Highlights From The Comments On Liberalism And Communities
Release Date: 08/15/2025
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...
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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.]
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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...
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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 …
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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...
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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...
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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...
info_outline[Original post: Should Strong Gods Bet On GDP?]
1: Comments About The Theory 2: Comments About Specific Communities
3: Other Comments
Comments About The Theory
Darwin writes:
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 have been part of a foam combat ('boffer') organization since college. You may want to say 'that's not a community, that's just a hobby', but the people in this sport form a strong community with tight bonds outside the game itself. Not only do I go to practices twice a week, I have 2 D&D games and 1 board game night every week with mostly members of the community, members of the community are my friends that I go out to movies and dinners with, play video games with voice chat on Discord with, talk to online in Discord servers and web forums and group chats, go to parties with and gossip about with other community members. Aside from attending over a dozen weddings of community members (mostly to other community members), I've served as best man for 2 members and wedding officiant for 2 other members. The sport itself has houses, guilds, and fighting units, all with their own ethos, credos, goals, activities, and hierarchies; it has knighthoods and squireships, it has awards for arts and crafts and community service. The sport has regular camping events that end up looking like temporary compounds of hundreds to thousand+ members, lasting from a weekend to a week. We may not have a singular God or Invisible Hand we all worship, but we have strong community norms towards things like inclusion, creating positive experiences, some modernized gender-neutral version of chivalry, creating safe spaces, etc.
If you didn't know me very very well, you might know that 'oh yeah, he does some kind of sword fighting thing on the weekends I think?', and not know there's a large and strong community there.
I wonder how many other things are like this - I think 'oh yeah, they play softball on the weekends, oh yeah, they belong to a knitting circle, oh yeah, they go to a lot of concerts, oh yeah, they volunteer at some kind of community center', and have no idea that there's a strong close-knit community surrounding those things that remains largely invisible to outsiders.