Astral Codex Ten Podcast

The official audio version of Astral Codex Ten, with an archive of posts from Slate Star Codex. It's just me reading Scott Alexander's blog posts.

Your Book Review: The Tale Of Genji 10/05/2026

Absurd Adventure And Amygdalectomy Advocacy 10/05/2026

Nicholas Decker In Hell 10/05/2026

Your Book Review: Thomas Urquhart’s Translation Of Rabelais 10/05/2026

Highlights From The Comments On The Substack Religion Debate 10/01/2026

Re: Re: Re: Pritchard On Liberal Happiness 10/01/2026

Your Book Review: A Residence Of 21 Years In The Sandwich Islands 09/28/2026

Your Book Review: A Residence Of 21 Years In The Sandwich Islands [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] 1. A New Cause Area In October 1819, my grandmother’s grandfather’s grandfather, Hiram Bingham I, stood with his wife, Sybil, and his friends outside Park Street Church in Boston and bade farewell to family before venturing into the unknown. They would spend the next five months on a cramped ship sailing to a foreign land of strange people, full of “destitution, degradation, and barbarism.” They did not know if they would ever return to America. Unlike others who voyaged out to sea, they were not whalers, nor merchants trying to make a quick profit. Instead, their goal was far more ambitious: to uplift an entire nation out of heathenry to civilization. Or as Hiram wrote, to “most effectually and most extensively promote the Redeemer’s cause with the means that are put into our hands”. I first came across Hiram’s memoir, A Residence of Twenty-One Years in the Sandwich Islands, on my honeymoon to the Hawaiian Islands last summer. I had vague knowledge of a family connection to the area, and decided to do some research into it. As I started reading, I had a growing sense of deja vu as I recognized my own patterns of thinking in Hiram’s words. Today’s Effective Altruists sincerely want to do the most good possible, and often focus on international development as a means of improving lives. However, there is another group who fits that description equally well: 19th-century missionaries. Hiram and his colleagues believed that Heaven and Hell were not metaphorical, and that doing the most good meant saving the most souls from eternal torment. And what, they asked themselves, was the most effective means towards accomplishing this goal? Spreading the Gospel to those who had never heard it. All of humanity required salvation, and those who lived in foreign lands mattered just as much as those who lived nearby. As a missionary destination, the Hawaiian Islands (then known as the Sandwich Islands), had several compelling advantages. First, the islands were very neglected, being recently discovered. While not as important as China, Egypt/Palestine, or India, they still held a sizable population. And unlike those places, there was little competition from other missionaries or pre-existing organized religions, making them much more tractable for conversion. The mission to Hawaii would prove notably cost-effective compared to other missions. Basically all that was needed was a ship, a printing press, and missionaries to teach the Bible. In other words, if the EA Forum existed in the early 19th century, I could easily imagine a post arguing that bringing the Gospel to the Sandwich Islands is a promising cause area. So, with the benefit of 200 years of hindsight, what can Effective Altruists and other aspiring do-gooders today learn from the previous wave of people who wanted to save the world? /episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/43057223

Why I'm Staying Out Of The Substack Religion Debate 09/28/2026

Why I'm Staying Out Of The Substack Religion Debate I. Matthew Adelstein (aka Bentham’s Bulldog) and Richard Chappell . So do , , , , , and , all within this month! I the omnipresence of the early ‘00s online atheism debate was a time-bound historical phenomenon. But now that the blogosphere has reincarnated as Substack, it’s back, nearly as strong as ever. I enjoyed participated in the early 00's version, but the current incarnation leaves me cold. I can’t get as interested as I once did in the details of the Fine-Tuning Argument, the Argument From Miracles, et cetera. It’s not just that I’ve already served my time in the theology mines. My lack of belief in God intuitively feels like it precedes all of these things. Consider by analogy a society where people regularly debated whether aliens assisted the rise of Napoleon. There are many reasons to believe in such assistance: Napoleon’s rise from Corsican nobody to Emperor and would-be world conqueror was a bizarre deviation from the usual pattern of history. He won battles outnumbered 4-to-1, when everyone knows victory usually goes to the larger army. He became monarch of France immediately after it had declared eternal enmity against the concept of monarchy and resolved to murder anyone who didn’t hate monarchy enough. And the arguments against such intervention are comparatively flimsy. True, nobody saw aliens, but a sufficiently advanced civilization could conduct its interventions in secret. True, our prior for alien intervention is generally low, but maybe this is unjustified: we have no idea how many historical events the aliens have intervened in; Alexander the Great was pretty strange too. True, Napoleon finally lost, but this is not decisive; maybe the aliens only wanted him to blaze brightly for a few years before his eventual defeat, or maybe stronger aliens were backing the Duke of Wellington. In a world where this hypothesis somehow entered the space of serious debate, it would be hard to dislodge. Our own historical community is protected from it not because they can precisely for and against each of these considerations and conclude its falsehood, but because common sense precludes entertaining it in the first place. This isn’t to say that Reason doesn’t work - if someone could precisely add up the Bayesian evidence for and against these considerations, they would get the right answer - but as a historical matter, this type of delicate reasoning wasn’t how our society resolved this question. My atheism is more deeply rooted in whatever prevented us from considering this question in the first place than in the type of delicate reasoning that could get us out of it. /episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/43057098

Your Book Review: The Escape Artist 09/28/2026

Your Book Review: The Escape Artist [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] Holocaust stories, both true and fictional, tend to repeat the same few clichés over and over. There’s the innocent child who only partially understands what’s happening (Diary of Anne Frank, Boy in the Striped Pajamas). There’s the sentimental redemption story that focuses on a small individual act (Life is Beautiful, The Book Thief). And of course, there’s the good German, or at least the morally conflicted one (Schindler’s List, The Reader). You won’t find any of these tropes in The Escape Artist. This 2022 book by Jonathan Freedland tells the true, and largely unknown, story of one of the few Jews ever to break out of Auschwitz. The details of his improbable escape are remarkable enough, but what really makes the story fascinating is the way it so thoroughly defies every single expectation we have of a Holocaust narrative. Its deeply unlikeable protagonist eventually alienates every friend and supporter he has, and dies a bitter old man, almost completely forgotten by history. His story lacks not only good Germans, but even good non-Germans, with his harshest criticism saved not for the Nazis, not even for the dithering Allies, but for the Jewish leaders of Europe. And though one could see the story of his escape as a triumph, in his own telling, it’s a failure, for although he makes it out of Auschwitz against all odds, he fails at his larger mission: to stop the Holocaust. There’s no redemption here, no moral uplift, no lessons save for perhaps the grimmest and most nihilistic “lesson” I’ve ever encountered in any story, Holocaust-related or otherwise: that when confronted with the unthinkable, most people’s natural tendency is denial. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. To get out of Auschwitz, first you have to get into Auschwitz… /episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/43056808

The Quest For Caffeine You Can Have At Night 09/05/2026

The Foothills Of Bay Area House Party 09/05/2026

MacGregor The Bridge Builder 09/05/2026

Open Questions On Open Weights 09/05/2026

Open Questions On Open Weights Last month, some of Silicon Valley’s biggest companies signed supporting open-weights AI. Open weights AI is like open-source software, where the creator makes the raw code publicly available for free download. It’s good insofar as it’s the only way an AI can truly be the user’s property, as opposed to something that companies like OpenAI or Anthropic temporarily let you use subject to their corporate guidelines and increasingly-nanny-state-like restrictions. If AI becomes the linchpin of the future, open weights AI feels like the sort of thing that could be the difference between being free yeomen vs. corporate serfs. It’s bad insofar as it removes the possibility of gatekeeping and lets criminals commit crimes with it. Open weights AI could be used for hacking, child pornography, harassment, or terrorism (the weights can’t commit the terrorism themselves, but they could give bomb-making or bioweapon-making advice). Since AIs have gotten very good - maybe superhuman - at hacking lately, the specter of a world where anyone can hack any site has gotten people grumbling that maybe open weights should be banned. It doesn’t help that China produces the best open weights AI, making the idea seem foreign and almost unpatriotic. Proponents counter that “when AI is outlawed, only outlaws will have AI”, arguing that bad people will get open weights AI regardless, and good people can use open weights AI to defend themselves. With the , companies including Microsoft, NVIDIA, OpenAI, Intel, Amazon, Meta, Hugging Face, and over a hundred others have come out in favor of this position. Who’s leading the other side? Nobody’s admitted to it. Some parts of the Trump administration lean anti-open-weights on China hawk grounds, but have stopped short of explicitly asking for a full ban. Anthropic, the most notable omission on the pro-open-weights letter, made “open-weights models that don’t have dangerous capabilities” - but the industry expects open weights models to have dangerous hacking capabilities within a year, and AFAICT the letter didn’t address that beyond inviting readers to draw the obvious conclusion. In the absence of a more obvious opponent, some open weights supporters suspect our conspiracy - the loose band of AI safety advocates, effective altruists, rationalists, and pause activists who worry about existential risk from superintelligence. This is a reasonable inference. By design, open weights AI is outside centralized control, and so impossible to permanently align against either human misuse (eg terrorism) or loss of control (eg AI turning against humans). Even if its creator trains it not to hack, anybody in the world can download the weights and retrain the AI to hack all day long. But in fact, most AI safety organizations have remained quietly neutral, and I don’t know of any who make this a centerpiece of their activism (though I’m not 100% up-to-date on the whole landscape; if you know of one, tell me). A few have proposed policies that are contingently incompatible with open weights AI existing, but they all frame it as collateral damage rather than something they’re excited about eliminating. I’m also neutral about open weights AI. I think it probably won’t be long-term sustainable, but I’m happy to wait for this to become clear in the normal course of things rather than expend effort and political capital to ban it immediately. /episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/42788990

The Beauty Of Settled Science 09/05/2026

Does Forecasting Have Room At The Top? 09/05/2026

Your Book Review: The Epic Of Gilgamesh 08/28/2026

Highlights From The Discourse On The Hugging Face Incident 08/28/2026

Links For July 2026 (Part 2) 08/28/2026

Psychology Research Is Mostly Fine 08/28/2026

The Hugging Face Incident 08/28/2026

Your Book Review: Breakdown In Pakistan 08/28/2026

Your Book Review: Breakdown In Pakistan [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] A couple of decades ago in Kabul, a fellow aid worker on his third beer came up with a vivid simile for what American money was doing to the Afghan organizations implementing USAID projects. “It’s like gluing a rabbit mouth-first to a fire hose. You blast its guts right out of its ass…but as long as the water keeps running, it looks like you’ve taught the rabbit to dance.” Oxford politics professor Masooda Bano uses less lurid language, but Breakdown in Pakistan addresses the same basic phenomenon: how Western aid donors and INGOs unintentionally eviscerate so many of the local institutions they try to “capacity-build.” The problem goes beyond the obvious mismatch of huge funds with small-scale organizations. Even low-to-moderate external funding can leave an organization hollowed out, bereft of local participants and the power it once had to motivate change on the ground. Anyone who cares about the global effectiveness of rich-country altruism needs to grasp the dynamic Bano analyzes. From the Western perspective, many of us want to put charitable money into a mechanism that delivers certain measurable outcomes (lives saved, morbidity reduced, income increased above poverty levels, etc.) as efficiently and reliably as possible. So we do our well-intentioned best to shape local institutions into a delivery vehicle for our projects. Readers of James C. Scott’s will recall how mid-eighteenth-century German “scientific foresters” treated forests similarly, as a mechanism to reliably yield the highest volume of lumber. They planted spruce in vast uniform grids, ordered for easy counting and harvesting, while stripping out other non-timber species. The resulting monoculture plantations seemed ideal for both commercial exploitation and experimentation; it’s much easier to control variables when you’ve removed as much natural variability as possible. Within a few decades, the downsides became evident. The first generation of trees grew strong, sucking up the accumulated benefits of the previous forest’s soil ecology; later generations were stunted, as the lack of biodiversity left the soils nutrient-poor. Plantations packed with trees of the same species and same height were far more vulnerable to pathogens, pests, and extreme weather. Large-scale forest die-offs, Waldsterben, eventually forced foresters to drastically modify their approach. That metaphor fits Bano’s story even better than my friend’s gutted rabbit. Over the last four decades, we’ve been systematically replacing diverse old-growth institutions with more legible NGO plantations worldwide. While we’ve been enjoying our increased ability to control outcomes and test hypotheses, the rot has been spreading, the impoverished ecology stunting more and more of the forest. And now the wind through those uniform, hollowed-out aisles has built into a storm. /episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/42587775

Links For July 2026 (Part 1) 08/18/2026

Contra Pritchard On Liberal Happiness 08/18/2026

Contra Pritchard On Liberal Happiness Cassie Pritchard, : I get why so many liberals are fundamentally disdainful of democracy these days—it’s because liberalism is exhausted. It’s out of answers. Liberalism won, it delivered the world it promised, and people still aren’t content. They’re not satisfied. So the people must be wrong. We are unfathomably richer than our ancestors. Output per capita in America today is on the order of 900 times greater than before the invention of agriculture, about ~225 times higher than in 1 CE, and about the same (225 times) higher than Europe in 1000 CE. If measurable productivity were really the greatest object of human society, then we shouldn’t just be a little bit happier than people in the distant (or even recent!) past—we should be ecstatic. We should already be living in a utopian age of overwhelming contentment. We should be currently experiencing a kind of paradise. The Kingdom of Heaven, as liberalism conceives of it, has already been made real on Earth. We are living in their Eden, and 20% of people are depressed. We’ve stopped reproducing ourselves. We’re overwhelmingly dissatisfied with our governments, anxious about our economies, and pessimistic about the future. Based on Pritchard’s own politics, I imagine she is using this to argue for socialism, but other people use the same reasoning to push fascism, theocracy, or other postliberal commitments. It’s a fair argument and deserves an answer. We’ll start with an elegant mathematical response which will satisfy nobody, then try to address the emotional impact. The elegant mathematical response is: : In a large U.S. sample, the shape of the association between happiness and Log(income) was extremely systematic: from $10,000/y to over $500,000/y, average happiness rose almost perfectly linearly with Log(income), with group-level correlations of 0.98-0.99 across a range of happiness measures, including both in-the-moment experience and overall life satisfaction. So if income increased 225x since the medieval era, then using observed coefficients, happiness should have increased about three points on a 1-10 scale. If the average serf would have rated his condition 3/10, we should be at 6/10. /episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/42474175

Your Book Review: Great And Desperate Cures 08/05/2026

Your Book Review: Great And Desperate Cures 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 used—and not much else. It did not require anesthesia or gloves, and the sharp instrument (either a leucotome or the sturdier orbitoclast) was not necessarily sterilized. It took less than ten minutes. The first step was to shock the patient until they lost consciousness. This eliminated the need for anesthesia, since there would be at least a few minutes until the patient regained consciousness, and also made the procedure more flexible; it did not require a surgeon, and did not even have to be performed in a hospital. The second step was to insert the sharp, eight-inch-long instrument into the brain. In most versions of the procedure, surgeons drilled holes into the skull and inserted the leucotome through those holes. Surgeons preferred an approach that allowed them to see where in the brain they were cutting. But the abbreviated procedure used a shortcut. Just above and behind the eye is a thin plate of bone that forms the roof of the eye socket. With enough force, the leucotome can be driven through that bone and into the frontal lobes of the brain. The cracking sound produced when the instrument fractures the orbital roof has caused at least one experienced clinician to faint. Once the instrument was inside, completing the surgery was simply a matter of rotating the tool left and right. The goal was to cut a large number of nerve fibers. Some thought that the procedure might work by severing fibers which maintained certain fixed distorted thought patterns; by destroying them, patients might be freed from the grip of their mental illness. But there wasn’t agreement among practitioners regarding why the procedure might work. This is the transorbital lobotomy. Around 50,000 people received lobotomies in the United States in the 1940s and early 1950s; approximately 10,000 used the transorbital method I just described, with the others using approaches surgeons would be more likely to approve of (e.g., using anesthesia, gloves, being able to see where you’re cutting…). It was billed as a cure for all sorts of mental illnesses, including schizophrenia, depression, and anxiety. And while some called it a method of last resort—a procedure which should only be used after every other conceivable method had failed—it was often used on people who did not have serious mental problems, and who had not tried less serious treatments. /episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/42322630

Against "Stochastic Terrorism" 08/04/2026

Against "Stochastic Terrorism" 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 other woke people . Socialists call health insurance companies greedy and accuse them of blocking life-saving treatment, and then Luigi Mangione . AI safety activists say that Sam Altman’s AI could destroy humanity, and then a guy at Sam Altman’s house. Liberals said that Charlie Kirk was a hatemonger who was driving Americans apart, and then an assassin . The pro-life movement describes abortion as murder, and then pro-life activists and . The “stochastic terrorism” concept is near-unique in how effectively it can be discredited merely by listing many examples of its use together in the same place. Almost no one supports a blanket prohibition on criticizing of all of these different groups of people. “Stochastic terrorism” mostly gets deployed opportunistically, by people who either are too blinkered to realize that the same argument could be leveraged against their own speech, or who hope you’re too blinkered to realize that. (in fact, one could argue that accusing someone of stochastic terrorism is itself stochastic terrorism! Here in America, we consider it justified to kill terrorists before they can threaten us further. Reclassifying criticism as terrorism implies it is potentially legitimate to apply the same norm to any especially harsh critics!) Still, a sliver of concept-users make some fig-leaf argument that the cases they approve of are different than the cases they disapprove of. Some proposed principles: /episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/42313110

AI Chip Regulation Is Not A Dystopian Surveillance State 08/04/2026

Introducing Plan A 08/04/2026

Introducing Plan A 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 that we rose to the occasion, to make the AI transition go down alongside the American Revolution and D-Day as one of our country’s finest hours? If your brain sputters and throws an error message at the question, isn’t that a problem? It’s a total coincidence that comes out the week after America’s 250th birthday. It was supposed to come out earlier, but got delayed. Then it was supposed to come out later, but got pushed forward. Still, the saying goes “A wizard is never late, nor is he early; he arrives exactly when he means to.” And if anyone qualifies as wizards, it’s Daniel Kokotajlo and his team of forecasters at the AI Futures Project. I about Daniel’s eerie accuracy over the 2021 - 2025 period. Since then, they’ve gained worldwide fame for their scenario, which predicted the rise and quick takeover of coding agents in early 2026, plus something like the fight over Fable. Plan A isn’t another prediction. It’s a wish list, a positive vision, a road map for navigating the future. It describes the best course of action that Daniel and the AI Futures Project can come up with, and what would happen if we took it. “Really? You got America a policy paper for its 250th birthday? Doesn’t America already have enough policy papers?” Sort of, but it’s not exactly a policy paper. It starts in a timeline similar to that of AI 2027, on track for a poorly-controlled intelligence explosion that either ends the world or dooms it to permanent techno-oligarchy. But this time, America is blessed with some extra foresight and determination, and makes only good choices (all non-Americans behave naturally, including trying to thwart America when incentivized to do so). It gives a year-by-year description of this best-of-all-possible-worlds, from now through 2040, as predicted by the best AI forecasters alive, with over a dozen supplements explaining all the implementation details. This is a crazy thing to try releasing. Daniel gave me several justifications for doing it anyway, but the one I remember most is that it’s supposed to be a floor. When some politician proposes a data center ban, or says that we have to gut safety regulation to compete with China, or promises a job retraining program, think to yourself: does this person have a vision for where all of this ends up? If so, is it as good as Plan A? If not, consider demanding that they do better. I did a lot of writing for AI 2027 and was listed as a co-author. Some of my writing made it into Plan A too, but it was a bit less. The difference is of degree rather than kind, but because of this - and to give me more latitude to discuss it the way I like with less PR blowback - we decided not to put me as a co-author this time. I continue to be proud of having a part in this, small as it may be. (related: everything in this post is my opinion only, and not officially endorsed by the AI Futures Project) /episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/42313065

Your Book Review: The Book Of Abraham 07/26/2026

The AI Superforecasters Are Here 07/17/2026

Chip Off The Old Block 07/17/2026

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