, including me, for failing to understand this:
Some people who routinely violate the Temporal Copernican Principle include Harari, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Sam Altman, Francis Fukuyama, Elon Musk, Clay Shirky, Tyler Cowen, Matt Yglesias, Tom Friedman, Scott Alexander, every tech company CEO, Ray Kurzweil, Robin Hanson, and many many more. I think they should ask themselves how much of their understanding of the future ultimately stems from a deep-seated need to believe that their times are important because they think they themselves are important, or want to be.
I deny misunderstanding this. Freddie is wrong.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/contra-deboer-on-temporal-copernicanism