Your Review: Ollantay
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
Finalist #9 in the Review Contest [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] Ollantay is a three-act play written in Quechua, an indigenous language of the South American Andes. It was first performed in Peru around 1775. Since the mid-1800s it’s been performed more often, and nowadays it’s pretty easy to find some company in Peru...
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My Responses To Three Concerns From The Embryo Selection Post
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
[original post ] #1: Isn’t it possible that embryos are alive, or have personhood, or are moral patients? Most IVF involves getting many embryos, then throwing out the ones that the couple doesn’t need to implant. If destroying embryos were wrong, then IVF would be unethical - and embryo selection, which might encourage more people to do IVF, or to maximize the number of embryos they get from IVF, would be extra unethical. I think a default position would be that if you believe humans are more valuable than cows, and cows more valuable than bugs - presumably because humans are more...
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Your Review: Dating Men In The Bay Area
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
Finalist #8 in the Review Contest [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] I. The Men Are Not Alright Sometimes I’m convinced there’s a note taped to my back that says, “PLEASE SPILL YOUR SOUL UPON THIS WOMAN.” I am not a therapist, nor in any way certified to deal with emotional distress, yet my presence seems to cause people...
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In Defense Of The Amyloid Hypothesis
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
A guest post by David Schneider-Joseph The “amyloid hypothesis” says that Alzheimer’s is caused by accumulation of the peptide amyloid-β. It’s the leading model in academia, but a favorite target for science journalists, contrarian bloggers, and neuroscience public intellectuals, who point out problems like: Some of the research establishing amyloid's role turned out to be fraudulent. The level of amyloid in the brain doesn’t correlate very well with the level of cognitive impairment across Alzheimer’s patients. Several strains of mice that were genetically programmed to have...
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Highlights From The Comments On Liberalism And Communities
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
[Original post: ] 1: Comments About The Theory 2: Comments About Specific Communities 3: Other Comments Comments About The Theory Darwin : I think you may (*may*, I'm not sure) be vastly underestimating how many people are in some form of nontraditional tight-knit community. Notice that many of the communities you list are things you've directly personally encountered through your online interests or social circle. Most people have never heard of libertarian homesteaders or rationalist dating sites, perhaps you have also never heard of the things most other people belong to. For my part, I...
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Your Review: My Father’s Instant Mashed Potatoes
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] My dad only actually enjoys about ten foods, nine of them beige. His bread? White. His pizza? Cheese. His meat? Turkey breast. And his side dish? Mashed potatoes. As a child I hated mashed potatoes, despite his evangelization of them. I too was a picky eater growing up, but I would occasionally...
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Should Strong Gods Bet On GDP?
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
Slightly contra Fukuyama on liberal communities Francis Fukuyama is on Substack; last month he wrote . As always, read the whole thing and don’t trust my summary, but the key point is: R. R. Reno, editor of the magazine First Things, the liberal project of the past three generations has sought to weaken the “” of populism, nationalism, and religion that were held to be the drivers of the bloody conflicts of the early 20th century. Those gods are now returning, and are present in the politics of both the progressive left and far right—particularly the right, which is characterized...
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Your Review: Joan of Arc
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
Finalist #6 in the Review Contest [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] When the prefect of Alexandria’s daughter converted to Christianity, nothing in particular happened - it wasn’t as though the laws outlawing the cult would be enforced against her. She was smart, she was pretty (beautiful, even) and she had connections. So...
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Suddenly, Trait-Based Embryo Selection
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
[see footnote 4 for conflicts of interest] In 2021, announced . When a couple uses IVF, they may get as many as ten embryos. If they only want one child, which one do they implant? In the early days, doctors would just eyeball them and choose whichever looked healthiest. Later, they started testing for some of the most severe and easiest-to-detect genetic disorders like Down Syndrome and cystic fibrosis. The final step was polygenic selection - genotyping each embryo and implanting the one with the best genes overall. Best in what sense? Genomic Prediction claimed the ability to forecast...
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My Heart Of Hearts
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
I promised some people longer responses: why people think “consistency” is an important moral value. After all, he says, the Nazis and Soviets were “consistent” with their evil beliefs. I’m not so sure of his examples - the Soviets massacred workers striking for better conditions, and the Nazis were so bad at race science that they banned IQ tests after Jews outscored Aryans - but I’m sure if he looked harder he could find some evil person who was superficially consistent with themselves. is suspicious that lots of people oppose the massacres in Gaza without having objected...
info_outlineThis is a reported phenomenon 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 system card:
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 here), but they deserve to be fleshed out and spread more fully.