Your Book Review: Great And Desperate Cures
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
Finalist #2 in the Book Review Contest [This is one of the finalists in the 2026 book 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. SURGERY FOR THE SOUL [content warning: this review is about lobotomies, and includes disturbing descriptions and pictures - SA] Surgery for the soul required a sharp, eight-inch-long instrument—one time, an ice pick from the Uline Ice Company was...
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Against "Stochastic Terrorism"
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
is the idea that if you spread fear and mistrust against a target, then eventually people will commit violence against that target, and it will be your fault, even if you never specifically said the words “you should commit violence”. Some other popular examples of the concept: Nativists spread fear and mistrust about Muslim immigrants, and then racists . The #Resistance insists that Donald Trump would destroy democracy, and then various people . Conservatives spread fear and mistrust about transgender people, and then bigots . Woke people say the police are racist and brutal, and then...
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AI Chip Regulation Is Not A Dystopian Surveillance State
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
This was one of the most common objections to . The plan proposes AI chip regulation to ensure that both China and America know where all the chips are, making their deal to regulate AI together “trustless” (ie neither side can defect even if they want to). Several people argued that this kind of regulation amounted to some kind of “Orwellian dystopia” or “global panopticon”. I’m reminded of a story I heard - I can’t find it, maybe one of you can - from a DC insider who said it was enraging to work with Silicon Valley, because he would bring up what he thought was the obvious...
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Introducing Plan A
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
A Is For America It’s increasingly clear that nobody has a plan for if this AI thing turns out to be real. Some people have suggestions, but they’re all things like “regulate a little more” or “regulate a little less” or “react to things as they come up”. This won’t be enough. Not just because things may move too quickly - although they will - but because in order to regulate or react, you need to know what you’re aiming for, and it’s increasingly clear that people can’t even visualize what AI going well could look like. What would it take to honestly tell our children...
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Your Book Review: The Book Of Abraham
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
[This is one of the finalists in the 2026 book 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] Part 1. The Book of Abraham opens with this paragraph: “A Translation of some ancient Records that have fallen into our hands from the catacombs of Egypt. The writings of Abraham while he was in Egypt, called the Book of Abraham, written by his own hand, upon papyrus.” As you can read,...
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The AI Superforecasters Are Here
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
The annual was earlier this month. This was the year prediction markets went from an obscure hobby to a multi-billion dollar industry; from semi-illegal to having the President’s son as an advisor. I can’t remember if anyone talked about any of that. It didn’t even register. All eyes were on the AI superforecasters. I met an AI superforecaster startup founder who told me his AI had turned $35 into $2 million on Kalshi over seven months. I met another who said they were beating the stock market by 25% with a market-neutral portfolio - of course this could be luck, but they’d beaten...
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Chip Off The Old Block
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
I. Having kids has given me new appreciation for old poetry. The first time I read Song of Hiawatha, I skimmed over the part in Book 3 where Hiawatha first meets his father Mudjekeewis: Filled with joy was Mudjekeewis When he looked on Hiawatha, Saw his youth rise up before him In the face of Hiawatha, Saw the beauty of Wenonah From the grave rise up before him. "Welcome!" said he, "Hiawatha, To the kingdom of the West-Wind! Long have I been waiting for you! Youth is lovely, age is lonely, Youth is fiery, age is frosty; You bring back the days departed, You bring back my youth of passion." ...
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The Metaculus Threat To Democracy Index
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
In recent posts on and , people have asked me - how do you know you’re not suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome? I take this seriously; we’ve all lost loved ones to this condition. The best check on my reasoning would be an objective measure of the health of American democracy. There are several “democracy indices” that purport to do this, but they have a mixed reputation. My impression is that most current accusations of bias are relatively weak - I agree with - but they rely enough on “expert” opinion that I don’t expect them to convince a skeptic. The newest entrant in...
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Should People Avoid Whole-Body Screening Info?
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
The most controversial part of last week’s article on the Midjourney ultrasound scanner was medical experts’ recommendation against whole-body screening (including existing whole-body screening technology using MRI). Isn’t this crazy? Whole-body screening can save lives by detecting serious diseases like cancer. The experts counterargue that it finds so many false positives - minor zit-like imperfections that would never have caused problems, but which cost patients time, money, anxiety, and side effect burden to investigate - that it ends up net negative. But isn’t this just a problem...
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Preliminary Thoughts On The Midjourney Scanner
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
like that, except from a medium-sized startup instead of a tech giant. Earlier today, they announced a pivot to medical scanners. The new , which they describe as “a bold new kind of machine to reimagine the foundations of healthcare and our relationships to our bodies”, will be a tank of water surrounded by a ring of ultrasound scanners. The patient goes into the tank, the scanners emit ultrasound from all angles, and then some fancy AI reconstructs the echoes into a 3D picture of the body. The result is ultrasound tomography: the same sort of rich data as a CT or MRI, but done via...
info_outlineThe Problem
Everyone hates Congress. That poll showing that cockroaches are more popular than Congress is now thirteen years old, and things haven’t improved in those thirteen years. Congressional approval dipped below 20% during the Great Recession and hasn’t recovered since.
A republic where a supermajority of citizens neither like nor trust their representatives is not the most stable of foundations, so it should not be shocking that the legislative branch is being subsumed by the executive.
What’s the solution? Many have been proposed, some with very snazzy websites. FairVote thinks that ranked choice voting and proportional representation will solve it. The Congressional Reform Project has another snazzy website with such bold proposals as “Increase the opportunity for Members to form relationships across party lines, including by bipartisan issues conferences.” There are more think tanks. They want to enlarge the House by a few hundred members, switch to a biennial budget system, spend more on Congressional staffers, and introduce term limits, among many other suggestions.
There are op-eds too. Here’s how the Atlantic wants to fix Congress. The New York Times of course has a solution. Here on Substack, Matt Yglesias thinks proportional representation is the solution, and Nicholas Decker has an especially interesting solution.
These proposals, no matter which direction they’re coming from, have two things in common. The first is that they largely agree on the problem: members of Congress are disconnected from their constituents. Thanks to a combination of huge gerrymandered districts, national partisan polarization, and the influence of large donors, a representative has little incentive to care about the experience of individual people in their district.
The second thing that all these proposed solutions have in common is that none of them will ever be implemented.