ACX Grants Results 2025
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
Thanks to everyone who participated in ACX Grants, whether as an applicant, an evaluator, or a funder. We received 654 applications this year, and were able to fund 42. To the other 612: sorry! Many of you had great ideas that we couldn’t fund for contingent reasons - sometimes because we couldn’t evaluate them at the level of depth it would have taken to feel comfortable supporting them, or because we had complicated conflicts of interest, or just because we didn’t have enough money. Some of you had ideas that were good but not a match for our particular grantmaking philosophy....
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Fascism Can't Mean Both A Specific Ideology And A Legitimate Target
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
The following three things can’t all be true simultaneously: Many Americans are fascists Fascists are an acceptable target for political violence Political violence in America is morally unacceptable (at the current time) I thought about this while following between Democratic hopeful Gavin Newsom and Trump advisor Stephen Miller. Newsom called Miller fascist; Miller accused this of being a call to violence which placed “a target” on him. Miller is hardly sympathetic here - , and later suggested Newsom for his speech (if only there were a word to describe the sort of person who...
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The Fatima Sun Miracle: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
0: Here Comes The Sun In 1917, three Portuguese children reported a vision of the Virgin Mary. She promised to return to them on the 13th of each month. On the sixth month - October 13th - she would perform a great miracle. Rumors spread, and on the 13th of each month, crowds gathered to watch the children speak to an apparition that only they could see. Increasingly many of these pilgrims started reporting minor visions or miracles themselves. Anticipation for the great October miracle consumed the region, then the country. On October 13, a crowd of about 70,000 people descended on the...
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Your Review: The Russo-Ukrainian War
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] You Can Just Do Things In the winter of 2022 I was unhappily working at a dull but decently compensated IT job, which I had come upon at last after four years of phoning it in at college and abandoning my brief stint as an MMA Fighter/Porn Store Security Guard due to feeling like I was getting...
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Sources Say Bay Area House Party
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
[previously in series: , , , , , , ] Something is off about this Bay Area House Party. There are . . . women. “I’ve never seen a gender balance like this in the Bay Area,” you tell your host Chris. “Is this one of those fabled ratio parties?” “No - have you heard of ? It’s the new male dating trend. You say in your Bumble profile that you’re a member of the Dissident Right who often attends parties with Curtis Yarvin. Then female journos ask you out in the hopes that you’ll bring them along and they can turn it into an article.” “What happens when they realize Curtis...
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Your Review: Project Xanadu - The Internet That Might Have Been
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] 1. The Internet That Would Be In July 1945, Vannevar Bush was riding high. As Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, he’d won World War II. His proximity fuse intercepted hundreds of V-1s and destroyed thousands of tanks, carving a path for Allied forces through the...
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Defining Defending Democracy: Contra The Election Winner Argument
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
Someone argues that Donald Trump threatens democracy, maybe because he’s asserting authority against the judiciary or the media or the NGOs. Someone else counterargues that it hardly seems undemocratic for someone to favor someone who won an election (the President) over other people who did not (the judiciary, the media). If anything, it seems undemocratic to allow the unelected people to continue to obstruct and harass elected leaders. The most common response is to say that fine, democracy is about who wins votes, but we also like liberalism, liberalism is under threat, it’s too hard to...
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Your Review: The Synaptic Plasticity and Memory Hypothesis
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] I. THE TASTE OF VICTORY The Tupinambá people ate their enemies. This fact scared , a German explorer who was captured by Tupinambá warriors in 1554, when they caught him by surprise during a hunting expedition. As their prisoner for nearly a year, Staden observed a number of their cannibalism...
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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.]
info_outlineWe received 654 applications this year, and were able to fund 42. To the other 612: sorry! Many of you had great ideas that we couldn’t fund for contingent reasons - sometimes because we couldn’t evaluate them at the level of depth it would have taken to feel comfortable supporting them, or because we had complicated conflicts of interest, or just because we didn’t have enough money. Some of you had ideas that were good but not a match for our particular grantmaking philosophy. Finally, a few of you were suffering from LLM psychosis. Please get help.
Of the 42 grantees, 40 have answered our email asking for confirmation that they still want the grant. I’m still waiting for confirmation emails from Lewis Wall and Nishank B. If you’re reading this and don’t think you got a confirmation email, check your spam folder. If it’s not in your spam folder, email me at scott@slatestarcodex.com. If you can’t reach me or I don’t respond, DM me on Substack or Twitter. I’ll give you until November 1 to get in touch, after which point the grant will be withdrawn. There are also a few projects so deep in stealth I don’t have permission to share their existence; I will mention these as they become public.
More information, and the all-important thanks to contributors, are after the list, which is:z