The Types Of Candidate You Find In The California Gubernatorial Race
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
Sorry, I give up. In past elections, I’ve covered every single candidate for governor of California, from the incumbents all the way down to the cranks. In 2022 there were twenty-six of them, and . But sorry, I give up. This year there are sixty. It’s too many. I can’t disambiguate them all into unique individuals with their own personalities, hopes, and dreams. So as consolation for the list I’m not giving you, here are the basic types, and a few examples of each. The Top-Tier Democrats One of these people will definitely win, but what else is there to say about them? They’re all...
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The Sigmoids Won't Save You
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
“All exponentials eventually become sigmoids” is an annoying AI talking point. If someone presents a graph like this… ….and points out that it seems like AI capabilities could soon reach the level marked “High”, then the height of intelligent debate is to point out that actually, the trend could go like this: …and then it would never reach the level marked “High”! In slogan form, this is “all exponentials eventually become sigmoids” (a sigmoid is the s-shape of the second graph, which starts exponential but gradually flattens out). It’s technically true. No process can...
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Nostalgebraist's Hydrogen Jukeboxes
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
, the only good theory of taste is Nostalgebraist’s. He wrote a post called , analyzing the literary output of an AI called R1. This AI tried hard to write good fiction, which was part of the problem. It crammed its stories with what Nostalgebraist called (stealing a term from Ginsberg) the “eyeball kick” - a flashy stylistic move that immediately catches the reader’s attention and “wows” them. Here are examples - some from R1, others from an experimental OpenAI model trained specifically for fiction-writing: “There is a prompt like a spell: write a story about AI and grief,...
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Three Model Organisms For Taste
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
(a continuation of ) Reddit Vexillology Vexillology is the c. elegans of aesthetics - the simplest model organism that lets us observe dynamics of interest. I haven’t read enough MFA books to do more than relay the thoughts of my betters, and you probably haven’t either. But anyone can have opinions on flags. If you’re like me, you learned the following code of good flags: They should be so simple that a child could draw them. No images, no “busy” areas, and - for God’s sake - no text The : “never put metal on metal, or color on color”. In medieval heraldry, “metals” were...
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Contra Everyone On Taste
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
Last year I wrote , which got many good responses from (eg) , , and . I tastelessly forgot to respond to them until now, but I appreciate how they forced me to refine my thinking. In particular, they helped me realize that “taste” and “good art” are hard to talk about, because the discussions conflate many different things: 1: Sensory Delight. Ode To Joy makes the listener feel joyful. Michelangelo’s David fills the viewer with awe at the human figure. The great cathedrals are impressive buildings, in a way that hits you like a punch to the gut. These judgments are...
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What Deontological Bars?
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
Constraint consequentialists believe that you should try to do good things that improve the world, unless those break hard-and-fast rules (“deontological bars”). For example, you shouldn’t assassinate democratically-elected leaders, even very bad ones. Why not? Since bad leaders set bad policy, and bad policy can kill many thousands of people, wouldn’t it be for the greater good? Because there’s always one gun-owner who thinks any given leader’s policies are bad, so without the rule, every leader would face constant assassination attempts, probably some of them would succeed, and...
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Your Attempt To Solve Debate Will Not Work
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
As a blogger, I hear about lots of projects to “solve debate”, or “disagree better”, or “map arguments”. Often these are ACX grant applications. I always turn them down. They’re well-intentioned, sophisticated, and doomed. I appreciate that Internet arguments usually don’t go well, that there are lots of ways to improve them, and that this is a worthy cause. But I’ve also seen a dozen projects of this sort fail. Here’s why I think yours will too: “Debate” almost never corresponds to mappable arguments. The simplest “solve debate” proposal is the argument map. Some...
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Links For April 2026
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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Half A Month Of Consolation Writing Advice
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
This month, rationalist institution is running their second , a bootcamp for aspiring bloggers. Participants have to publish a post a day, or they get kicked out. You can read their posts . I’m too old to manage that pace, but agreed to participate as an advisor. Then I missed the first half of the month because I was on a trip. As compensation, here are fifteen pieces of writing advice for the fifteen days I was absent. 1: Against microdishonesty Sasha Chapin has a piece . Maybe lying gives Sasha writer’s block, but for my last set of mentees it more often just made things sound awkward...
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Orban Was Bad, Even Though We Don't Have A Perfect Word For His Badness
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
, __________ of Hungary for sixteen years, earlier this week. The simplest phrase to put in the blank is “prime minister”. Some people have proposed more loaded terms like “strongman”, “autocrat”, and “dictator”. But he did lose his re-election bid earlier this week, prompting comments that these more loaded terms, especially the d-word, might have been hyperbolic.
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“Telescopic altruism” is a supposed tendency for some people to ignore those close to them in favor of those further away. Like its cousin “virtue signaling”, it usually gets used to own the libs. Some lib cares about people in Gaza - why? Shouldn’t she be thinking about her friends and neighbors instead? The only possible explanation is that she’s an evil person who hates everyone around her, but manages to feel superior to decent people by pretending to “care” about foreigners who she’ll never meet.
This collapses upon five seconds’ thought. Okay, so the lib is angry about the Israeli military killing 50,000 people in Gaza. Do you think she would be angry if the Israeli military killed 50,000 of her neighbors? Probably yes? Then what’s the problem?
“But vegetarians care about animals more than humans!” Okay, yeah, they sure do get mad about a billion pigs kept for their entire lives in cages too small to turn around in, then murdered and eaten. Do you think they’d care if a billion of their closest friends were kept for their entire lives in cages too small to turn around in, then murdered and eaten? I dunno, seems bad.
Maybe there is some possible comparison where some altruist cares about some set of foreigners more than a comparable set of countrymen? The war in Gaza killed 50,000 people, but the opioid crisis kills a bit over 50,000 Americans per year - is everyone who cares about Gaza exactly equally concerned about the opioid crisis? No, but there’s a better explanation - people care about dramatic deaths in big explosions more than boring health crises, regardless of where they happen. Everyone, lib and con alike, cared more about 9-11 than about a hundred opioid crises, even though the former only killed 4% as many people as the latter. And even the people who care about the opioid crisis usually can’t bring themselves to care about anything on the List Of Top US Causes Of Death, which are all extra-boring things like diabetes. Once you match like to like, nope, it’s pretty hard to find a “telescopic altruism” example that stands out from the general background of people having weird priorities.
Nearly everyone cares about people close to them more than people far away. If there’s a lib who would attend a Gaza protest instead of getting their deathly-ill kid emergency medical care, I haven’t met them - and the “telescopic altruism” crowd certainly hasn’t provided evidence of their existence. Instead, the people who care about their neighbors 1,000,000x times more than Gazans point to the people who ‘only’ care about their neighbors 1,000x times more than Gazans and say “Look! Those guys care about Gazans more than their neighbors! Get ‘em!” in order to avoid any debate about whether a million or a thousand or whatever is the right multiplier.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/against-the-concept-of-telescopic