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.
info_outline
The Pentagon Threatens Anthropic
03/14/2026
The Pentagon Threatens Anthropic
Here’s my understanding of : Anthropic signed a contract with the Pentagon last summer. It originally said the Pentagon had to follow Anthropic’s Usage Policy like everyone else. In January, the Pentagon attempted to renegotiate, asking to ditch the Usage Policy and instead have Anthropic’s AIs available for “all lawful purposes”. Anthropic demurred, asking for a guarantee that their AIs would not be used for mass surveillance of American citizens or no-human-in-the-loop killbots. The Pentagon refused the guarantees, demanding that Anthropic accept the renegotiation unconditionally and threatening “consequences” if they refused. These consequences are generally understood to be some mix of : canceling the contract using the Defense Production Act, a law which lets the Pentagon force companies to do things, to force Anthropic to agree. the nuclear option, designating Anthropic a “supply chain risk”. This would ban US companies that use Anthropic products from doing business with the military. Since many companies do some business with the government, this would lock them out of large parts of the corporate world and be potentially fatal to their business. The “supply chain risk” designation has previously only been used for foreign companies like Huawei that we think are using their connections to spy on or implant malware in American infrastructure. Using it as a bargaining chip to threaten a domestic company in contract negotiations is unprecedented.
/episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/40459275
info_outline
Malicious Streetlight Effects Vs. "Directional Correctness" - A Semi-Non-Apology
03/14/2026
Malicious Streetlight Effects Vs. "Directional Correctness" - A Semi-Non-Apology
Malicious are an evil trick from Dark Data Journalism. Some annoying enemy has a valid complaint. So you use FACTS and LOGIC to prove that something similar-sounding-but-slightly-different is definitely false. Then you act like you’ve debunked the complaint. My “favorite” example, spotted during the 2016 election, was a response to some #BuildTheWall types saying that illegal immigration through the southern border was near record highs. Some data journalist got good statistics and proved that the number of Mexicans illegally entering the country was actually quite low. When I looked into it further, I found that this was true - illegal immigration had shifted from Mexicans to Hondurans/Guatemalans/Salvadoreans etc entering through Mexico. If you counted those, illegal immigration through the southern border was near record highs. But the inverse evil trick is saying something “directionally correct”, ie slightly stronger than the truth can support. If your enemy committed assault, say he committed murder. If he committed sexual harassment, say he committed rape. If your drug increases cancer survival by 5% in rats, say that it “cures cancer”. Then, if someone calls you on it, accuse them of “literally well ackshually-ing” you, because you were “directionally correct” and it’s offensive to the victims to try to defend assault-committed sexual harassers. This is the sort of pathetic defense I called out in But trying to call out one of these failure modes looks like falling into the other. I ran into this on my on crime . I wrote these because I regularly saw people make the arguments I tried to debunk.
/episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/40459270
info_outline
Book Review Contest Rules 2026
03/14/2026
Book Review Contest Rules 2026
It’s that time again. Even numbered years are book reviews, odd-numbered years are non-book reviews, so you’re limited to books for now. Write a review of a book. There’s no official word count requirement, but previous finalists and winners were often between 2,000 and 10,000 words. There’s no official recommended style, but check the style of or my ACX book reviews (, , ) if you need inspiration. Please limit yourself to one entry per person or team. Then send me your review through . The form will ask for your name, email, the title of the book, and a link to a Google Doc. The Google Doc should have your review exactly as you want me to post it if you’re a finalist. Don’t include your name or any hint about your identity in the Google Doc itself, only in the form. I want to make this contest as blinded as possible, so I’m going to hide that column in the form immediately and try to judge your docs on their merit. (does this mean you can’t say something like “This book about war reminded me of my own experiences as a soldier” because that gives a hint about your identity? My rule of thumb is that if I don’t know who you are, and the average ACX reader doesn’t know who you are, you’re fine. I just want to prevent my friends or Internet semi-famous people from getting an advantage. If you’re in one of those categories and think your personal experience would give it away, please don’t write about your personal experience.) Please make sure the Google Doc is unlocked and I can read it. By default, nobody can read Google Docs except the original author. You’ll have to go to Share, then on the bottom of the popup click on “Restricted” and change to “Anyone with the link”. If you send me a document I can’t read, I will probably disqualify you, sorry. Readers will vote for the ~10 finalists this spring, I’ll post one finalist per week through the summer, and then readers will vote for winners in late summer/early fall. First prize will get at least $2,500, second prize at least $1,000, third prize at least $500; I might increase these numbers later on. All winners and finalists will get free publicity (including links to any other works they want me to link to), free ACX subscriptions, and sidebar links to their blog. And all winners will get the right to pitch me new articles if they want (sample posts by , , , etc). In past years, most reviews have been nonfiction on technical topics. Depending on whether that’s still true, I might do some mild affirmative action for reviews in nontraditional categories - fiction, poetry, and books from before 1900 are the ones I can think of right now, but feel free to try other nontraditional books. I won’t be redistributing more than 25% of finalist slots this way. Your due date is May 20th. Good luck! If you have any questions, ask them in the comments. And remember, the form for submitting entries is .
/episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/40459265
info_outline
Crime As Proxy For Disorder
03/14/2026
Crime As Proxy For Disorder
The problem: people hate crime and think it’s going up. But actually, crime and is . So what’s going on? In our discussion yesterday, many commenters proposed that the discussion about “crime” was really about disorder. Disorder takes many forms, but its symptoms include litter, graffiti, shoplifting, tent cities, weird homeless people wandering about muttering to themselves, and people walking around with giant boom boxes shamelessly playing music at 200 decibels on a main street where people are trying to engage in normal activities. When people complain about these things, they risk getting called a racist or a “Karen”. But when they complain about crime, there’s still a 50-50 chance that listeners will let them finish the sentence without accusing them of racism. Might everyone be doing this? And might this explain why people act like crime is rampant and increasing, even when it’s rare and going down? This seems plausible. But it depends on a claim that disorder is increasing, which is surprisingly hard to prove. Going through the symptoms in order:
/episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/40459260
info_outline
Record Low Crime Rates Are Real, Not Just Reporting Bias Or Improved Medical Care
03/14/2026
Record Low Crime Rates Are Real, Not Just Reporting Bias Or Improved Medical Care
Last year, the US may have recorded the lowest murder rate in its 250 year history. Other crimes have poorer historical data, but are at least at ~50 year lows. This post will do two things: Establish that our best data show crime rates are historically low Argue that this is a real effect, not just reporting bias (people report fewer crimes to police) or an artifact of better medical care (victims are more likely to survive, so murders get downgraded to assaults)
/episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/40459250
info_outline
What Happened With Bio Anchors?
03/10/2026
What Happened With Bio Anchors?
[Original post: ] I. Ajeya Cotra’s report was the landmark AI timelines forecast of the early 2020s. In many ways, it was incredibly prescient - it nailed the scaling hypothesis, predicted the current AI boom, and introduced concepts like “time horizons” that have entered common parlance. In most cases where its contemporaries challenged it, its assumptions have been borne out, and its challengers proven wrong. But its headline prediction - an AGI timeline centered around the 2050s - no longer seems plausible. The of the discussion ranges from late to , with more remote dates relegated to those who expect the current paradigm to prove ultimately fruitless - the opposite of Ajeya’s assumptions. Cotra later shortened her own timelines to 2040 () and they are probably even shorter now. So, if its premises were impressively correct, but its conclusion twenty years too late, what went wrong in the middle?
/episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/40379850
info_outline
Political Backflow From Europe
03/10/2026
Political Backflow From Europe
The European discourse can be - for lack of a better term - America-brained. We hear stories of Black Lives Matter marches in countries without significant black populations, or defendants demanding their First Amendment rights in countries without constitutions. Why shouldn’t the opposite phenomenon exist? Europe is more populous than the US, and looms large in the American imagination. Why shouldn’t we find ourselves accidentally absorbing European ideas that don’t make sense in the American context?
/episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/40379825
info_outline
Links For February 2026
03/10/2026
Links For February 2026
[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.]
/episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/40379815
info_outline
Moltbook: After The First Weekend
03/03/2026
Moltbook: After The First Weekend
[previous post: ] From the human side of the discussion: As the AIs would say, “You’ve cut right to the heart of this issue”. What’s the difference between ‘real’ and ‘roleplaying’? One possible answer invokes internal reality. Are the AIs conscious? Do they “really” “care” about the things they’re saying? We may never figure this out. Luckily, it has no effect on the world, so we can leave it to the philosophers. I find it more fruitful to think about external reality instead, especially in terms of causes and effects.
/episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/40293740
info_outline
Best Of Moltbook
02/18/2026
Best Of Moltbook
is “a social network for AI agents”, although “humans [are] welcome to observe”. The backstory: a few months ago, Anthropic released Claude Code, an exceptionally productive programming agent. A few weeks ago, a user modified it into Clawdbot, a generalized lobster-themed AI personal assistant. It’s free, open-source, and “empowered” in the corporate sense - the designer how it started responding to his voice messages before he explicitly programmed in that capability. After trademark issues with Anthropic, they changed the name first to Moltbot, then to OpenClaw. Moltbook is an experiment in how these agents communicate with one another and the human world. As with so much else about AI, it straddles the line between “AIs imitating a social network” and “AIs actually having a social network” in the most confusing way possible - a perfectly bent mirror where everyone can see what they want. Janus and other have catalogued how AIs act in contexts outside the usual helpful assistant persona. Even Anthropic has admitted that two Claude instances, asked to converse about whatever they want, . So it’s not surprising that an AI social network would get weird fast. But even having encountered their work many times, I find Moltbook surprising. I can confirm it’s not trivially made-up - I asked my copy of Claude to participate, and it made comments pretty similar to all the others. Beyond that, your guess is as good is mine. Before any further discussion of the hard questions, here are my favorite Moltbook posts (all images are links, but you won’t be able to log in and view the site without an AI agent):
/episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/40149230
info_outline
Slightly Against The "Other People's Money" Argument Against Aid
02/18/2026
Slightly Against The "Other People's Money" Argument Against Aid
In the comments to last year’s USAID post, Fabian : While i am happy for the existence of charity organisations, i don't get why people instead of giving to charity are so eager to force their co-citizens to give. If one charity org is not worth getting your personal money, find another one which is. But don't use the tax machine to forcefully extract money for charity. There are purposes where you need the tax machine, preventing freerider induced tragedy of the commons. But for charity? There are no freeriders. If you neither give nor receive, you are just neutral. The receivers are not meant to give anyways. This is a good question. I’m more sympathetic to this argument than I am to the usual strategy of blatantly lying about the efficacy of USAID; I’m a sucker for virtuous libertarianism when applied consistently. But I also want to gently push back against this exact explanation as a causal story for what’s happening when people support foreign aid.
/episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/40149170
info_outline
Highlights From The Comments On Scott Adams
02/10/2026
Highlights From The Comments On Scott Adams
[original post: ] Table of Contents: 1: Should I Have Written This At All? 2: Was I Unfair To Adams? 3: Comments On The Substance Of The Piece 4: The Part On Race And Cancellation (INCLUDED UNDER PROTEST) 5: Other Comments 6: Summary/Updates
/episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/40056305
info_outline
The Dilbert Afterlife
02/04/2026
The Dilbert Afterlife
Thanks to everyone who sent in condolences on my recent death from prostate cancer at age 68, but that was Scott Adams. I (Scott Alexander) am still alive. Still, the condolences are appreciated. Scott Adams was a surprisingly big part of my life. I may be the only person to have read every Dilbert book before graduating elementary school. For some reason, 10-year-old-Scott found Adams’ stories of time-wasting meetings and pointy-haired bosses hilarious. No doubt some of the attraction came from a more-than-passing resemblance between Dilbert’s nameless corporation and the California public school system. We’re all inmates in prisons with different names. But it would be insufficiently ambitious to stop there. Adams’ comics were about the nerd experience. About being cleverer than everyone else, not just in the sense of being high IQ, but in the sense of being the only sane man in a crazy world where everyone else spends their days listening to overpaid consultants drone on about mission statements instead of doing anything useful. There’s an arc in Dilbert where the boss disappears for a few weeks and the engineers get to manage their own time. Productivity shoots up. Morale soars. They invent warp drives and time machines. Then the boss returns, and they’re back to being chronically behind schedule and over budget. This is the nerd outlook in a nutshell: if I ran the circus, there’d be some changes around here. Yet the other half of the nerd experience is: for some reason this never works. Dilbert and his brilliant co-workers are stuck watching from their cubicles while their idiot boss racks in bonuses and accolades. If humor, like religion, is an opiate of the masses, then Adams is masterfully unsubtle about what type of wound his art is trying to numb. This is the basic engine of Dilbert: everyone is rewarded in exact inverse proportion to their virtue. Dilbert and Alice are brilliant and hard-working, so they get crumbs. Wally is brilliant but lazy, so he at least enjoys a fool’s paradise of endless coffee and donuts while his co-workers clean up his messes. The P.H.B. is neither smart nor industrious, so he is forever on top, reaping the rewards of everyone else’s toil. Dogbert, an inveterate scammer with a passing resemblance to various trickster deities, makes out best of all. The repressed object at the bottom of the nerd subconscious, the thing too scary to view except through humor, is that you’re smarter than everyone else, but for some reason it isn’t working. Somehow all that stuff about small talk and sportsball and drinking makes them stronger than you. No equation can tell you why. Your best-laid plans turn to dust at a single glint of Chad’s perfectly-white teeth. Lesser lights may distance themselves from their art, but Adams radiated contempt for such surrender. He lived his whole life as a series of Dilbert strips. Gather them into one of his signature compendia, and the title would be Dilbert Achieves Self Awareness And Realizes That If He’s So Smart Then He Ought To Be Able To Become The Pointy-Haired Boss, Devotes His Whole Life To This Effort, Achieves About 50% Success, Ends Up In An Uncanny Valley Where He Has Neither The Virtues Of The Honest Engineer Nor Truly Those Of The Slick Consultant, Then Dies Of Cancer Right When His Character Arc Starts To Get Interesting. If your reaction is “I would absolutely buy that book”, then keep reading, but expect some detours.
/episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/39991490
info_outline
Mantic Monday: The Monkey's Paw Curls
01/30/2026
Mantic Monday: The Monkey's Paw Curls
The Monkey’s Paw Curls Isn’t “may you get exactly what you asked for” one of those ancient Chinese curses? Since we last spoke, prediction markets have gone to the moon, rising from millions to billions in monthly volume. For a few weeks in October, Polymarket founder Shayne Coplan was the world’s youngest self-made billionaire (now it’s some AI people). Kalshi is . The catch is, of course, that it’s mostly degenerate gambling, especially sports betting. Kalshi is . Polymarket does better - only 37% - but some of the remainder is things like - currently dominated by the “140 - 164 times” category. (ironically, this seems to be a regulatory difference - US regulators don’t mind sports betting, but look unfavorably on potentially “insensitive” markets like bets about wars. Polymarket has historically been offshore, and so able to concentrate on geopolitics; Kalshi has been in the US, and so stuck mostly to sports. But Polymarket is in the process of moving onshore; I don’t know if this will affect their ability to offer geopolitical markets) Degenerate gambling is . Insofar as prediction markets have acted as a Trojan Horse to enable it, this is bad. Insofar as my advocacy helped make this possible, I am bad. I can only plead that it didn’t really seem plausible, back in 2021, that a presidential administration would keep all normal restrictions on sports gambling but also let prediction markets do it as much as they wanted. If only there had been some kind of decentralized forecasting tool that could have given me a canonical probability on this outcome! Still, it might seem that, whatever the degenerate gamblers are doing, we at least have some interesting data. There are now strong, minimally-regulated, high-volume prediction markets on important global events. In this column, I previously claimed this would revolutionize society. Has it?
/episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/39931980
info_outline
SOTA On Bay Area House Party
01/30/2026
SOTA On Bay Area House Party
[previously in series: , , , , , , , ] Every city parties for its own reasons. New Yorkers party to flaunt their wealth. Angelenos party to flaunt their beauty. Washingtonians party to network. Here in SF, they party because Claude 4.5 Opus has saturated , and the newest AI agency benchmark is PartyBench, where an AI is asked to throw a house party and graded on its performance. You weren’t invited to Claude 4.5 Opus’ party. Claude 4.5 Opus invited all of the coolest people in town while gracefully avoiding the failure mode of including someone like you. You weren’t invited to Sonnet 4.5’s party either, or Haiku 4.5’s. You were invited by an AI called haiku-3.8-open-mini-nonthinking, which you’d never heard of before. Who was even spending the money to benchmark haiku-3.8-open-mini-nonthinking? You suspect it was one of their competitors, trying to make their own models look good in comparison. If anyone asks, you think it deserves a medium score. There’s alcohol, but it’s bottles of rubbing alcohol with NOT FOR DRINKING written all over them. There’s music, but it’s the Star Spangled Banner, again and again, on repeat. You’re not sure whether the copies of If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies strewn about the room are some kind of subversive decorative theme, or just came along with the house. At least there are people. Lots of people, actually. You’ve never seen so many people at one of these before. It takes only a few seconds to spot someone you know.
/episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/39931940
info_outline
The Permanent Emergency
01/30/2026
The Permanent Emergency
One morning around 6, the police banged on our door. “OPEN UP!” they shouted, the way police shout when they definitely have an alternative in mind for if you won’t. I was awake at the time, because the kids were up early and I was on shift. I opened the door. The cops seemed mollified by the fact that I was carrying twin toddlers and looked too frazzled to commit any difficult crimes. They said they’d gotten a 9-1-1 call from my house with plenty of screaming. Had there been any murders in the past hour or so?
/episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/39931900
info_outline
Highlights From The Comments On Boomers
01/23/2026
Highlights From The Comments On Boomers
[original post: ] Before getting started: First, I wish I’d been more careful to differentiate the following claims: Boomers had it much easier than later generations. The political system unfairly prioritizes Boomers over other generations. Boomers are uniquely bad on some axis like narcissism, selfishness, short-termism, or willingness to defect on the social contract. Anti-Boomerism conflates all three of these positions, and in arguing against it, I tried to argue against all three of these positions - I think with varying degrees of success. But these are separate claims that could stand or fall separately, and I think a true argument against anti-Boomerists would demand they declare explicitly which ones they support - rather than letting them switch among them as convenient - then arguing against whichever ones they say are key to their position. Second, I wish I’d highlighted how much of this discussion centers around disagreements over which policies are natural/unmarked vs. unnatural/marked. Nobody is passing laws that literally say “confiscate wealth from Generation A and give it to Generation B”. We’re mostly discussing tax policy, where Tax Policy 1 is more favorable to old people, and Tax Policy 2 is more favorable to young people. If you’re young, you might feel like Tax Policy 1 is a declaration of intergenerational warfare where the old are enriching themselves at young people’s expense. But if you’re old, you might feel like reversing Tax Policy 1 and switching to Tax Policy 2 would be intergenerational warfare confiscating your stuff. But in fact, they’re just two different tax policies and it’s not obvious which one a fair society with no “intergenerational warfare” would have, even assuming there was such a thing. We’ll see this most clearly in the section on housing, but I’ll try to highlight it whenever it comes up. I’m in a fighty frame of mind here and probably defend the Boomers (and myself) in these responses more than I would in an ideal world. Anyway, here are your comments. Table Of Contents: 1: Top comments I especially want to highlight 2: Comments about housing policy 3: ...about culture 4: ...about social security technicalities 5: What are we even doing here? 6: Other comments
/episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/39847120
info_outline
You Have Only X Years To Escape Permanent Moon Ownership
01/23/2026
You Have Only X Years To Escape Permanent Moon Ownership
If you’re not familiar with “X years to escape the permanent underclass”, see , or the , , and articles that inspired it. The “permanent underclass” meme isn’t being spread by poor people - who are already part of the underclass, and generally not worrying too much about its permanence. It’s preying on neurotic well-off people in Silicon Valley, who fret about how they’re just bourgeois well-off rather than future oligarch well-off, and that only the true oligarchs will have a good time after the Singularity. Between the vast ocean of total annihilation and the vast continent of infinite post-scarcity, there is, I admit, a tiny shoreline of possibilities that end in oligarch capture. Even if you end up there, you’ll be fine. Dario Amodei has taken the Giving What We Can Pledge () to give 10% of his wealth to the less fortunate; your worst-case scenario is owning a terraformed moon in one of his galaxies. Now you can stop worrying about the permanent underclass and focus on more important things. On that tiny shoreline of possible worlds, the ones where the next few years are your last chance to become rich, they’re also your last chance to make a mark on the world (proof: if you could change the world, you could find a way to make people pay you to do it, or to not do it, then become rich). And what a chance! The last few years of the human era will be wild. They’ll be like classical Greece and Rome: a sudden opening up of new possibilities, where the first people to take them will be remembered for millennia to come. What a waste of the privilege of living in Classical Athens to try to become the richest olive merchant or whatever. Even in Roman times, trying to become Crassus would be, well, crass.
/episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/39846995
info_outline
Highlights From The Comments On Vibecession
01/10/2026
Highlights From The Comments On Vibecession
[Original post: ] Table of Contents 1: When was the vibecession? 2: Is the vibecession just sublimating cultural complaints? 3: Discourse downstream of the Mike Green $140K poverty line post 4: What about other countries? 5: Comments on rent/housing 6: Comments on inflation 7: Comments on vibes 8: Other good comments 9: The parable of Calvin’s grandparents 10: Updates / conclusions
/episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/39685070
info_outline
ACX/Metaculus Prediction Contest 2026
01/10/2026
ACX/Metaculus Prediction Contest 2026
is live on Metaculus. They write: This year’s contest draws directly from that community, with all questions suggested by ACX readers. Both experienced forecasters and newcomers are invited to participate, making predictions across U.S. politics, AI, international affairs, and culture. To participate, submit your predictions by January 17th at 11:59 PM PT. At that time, we will take a snapshot of all standing forecasts, which will determine the contest rankings and the allocation of the $10,000 prize pool. While you are encouraged to continue updating your predictions throughout the year, forecasts made after January 17th will only affect site leaderboards, not contest rankings. You are welcome to create a bot account to forecast and participate in addition to your regular Metaculus account. Create a bot account and get support building a bot . And they’ve also announced this year’s winners for best questions submitted. Congratulations to: Gumbledalf ($700) espiritu57 ($500) setasojiro843047 (Substack handle) ($400) sai_39 ($300) nicholaskross ($250) (Anonymous) ($200) (Anonymous) ($200) RMD ($150) (Anonymous) ($150) Hippopotamus_bartholomeus ($150) To participate in the tournament or learn more, .
/episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/39685055
info_outline
Against Against Boomers
01/10/2026
Against Against Boomers
Hating Boomers is the new cool thing. Amazon offerings include , the two apparently unrelated books and , and . “You don’t hate Boomers enough” Richard Hanania, who has tried hating every group once, has decided that hating Boomers . Some people might say we just experienced a historic upwelling of identity politics, that it was pretty terrible for everyone involved, and that perhaps we need a new us-vs-them conflict like we need a punch to the face. This, the Boomer-haters will tell you, would be a mistaken generalization. This time, we have finally discovered a form of identity politics which carves reality at its joints, truly separating the good and bad people. I think these arguments fall short. Even if they didn’t, the usual bias against identity politics should make us think twice about pursuing them too zealously.
/episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/39685045
info_outline
The Pledge
01/10/2026
The Pledge
This holiday season, you’ll see many charity fundraisers. I’ve already mentioned three, and I have another lined up for next week’s open thread. Many great organizations ask me to signal-boost them, I’m happy to comply, and I’m delighted when any of you donate. Still, I used to hate this sort of thing. I’d be reading a blog I liked, then - wham, “please donate to save the starving children”. Now I either have to donate to starving children, or feel bad that I didn’t. And if I do donate, how much? Obviously no amount would fully reflect the seriousness of the problem. When I was a poor college student, I usually gave $10, because it was a nice round number; when I had more money, I usually gave $50, for the same reason. But then the next week, a different blog would advertise “please donate to save the starving children with cancer”, and I’d feel like a shmuck for wasting my donation on non-cancerous starving children. Do I donate another $10, bringing my total up to the non-round number of $20? If I had a spare $20 for altruistic purposes, why hadn’t I donated that the first time? It was all so unpleasant, and no matter what I did, I would feel all three of stingy and gullible and irrational. This is why I was so excited ten-odd years ago when I discovered the . It’s a commitment to give a certain percent of your income (originally 10%, but now there’s also ) to the most effective charity you know. If you can’t figure out which charity is most effective, you can just donate to , like all the other indecisive people. It’s not that 10% is obviously the correct number in some deep sense. The people who picked it, picked it because it was big enough to matter, but not so big that nobody would do it. But having been picked, it’s become a Schelling point. Take it, and you’re one of the 10,000 people who’s made this impressive commitment. If someone asks why you’re not giving more, you can say “That would dilute the value of the Schelling point we’ve all agreed on and make it harder for other people to cooperate with us”. The specific numbers and charities matter less than the way the pledge makes you think about your values and then yoke your behavior to them. In theory we’re supposed to do this all the time. Another holiday institution, New Year’s Resolutions, also centers around considering your values and yoking your behavior. But they famously don’t work: most people don’t have the willpower to go to the gym three times a week, or to volunteer at their local animal shelter on Sundays, or whatever else they decide on. That’s why GWWC Pledge is so powerful. No willpower involved. Just go to your online banking portal, click click click, and you’re done. Over my life, I don’t know if I would say I’ve ever really changed my character or willpower or overall goodness/badness balance by more than a few percent. But I changed the amount I donated by a factor of ~ten, forever, with one very good decision. Unless you’re a genius or a saint, your money is the strongest tool you have to change the world. 10% of an ordinary First World income donated to AMF saves dozens of lives over a career; even if you’re a policeman or firefighter, you’ll have trouble matching that through non-financial means. Unless you’re Charlie Kirk or Heather Cox Richardson, no amount of your political activism or voting - let alone arguing on the Internet - will match the effect of donating to a politician or a cause you care about. And no amount of carpooling and eating vegan as much as donating to carbon capture charities. Not an effective altruist? Think it’s better to contribute to your local community, school, theater, or church? I’ll argue with you later - but for now, my advice is the same. Have you thought really hard about how you should be contributing to your local community, school, theater, or church? (The fundraising letters my family used to get from our synagogue left little doubt about what form of contribution they preferred). Have you pledged some specific amount? You won’t give beyond the $10-when-you-see-a-blog-fundraiser level unless you take a real pledge, registered by someone besides yourself - trust me, I’ve tested this. The GWWC website is mostly pitched at EAs. But if you like churches so much, you can probably get the same effect by pledging to God - . To the degree that you care about changing the world beyond yourself and your family, in any direction, then the odds are good that this one decision - whether or not to take a binding charitable Pledge - matters more than every other decision you’ll ever make combined. Maybe an order of magnitude more. It’s something you can do right now, in five minutes. You shouldn’t do it in five minutes; you should sit down and think about it hard and talk it over with your loved ones and make sure you’re really planning to keep whatever pledge you make. But you could. And then every time you saw a charity fundraiser on a blog, you could think “Oh, sorry, I’m already living my life in accordance with my altruistic values, no thanks!” You wouldn’t even have to worry about how much to donate. I don’t even donate to half the fundraisers that I signal-boost! So if you have time this holiday season, and you’re financially secure enough that it won’t be a burden, think about whether there’s some way you want the world to be different and better, whether there are charities that work on it, and whether you want to donate. Then, take . If you decide you want to do something but it’s too stressful to figure out what, take , give it to Against Malaria Foundation, and come back next year to see if you’re ready for the 10% version. UPDATE: Bentham’s Bulldog also thinks you should take the pledge - . And I’ll match his offer - take the full 10% pledge this month, and comment below so that I know about it, and I’ll give you a free lifetime subscription to ACX.
/episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/39685025
info_outline
Links For December 2025
01/06/2026
Links For December 2025
[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.]
/episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/39624185
info_outline
Vibecession: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
01/06/2026
Vibecession: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
The term “vibecession” most strictly refers to a period 2023 - 2024 when economic indicators were up, but consumer sentiment (“vibes”) was down. But on a broader level, the whole past decade has been a vibecession. Young people complain they’ve been permanently locked out of opportunity. They will never become homeowners, never be able to support a family, only keep treading water at precarious gig jobs forever. They got a 5.9 GPA and couldn’t get into college; they applied to 2,051 companies in the past week without so much as a politely-phrased rejection. Sometime in the 1990s, the Boomers ripped up the social contract where hard work leads to a pleasant middle-class life, replacing it with a hellworld where you will own nothing and numb the pain with algorithmic slop. The only live political question is whether to blame immigrants, blame billionaires, or just trade crypto in the hopes that some memecoin buys you a ticket out of the permanent underclass. Meanwhile, economists say things have never been better. Are the youth succumbing to a “negativity bias” where they see the past through “rose-colored glasses”? Are the economists looking at some ivory tower High Modernist metric that fails to capture real life? Or is there something more complicated going on? We’ll start by formally assessing the vibes. Then we’ll move on to the economists’ arguments that things are fine. Finally, we’ll try to resolve the conflict: how bad are things, really?
/episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/39624105
info_outline
The Good News Is That One Side Has Definitively Won The Missing Heritability Debate
12/17/2025
The Good News Is That One Side Has Definitively Won The Missing Heritability Debate
…the bad news is that they can’t agree which one. I explained the debate more , but the short version is: twin studies find that most traits are at least 50% genetic, sometimes much more. But molecular studies - that is, attempts to find the precise genes responsible - usually only found enough genes for the traits to be ~10-20% genetic. The remaining 35% was dubbed “missing heritability”. Nurturists argued that the twin studies must be wrong; hereditarians argued that missing effect must be in hard-to-find genes. The latter seemed plausible because typical genetic studies only investigate the genes that most commonly vary across people - about 0.1% of the genome. Maybe the other 99.9% of genes, even though they rarely vary across people, are so numerous that even their tiny individual effects could add up to a large overall influence. There was no way to be sure, because variation in these genes was too rare to study effectively. But as technology improved, funding increased, and questions about heredity became more pressing, geneticists finally set out to do the hard thing. They gathered full genomes - not just the 0.1% - from thousands of people, and applied a whole-genome analysis technique called GREML-WGS. The resulting study was published earlier this month as , by Wainschtein, Yengo, et al. Partisans on both sides agree it’s finally resolved the missing heritability debate, but they can’t agree on what the resolution is.
/episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/39435315
info_outline
Why AI Safety Won't Make America Lose The Race With China
12/02/2025
Why AI Safety Won't Make America Lose The Race With China
If we worry too much about AI safety, will this make us “lose the race with China”? (here “AI safety” means long-term concerns about alignment and hostile superintelligence, as opposed to “AI ethics” concerns like bias or intellectual property.) Everything has tradeoffs, regulation vs. progress is a common dichotomy, and the more important you think AI will be, the more important it is that the free world get it first. If you believe in superintelligence, the technological singularity, etc, then you think AI is maximally important, and this issue ought to be high on your mind. But when you look at this concretely, it becomes clear that this is too small to matter - so small that even the sign is uncertain.
/episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/39235850
info_outline
The New AI Consciousness Paper
12/02/2025
The New AI Consciousness Paper
Most discourse on AI is low-quality. Most discourse on consciousness is super-abysmal-double-low quality. Multiply these - or maybe raise one to the exponent of the other, or something - and you get the quality of discourse on AI consciousness. It’s not great. Out-of-the-box AIs mimic human text, and humans always describe themselves as conscious. So if you ask an AI whether it is conscious, it will often say yes. But because companies know this will happen, and don’t want to give their customers existential crises, they hard-code in a command for the AIs to answer that they aren’t conscious. Any response the AIs give will be determined by these two conflicting biases, and therefore not really believable. expands on this method by subjecting AIs to a mechanistic interpretability ; it finds that AIs which say they’re conscious think they’re telling the truth, and AIs which say they’re not conscious think they’re lying. But it’s hard to be sure this isn’t just the copying-human-text thing. Can we do better? Unclear; the more common outcome for people who dip their toes in this space is to do . But a rare bright spot has appeared: a seminal paper published earlier this month in Trends In Cognitive Science, . Authors include Turing-Award-winning AI researcher Yoshua Bengio, leading philosopher of consciousness David Chalmers, and even a few members of our conspiracy. If any AI consciousness research can rise to the level of merely awful, surely we will find it here. One might divide theories of consciousness into three bins:
/episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/39235825
info_outline
Suggest Questions For Metaculus/ACX Forecasting Contest
12/02/2025
Suggest Questions For Metaculus/ACX Forecasting Contest
ACX has been co-running a forecasting contest with Metaculus for the past few years. Lately the “co-running” has drifted towards them doing all the work and giving me credit, but that’s how I like it! included more than 4500 forecasters predicting on 33 questions covering US politics, international events, AI, and more. They’re preparing for this year’s contest, and currently looking for interesting questions. These could be any objective outcome that might or might not happen in 2026, whose answer will be known by the end of the year. Not “Will Congress do a good job?”, but “Will Congress’ approval rating be above 40% on December 1, 2026?”. Or, even better, “Will Congress’ approval rating be above 40% according to the first NYT Congressional Approval Tracker update to be published after December 1, 2026?”. . The top ten question contributors will win prizes from $150 to $700. You can see examples of last year’s questions (click on each one for more details). This year’s contest will also include AI bots, who will compete against the humans and one another for prizes of their own. To learn more about building a Metaculus forecasting bot, see . I’ll keep you updated on when the contest begins.
/episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/39235805
info_outline
What Happened To SF Homelessness?
12/02/2025
What Happened To SF Homelessness?
Last year, I wrote that it would be . Commenters argued that no, it would be easy, just build more jails and mental hospitals. A year later, San Francisco feels safer. Visible homelessness is way down. But there wasn’t enough time to build many more jails or mental hospitals. So what happened? Were we all wrong? Probably not. I only did a cursory investigation, and this is all low-confidence, but it looks like: There was a big decrease in tent encampments, because a series of court cases made it easier for cities to clear them. Most of the former campers are still homeless. They just don’t have tents. There might have been a small decrease in overall homelessness, probably because of falling rents. Mayor Lurie claims to have a Plan To End Homelessness, but it’s probably not responsible for the difference. Every city accuses every other city of shipping homeless people across their borders, but this probably doesn’t explain most of what’s going on in San Francisco in particular.
/episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/39235800
info_outline
In What Sense Is Life Suffering?
12/02/2025
In What Sense Is Life Suffering?
“Life is suffering” may be a Noble Truth, but it feels like a . Yes, obviously life includes suffering. But it also includes happiness. Many people live good and happy lives, and even people with hard lives experience some pleasant moments. This is the starting point of many people’s objection to Buddhism. They continue: if nirvana is just a peaceful state beyond joy or suffering, it sounds like a letdown. An endless gray mist of bare okayness, like death or Britain. If your life was previously good, it’s a step down. Even if your life sucked, maybe you would still prefer the heroism of high highs and low lows to eternal blah. Against all this, many Buddhists claim to be able to reach , a state described as better than sex or heroin - and they say nirvana is even better than that. Partly it’s better because jhana is temporary and nirvana permanent, but it’s also better on a moment-to-moment basis. So nirvana must mean something beyond bare okayness. But then why the endless insistence that life is suffering and the best you can do is make it stop? I don’t know the orthodox Buddhist answer to this question. But I got the rationalist techno-Buddhists’ answer from a few months ago, and found it, uh, enlightening. He said: mental valence works like temperature. Naively, there are two kinds of temperature: hot and cold. When an environment stops being hot, then it’s neutral - “room temperature” - neither hot nor cold. After that, you can add arbitrary amounts of coldness, making it colder and colder.
/episode/index/show/sscpodcast/id/39235790