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.

Writing For The AIs 11/23/2025

Links For October 2025 11/23/2025

Model City Monday 10/27/25 11/23/2025

Highlights From The Comments On Fatima 11/23/2025

Tech PACs Are Closing In On The Almonds 11/20/2025

Non-Book Review Contest 2025 Winners 11/20/2025

ACX Grants Results 2025 11/08/2025

Fascism Can't Mean Both A Specific Ideology And A Legitimate Target 11/08/2025

The Fatima Sun Miracle: Much More Than You Wanted To Know 10/23/2025

The Fatima Sun Miracle: Much More Than You Wanted To Know 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 children’s home village of Fatima. At solar noon, the children made contact with the Virgin and said the great miracle was still on track. Then someone - accounts differ as to whether it was the children or a member of the crowd - pointed to the sky. According to the ~150 eyewitness accounts that have come down to us, the clouds parted, and the pilgrims saw a strange pale sun (or sun-like object), painless to gaze upon. As they watched in wonder, it began to spin around and flash all the colors of the rainbow, drenching the trees and buildings and crowd with yellow, green, and purple light in sequence. Then it seemed to loom, or grow, or fall to earth - accounts differ, but everyone agrees there was mass panic, as the people expected to be crushed or burned or consumed. It lurched downward three times, as the crowd screamed in terror or confessed their sins - then returned to its usual place in the sky. The whole affair had lasted ten minutes. Since then, the Sun Miracle of Fatima has gained a reputation as the final boss of paranormal experiences, the ultimate challenge for would-be skeptics and debunkers. It’s not hard to see why. The witnesses included journalists, atheists, prominent scientists, and people who freely admitted that they had only attended in order to laugh at everyone else when nothing happened. There are far too many of them to dismiss, and their reports are surprisingly close to unanimous. People in nearby towns who knew nothing about the miracle claimed to have seen the same thing, seemingly ruling out mass hallucination. There are photographs - too low-tech to clearly visualize the sun, but clear enough to show a crowd pointing at the sky in astonishment. For one hundred eight years, believers and skeptics have written magazine articles, scientific papers, and at least a dozen books on the topic, mostly without progress. Now its fame has reached Substack. , and , with additional commentary from and . I don’t think any of them have risen to the occasion. Ethan observes the formalities of good debate, but regurgitates such a neatly-packaged story that readers are liable to miss the thousand little threads that trail off the bottom and lead places that are, if anything, even stranger than the original miracle. Evan puts admirable effort into arguing that child-seers could confabulate visions, but by the time he gets to the sun miracle itself, he has only a few potshots about crowd psychology and “optical phenomena”. Other skeptics are even worse, barely gesturing at Evan’s piece before redirecting their attention to boasts about how they have totally demolished the credulous fundies, or laments about how cosmically unfair it is that they must take time out of their busy schedules to respond to such idiocy. The final boss of the paranormal deserves more respect! We will at try to at least do better than the other Substackers. But as a stretch goal, I would like to actually advance this 108-year-long conversation. /episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/38753915

Your Review: The Russo-Ukrainian War 10/05/2025

Your Review: The Russo-Ukrainian War [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 too old to be broke. If pressure to fit in with my yuppie, family-and-career-having peers pushed me into corporate life, the depressing mundanity of Covid-era day-to-day pushed me out just as quickly. On February 24th, 2022, Russia began its full scale invasion, and America learned what a “Ukraine” was. Having long used politics as a surrogate activity to distract myself from my life of chronic underachievement, I was already a little more familiar than most with the country’s woes, and had followed the conflict from the time of the Euromaidan protests. Years before I had read of the likes of Azov and its many foreign volunteers, and had even periodically fantasized about dropping everything and going to the Donetsk Airport. But no, that Wasn’t The Type Of Thing Normal People Like Me Did, so instead I joined my own country’s armed forces, sat around pushing papers, earned the dubious honor of washing out “ahead of schedule”, and finally graduated college with a not very useful degree and a mediocre GPA. With the invasion however, things changed. Before I had always vaguely felt that I would eventually end up doing something “cool”, and had soothed myself with reassurances that I was still in the “early life” section of my future Wikipedia article and would bide my time before I made my play at greatness. Now however, the unrealisticness of this conceit was thrown into uncomfortably sharp relief by a certain contrast I could not not ignore. Only three days after the start of the full scale invasion, Ukrainian foreign minister Dymytro Kuleba announced the creation of the “International Legion For The Territorial Defense Of Ukraine”. Unlike in 2014, Ukraine was now specifically and officially soliciting foreigners with military experience to fight for them! I was at least technically in that category! I thought about my own time in the military. My ideas of going to war in Afghanistan had been quashed by the US withdrawal not long after I joined, and I had quickly found that military life involved more editing forms in Adobe Acrobat and less explosions than I had naively supposed. But this was a real war, a deadly serious war, and a major, world defining event at that. In the early months of the invasion the international media talked about almost nothing else. I spent all day at my desk pretending to work while frantically refreshing OSINT live maps and breathlessly following news from the front. I remember the circulation of harrowing video clips. Kalashnikovs being distributed to civilians in Kyiv, the mayor of a small village publicly asking its inhabitants whether they should personally accede to Russian ultimatums, or risk having their property destroyed and lives forfeit- to resounding cries of “Glory to Ukraine”. The Ukrainians’ courage blew my mind. There were people who really had something to die for, and by extension something to live for. Meanwhile, there I was, sipping coffee and getting fat. The creation of the legion felt like destiny was reaching its hand out to me. Was I really going to ignore it so I could handle support tickets for the rest of my life? /episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/38468200

Sources Say Bay Area House Party 10/05/2025

Sources Say Bay Area House Party [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 Yarvin isn’t at the party?” “Oh, everyone pools their money and hires someone to pretend to be Curtis. You can just do things. Today it’s Ramchandra.” You follow his gaze, and there is Ramchandra, hair greased back, wearing a leather jacket, surrounded by a crowd of young women. “When I say I’m against furries,” he’s explaining, staccato, at 120 wpm, “I mean the sort of captured furries you get under the post-Warren-G-Harding liberal order, the ones getting the fat checks from the Armenians at Harvard and the Department of Energy. I love real furries, the kind you would have found in 1920s New Mexico eating crocodile steaks with Baron von Ungern-Sternberg! Some of my best friends are furries, as de Broglie-Bohm and my sainted mother used to say! Just watch out for the Kikuyu, that’s my advice! Hahahahahaha!” Some of the women are taking notes. “But enough about me. When I was seventeen, I spent seven weeks in Bensonhurst - that’s in the Rotten Apple, in case you can’t tell your Nepalis from your Neapolitans. A dear uncle of mine, after whom I was named…” “Ramchandra is pretty good,” you admit. “Still, if it were me I would have gone with a white guy.” “It’s fine,” says Chris. “Curtis describes himself as a mischling, and none of the journos know what that means.” Ramchandra is still talking. “Of course, strawberries have only been strawberries since after the Kronstadt Rebellion. Before that, strawberries were just pears. You had to get them hand-painted red by Gypsies, if you can believe that. Gypsies! So if you hear someone from west of Pennsylvania Avenue mention ‘strawberries’, that’s what we in the business call il significanto.” “I admit he has talent,“ you say. “But this curtfishing thing - surely at some point your date realizes that you’re not actually a high-status yet problematic bad boy who can further her career just by existing, and then she ghosts you, right?” “That’s every date in San Francisco. But when you curtfish, sometimes she comps your meal from her expense account. It’s a strict Pareto improvement!” After some thought, you agree this is a great strategy with no downsides, maybe the biggest innovation in dating since the invention of alcohol. Having failed to bring your own journo to the party, you look for one who seems unattached. You catch the eye of a blonde woman who introduces herself as Gabrielle, and you try to give her the least autistic “Hello” of which you are capable. /episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/38468175

Your Review: Project Xanadu - The Internet That Might Have Been 09/26/2025

Defining Defending Democracy: Contra The Election Winner Argument 09/26/2025

Your Review: The Synaptic Plasticity and Memory Hypothesis 09/24/2025

Your Review: The Synaptic Plasticity and Memory Hypothesis [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 rituals. They were elaborate, public affairs; here’s a description of them from Duffy and Metcalf’s The Return of Hans Staden, an assessment of Staden’s voyage and claims: (Ch. 2, pg. 51-52) First a rope was placed around the neck of the captive so that he might not escape; at night the rope was tied to the hammock in which the captive slept. Straps that were not removed were placed above and below the knees. The captives were given women, who guarded them and also slept with them. These women were high-status daughters and sisters of chiefs; they were unmarried and sometimes gave birth to the child of a captive. Some of the captives might be held for a period of time until corn was planted and new large clay vessels—for drink and cooking flesh—were made. Guests were invited to the ceremony, and they often arrived eight to fifteen days in advance of it. A special small house was erected, with no walls but with a roof, in which the captives were placed with women and guards two or three days before the ceremony. In the other houses, feathers were prepared for a headdress or for body ornamentation, and inks were made for tattoos. Women and girls prepared fifty to one hundred vats of fermented manioc beer. Then, when all was ready, they painted the victim’s face blue, mounted a headdress of wax covered with feathers on him, and wound a cotton cord around his waist. The guests began to drink in the afternoon and continued all through the night. At dawn, the one who was to do the killing came out with a long, painted wooden club and smashed the captive on the head, splitting it open. The attacker then withdrew for eight to fifteen days of abstinence while the others ate the cooked flesh of the captive and finished all of the drink made for the occasion. /episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/38336185

Book Review: If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies 09/12/2025

Book Review: If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies 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 answered: moral clarity. Most people in AI safety (including me) are uncertain and confused and looking for least-bad incremental solutions. We think AI will probably be an exciting and transformative technology, but there’s some chance, 5 or 15 or 30 percent, that it might turn against humanity in a catastrophic way. Or, if it doesn’t, that there will be something less catastrophic but still bad - maybe humanity gradually fading into the background, the same way kings and nobles faded into the background during the modern era. This is scary, but AI is coming whether we like it or not, and probably there are also potential risks from delaying too hard. We’re not sure exactly what to do, but for now we want to build a firm foundation for reacting to any future threat. That means keeping AI companies honest and transparent, helping responsible companies like Anthropic stay in the race, and investing in understanding AI goal structures and the ways that AIs interpret our commands. Then at some point in the future, we’ll be close enough to the actually-scary AI that we can understand the threat model more clearly, get more popular buy-in, and decide what to do next. MIRI thinks this is pathetic - like trying to protect against an asteroid impact by wearing a hard hat. They’re kind of cagey about their own probability of AI wiping out humanity, but it seems to be somewhere around 95 - 99%. They think plausibly-achievable gains in company responsibility, regulation quality, and AI scholarship are orders of magnitude too weak to seriously address the problem, and they don’t expect enough of a “warning shot” that they feel comfortable kicking the can down the road until everything becomes clear and action is easy. They suggest banning all AI capabilities research immediately, to be restarted only in some distant future when the situation looks more promising. Both sides honestly believe their position and don’t want to modulate their message for PR reasons. But both sides, coincidentally, think that their message is better PR. The incrementalists think a moderate, cautious approach keeps bridges open with academia, industry, government, and other actors that prefer normal clean-shaven interlocutors who don’t emit spittle whenever they talk. MIRI thinks that the public is sick of focus-group-tested mealy-mouthed bullshit, but might be ready to rise up against AI if someone presented the case in a clear and unambivalent way. Now Yudkowsky and his co-author, MIRI president Nate Soares, have reached new heights of unambivalence with their new book, (release date September 16, currently available for preorder). /episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/38190080

Links For September 2025 09/10/2025

Your Review: Participation in Phase I Clinical Pharmaceutical Research 09/10/2025

Your Review: Participation in Phase I Clinical Pharmaceutical Research [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 determine the FDA’s standards for accepting or rejecting a new drug. You might have some idea what kinds of a company has to jump through to conduct actual research which meets legal guidelines for patient safety and autonomy. You may be less familiar though, with how the sausage is actually made. How do pharmaceutical companies actually go through the process of testing a drug on human participants? I’m going to be focusing here on a research subject’s view of what are known as Phase I clinical trials, the stage in which prospective drugs are tested for safety and tolerability. This is where researchers aim to answer questions like “Does this drug have any dangerous side effects?” “Through what pathways is it removed from a patient’s body?” and “Can we actually give people enough of this drug that it’s useful for anything?” This comes before the stage where researchers test how good a drug is at actually treating any sort of disease, when patients who’re suffering from the target ailments are given the option receive it as an experimental treatment. In Phase I clinical trials, the participants are healthy volunteers who’re participating in research for money. There are almost no cases in which volunteer participation is driven by motivations other than money, because the attitudes between research participants and clinicians overwhelmingly tend to be characterized by mutual guarded distrust. This distrust is baked into the process, both on a cultural level among the participants, and by the clinics’ own incentives. All of what follows is drawn from my own experiences, and experiences that other participants in clinical pharmaceutical research have shared with me, because for reasons which should become clear over the course of this review, research which systematically explores the behaviors and motives of clinical research participants is generally not feasible to conduct. /episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/38154255

What Is Man, That Thou Art Mindful Of Him? 09/10/2025

Open Letter To The NIH 09/02/2025

Open Letter To The NIH 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 would spend all the money by the end of the fiscal year. That is good news, because any money not spent by that point will disappear. The bad news is the fiscal year ends on September 30th and , “the true shortfall far exceeds $5 billion.” requests that Dr. Bhattacharya do what he said he would and spend all the money by September 30th. We as the originators of the letter do not want to be named publicly because we are concerned about being the focal point for blame and retaliation. We would rather be members of a large crowd of signatories than be singled out as individuals to make an example of. Based on our understanding of current administration norms, we do not expect retaliation against private individuals who sign this letter. We are looking for signatures from scientists, doctors, and healthcare professionals. So if that is you, please sign . If you want to help support the letter more broadly, email . Our stretch goal is to have a thousand people sign the letter within the next two weeks. To hammer home (since many people failed to understand it) that this is not the contents of the letter, I am including the actual contents below: We, the undersigned scientists, doctors, and public health stakeholders, commend your commitment to spend all funds allocated to the NIH, as reported in The Washington Post. At the same time, we are concerned by reports that U.S. institutions received nearly $5 billion less in NIH awards over the past year. With less than one month to the end of the fiscal year, we submit this urgent request to ensure that your commitment is upheld. If you anticipate that all appropriated funds cannot be spent in time, we request a public disclosure of the barriers preventing the achievement of this crucial responsibility. We present this request in the spirit of the broad, bipartisan consensus in favor of spending appropriated NIH funds. In their July letter to the Office of Management and Budget, fourteen Republican senators, led by Senators Collins, Britt, and McConnell, forcefully argued that suspension of NIH funds “could threaten Americans' ability to access better treatments and limit our nation's leadership in biomedical science.” The case for investment in medical research transcends political divides as it serves our collective national interest. The return on investment from research is compelling. Synthesizing the empirical literature, economist Matt Clancy estimates that each public and private R&D dollar yields roughly $5.50 in GDP—and about $11 when broader benefits are counted. Every dollar of NIH funding not deployed represents lost opportunities for breakthrough treatments, missed chances to train the next generation of scientists, and diminished returns on America's innovation ecosystem. Spending these funds is also a competitiveness imperative as China attempts to transform itself from a low-end manufacturer to a high-tech research and innovation juggernaut. In 2024, the Chinese government increased its spending on science and technology by 10%, and the nation’s total expenditure on research and development increased by 50% in nominal terms between 2020 and 2024. As China’s number of clinical trials and new drug candidates begin to outpace the U.S., America cannot afford to allow biomedical research funding to go unspent. We respectfully ask that you ensure that NIH will obligate all FY25 funds by September 30, 2025, and, if that is not possible, that you address the scientific community to explain why and what must be done to ensure all appropriated funds are spent in FY26. We stand ready to support your efforts to preserve this vital national investment. /episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/38056065

In Search Of AI Psychosis 09/02/2025

Your Review: Ollantay 08/24/2025

My Responses To Three Concerns From The Embryo Selection Post 08/24/2025

Your Review: Dating Men In The Bay Area 08/24/2025

In Defense Of The Amyloid Hypothesis 08/20/2025

In Defense Of The Amyloid Hypothesis 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 extra amyloid did eventually develop cognitive impairments. But it took much higher amyloid levels than humans have, and on further investigation the impairments didn't really look like Alzheimer’s. Some infectious agents, like the gingivitis bacterium and the herpesviruses, seem to play a role in at least some Alzheimer’s cases. . . . and amyloid is one of the body's responses to injury or infection, so it might be a harmless byproduct of these infections or whatever else the real disease is. Anti-amyloid drugs (like ) don't reverse the disease, and only slow progression a relatively small amount. Opponents call the amyloid hypothesis zombie science, propped up only by pharmaceutical companies hoping to sell off a few more anti-amyloid me-too drugs before it collapses. Meanwhile, mainstream scientists . . . continue to believe it without really offering any public defense. Scott was so surprised by the size of the gap between official and unofficial opinion that he asked if someone from the orthodox camp would speak out in its favor. I am , an engineer formerly with SpaceX and Google, now working in AI safety. Alzheimer’s isn’t my field, but I got very interested in it, spent six months studying the literature, and came away believing the amyloid hypothesis was basically completely solid. I thought I’d share that understanding with current skeptics. /episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/37889435

Highlights From The Comments On Liberalism And Communities 08/15/2025

Highlights From The Comments On Liberalism And Communities [Original post: ] 1: Comments About The Theory 2: Comments About Specific Communities 3: Other Comments Comments About The Theory Darwin : 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. /episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/37834625

Your Review: My Father’s Instant Mashed Potatoes 08/15/2025

Should Strong Gods Bet On GDP? 08/15/2025

Should Strong Gods Bet On GDP? Slightly contra Fukuyama on liberal communities Francis Fukuyama is on Substack; last month he wrote . As always, read the whole thing and don’t trust my summary, but the key point is: R. R. Reno, editor of the magazine First Things, the liberal project of the past three generations has sought to weaken the “” of populism, nationalism, and religion that were held to be the drivers of the bloody conflicts of the early 20th century. Those gods are now returning, and are present in the politics of both the progressive left and far right—particularly the right, which is characterized today by demands for strong national identities or religious foundations for national communities. However, there is a cogent liberal response to the charge that liberalism undermines community. The problem is that, just as in the 1930s, that response has not been adequately articulated by the defenders of liberalism. Liberalism is not intrinsically opposed to community; indeed, there is a version of liberalism that encourages the flourishing of strong community and human virtue. That community emerges through the development of a strong and well-organized civil society, where individuals freely choose to bond with other like-minded individuals to seek common ends. People are free to follow “strong Gods”; the only caveat is that there is no single strong god that binds the entire society together. In other words - yes, part of the good life is participation in a tight-knit community with strong values. Liberalism’s shared values are comparatively weak, and its knitting comparatively loose. But that’s no argument against the liberal project. Its goal isn’t to become this kind of community itself, but to be the platform where communities like this can grow up. So in a liberal democracy, Christians can have their church, Jews their synagogue, Communists their commune, and so on. Everyone gets the tight-knit community they want - which beats illiberalism, where (at most) one group gets the community they want and everyone else gets persecuted. On a theoretical level, this is a great answer. On a practical level - is it really working? Are we really a nation dotted with tight-knit communities of strong values? The average person has a church they don’t attend and a political philosophy that mainly cashes out in Twitter dunks. Otherwise they just consume whatever slop the current year’s version of capitalism chooses to throw at them. It’s worth surveying the exceptions that prove the rule: /episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/37834450

Your Review: Joan of Arc 08/07/2025

Suddenly, Trait-Based Embryo Selection 08/05/2025

Suddenly, Trait-Based Embryo Selection [see footnote 4 for conflicts of interest] In 2021, announced . When a couple uses IVF, they may get as many as ten embryos. If they only want one child, which one do they implant? In the early days, doctors would just eyeball them and choose whichever looked healthiest. Later, they started testing for some of the most severe and easiest-to-detect genetic disorders like Down Syndrome and cystic fibrosis. The final step was polygenic selection - genotyping each embryo and implanting the one with the best genes overall. Best in what sense? Genomic Prediction claimed the ability to forecast health outcomes from diabetes to schizophrenia. For example, although the average person has a 30% chance of getting type II diabetes, if you genetically test five embryos and select the one with the lowest predicted risk, they’ll only have a 20% chance. Since you’re taking the healthiest of many embryos, you should expect a child conceived via this method to be significantly healthier than one born naturally. Polygenic selection straddles the line between disease prevention and human enhancement. In 2023, entered the field. Unlike Genomic Prediction, which tested only the most important genetic variants, Orchid offers whole genome sequencing, which can detect the de novo mutations involved in autism, developmental disorders, and certain other genetic diseases. Critics accused GP and Orchid of offering “designer babies”, but this was only true in the weakest sense - customers couldn’t “design” a baby for anything other than slightly lower risk of genetic disease. These companies refused to offer selection on “traits” - the industry term for the really controversial stuff like height, IQ, or eye color. Still, these were trivial extensions of their technology, and everybody knew it was just a matter of time before someone took the plunge. Last month, a startup called took the plunge. /episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/37675365

My Heart Of Hearts 08/03/2025

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