Apply For An ACX Grant (2025)
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
We’re running another ACX Grants round! If you already know what this is and just want to apply for a grant, use (should take 15 - 30 minutes), deadline August 15. If you already know what this is and want to help as a , , , , or , click the link for the relevant form, same deadline. Otherwise see below for more information. What is ACX Grants? ACX Grants is a microgrants program that helps fund ACX readers’ charitable or scientific projects. Click the links to see the and cohorts. The program is conducted in partnership with , a charity spinoff of Manifold Markets, who handle the...
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Press Any Key For Bay Area House Party
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
[previously in series: , , , , , ] It is eerily silent in San Francisco tonight. Since Mayor Lurie's crackdown, the usual drug hawkers, catcallers, and street beggars are nowhere to be seen. Still, your luck can’t last forever, and just before you reach your destination a man with bloodshot eyes lurches towards you. You recognize him and sigh. "Go away!" you shout. "Hey man," says Mark Zuckerberg, grabbing your wrist. "You wanna come build superintelligence at Meta? I'll give you five million, all cash." "I said go away!" "Ten million plus a Lambo," he counters. "I don't even know anything...
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Your Review: Islamic Geometric Patterns In The Metropolitan Museum Of Art
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]
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Book Review: Arguments About Aborigines
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
I. A thought I had throughout reading L.R. Hiatt’s was: What are anthropologists even doing? The book recounts two centuries’ worth of scholarly disputes over questions like whether aboriginal tribes had chiefs. But during those centuries, many Aborigines learned English, many Westerners learned Aboriginal languages, and representatives of each side often spent years embedded in one another’s culture. What stopped some Westerner from approaching an Aborigine, asking “So, do you have chiefs?” and resolving a hundred years of bitter academic debate? Of course the answer must be...
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Your Review: Of Mice, Mechanisms, and Dementia
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] “The scientific paper is a ‘’ that creates “a totally misleading narrative of the processes of thought that go into the making of scientific discoveries.” This critique comes not from a conspiracist on the margins of science, but from Nobel laureate Sir Peter Medawar. A brilliant...
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Practically-A-Book Review: Byrnes on Trance
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
Steven Byrnes is a physicist/AI researcher/amateur neuroscientist; needless to say, he blogs on Less Wrong. I finally got around to reading . If that sounds boring, it shouldn’t: Byrnes charges head-on into some of the toughest subjects in psychology, including trance, amnesia, and multiple personalities. I found his perspective enlightening (no pun intended; meditation is another one of his topics) and thought I would share. It all centers around this picture: But first: some excruciatingly obvious philosophical preliminaries.
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Now I Really Won That AI Bet
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
In June 2022, I bet a commenter $100 that AI would master image compositionality by June 2025. DALL-E2 had just come out, showcasing the potential of AI art. But it couldn’t follow complex instructions; its images only matched the “vibe” of the prompt. For example, here were some of its attempts at “a red sphere on a blue cube, with a yellow pyramid on the right, all on top of a green table”. At the time, I wrote: I’m not going to make the mistake of saying these problems are inherent to AI art. My guess is a slightly better language model would solve most of them…for...
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Your Review: 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. It was originally given an Honorable Mention, but since was about an exciting new experimental school, I decided to promote this more conservative review as a counterpoint.] “Democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” - Winston Churchill “There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The...
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Highlights From The Comments On Missing Heritability
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
[Original thread here: ] 1: Comments From People Named In The Post 2: Very Long Comments From Other Very Knowledgeable People 3: Small But Important Corrections 4: Other Comments
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Links For July 2025
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
[I haven’t independently verified each link. On average, commenters will end up spotting evidence that around two or three of the links in each links post are wrong or misleading. I correct these as I see them, and will highlight important corrections later, but I can’t guarantee I will have caught them all by the time you read this.]
info_outlineSome of the more unhinged writing on superintelligence pictures AI doing things that seem like magic. Crossing air gaps to escape its data center. Building nanomachines from simple components. Plowing through physical bottlenecks to revolutionize the economy in months.
More sober thinkers point out that these things might be physically impossible. You can’t do physically impossible things, even if you’re very smart.
No, say the speculators, you don’t understand. Everything is physically impossible when you’re 800 IQ points too dumb to figure it out. A chimp might feel secure that humans couldn’t reach him if he climbed a tree; he could never predict arrows, ladders, chainsaws, or helicopters. What superintelligent strategies lie as far outside our solution set as “use a helicopter” is outside a chimp’s?
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/testing-ais-geoguessr-genius