Book Review: If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
I. Eliezer Yudkowsky’s is the original AI safety org. But the original isn’t always the best - how is Mesopotamia doing these days? As money, brainpower, and prestige pour into the field, MIRI remains what it always was - a group of loosely-organized weird people, one of whom cannot be convinced to stop wearing a in public. So when I was doing AI grantmaking last year, I asked them - why should I fund you instead of the guys with the army of bright-eyed Harvard grads, or the guys who just got Geoffrey Hinton as their celebrity spokesperson? What do you have that they don’t? MIRI...
info_outline
Links For September 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_outline
Your Review: Participation in Phase I Clinical Pharmaceutical Research
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] If you’ve been following this blog for long, you probably know at least a bit about pharmaceutical research. You might know a bit about the sort of to influence doctors’ prescribing habits, or how it takes on average to bring a new medication to market, or something about the which...
info_outline
What Is Man, That Thou Art Mindful Of Him?
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
"You made him lower than the angels for a short time..." God: …and the math results we’re seeing are nothing short of incredible. This Terry Tao guy - Iblis: Let me stop you right there. I agree humans can, in controlled situations, provide correct answers to math problems. I deny that they truly understand math. I had a conversation with one of the humans recently, which I’ll bring up here for the viewers … give me one moment …
info_outline
Open Letter To The NIH
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
You can sign the letter . The Trump administration has been , and people and groups with business before the administration have started laundering criticism through other sources with less need for goodwill. So I have been asked to share , which needs signatures from scientists, doctors, and healthcare professionals. The authors tell me (THIS IS NOT THE CONTENTS OF THE LETTER, IT’S THEIR EXPLANATION, TO ME, OF WHAT THE LETTER IS FOR): The NIH has spent at least than Congress has appropriated to them, which is bad because medical research is good and we want more of it. In May, that he...
info_outline
In Search Of AI Psychosis
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
AI psychosis (, ) is an apparent phenomenon where people go crazy after talking to chatbots too much. There are some high-profile anecdotes, but still many unanswered questions. For example, how common is it really? Are the chatbots really driving people crazy, or just catching the attention of people who were crazy already? Isn’t psychosis supposed to be a biological disease? Wouldn’t that make chatbot-induced psychosis the same kind of category error as chatbot-induced diabetes? I don’t have all the answers, so think of this post as an exploration of possible analogies and precedents...
info_outline
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...
info_outline
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...
info_outline
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...
info_outline
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...
info_outlineSlightly contra Fukuyama on liberal communities
Francis Fukuyama is on Substack; last month he wrote Liberalism Needs Community. 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 “strong Gods” 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 today by demands for strong national identities or religious foundations for national communities.
However, there is a cogent liberal response to the charge that liberalism undermines community. The problem is that, just as in the 1930s, that response has not been adequately articulated by the defenders of liberalism. Liberalism is not intrinsically opposed to community; indeed, there is a version of liberalism that encourages the flourishing of strong community and human virtue. That community emerges through the development of a strong and well-organized civil society, where individuals freely choose to bond with other like-minded individuals to seek common ends. People are free to follow “strong Gods”; the only caveat is that there is no single strong god that binds the entire society together.
In other words - yes, part of the good life is participation in a tight-knit community with strong values. Liberalism’s shared values are comparatively weak, and its knitting comparatively loose. But that’s no argument against the liberal project. Its goal isn’t to become this kind of community itself, but to be the platform where communities like this can grow up. So in a liberal democracy, Christians can have their church, Jews their synagogue, Communists their commune, and so on. Everyone gets the tight-knit community they want - which beats illiberalism, where (at most) one group gets the community they want and everyone else gets persecuted.
On a theoretical level, this is a great answer. On a practical level - is it really working? Are we really a nation dotted with tight-knit communities of strong values? The average person has a church they don’t attend and a political philosophy that mainly cashes out in Twitter dunks. Otherwise they just consume whatever slop the current year’s version of capitalism chooses to throw at them.
It’s worth surveying the exceptions that prove the rule:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/should-strong-gods-bet-on-gdp