Your Review: Alpha School
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
[This is one of the finalists in the 2025 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] “Just as we don’t accept students using AI to write their essays, we will not accept districts using AI to supplant the critical role of teachers.” — Arthur Steinberg, American Federation of Teachers‑PA, reacting to Alpha’s cyber‑charter bid, January 2025 In January 2025, the...
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Missing Heritability: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
The Story So Far The mid-20th century was the golden age of nurture. Psychoanalysis, behaviorism, and the spirit of the ‘60s convinced most experts that parents, peers, and propaganda were the most important causes of adult personality. Starting in the 1970s, the pendulum swung the other way. Twin studies shocked the world by demonstrating that most behavioral traits - especially socially relevant traits like IQ - were substantially genetic. Typical estimates for adult IQ found it was about 60% genetic, 40% unpredictable, and barely related at all to parenting or family environment. By the...
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Open Questions For Future ACX Grants Rounds
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
Related to:
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ACX Grants 1-3 Year Updates
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
The first cohort of ACX Grants was announced in , the second in . In 2022, I posted for the first cohort. Now, as I start thinking about a third round, I’ve collected one-year updates on the second and three-year updates on the first. Many people said my request for updates went to their spam folder; relatedly, many people have not yet sent in their updates. If you’re a grantee who didn’t see my original email, but you do see this post, please fill in the update form . All quote blocks are the grantees’ own words; text outside of quote blocks is my commentary.
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The Claude Bliss Attractor
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
This is where if two copies of Claude talk to each other, they end up spiraling into rapturous discussion of spiritual bliss, Buddhism, and the nature of consciousness. From the : Anthropic swears they didn’t do this on purpose; when they ask Claude why this keeps happening, Claude can’t explain. Needless to say, this has made lots of people freak out / speculate wildly. I think there are already a few good partial explanations of this (especially Nostalgebraist ), but they deserve to be fleshed out and spread more fully.
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"But" vs. "Yes, But"
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
This is another heuristic from the same place as . If someone proves you are absolutely, 100% wrong about something, it’s polite to say “Oh, I guess I was wrong, sorry” before launching into your next argument. That is, instead of:
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If It's Worth Your Time To Lie, It's Worth My Time To Correct It
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
People don’t like nitpickers. “He literally did the WELL AKTUALLY!” If you say Joe Criminal committed ten murders and five rapes, and I object that it was actually only six murders and two rapes, then why am I “defending” Joe Criminal? Because if it’s worth your time to lie, it’s worth my time to correct it.
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P-Zombies Would Report Qualia
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
There’s a long-running philosophical argument about the conceivability of otherwise-normal people who are not conscious, aka . This has spawned a shorter-running (only fifteen years!) rationalist sub-argument on the topic. The last time I checked its status was , which says: 1. Both Yudkowsky and Chalmers agree that humans possess “qualia”. 2. Chalmers argues that a superintelligent being which somewhow knew the positions of all particles in a large region of the Universe would need to be told as an additional fact that any humans (or other minds possessing qualia) in this region of...
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Choose Nonbook Review Finalists 2025
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
It's time to narrow the 141 entries in the to about a dozen finalists. I can't read 141 reviews alone, so I need your help. Please pick as many as you have time for, read them, and rate them . Don’t read them in order! If you read them in order, I’ll have 1,000 votes on the first review, 500 on the second, and so on to none in the second half. Either pick a random review (thanks to Taymon for making a random-review-chooser script ) or scroll through the titles until you find one that catches your interest - you can see individual entries here (thanks to a reader for collating them): ...
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Bayes For Everyone
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
A guest post by Brandon Hendrickson [Editor’s note: I accept guest posts from certain people, especially past Book Review Contest winners. Brandon Hendrickson, whose won the 2023 contest, has taken me up on this and submitted this essay. He writes at and will be at this weekend, where he and Jack Despain Zhou aka TracingWoodgrains will be doing a live conversation about education.] I began my of a couple years back with a rather simple question: Could a new kind of school make the world rational? What followed, however, was a sprawling distillation of one scholar’s answer that I...
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