Your Book Review: The Tale Of Genji
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
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 subscribe to.] The past is an alien civilisation Around the year 1000, the Imperial Court of Japan...
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Absurd Adventure And Amygdalectomy Advocacy
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
I am . In 2023, my review of 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 . Later that year, my connection to neuroscience took an unexpected turn, and I wrote about . This post is an update on how I’m doing. I’m doing well. Very well, in fact. Suspiciously well. So well that the only other person I’ve ever heard of doing as well as I am was Jo Cameron, who was for her rare genetic mutation that makes her incapable of negative emotion. My case can’t be a...
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Nicholas Decker In Hell
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
I. Econblogger Nicholas Decker : 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 we’re not going to find anything deep without actually being in contact with the systems […] I envision AI...
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Your Book Review: Thomas Urquhart’s Translation Of Rabelais
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
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 language. Let’s meet the hero of our story.
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Highlights From The Comments On The Substack Religion Debate
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
[Original post: ] Ben Smith : 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 this or be overwhelmed, but I think it’s important to keep hand-wavey heuristics for not participating in arguments, vs. actual participation in...
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Re: Re: Re: Pritchard On Liberal Happiness
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
In early July, 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, 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 looking pretty good. Last week, . I don’t have the interest to give this the full treatment it requires, but she deserves some response, so...
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Your Book Review: A Residence Of 21 Years In The Sandwich Islands
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
[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 family before venturing into the unknown. They would spend the next five months on a...
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Why I'm Staying Out Of The Substack Religion Debate
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
I. Matthew Adelstein (aka Bentham’s Bulldog) and Richard Chappell . So do , , , , , and , all within this month! I 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 leaves me cold. I can’t get as interested as I once did in the details of the Fine-Tuning Argument, the Argument From Miracles, et cetera. It’s not just that I’ve already served my time in the theology...
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Your Book Review: The Escape Artist
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
[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 the Striped Pajamas). There’s the sentimental redemption story that focuses on a...
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The Quest For Caffeine You Can Have At Night
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
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 a half-life of about three hours. has graphed the total effective concentration over...
info_outlineOkay, let’s do this! Link is here, should take about twenty minutes. I’ll close the form on Monday 10/21 and post results the following week.
I’ll put an answer key in the comments here, and have a better one including attributions in the results post. DON’T READ THE COMMENTS UNTIL YOU’RE DONE.